Between Heaven and Texas by Marie Bostwick Read Free Book Online Page A

had done it. Of course, it had to have been a terrible and heartbreaking shock. But it was so sad. Having lived through the misery and isolation of one prison, Graydon had returned home and entered another, but this time he’d done it by choice.
    Lydia Dale, on the other hand, was stuck. Mary Dell had tried to talk her out of marrying Jack Benny, but she’d accused Mary Dell of trying to “spoil her last chance at happiness,” unable to see that if anything was going to spoil her chance for happiness, it was marrying Jack Benny. She knew that now, of course.
    Mary Dell did up the green rhinestone buttons on her bright blue blouse, thinking back on the vision of happiness that Lydia Dale had conjured all those years ago, the one that had propelled Mary Dell out of the bathroom and down the aisle, a picture of them living next door to each other with passels of towheaded children running back and forth between the houses, stealing cookies and causing havoc, of holidays and birthdays celebrated with a crowd of relatives, of being best friends again and for always.
    It hadn’t happened.
    The sisters lived close, but they weren’t close—not like they had been. They talked all the time, and Mary Dell saw the children, nine-year-old Jeb and six-year-old Brocade, known as Cady, at least twice a week. The kids were sweet, and Lydia Dale and Jack Benny’s little house was just six miles from the ranch. But Jack Benny was a wedge between the sisters. Lydia Dale refused to discuss her marriage, and because they couldn’t talk about that, they couldn’t talk about a lot of things.
    So many fine plans, but none of it had worked out.
    The only thing that had turned out better than she could have hoped was the one thing she’d never planned on at all. She’d never figured on falling in love with her husband on her honeymoon, but that’s what had happened.
    Donny was not only a handsome man but a good one, and a loving husband, a little incommunicative and hard to unglue from the television during football season, but that was all right. Mary Dell loved football, like any true Texan. She’d grown up going to the high school home games every Friday night during the season and still did, along with everybody else in town. Friday night football was the social highlight of the week in Too Much. And, of course, they watched televised college games on Saturday and professional teams on Sunday after church, especially if the Cowboys were playing. Mary Dell couldn’t wait for the start of the new season. Sitting snuggled up next to her husband on the sofa while they watched a game together was just one more pleasure of being married to Donny. But for their inability to have children, Mary Dell would have described her marriage as perfectly happy. Who’d ever have figured that the man she’d “had” to marry thirteen years before would be the ideal man for her? How did she get so lucky?
    And Donny wasn’t just good to her; he was good to her folks too. She didn’t know how the family would have survived without him.
    After Dutch developed diabetes and lost part of his left foot to the disease, he wasn’t capable of doing as much on the ranch—not that he’d ever been much of a go-getter to start with. When Dutch was running things, the ranch barely broke even. But things changed when Donny joined the family.
    Donny worked sunup to sundown, adding a new breed of beef cattle to the mix of livestock, sheep too, putting those ideas he’d talked about on their honeymoon into practice and making the ranch profitable enough to support the whole family—the whole family, not just himself and Mary Dell but Dutch and Taffy, Grandma Silky, even Jack Benny and Lydia Dale.
    Jack Benny was a Benton, which, in theory, should have made him a wealthy man, at least by Too Much standards. But he and his daddy didn’t get on. Noodie kept a tight grip on the family