Sweet Water by Anna Jeffrey Read Free Book Online Page A

left home for Dallas, full of ambition to earn a degree in culinary arts. Her dream was to be hired as a sous-chef in an upscale metropolitan restaurant or one of the big hotels in Dallas or Fort Worth and eventually work her way up to executive chef. She had even considered becoming a master baker. She was good.
    Then things happened. Plans failed to gain traction. Out of money, she dropped out of school and drifted from cooking in one fried food joint to the next, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing, barely making ends meet.
    And now she had returned to where she began.
    Agua Dulce. English translation: Sweet Water. This place’s reason to exist was a single water well of unknown depth and volume that produced cold, sweet drinking water, a rarity in West Texas.
    Not far from where she sat, visible in silhouette, stood the flat-roofed, pumice-stone building that protected the precious well. And not far from that stood the huge round tank that stored water for the use of all Agua Dulcians. Just after World War II, so the story went, a promoter from the East had the well drilled at great cost, hoping to establish a real town and make a fortune in a land sales scheme. She wondered if he knew he had drilled for the wrong commodity. In those days the fortune to be made from holes in the ground in West Texas was from crude oil. The modern-day testimony to that fact was more than   six hundred oil wells in Cabell County.
    She stopped her mental wandering. What was she doing musing over geology and geography? She had enough that was closer to home to worry about.
    As Vince finished on a blue note, she heard the crunch of footsteps and peered out into the night. She recognized Bob Nichols approaching, bundled up in a safari coat, his bushy white hair and beard appearing to glow fluorescent in the moonlight.
    “Good evening, Marisa,” he said softly as he stepped up onto the deck.
    Bob always spoke formally and barely above a whisper, as if he feared he might disturb the measureless desert quiet. He had lived in Agua Dulce for at least twenty years. She remembered when he came. He owned and operated the Starlight Inn, a ten-unit motel that was a hodgepodge of mobile homes and concrete block buildings ranging from ten to fifty years old.
    “Hi, Bob,” was all she answered, not really wanting to encourage conversation or a visit.
    “How is your mother this evening?”
    “She had a good day, I think. Her mind seemed to be working better.”
    He nodded. “Ah.” He came to where she sat, carrying an Albertson’s Bakery sack. “I brought her a treat. I went in today.” He handed over the white paper sack.
    He meant he had gone to Odessa or maybe Midland, where all Agua Dulce citizens went for shopping or doctor visits or other necessities. To Marisa, the trip to Odessa or Midland, where she had lived and worked at Denny’s for a time, was a chance to mingle among other human beings--to see the bright lights, so to speak. To a recluse like Bob Nichols, the trip was a trauma. She looked into the sack. Doughnuts and sweet rolls. “Hey, thanks. She loves these.” She set the sack on the TV tray and turned down the radio’s volume. “Did you have a good trip?”
    He shook his head and sank into the other rocking chair.
    “Do you have customers tonight?” She asked mostly because his having guests in the motel   usually   meant breakfast business in Pecos Belle’s. He raised seven   fingers. “Seven? Hey, that’s good for April, right?”
    The months between tourist seasons were lean, April being one of the leanest. With school still in session, no families traveled the highway and the snowbirds who had come south to escape the snow and ice of the northern climes were heading home.
    He nodded and sighed.
    “Where they from?”
    “The North mostly.” In Bob-speak, that meant anywhere north of Amarillo. “Except for a biker. He came from Fort Worth, I believe he said.”
    So the guy on whose shoulder she had cried was