Dry Creek Sweethearts

“I thought you’d started doing your own cooking,” Linda said as she walked over to his table. “Coffee?”

“Please.” Duane smiled. “I’d be a fool to eat my cooking when you’ve got the café here.”

Linda smiled back.

Duane told himself that smiling was a good beginning for the two of them. That’s where they’d started back in junior high school.

“I’m sorry I’ve been gone.”

Linda looked at him cautiously.

“You needed your friends, and I wasn’t here.”

“It’s okay,” Linda said softly as she pulled out her order pad. “What’ll it be?”

Duane resisted the impulse to throw his heart at her feet. “Scrambled eggs and toast.”

JANET TRONSTAD

grew up on a small farm in central Montana. One of her favorite things to do was to visit her grandfather’s bookshelves, where he had a large collection of Zane Grey novels. She’s always loved a good story. Today Janet lives in Pasadena, California, where she is a full-time writer.

Dry Creek Sweethearts

Janet Tronstad

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

—Romans 8:28

This book is dedicated with love to my brother-in-law, Duane Enger. He has graciously allowed me to use his name for the hero in this book with the understanding that I would also include his dog, Boots. Boots plays himself in the book, but the only thing my Duane has in common with his namesake in this book is his love for his high school sweetheart, my sister, Margaret. Well, that and his affection for an old Silverton guitar that he sometimes brings out to play in the evenings.

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

Epilogue

Questions for Discussion

Chapter One

“I don’t care if he did grow up in Dry Creek, he’s still not one of us. Not anymore.” Linda Morgan struggled to keep her voice neutral as she flipped the sign in her café window to Closed and began to stack chairs on tables so she could mop the floor.

A neutral calm was the best she could expect of herself when it came to Duane Enger.

She should have refused to let her younger sister, Lucy, hang his old guitar on the wall of the café when the idea first came up months ago. Then she and her sister wouldn’t even be having this conversation now.

Lucy was too young to know there was no point in building a shrine to someone who had left everything behind so he could go off and chase his dream of becoming a rock star. Every time Linda looked at the guitar she remembered that the old six-string Silvertone hadn’t been good enough for Duane to take with him. The frets were worn down and it needed new strings. So he had left the Silvertone behind, just as he’d eventually left everything and everyone behind, even her.

The small Montana town of Dry Creek had not been big enough for Duane and his dreams.

Of course, Linda couldn’t tell her sister all of this—especially not in the tone of voice she was using in her head as she thought it. Lucy had a tender heart and Linda didn’t want her to worry that anyone around here held anything against the man Lucy had just started to idolize. A teenage girl needed heroes, and Duane was better than most who were out there.

Besides, Linda told herself, the whole thing with Duane shouldn’t bother her anymore. Lots of people were disappointed by their high school sweethearts. She wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t even worth talking about. It had been eight long years since Duane left Dry Creek. That was plenty of time for a broken heart to heal.

Right now, Linda had more important things to worry about anyway, like keeping the floor clean after all the rain they’d had this week. The road into Dry Creek was asphalt, but the parking area in front of her café was pure dirt. That meant mud and lots of it. She’d already mopped the floor twice today and she had to do it again tonight before she and Lucy headed home. A woman who needed to mop a floor that often didn’t have time to be thinking about some man who had left her behind to pursue his fantasy of stardom.

Linda lifted the last chair up. It was half her fault anyway. She never should have trusted a man who couldn’t even stick with the name he was given the day he was born. Duane had traded his name for a stage name before he left Dry Creek. That should have been her first clue about how much commitment the man had in his bones. He eventually started going by Duane again, but lots of people still knew him as the Jazz Man.

Linda set the chair down hard on the table and winced when she heard the soft slam. Okay, so Duane might still bother her a little more than she would like. Which was probably natural; she was only human. She might have grown closer to God since Duane left, but she still had a way to go. Her heart had healed, but her head still hadn’t totally forgiven him or herself for believing in him.

Linda thought Lucy had given up the argument until she saw her sister looking at her with reproach in her eyes.

“But we have to display these things. He’s famous.” Lucy held up the letter she’d framed to hang beside the guitar and gazed at it as if it were written in pure gold. “The Jazz Man is the only famous person to ever come out of Dry Creek—right here—and he remembers us.”

The Jazz Man is what Duane had started calling himself just before he left. All through high school, he’d played and sung his own arrangements, along with songs from the old jazz masters like Duke Ellington. Linda had sung with him, especially on the classics. Back then, Duane had been happy enough with himself and his jazz revival plans.

Then, he set his eyes on Hollywood and nothing was good enough, not his name, not his guitar, not his friends. Not even his hometown.

Still, Linda told herself, none of that was Lucy’s fault. Besides, if Linda let her sister hang the letter on the wall as she’d been requesting, it might actually help them both forget about the piece of paper since it would no longer be in her sister’s pocket where she could pull it out and read it every ten seconds.

“Go ahead and put your letter up there if you want.” Linda tried to sound gracious. “But, just so you know, he’s not that famous. There are lots of places where people haven’t even heard of him.”

Like Timbuktu. And maybe that nursing home in Miles City. The more Linda thought about it the more she knew she was overreacting. Lucy might have been carrying that letter around with her since it came in the mail a week ago. And she might have gone all dewy-eyed every time she read it. But it was the memories that it brought back to Linda that were the problem, not the letter itself.

Linda suspected she’d worn a very similar look on her face when she was four years younger than Lucy and had seen Duane for the first time. At the age of eleven, he had come to Dry Creek to live in the Enger family home on the outskirts of town. Rumor had it that Duane had been arrested trying to steal a car in Chicago and the courts had sent him to Dry Creek to get reformed under the stern guidance of his great-aunt, Cornelia Enger.

To Linda back then, Duane had looked every bit the tough city boy people said he was. He wore ragged black sneakers when the rest of the boys in school were wearing leather cowboy boots. And he had that old Silvertone guitar strapped to his back all the time. It was whispered that he knew how to hot-wire a car, pass a fake twenty-dollar bill and French-kiss a girl. No one was quite sure if the latter knowledge came from experience or observation, but the adults didn’t like it no matter how he’d learned about it.

Linda’s mother asked her not to talk to Duane in school and that had made Linda determined to be his friend. The adults in Dry Creek all eyed the boy cautiously, but Linda decided he just looked lonely. He scowled at everyone, but Linda just kept smiling at him until one day, when they were in the seventh grade, he smiled back.

It wasn’t much of a smile, but the thaw had begun. Eventually, he would play a song on his guitar for her now and then. Over time, he seemed to fall in love with Linda as much as she was with him. She was thrilled when they were freshmen in high school and he said she was his girl, and then when they were sophomores and he called her his sweetheart. When they were eighteen, he secretly asked her to marry him…someday when everything was good…someday when he could support them…someday when his dreams had had a chance to come true.

Of course, someday never came.

“It’s just as well he left Dry Creek,” Linda finally said. “He would never have been happy here.”

She didn’t know what would have made Duane happy. Back then, she had thought it was his music. He’d learned to play the guitar from some man in Chicago and Duane had been fierce about wanting to spark another major jazz revival. Linda believed he could bend the whole music world to his thinking by the sheer force of his wanting to make it happen. As it turned out, her belief lasted longer than his determination. He gave up on jazz and joined a rock band that promised a quicker route to fame. Duane was impatient with everything. He hated lines and contracts and waiting for people to respond to his music.

So, he left jazz and went to where the music beat faster. The rock band he joined toured and recorded and, now and then, even had a song with a few jazz overtones in it. She knew those jazz moments came from Duane.

Not that Linda really listened to the songs from Duane’s band anymore. If she heard something from them come on the radio, she turned it off. She didn’t want to be wondering what the words to these songs meant. Or, if Duane had written them and who he had in mind when he wrote them. Or if he ever sang the songs he had written for her. Or if he even thought about her anymore.

Not that she wanted Duane to think about her now. It was much too late for that. And it was okay. God’s plan had been for her to be in Dry Creek. It was her place; hers and Lucy’s. When their mother died and left them alone, the people of Dry Creek had made a circle around them and became their family. She and her sister wouldn’t have been happy anyplace else. And she was happy here. Really, she was.

Sometimes her memories of Duane seemed like nothing more than a long-ago dream, vaguely sweet but irrelevant to her life today.

“I doubt he even signs those letters himself.” Linda brought herself back to Lucy and the problem at hand. So much had changed. “He probably has someone who does the whole thing for him. You could have been anybody writing to him and you would have gotten the same letter back.”

She hoped she wasn’t being too hard on her sister. She hadn’t known Lucy had sent a letter telling Duane all about the outdoor concert she and the other high school students had given last spring, until Lucy got a letter in response. Linda would have protested if she’d known Lucy had written; her sister didn’t need to waste her time thinking about someone who wasn’t giving anyone in Dry Creek a moment’s thought.

“He signed it ‘Love, Duane.’ That has to mean something.”

Obviously, Linda thought, her skepticism wasn’t making a dent in Lucy’s adoration.

“It means he hopes we buy his new CD.” Linda stepped over so she could take a closer look at the letter her sister held. “I don’t even know if that’s his real signature.”

There was a time when Linda would have definitely recognized Duane’s handwriting, but eight years was a long time and she’d had better things to think about. She had a business to run and, after her mother had died, she had a younger sister to raise. Besides, Duane had probably changed the way he signed his name many times over the years anyway. Change seemed to be his pattern.

“But you two used to be friends,” Lucy protested. “I remember all those times when he snuck out to the farm when Mom was at work. He was your boyfriend. I saw him kiss you dozens of times.”

Linda felt her whole face stiffen. Duane had been more than her boyfriend; she’d said yes when he’d asked her to marry him someday. She’d been foolish enough to think that meant she was his fiancée and she’d waited for him like a woman of her word until she visited him and it became apparent things would never work out. Not that she was going to tell Lucy that. No one needed to know about her empty dreams. “Things change.”

With Duane, things had really changed.

Everything was gone. Duane’s great-aunt had died in her sleep just after he graduated from high school. She’d been ill for some time and the doctor said she’d just hung on until she could see Duane through school. Linda had stood with Duane as they buried his aunt and she’d felt him tremble.

There were no Engers in Dry Creek now, except for Duane’s old dog, Boots. Duane had taken Boots with him when he first left Dry Creek and then, a year or so later, he’d asked Mrs. Hargrove if Boots could live with her for a while. He paid the older woman, of course, but still that didn’t make it right.

A dog should be with its master, especially this dog. Boots would die for Duane.

Every time Linda thought about it she was indignant on Boots’s behalf. Duane couldn’t help it when he lost his great-aunt, but he didn’t need to lose Boots, too. Besides, a man shouldn’t ignore the kind of loyalty Boots had. It should count for something more than just remembering to send a check to cover some dog biscuits. And, if the truth were told, Linda wasn’t even sure Duane sent the checks regularly. Maybe he’d completely forgotten about the dog.

Mrs. Hargrove was too kind to evict Boots even if she never received a dime for his care. Now that she thought of it, Linda wondered if Duane had some purebred show dog in Hollywood that he used for publicity shots. Maybe he’d replaced Boots just the way he’d replaced everyone else.

Linda almost said something, but Lucy clearly wasn’t thinking about the injustice befalling anyone left behind in Dry Creek. She was looking straight at Linda with a hopeful look on her face.

“You went to Hollywood to visit him,” Lucy said softly. “Remember? I stayed with Mrs. Hargrove and you went to see him. That had to mean something.”

“That was a long time ago.”

It was shortly after their mother had died. Their father had been dead for years by then and their mother’s death left Linda broken. It was too much. She had gone to see Duane as instinctively as she’d wept at her mother’s graveside. He’d opened his arms to her, too. She’d been comforted until she realized he had no intention of returning to Dry Creek and she couldn’t go with him on the road chasing his dreams as he’d asked, not when she suddenly had a seven-year-old sister to think about. So she’d left him a note saying things just wouldn’t work out between them and she had come back to Dry Creek.

Duane had brought Boots back shortly after that, but Linda had refused to see Duane then. She needed to get on with her life and she couldn’t do that if Duane kept stopping by. At the time, she hadn’t known it would be Duane’s last visit to the town. His great-aunt had left him her house, and Linda had thought Duane would need to stop by to tend it. It was his duty to take care of that house; she thought he’d be back often. But he wasn’t.

“I still think we should name the café after him. We could be The Jazz Café in memory of him,” Lucy said.

“We don’t need a name. We’re the only café in Dry Creek.”

Dry Creek had a hardware store, a café, and a part-time bakery. That and a dozen or so houses were all that was around, except for the church, of course. The church was the heart of the community. But the café was central, too. No one even needed directions to the café. It was right there for everyone to see. Linda had never worried about having any signs up except the Open and Closed one in the big front window.

“I bet people will pay more to eat in a place with a name,” Lucy said. “Don’t you think?”

“I’m not going to charge more just because there’s a name over the door. Besides, the food tastes the same whether or not we call ourselves something.”

“Lance says we need a name. That it will increase business.”

Linda sighed at that. Besides her, the only other friend Duane had in high school had been Lance Walker, a boy who was part Sioux and had come off the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota with a chip on his shoulder that rivaled Duane’s. The two were competitive with each other about everything, but they had become firm friends.

Lance had been sent to Dry Creek to live with a distant relative, Mr. Higgins, just as Duane had been sent to live with his great-aunt. Lance didn’t have Duane’s wanderlust, though. He’d stayed in the area after high school, and now he rode rodeo in Miles City. After he’d won a couple of events, he’d begun looking for sponsors for the shirt he wore on his back. Linda had offered to sponsor him even if she didn’t have a name to advertise on the shirt, but he refused, saying he was taking advertising not charity.

“Everything isn’t always about dollars and cents,” Linda said. “Lance knows that.”

Lance had his pride, and Linda had begun to wonder if he was serious when he kept asking her to close the café early some Saturday night so she could go to dinner with him in Miles City. At first, she thought he was asking her out because of old times, but she was no longer sure. She wished she could feel half the emotions about Lance as she did about Duane’s old dog, Boots.

Linda told herself she didn’t want to wind up some disappointed old woman who was still bitter because her first love had left her a million years ago and she’d never moved on. Anyway, it would be good to date again. She could hardly use the excuse of raising Lucy much longer, especially now that her sister was a sophomore in high school.

Linda used to love to date. When she was Lucy’s age, she had her hair streaked with red and her mascara loaded with glitter. She and Duane used to drive into Miles City every Saturday night just to go line dancing. Sometimes Lance would go along with them and the three of them bumped shoulders with strangers and gave wild coyote yells when the line broke apart. It was more aerobic exercise than dancing really, but they liked the feet-stomping excitement of it. They’d wind down with a soda or malt at a late-night diner. Duane liked strawberry. She chose vanilla.

Those days seemed like an eternity ago. Linda couldn’t recall when she had first started feeling like such an old woman. She was only twenty-seven years old and some days she’d rather spend the evening with her feet propped up than go anywhere. Maybe she needed some new vitamins.

Of course, she had plenty of energy during the day; it was just when she thought of dating that she got tired and wanted to stay home in her old bathrobe and watch television.

“Mama always told us to let our light shine,” Lucy said softly. “I think she’d want you to give the café a nice name.”

Linda’s eyes softened as she looked over at her sister. Lucy was carefully marking a place on the wall to put a nail so she could hang her framed letter. Lucy didn’t really remember their mother saying that about their light; she remembered Linda telling her that their mother had said something like that.

Their mother hadn’t said much about love or happiness or anything that a young girl could hold on to so Linda added a few quotes of her own to the stories she told Lucy on the theory that their mother might have said something like that if she’d given her and Lucy more than a passing thought. Her mother had been so caught up in mourning the death of their father years ago that she hadn’t paid much attention to either of her two daughters. The admonition to stay away from Duane Enger was the only advice her mother had ever given her about men.

Linda knew a young girl needed more than that. She needed to feel loved. She also needed to have some words to guide her. And someone to listen to her and understand what she was saying.

“Maybe you’re right,” Linda finally said. “A name for the café couldn’t hurt us.”

Lucy smiled up at her. “You won’t be sorry.”

“Just think of something without Jazz in it. All we need is a simple name. Something like the Morgan Café or the Sunshine or—”

“Definitely not the Sunshine Café,” Lucy said. “Not in this mud.”

The rain was a blessing in this part of Southern Montana. For years, there hadn’t been enough of it and the ranchers had been worried about drought. Now the skies were being overly generous with moisture, which made a lot of people, and their cattle, happy even if it didn’t do much for the floor of Linda’s café.

Still, Linda knew that happy ranchers made good customers, so she thanked God for the rain.

“We’ll think of a name on the way home, after I finish mopping.” Linda congratulated herself on moving Lucy’s attention away from the letter. Hopefully, once it was hanging on the wall, Lucy would forget about it.

Linda pulled her mop out of the bucket. The lemon smell of her cleaning solution cut through the old coffee smell. Linda prided herself on her black-and-white floor. That, along with the gray Formica-topped tables, gave the whole place a fifties look. And it was neat and orderly, just the way she liked. She had an old malt machine on the counter and two-dozen malt glasses hanging from a rack above it. She was also saving up for a genuine ruby-red jukebox to put next to the door of the kitchen. When that happened, everything would be perfect.

And, if the decor wasn’t enough to inspire a name, the café itself should be. She made an honest cup of coffee and charged fair prices. She ran a working person’s café that offered good value. There should be a name in all of that somewhere.

“The name shouldn’t be too froufrou, though,” Linda told her sister. “Remember who most of our customers are. Ranching families. We could just call ourselves the Dry Creek Café and everyone would be happy.”

Lucy wasn’t listening. “I should write and tell the Jazz Man about his guitar hanging on our wall.” Lucy adjusted the framed letter she’d just hung. “I think he’d want to know, especially if we have a name.”

Linda sighed. Maybe she’d made a mistake in letting Lucy think life was filled with more love floating around than it really was. “He gets lots of letters, honey. Tons of them probably.”

“But not letters from Dry Creek,” Lucy said confidently. “This is his home. He wants to hear from us.”

Linda didn’t answer. What could she say? So she just pushed her mop across the floor. The rain was coming down steady still. She’d just seen a flash of lightning and she wanted to get the floor mopped quickly so they could get back to the farm before the roads got any worse. She didn’t want to get stuck in the mud.

“I think he might want to know about all the rain we’ve had this spring,” Lucy continued. “He knows how dry it usually is so he’ll be happy. His great-aunt’s lilac bushes are going to be in full bloom pretty soon if the rain ever stops.”

A person had to drive past the Enger driveway in order to take the road out to the Morgan farm. It always made Linda sad to see the old Enger house standing there without anyone living in it, so she tried not to look in that direction as she passed.

It was time to stop avoiding things, she decided. She needed to put the past to rest.