Kayla sat in the chair at the table that passed for Josh's desk and looked around in the late-morning light as some of his music blasted and thumped through the old building around her. He'd told her to grab whatever music that she wanted from his CDs and his laptop for her MP3 player and she was sifting through his Counting Crows CDs at the moment, looking for a tune that he'd played in the truck the other day. She smiled when she found it and a second later "American Girls" was on.
She'd asked him why he liked that one, and he'd replied that she would find that he liked songs because he liked them , mostly, and that there was almost never a tendency toward songs that "meant something" to him, though it did happen now and then.
She sat forward as she browsed suddenly. He must have had everything that ZZ-Top had ever recorded. Other than their top 40 hits, she'd never really given them a listen, so she switched CDs and sat back with her finger on the song selector of the player and sipped her coffee for a few minutes. Browsing his MP3s, she found that he'd put everything there as well, and in another few minutes, she found a few things that she hurried to copy onto her player. When she was done for the moment, she sat back as "Tramp" came from the speakers and she enjoyed the slower, slightly hypnotic tempo for a moment and then she got up to dance a little to it. Daisy looked up at her, but didn't seem interested enough to want to get up.
She looked out through the dirty windows of the shed. She was all alone on the ranch, mostly. After breakfast, Rose had taken Jilly to spend most of the day with Consuella and Margarita's kids at Margarita's place. Daisy was lying on the floor there beside her and Josh was out on the old four-wheeler that he'd found in another shed the week before. Rose told him to go ahead and see if it was usable, since she hadn't thought of it after Sam had passed on and Josh had it running in no time. He was off fixing some of the fence in a far-off corner of the ranch.
She looked around herself some more and had to smile. A little over a week ago, they'd almost been at each other's throats. Now she found him there in her mind quite often. She saw an open pack of Canadian cigarettes on the desk next to a framed photo and she bent down a little to look at the picture.
It was an old family shot, taken when Josh was a teenager. Since the scar there looked much as she knew it, she judged that he must have been sixteen or so. His family looked like really nice people in the way that all people look when they're forced to hold still for one of these things. The photo was taken outside and she could see snow everywhere in the background. Kayla thought that Josh's mother was a lovely woman, and his father looked somewhat like him and had most of Josh's build, but he was in a suit, so there wasn't that much more about him to tell by. But there was another individual there in that picture, a man, and Kayla knew almost with dead certainty then that Josh had a brother.
He looked to be somewhat older, obviously, and he was in uniform with a beret on his head. Kayla looked closely and shook her head in a bit of wonder. Whoever this was, he looked a lot closer to how Josh looked now, though she guessed that he might have been about a decade younger than Josh at the time. She smiled to herself and then at his mother. The woman obviously knew how to build great-looking sons...
She stared at Josh. He had long hair then, and it was something to see him like this. It almost made her want to laugh a little. Depending on the position that she was in and how she held her head, her own dark red hair was long enough for her to feel it as it brushed against her ass. She couldn't see it from the angle of this frontal shot, but she had a pretty strong notion that his hair had been just as long then or very near to it. Kayla grinned as she reached of the pack.
She lit one of his cigarettes and stared at the picture some more, wondering about the lives of all of them.
She took another draw on the smoke and looked at it for a second. It tasted like a cigarette, but it was different, blander somehow. She smiled at that as she remembered when she'd asked him about it a couple of days before. He'd joked that it was a reflection of his people. She told him that she didn't know, but the one that she knew tended to be full of crap now and then.
Not far from the photo, she saw his wallet sitting next to his passports. He carried his current one and several older and expired ones as well. She felt the urge, and even though she was confident that if she'd asked, he'd have told her to go on ahead and look through it if she wanted to, she didn't touch the wallet. She hadn't asked, and that was that. But those passports, ...
Josh had told her that until a little after 9/11, Americans and Canadians had shared the longest undefended border in the world and that both could pass fairly freely back and forth without much fuss, but that now they needed passports. That made her a little sad somehow as she picked up the thin booklets and in another few minutes, she knew where he had been.
She saw the dates, and guessed at the visits to the United States to visit Rose and Sam. It was the other places that came to her eye -- Cambodia, Bosnia several times, East Timor, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Haiti twice, Afghanistan three times, she noted as she wondered to herself. Kayla wanted to make a joke to herself that at least he hadn't been to Bangkok, Thailand, but she knew that he hadn't been in any of those far-off places for fun.
She was about to put the little pile back when she noticed the thin envelope of photos from a photo-developing outlet that had lain under the passports. It was a little old and worn. She was very careful as she removed the group of photos. She couldn't guess about most of the people in the shots and what Josh's relationship with them might have been, but she saw him in a few and she smiled.
He was wearing combat fatigues in most of them, though the coloring changed now and then. In some of the older ones, it was just a drab green. In a few others, there was a sort of green camouflage theme, and in the newer ones, it was a desert mottling. It was the same for the weapons that she saw in a few of the pictures. In the older ones, there was a rifle that she had no idea about, but in the newer ones, he looked to have much the same rifle as American troops used. Most of the shots showed no weapons at all. He just looked to be caught goofing in a moment while he worked at something else.
The odd thing to her was that in almost every shot, he was wearing what looked to be the same dark red beret. It looked as though it could have been edited in to every picture, though she knew that it wasn't the case. In a couple, there was a floppy hat there on his head. When she'd been through the pile, she replaced them in the envelope and put it back where it had been and went back to selecting music files from his laptop.
As she browsed, she thought about looking around at the other files there, but she decided against it. He probably wouldn't have an issue with it if she did, but she already felt as though she'd been snooping enough in his life, well for now, anyway. They had an agreement. What had been in their lives was past. It would always be there, and they'd agreed that the past wasn't the focus so much as the present was, since they'd decided to try to forge something of a future for themselves out of all of this somehow if they could, and that was more than enough for Kayla.
The wading pool from the supply store sat in the yard, looking something like a strange oddity. It was brightly-colored, but it was surrounded by slat fencing. Josh had joked at how the guy at the place had stared at him, since Josh had no other way to describe it when he'd asked for "snow fence". He explained that the stuff was used where he came from to line roads with so that blowing snow didn't pile up so much on the road itself, but the man did get the idea and had something like that.
The fence was to keep Daisy out of the pool, though both Jillian and Daisy took the installation of it to be something of a personal affront. Rose had shrugged and said that it was that way or no way at all, so Jillian had accepted it. Josh had found some patio lanterns and the thing looked really weird after that, but Kayla had agreed that in the evening, it could look pretty festive.
Kayla had filled it right before breakfast and she now waited for it to warm up a little from the sun. She had a plan for today that she hadn't told anyone about. She smiled to herself as she finished the cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. She unplugged her player and shut everything down to walk back to the bunkhouse.
She decided that she wanted to browse his music some more a little later, and she now wanted to buy some of the ZZ-Top CDs for herself. She liked the convenience of MP3s, but the file compression took a lot of the range away, and her ears were good enough to really notice it. In a few minutes back in the bunkhouse, she's burned a CD to at least listen to in the car -- or on her old CD player by the "pool", she smirked.
It took her a long minute when push came right down to shove, but a half-hour later, Kayla walked out of the house wearing her sunglasses, her old Stetson, and her little bikini -- the first one that she'd worn in so long. She carried a towel, a cold can of Diet Coke, and a novel that she'd bought and never got far into. Since she was beginning to believe in the possibility that such a thing as a romance might actually be able to exist now, she couldn't see why it couldn't happen in the pages of a book either. Once she'd slathered on some sunscreen and settled herself comfortably, she decided that it might not be a South Pacific island, but it wasn't bad.
That was how Josh found her an hour later.
Kayla heard him coming and thought a few things over as she watched him park the four-wheeler and get off. For her, time seemed to move into a sort of slow-motion mode as she watched him. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and looked at it a little sadly before putting his old cowboy hat back on his head.
The work of the morning had soaked the shirt through and it also wore a little of the dirt of the job as well. He was sweating buckets and he wanted a drink of water, and after that, all that he wanted was a cup of coffee and maybe a cigarette, though he decided that the last thing wasn't really a limiting factor since he had to walk all the way to the shed to get one. He began to walk toward the house.
