Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [99]
From the corner of her eye Clare saw Devon notice.
“I happened to be in the neighborhood.” He grinned. “I wondered if I might buy you two ladies dinner.”
“Steak?” Devon qualified.
“The best in town,” Steve agreed.
Clare let their momentum carry her to baggage claim and out into the yellow afternoon light. After all, Devon already thought she and Steve were together.
He carried Devon’s duffel bag to Clare’s rental car and showed off the clunker of a truck from the park motor pool. “A hundred eighty thousand miles and she shudders when I brake. It’s a wonder I made it over Teton Pass.”
“I’m glad you did,” Clare told him.
Devon gave him a funny look.
As he held Clare’s car door for her, he murmured, “If I didn’t catch you at the airport, I was going to check the motels.”
A little stab went through her at the thought of what people could do in motels. This evening, though, she had a duty to her daughter.
At Jackson’s Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, the main room boasted a dance floor, pool tables, and long bars on either side. Glass cases displayed a stuffed grizzly, bighorn sheep, and game birds. When Devon mounted a vacant saddle that served as a barstool, Clare smiled at a wisp of memory; her tiny blond child bouncing a hobbyhorse until the springs squealed.
“I’ll have a Coors,” Devon directed the young man wiping the knotty pine bar.
Clare lost her smile. “You will not.” She ordered Cokes for them both.
“One more,” Steve said.
Devon looked softer in the golden glow that illuminated the Cowboy.
Steve slid some bills across the bar to pay for their drinks. Clare liked that he was taking care of them.
“Have you been to Jackson before?” he asked Devon.
She shook her head.
He looked at a faded sepia print of men dancing to a fiddler’s tune. “Jackson was a pretty wild place around the turn of the century. There weren’t enough women, so the men danced with each other.”
Devon flipped back her hair and looked bored.
“No kidding.” He kept on. “The guys with the longest hair pretended to be gals.”
“They were probably gay.”
“Maybe.” Steve looked at Clare. “I think most of them were just lonely.”
As lonely as she’d been last night when she knew another woman held him from beyond the grave.
“Haywood, party of three.”
They followed the hostess to the basement steakhouse. After recommending the ribeye, Steve turned to Devon. “I also have a research project that involves the Nez Perce War of 1877.”
Devon looked like she was in history class waiting for the bell.
Steve elaborated. “Your mother said your family has some Nez Perce in it.”
“I didn’t know that.” Devon turned blue eyes on Clare. “I don’t look like an Indian.”
“No, of course you don’t,” Clare soothed. “My great-grandfather was a quarter Nez Perce, making you one sixty-fourth.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Devon insisted.
Clare shrugged, but she felt uneasy. She’d been acting like the “folks” Garrett had talked about, not wanting to mention their Native American ancestors for fear of being ejected from the drawing room.
With smooth ease, Steve saved her by regaling them with stories about the old days in Jackson’s Hole, when the fur trapping of the early eighteen hundreds gave way to turn-of-the-century homesteading and running cattle. Ranching “dudes”, guests from California or the east, had gradually taken over, evolving into the tourist industry that sustained the region in the late nineteen-eighties.
Clare relaxed and enjoyed the evening more than she had imagined possible. The steaks were fork tender. She ordered a glass of red wine and hoped it didn’t bother Steve as he drank his Coke.
When they stepped out of the Cowboy, Saturday night traffic was thick on Cache Street. A charred undercurrent came to Clare’s nostrils, borne on the wind from the Teton Wilderness. The fires had consumed nearly a million acres in the Greater Yellowstone Area. Some called it disaster, as Connie Chung, Dan Rather, and Jim Lehrer entertained the nation nightly with forests in flames. Others, like