His Wicked Mouth Page 2

  Others hid their eggs in corners and on the lower level of the coop where I’d left the structure open rather than dividing it up into compartments. Those took longer to find, but eventually, my basket was full, and I thanked the ladies before heading up to the house. I would come back to shoo them into their coop for the night and do another search.

  Some of these girls liked to get creative and lay their eggs after coming out of the coop, so I had to search throughout the whole place to find them. Sometimes, I felt a little bad taking the eggs away after they worked so hard to hide them. They would squawk and cackle, and I knew they were worried about their babies. But since there was no rooster to be seen on my farm, there could be no babies.

  Finished with the chickens, I went to feed and water the horses, sheep, and cows. By the time they were all finished, the sun was up, and the sky was getting bright and blue. I would need to come back out and milk the cows soon, but it was time to head back up to the house to make breakfast for the humans. There were far fewer of those than there were animals.

  It was just my father and me. Staying home and taking care of my daddy was often even more of a challenge than taking care of all the animals and the crops on the farm. And those challenges started first thing in the morning when it was time to prepare him a healthy breakfast before he came downstairs.

  It was just about seven when I got into the kitchen and started putting together his breakfast. The coffee was brewing in the old-fashioned percolator because he refused to even entertain the idea of having any sort of new coffee technology in his kitchen. He talked about it like a single-pod coffeemaker was going to rise up and take over the world. The percolator was obedient, and he could trust it.

  While it bubbled and spat, I lined up the fresh fruit I’d bought the day before and started cutting it up into a fruit salad. A squeeze of fresh orange juice stopped the fruit from oxidizing and added more flavor. The rest of the juice went into a glass to sit at his place at the table.

  Once the salad was made, I took out the mason jars of overnight oats I’d put together the night before. Made with Chia seeds and almond milk, they were perfectly softened and would be delicious with a little sprinkle of brown sugar or some berries.

  To my mind, everything I was making for him looked delicious, but I knew I was in for some grumbling and whining as soon as he made it downstairs in the kitchen. That was the way every breakfast with him started. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate I was there working hard to take care of him. It was just that several decades of sausage, heavily buttered toast, fried potatoes, bacon, and way too much salt every morning were a hard habit to break.

  I chopped up some onions and peppers taken fresh out of the garden and tossed them in a pan to cook. Separating several eggs, I whipped up the whites and scrambled them up. I was doing everything I could to diligently take care of my father’s health.

  I didn’t really have a choice. It had to be done. Earlier that year, his doctor had given a dire warning that his health was slipping. He needed to watch his cholesterol and blood pressure and trim some of the extra weight off his belly. Daddy said he understood the importance of following the doctor’s instructions and doing everything he needed to do. But Hugh Dixon was a stubborn man.

  Which was where I came in. Because as stubborn as he was, his daughter was just as stubborn. So I was handling things. He could moan and groan all he wanted, but I was going to make sure he changed his life so he could be around a good while longer.

  I was just setting all the plates out on the table when my father came downstairs into the kitchen. He was wearing farming clothes, ready to put in a hard day of work. Both of us knew he couldn’t do what he used to do. His body wouldn’t let him. But he tried. Usually far harder than he should have. It wasn’t just in his eating that he was stubborn. He also didn’t know how to rest or take time off.

  He walked over to the table and looked into the bowls and platters with an almost hopeful look on his face. It was like he thought one morning I was just going to change my mind and go back to preparing the same sort of heavy, unhealthy breakfasts my mama made for him every day of their marriage.

  She didn’t realize how unhealthy those foods were. It was just what they had grown up eating and what their parents had eaten before them. She cooked for him that way because she loved him. Now I was cooking for him in a different way but for the same reason. I wanted him around a good long time, and that meant cleaning up his insides and keeping him healthy.

  That thought brought the familiar sadness and ache to my chest that thinking of my mother often did. I tried not to think about why she wasn’t a part of our lives anymore. It was easier to think of her as though she had died. That way, I didn’t have to remember that she chose to be gone. She had looked at her husband and her tiny daughter and decided neither one of us was important enough to stay.

  The man she was having an affair with was far more important. The new life waiting for her in Miami was far more important. And they were what took her away from us. All that she left behind was a hastily written note saying she could never be a good mother and needed to go live her own life.

  And in a way, I guessed that was what made her a good mother. I remembered the good times. The meals she cooked and the holidays we had together. I even remembered a few times when they were out in the fields working alongside each other and I heard them laughing as I played nearby.

  She must have known she wouldn’t be able to keep up with times like that. It wasn’t in her. So, she left before she could destroy those thoughts. She left before she was able to replace those happy memories with too much pain. She probably didn’t realize just how much pain it would actually cause.

  It never left my mind or my heart that the only reason I was able to cling onto those good memories and not think horrible thoughts about my mother was my father. From the very first day she was gone, he stepped up, determined to be everything I needed. In every way he possibly could, he was going to be both my father and my mother. That included working an extra job to make ends meet and never once breathing a negative word about my mother.

  He encouraged me to remember her in the way that made me happy. He wanted me to hold on to those moments because they were real. I didn’t need to throw them away just because they were over. Not that I was able to always do that. There were plenty of times when I was growing up that her being gone ripped me to shreds. There were times when he just wasn’t able to be my mother.

  But I tried hard not to talk about them. I never wanted to hurt him. He had gone through so much to give me a good life, and kept trying so the farm would stay alive. He was stubborn and frustrating, but he was the greatest man I knew.

  His nose wrinkled up when he looked at the oatmeal and fruit. “This is breakfast?”

  “Well, it certainly isn’t Thanksgiving dinner,” I said.

  “It better not be,” he said. “Come Thanksgiving, I better have a day off from all this. It isn’t Thanksgiving without a big pile of mashed potatoes dripping with butter, dressing, and gravy over everything. Just wouldn’t be right.”

  I laughed and shook my head as I reached up into the cabinet and pulled down his favorite mug to fill with coffee.

  “Tell you what. You keep cooperating and eating the way you know you should, and on Thanksgiving, you can have a reprieve. We’ll cook up the same feast like we always have and I won’t say a single word when you put gravy on it. I’ll even make Mama’s pumpkin pie.”

  He looked at me for a moment like he was evaluating how much he could trust me. He decided my word was good enough and gave a single, firm nod.

  “Right, then I will look forward to that,” he said. “But I can’t promise you I’m going to be happy about it. I’d much rather have some bacon. What kind of morning starts with fruit and cold oatmeal?”

  I set the coffee beside him. “A healthy one that’s going to keep you going for lots of years to come. You know, if you weren’t so stubborn, you might find t
hat you actually like it.”

  “I don’t know if I would go that far.” He took a bite of the eggs and thought about them for a second. “But maybe I could tolerate it.”

  “There you go,” I said, kissing him on the bald spot on the top of his head. “Making strides.”

  I sat across from him and dished myself up some of the food. I listened to him grumble about breakfast while I ate and drank a cup of green tea. That was my next step. He needed to get off the coffee, but trying to do that at the same time I was cutting out his favorite foods would be a bridge too far.

  My plan was to drink the tea around him so he got used to it, then gradually convince him to try it while weaning him off the coffee. It wasn’t exactly a fully formed plan, but it was something.

  When we were done eating and everything was cleaned up, I packed up several reusable water bottles full to the brim with cool water and ice to keep him hydrated, added some chopped raw vegetables into the bag for him to have for a snack, and headed out onto the farm with him.

  Chapter 3

  Garrett

  It had gotten to the point where I dreaded even waking up in the morning.

  That wasn’t a suicidal thought. It didn’t mean if the hotel room windows actually opened or if I still had enough money to afford one with a balcony I’d be flinging myself off and becoming yet another episode of a true crime investigative TV show focused on the Strip.

  Instead, it was just that those first few minutes of being awake sucked so much.

  That morning, the pain in my head and the disgusting sour note in my mouth woke me up before my eyes opened. It was like there was some sort of vengeful, pissed-off creature in my head kicking me in the back of the eyeballs repeatedly. Whatever I had done to make him angry, that dude was giving me the what-for.

  I groaned and rolled over in the tangled sheets to feel the space beside me in the bed. It was empty, which came as both a disappointment and a relief. It meant I didn’t hook up with any of the women I saw in the casino the night before. But it also meant I didn’t forget about having somebody there with me.

  That wasn’t so far outside of the realm of possibility. There were plenty of mornings when I woke up and had little to no memory of what happened the night before. Sometimes, I woke up not even remembering how I got back to my hotel room to begin with. It wasn’t quite so bad that day. I remembered putting on the charm for the two women and trying to get them back to my room with me, but then things went haywire. Of all the memories I could retain and not have scrubbed out of my brain by alcohol, that wasn’t among my favorites.

  I finally managed to pry my eyelids up and look around the room. Keeping the do not disturb sign hanging on my doorknob at all times certainly kept the housekeeping staff from walking in on me while I slept a good portion of the day. But it also left my room a little worse for wear. At that point, it was a complete mess and it didn’t smell that great.

  I didn’t want to contemplate what all was creating that smell. In all honesty, it could have been any number of things. That day was definitely going to be one when I took down the sign and vacated for a while. I could leave the mess to them and come back to a clean slate.

  I dragged myself out of bed and scratched my stomach as I walked across the room to the window. Pushing aside the curtains that were the only thing that held back the sunlight, I squinted down at the Las Vegas Strip that people idealized. They created a romanticized version of it in their heads, all fueled by the shiny impressive images of all the lights glowing at night.

  Rarely did they see images of the Strip during the day. And that was because Vegas was nothing short of an ugly city during the day. For as bright and shiny as the place was when the sun went down, it was dark and depressing in the daylight. It was just so much brown and haze and concrete.

  There was a time when all I saw was excitement and opportunity. When I first got there, I could see beyond all that concrete and dingy reality to the adrenaline-fueled fun, freedom, and thrills that seemed to pump through the streets. I stood at the window just like I was then, looking out over everything and thinking it was one of the greatest things I had ever seen.

  It never would have occurred to me then that I would ever miss the rolling green hills of Montana. More times in my life than I could count, I stood at the window of my bedroom back home or out on the front porch and looked out over the ranch without even caring what I was seeing.

  It was just the same thing over and over. The same sight I saw every day of my life from the day I was born. I wanted more. By the time I left home, I really believed I could happily go the rest of my life without ever seeing the ranch or so much as a single head of cattle ever again.

  Now I didn’t feel the same way. I had seen enough of what was outside Green Valley, and there had been plenty of times over the last few months when I longed to look out the window and see those hills again. I missed the sky. I missed the stars. I even missed the cattle.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered how my brothers were. I’d left all seven of them behind when I fled the green hills of Montana. For a while there, I checked in on them and let them know where I was so they could check in on me. But that faded out. At first, it was because I was tired of hearing them say they were worried about me or wanting to know what I was doing with my life.

  Then it became that I didn’t want to admit it. I wanted to just keep going without the responsibility of my brothers and my home hanging over me.

  Now I wondered if they even thought about me anymore. Maybe they had just given up on me. They had tossed out the hope that I would ever turn my life around and become something more than the black sheep everybody always said, and I would never amount to anything.

  I wouldn’t be able to blame them if they had. To tell the truth, I hadn’t given them much reason to expect more from me than what I had right then. Hotel rooms littered with empty liquor bottles and dirty clothes. Filth and disappointment.

  Glancing over at the clock, I saw it was well past the time for breakfast. Every day when I woke up, I thought of it as morning. But it was getting less and less frequent that I actually woke up anytime near what would be considered morning. Fortunately for me, one of the good things about a lot of hotels in Las Vegas was the buffet.

  The smaller hotels tried to compete with the bigger names by offering a never-ending stream of food. Almost from morning until night, there was always a free buffet set up downstairs. On weekends, there was a happy hour in the evening with free drinks and snacks too. It meant I could eat anytime and didn’t have to worry as much about my dwindling savings.

  After all, I needed that for the casino.

  I went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror at myself. Greasy hair and a few days too much facial hair stared back at me. There were some days when I could barely even recognize myself. I wondered if anybody back home in Green Valley would know who I was if I just walked back down Main Street.

  As soon as the thought went through my mind, another chased right after it. Would it be a bad thing if they didn’t recognize me? So many of them had their ideas about who Garrett Montgomery was. I couldn’t even count the number of times in my life I had heard people make jokes about me and my family.

  Usually, they thought they were being witty when they said with eight sons, there was bound to be one who didn’t grow up quite right. But that was exactly the way most of the people in Green Valley thought of me. Of the eight Montgomery boys, I was the one who caused the most trouble. I stood out in all the wrong ways, and none of them ever let me forget it.

  Maybe they thought they were doing me some sort of good by keeping a running tally of everything they thought I did wrong. Considering they seemed to take particular joy in adding on things I didn’t do, the records didn’t speak kindly about me.

  It was kind of like jumping down into a hole to see how deep it was, then having people pour buckets of water down the sides. It was my fault I crashed headlong into the bottom. But
they made sure I kept tumbling back down, even when I was trying to climb up.

  A lot of the time, it felt like there was no real point in trying to do anything but live up to their perception of me. If they were already going to think the worst of who I was and what I was going to do with my life, why bother doing anything else?

  It only got worse after my mother died. She was a driving force for me to try to do good things with my life. Not that I was ever going to be a golden boy like my brother Cassidy or sweet and charming like the youngest, Sawyer. That just wasn’t me. I wasn’t trying to fool myself into thinking I was some sort of misunderstood tragic creature who just couldn’t catch a break.

  The vast majority of my bad reputation was free and clear. I was never going to try to pretend that wasn’t the case. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t aggravating to have people always looking down on me even when I wasn’t the one to blame.

  Maybe if I headed back to Green Valley now and nobody recognized me, I could just start my reputation all over again. Of course, I didn’t know that would do much good. At this point, there wasn’t a lot to build on. And maybe they didn’t want me back there anyway.

  I could have taken a few minutes to get in the shower and make myself at least somewhat presentable before I went downstairs to the buffet, but I didn’t bother. There wasn’t anybody there in the hotel I wanted to impress or even cared about making a good impression on. I just wanted a cup of coffee and some food.

  I did manage to throw some clothes on. Whether they were legitimately clean or not was somewhat up for debate, but there wasn’t anything immediately obvious spilled on them, so I went with it. Somebody had already called the elevator, and I didn’t feel like waiting, so I headed down the stairs. That meant they dropped me off at the back of the small casino on the bottom floor.