Sweet Masterpiece - The First Samantha Sweet Mystery

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Beau came walking up, just as she cut the truck's engine and got out. She waved helplessly at the red car. His face collapsed into the same oh shit expression that Sam imagined on her own.

"I have no idea what she's doing here," she said. "She lives in L.A. and only visits me when-"

"When there's trouble," he finished. "I'll go. You sort it out and call me later. Let me know if you need any help."

He gave her a lingering kiss and walked down the driveway.

Sam knew she should have expected this. Kelly had borrowed her bank balance a few weeks ago. That was the warning, the clue that should have let her know that her daughter would show up on her doorstep.

She walked to the back door, dreading the conversation that was about to take place.

Kelly, the girl who alternately charms my heart and wrenches my guts, Sam thought. The young woman who should be out on her own-she's thirty-four years old, after all-but who shows up uninvited at the worst possible times.

She paused at the door, the past flooding back. Thirty-five years ago Samantha Sweet had been this dumb girl just out of high school in small town Texas, seeing no future whatsoever in her job at the Dairy Queen. Billy Roy Farmer, from a long line of cotton-farming Farmers, was sniffing around like a horny dog. They'd lost their virginity together but truthfully Sam just couldn't see herself settling into a life of Tupperware parties, Friday night football games, Wednesdays and Sundays at the Baptist church, and forever looking out a kitchen window at miles of flat. Cause that's what a cotton farm in Texas was-flat.

Her life would become her mother's, and at night in the room Sam shared with her sister Rayleen, she'd nearly scream out loud at the thought of it. To keep from going entirely insane she thought of other places she might go, but truthfully, nobody she'd ever known had ever traveled any farther than Dallas so she didn't have much to compare to. In the 1970s a trip to Six Flags Over Texas was every local kid's idea of a dream come true.

Then one day she'd just taken her paycheck-$52.47 after taxes-and put half of it into her precious little savings account, which totaled nearly three hundred bucks after two summers and about a million Saturdays of making chocolate sundaes. She was on her way to the library to return a Kathleen Woodiwiss romance novel (that sort of reading was going to get her into trouble with Billy Roy, she just knew it). She knew there was such a thing as birth control, but Kathleen's characters never bothered with it and Sam was a little fuzzy on the details of how it worked anyway-they didn't discuss it much in the Baptist church.

Anyway, walking down Main Street, she passed Bobbie Jo Hudson's Travel Agency and a shiny new poster in the window caught her eye. Alaska. Everything in that picture was blue and green, with snow on top. And nothing about that landscape was flat. And she fell in love right then and there. Sam must have stared for ten minutes because Bobbie Jo Hudson came out and asked if there was something she could help her with. And Sam just blurted out that it sure would be great to see Alaska some day, and Bobbie Jo laughed and said, "Well, a ticket to get you there would cost almost four hundred dollars." That's how she said it: four hundred in a big italicized voice. It was pretty clear that she'd never sold a ticket that pricey before, and as Sam thought about it on her way to the library she kind of wondered how on earth anyone made a living out of a travel agency in this town anyway. Nobody ever went anywhere.

She turned in Kathleen Woodiwiss and found herself wandering to the Jack London novels and before she knew it she was back in her room at home, blazing her way through The Call of the Wild.