Born Under The Lone Star

He picked up on the first ring

“Hello?” Even in that one word, a west Texas drawl, the quality of Justin’s voice echoed. It was the same resonant public speaking voice that had made Brandon’s grandfather stand out in the halls of Congress.

She swallowed, then started again. “May I speak to Brandon Smith, please?”

“This is Brandon.”

Markie closed her eyes. She was talking to her very own son again. Just like the first time, it was scary, but also strangely intoxicating. It took all her will to suppress tears as her mind flashed back to the pages of her journal where she had made those promises to him so long ago. Would she keep them now? Or would she injure her child? Would she hold him back?

Or let him go?

Dear Reader,

People often ask me where I get my story ideas. THE BABY DIARIES were first “conceived” when I was reminiscing with a friend about the birth of my middle daughter, who was born when my husband was a candidate in a statewide political race. It occurred to me then that babies seldom arrive when it is convenient.

THE BABY DIARIES are three stories of three sisters, each having a baby under most inconvenient circumstances, each falling in love under equally inconvenient circumstances.

For these stories I returned to my beloved Texas Hill Country. My brother and sister-in-law, her mother, Jean, and Jean’s longtime friend Helen were perfect traveling companions as we hit the trail in the minivan and explored the colorful towns and rural areas that eventually melded into the setting I have named Five Points.

One final note: authors are also often asked if their work is autobiographical. Yes and no. While my own impressions and experiences are always unconsciously woven into any story, this town and these characters are pure fiction. For example, unlike the conniving Marynell McBride, my own mother was honest to a fault and would never, ever have touched someone else’s diary!

As always, my best to you,

Darlene Graham

P.S. I love to hear from you! Drop me a line at

P.O. Box 720224, Norman, OK 73070 or visit

www.darlenegraham.com. While you’re there, take a peek at the next book in THE BABY DIARIES series, Lone Star Rising.

Born Under the Lone Star

Darlene Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This first book in my new Texas series is dedicated to

Rick and Jody, my precious brother and dear sister-in-law.

Despite six-shooters, snakes and donkeys that bite,

I will go back to the Hill Country with you two anytime!

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

If you are reading this diary without my permission, stop right now. I mean it. I want you to put this diary down. Immediately. For your information, this means you, Mother.

I’m warning you, if you keep going you’ll find out things you don’t want to know.

Okay, I know you’re still reading, you snoopy old thing, so you asked for it. Don’t blame me if you have a horse heart attack.

I am pregnant.

There.

And Justin Kilgore is the father. How do you like that? Me and Justin. We’re in love. And don’t you dare try to interfere with that. Don’t you dare go and ruin the one beautiful thing—

“WHAT ARE YOU reading there, Sissy?”

Markie McBride jumped at the sound of her middle sister’s words, even though Robbie always spoke with the soothing lilt of a low violin. Not even the antics of her three little boys could make Robbie McBride Tellchick raise her voice.

“Nothing.” Markie closed the cover and tried to stuff the book back down in the dusty old cardboard box where she’d found it moments ago. It had been a physical shock to look down and see, wedged in between her yellowed first communion dress and her high school letter jacket, next to a flank of musty yearbooks, the faded mauve cover that was her Baby Diary, as she had come to call it many years ago. Eighteen years ago, to be exact. Her son would be eighteen by now. Correction. Her son was eighteen now—a bright, exceptional, eighteen-year-old young man. Only a few days ago, she had talked to him herself, in a phone conversation that had haunted her ever since.

As her hand struggled in the tangle of dry-cleaner bags encasing the cloth items in the box, she realized, not for the first time, that her mother was a totally conflicted human being.

Hot and cold. Love and hate. That was Marynell McBride. Mostly cold and mostly hate, Markie decided sadly, as her mind absorbed this latest in a long line of betrayals. Where was the photograph? Markie couldn’t risk looking for it now.

The box had been tightly packed and the diary refused to fit back into its appointed slot. Markie pushed harder. So weird. So, so weird that she’d stumbled on the thing now, when she’d been compelled to return to Five Points to attend her brother-in-law’s funeral. Now, at the very time that her son, Justin’s son, was actually preparing to come here, as well. It was almost like some kind of…eerie convergence. Like fate or something.

“It looked,” Robbie said as she leaned back with a grin and planted a palm on the saggy mattress of the twin bed where she’d been sorting old photographs, “like one of our old diaries.” She craned her neck in Markie’s direction. “Whose is it? Yours? Frankie’s?”

With their father’s encouragement, the three sisters had each faithfully kept journals in their teens.

“It’s in your blood,” P. J. McBride had explained quietly one Christmas as he passed each girl a ribbon-bound stack of blank journals, “like your pioneer grandmother and her mother before her.” Daddy had kept those old leather-bound journals, hardly legible now, but precious as ancient Egyptian scrolls to P.J.

The girls had decorated their plain cloth-bound versions so each could immediately recognize her own elaborate designs. Ever-sensible Robbie had likely disposed of her own foolish ramblings long ago.

Markie had gotten rid of her journals, too. All but this one. She could never bring herself to part with the record of her seventeenth year. The Baby Diary.

The last time she’d moved, the diary hadn’t shown up at her new town house with the rest of her stuff. Its disappearance had distressed her terribly. And, even more distressing was the loss of the photo. Her one picture. That broke her heart more than anything. She’d grieved, alone and in secret, over that loss especially. She should have had copies made instead of sticking it inside the diary cover. Where, she had fretted during many lonely evenings of unpacking, could her precious diary have disappeared to?

Now she knew.

She stared at the back of Marynell McBride’s graying head as her mother’s skinny arm furiously scrubbed at the panes of one of the high dormer windows as if it were the Queen Mother who was coming to stay instead of Marynell’s own three rambunctious grandsons.

She took my diary, Markie thought with a familiar sickness of heart. For heaven’s sake, Mother, what were you going to do? Blackmail me?

“Fess up.” Again, Robbie’s voice made Markie jump. “Whose is it?” Robbie was smiling pleasantly.

“Nobody’s. I mean, it’s nothing. Really.” Markie knew she sounded guilty, probably looked it, too.

Markie could see Marynell’s thin back stiffen high up on the ladder. The woman slowly turned her head and squinted down at her youngest daughter with an expression that was equal parts hostility and suspicion. “Margaret,” she demanded, “where did you get that box?”

Funny. Marynell never called Frankie “Frances,” or Robbie “Roberta.” And although Marynell had coined her daughter’s tomboy nicknames, she reserved the use of Markie’s full name for the times she was working herself into a slow-burning rage at her daughter.

“From under the bed.” Markie fixed challenging eyes on her mother’s face, willing her, daring her, to press the issue, especially here in front of Robbie, especially now.

Robbie, sensing the sudden shift in the atmosphere, frowned. As she stood and crossed the room, the taut silence seemed amplified by the scuffing of her house slippers and the measured ticking of their father’s antique mantel clock.

Markie turned her eyes from her mother’s scowl to her sister’s pallid face. Robbie didn’t look like herself these days. Instead of the family’s slender Irish rose, she looked like a puffy, used-up, freckled hag. Her long ginger-colored hair, usually bound in a neat French braid, was shoved behind her ears, limp and unbrushed. At ten o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t dressed, unthinkable for a farm wife. Her frayed pink terry-cloth robe accentuated her pale complexion and the girth of her expanding middle. As she waddled across the bare floorboards of the long attic room, Markie thought how Robbie even moved like an old woman now. So unlike the energetic sprite that had kept pace with a robust husband and three growing boys on their huge farm. But Robbie was doing a lot of uncharacteristic things lately—understandable under the circumstances—like now, for example, poking her nose in where it didn’t belong.

“It is one of the diaries.” Robbie’s teasing smile returned as she advanced, having no idea what she was about to do. “Nothing else could make you blush like that.” Her hand snaked out to grab at Markie’s, still submerged in the box, now sweating on the cloth covering that encased the most damaging secret of her life.

When Robbie’s hand tugged on her wrist, Markie pushed her sister away. “Stop it!” she snapped. “I said it’s nothing!”

“Ah, now,” Robbie wheedled, “we could use a little entertainment. Couldn’t we, Mother?”

“That box wasn’t supposed to go in this room.” Marynell acted as if Robbie hadn’t even spoken. Her brow was creased and her voice grew vehement as she started to descend the ladder. “I told P.J. to put it across the hall with my things. I swear, that man never does anything right.”

The McBride farmhouse had a high converted attic, cleaved in two by a dark hallway illuminated by a single bare bulb at one end and a tiny window at the other. Right now, at midmorning, a thin shaft of light poured down the steep-pitched stairs that led to the kitchen. On either side of the hall, two enormous rooms stretched the length of the Victorian-era frame structure, with dormers poking out along the front and back planes of the roof.

Those two rooms had been rigidly appointed when the sisters were growing up. Their bedroom was at the front of the house, arranged like a dormitory with three twin beds evenly spaced between the two dormers and three scratched and dented dressers standing at attention on the opposite wall. The mantel clock on top of the center dresser had been the only decoration allowed during their childhoods. The long room on the other side of the hall was the playroom, later the study. Three identical desks, three plain bookshelves, three metal footlockers. No rugs. No curtains. No pictures. Marynell was nothing if not tidy. She despised clutter, her husband P.J.’s most especially.

Both attic rooms had grown fallow and musty since the girls had grown and gone. The one they were cleaning now had devolved into a repository for P.J.’s projects and memorabilia. Tucked in among the three beds were boxes of old photos and papers, childhood keepsakes from his daughters, magazines, sheet music, hunting and fishing equipment, anything that “offended” Marynell’s aseptic sense of order.

The other room, dedicated to Marynell’s sewing and paperwork, remained as bleak and sterile as an operating room. Marynell liked it that way—their belongings strictly divided.

Today the three women had been mucking out this room so Robbie’s three boys could stay here until she could get her life sorted out. The move back to the McBride farm had been Marynell’s idea. She adored her grandsons—the sons she never had.

Marynell was scrambling down the ladder faster than a spider backing down its web. “I’ll take that box across the hall myself.”

“I’d like to look through it first,” Markie said evenly while she kept one hand on the cardboard edge and the other inside…on the diary.

“Those are my things,” Marynell protested.

“Not exactly, Mother. This is my letter jacket, these are my yearbooks, and this is my diary.” Markie flipped her hand.

“Ha! So it is one of yours.” Robbie succeeded in snatching it from Markie’s grip. “Full of dreadful teenage secrets, I bet.” In fact, except for the one hidden in these pages, Markie couldn’t think of a single secret between the sisters. Her heart hammered and her stomach sank as her sister started flipping pages.

“Anything about me and Danny in here?” Robbie flopped on the nearest bed as she skimmed page after page of Markie’s teenage scrawl. In recent days Robbie’s whole world had come down to this obsessive quest—the desire for one more word, one more photograph, one more memory of Danny.

Robbie’s face lit with an expectant smile as she scanned the early pages, the first genuine smile Markie had seen in days. For the moment, her beleaguered sister looked vaguely like a teenager in love, instead of a devastated widow. “Here we go.” She read aloud with obvious delight, “Ohmigosh!!!! Robbie and Danny are getting married. With four exclamation points—isn’t that cute?”

Markie’s heart contracted. This diary contained precious few entries about Robbie’s youthful romance with Danny. In only a few pages Robbie would see the secret Markie was in no mood to reveal, certainly not now.

“There’s nothing else. Now, give it back to me.” Markie grabbed at her sister’s arm, but Robbie swung away saucily as Marynell inserted her tall frame between the girls.

Markie’s mother’s thin face had turned as gray as the cleaning rag compressed in her bony fingers. “This is my house,” she said to Markie quietly, ominously, “and you have no right to go through my things.”

“Your things?” Markie spun to face her mother squarely.

In these last few days since she’d returned to the farm, she had finally given up hope of even the pretense of a decent relationship with Marynell, even for Robbie’s sake. Truth be told, Markie had given up that hope a long time ago. Truth be told, she was never going to please her mother no matter what she did. And truth be told, if it weren’t for her father and Robbie, she would never have set foot in this house again, not after… It was certainly too late now. Recently, fate—kindly or not, Markie couldn’t decide—had engineered it so that she now knew exactly how much her long-ago decision had cost. It had cost her the beautiful young man who was her son, or rather, the son of a very fortunate family in Dallas.

“I will not be disrespected this way.” Marynell’s crepe-paper cheeks grew mottled, but for once her mother’s distress inspired no mercy in her youngest daughter. “This is my home and I… I…” Marynell stammered before her lips clamped shut and her chin went up, her old defiant gesture.

“Oh, there has never been any question about that.” Markie couldn’t help her sarcasm. “That’s why it’s okay for us to go through Daddy’s stuff like a wrecking crew, but your precious things must not be touched. But that happens to be my diary.” She pointed at the volume still in Robbie’s hands. “And you took it, didn’t you, Mother?” The accusation made tears spring to her eyes. “Back when you and Daddy were helping me move from Dallas to Austin.” Markie had moved a few times early in her career, but since the move to Austin a few years ago she felt settled at last. High time. She was thirty-five.

“I did it for your own good.” Marynell’s compressed lips were turning white.

Robbie’s head came up. The sappy smile was gone, replaced by a worried frown. “Hey, you two,” she chided in her musical voice. “What’s this all about?”

“Your sister’s husband,” Marynell hissed, “has just been killed in a tragic accident.” She emphasized each word as if Markie had somehow forgotten why they were all assembled here. “And she does not need any of your foolish drama.”

“This isn’t about me, mother. It’s about you, stealing my diary. And not just any diary. This diary.” Markie jabbed a finger at it.

“What in the world is going on here?” Robbie looked puzzled…and deeply disturbed.

“I was trying to protect you.” Marynell ignored Robbie’s question. “You were a very foolish teenage girl who had no idea what you were writing in those pages. You still have no idea.”

“Well, you certainly shouldn’t have had any idea what I was writing in those pages!” Markie was practically shouting now.

“Hey, now, Miss Marker.” Robbie’s use of Markie’s old childhood nickname did not mollify her. After years of heartache she was determined to have it out with the old biddy, right here. Right now.

“Nothing is sacred with you, is it, Mother?”

“Sis.” Robbie touched Markie’s sleeve. “Stop it. It’s just an old diary. Here.” She held out the volume.

Robbie, the peacemaker, Markie thought. Robbie, Marynell’s whipped little pet.

Marynell’s eyes flitted to the diary, then to the pained expression on her bereaved middle daughter’s face. Glaring back into Markie’s eyes, she said, “You can take the thing and publish it in the Dallas Morning News for all I care. Whatever happens now, it’s not on my head.” She turned on her heel and stomped from the room.

“What on earth was that all about?” Robbie said after they heard the stairway door slam.

“That diary.” Markie was unable to keep the creeping sorrow and resignation out of her voice, out of her heart. She sighed. “Or rather, what’s in it. Read. You’ll see.”

“I’m not sure I want to now. Here.” Robbie flapped the volume at Markie. “Take it.”

Markie pushed the diary back. “No. I’m sick of secrets. Go on. Read it. I want you to. Honest.” Even though she meant what she said, she couldn’t help crossing her arms protectively around her middle.

To hide her pain, she turned to look out the dormer window. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her sister hesitating, then unsteadily lowering herself to perch on the edge of the bed.

Just beyond the bare yard Markie could see the windmill, like a huge leaden sunflower, fanning above the leafy tops of twin live oaks. The holding tank to the side was the same dull silver color, the color of all things utilitarian on the farm. In the foreground a rickety post-and-barbed-wire fence demarcated her father’s garden, already bursting with spring foliage. An overalls-and-Stetson bedecked scarecrow, twice the size of a real man, stood over the rows with a toy gun lashed to one stuffed glove and a lurid smile painted on his pale muslin face. Markie smiled. One year her father had actually won first prize in the scarecrow festival over at Cedarville.

Beyond lay the acres and acres of gently rolling land that marked the southern reaches of the Texas Hill Country. Will I ever get away from this beautiful, godforsaken place? Markie was beginning to doubt whether she should stay on here to help her widowed sister. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass, as if her very countenance, her very identity, arose from this land, would always be imprinted here.

Markie’s love-hate relationship with the Hill Country had plagued her even after she’d made a disciplined effort to focus on a new life, a good life. Even her years as a mover and shaker among the power suits in the glass-walled urban canyons of Dallas had not eradicated the strange spell of the Texas Hill Country. Rocky gorges. Remote waterfalls. Wild rivers. Dusty rodeos. Savory barbecues. Old-time German Christmases. The memories, good and bad, always vivid, came back to her too easily as she looked out over the landscape where she had grown up. The Texas Hill Country was not the kind of place one could just leave.

Sometimes it felt as if she was two people. The hearty little girl who grew up running around this rustic landscape regulated by the seasonal rhythms of farming, and the sleek, sophisticated young woman who thrived in a bustling cosmopolitan culture, rushing headlong into the future. Two distinct parts, cleaved by the one event certain to change girl to woman—the birth of a child.

For some moments Robbie had been flipping pages, reading with the diary held close to her face as had been her girlhood habit. Markie noted the exact moment when she stopped. The clock ticked three times before Robbie lowered the open book to her lap, her finger touching one spot on the page, like a devotee lining a particular passage of the Bible in church.

Markie bit her lip as, with head bent, still as a penitent, her sister stared at the open page.

Robbie lifted sad eyes up to look at her sister and asked, “Am I reading this right?”

Markie didn’t answer. She turned back to the view. So peaceful. So beautiful. As if nothing had ever gone wrong in this place. But everything had.

“Markie?” Robbie’s troubled voice insisted from behind. “You…you had a baby?”

Markie stood stock still, closing her eyes, imagining again the scene of Danny’s death. What a horrible way to see one’s husband die. And what a horrible time to find out that your little sister is not even remotely who you thought she was. “Yes,” she said without looking back at Robbie. “When I was seventeen.”

“I… I don’t believe it.” Robbie flared a palm over her swollen bosom, where a perennial gold cross winked on a short chain. A gift from Danny, no doubt. Her sister, always the good girl to the core, would never understand what Markie had gone through, no matter how many diaries explained the pain.

Markie turned upon her sister with that uncompromising steady gaze that had vaulted her to her success in the political arena. “Well, you’ve got to believe it. Because it’s true.”

CHAPTER TWO

The maternity home is not such a bad place. It’s kind of pretty from the street, actually. Quaint. A brick three-story with a big porch and tall white columns. Somebody said it’s an old converted sorority house. Isn’t that weird? It’s a sisterhood of losers now. Girls like me who listened to some guy’s sweet talk until he broke her heart.

The home—and I use that word in the worst sense, sort of like the warehouses where they stick old people—is tucked away at the end of a long, shady street a few blocks from the University of Texas campus. There’s nothing that indicates what’s really going on inside—just a little brass plaque beside the door that reads Edith Phillips Center. For Wayward Girls, I added in my head as I walked through the door.

Frankie insisted on lugging my bags upstairs, acting like she wasn’t in a hurry, but I could tell she was. I could tell she wanted to beat the rush-hour traffic around the capitol. And, of course, the almighty Dr. Kyle mustn’t miss his dinner.

A girl who actually looked more pregnant than me showed us to a tiny office where I met my caseworker, May, who is kind of cool. May looks as if she’s stuck back in the sixties, wearing a loud afghan and a shiny Afro. Really. She even made Frankie laugh. Then we met some of the other girls, who were in the kitchen cooking dinner together like one big happy family.

My room’s on the second floor. Frankie spread the twin comforter set she bought for me across the bed and set up some pictures in pretty frames on the dresser as if she was moving me into a real sorority house or something.

“Call me when it happens and I’ll come right away,” she told me as she gave me one last hug. “And remember, we love you.”