Chapter 7: Blue Side of Lonesome

As winter worked its way through the cold days and nights, I pretty much finished what I envisioned doing on the house. I resurfaced the wainscoting and the kitchen cabinets, refinished the heavy oak kitchen table and chairs and painted the upper part of the walls. In talking it over with Dana, we decided paint would look better that trying to put wallpaper back.

There was some water damage in the bathroom and I wound up yanking everything out and redoing it from scratch. I found an antique tub and sink from an estate sale in Pueblo that looked great. I did the bathroom floor in large squares of Mexican tile and added a deck on the back of the house with a door from the bedroom. I wound up using the truck so much I took it back and gave David the Focus.

Dana lived in the big ranch house with her dad, Ben Ross. Her mom had died several years ago of cancer and her dad had taken it hard. He wasn't that old, in his early fifties but Dana said he just wasn't interested in much of anything lately.

"He does give riding lessons and boards horses; that does keep him busy. It's during the winter when things are quiet that I worry about him. I've tried to get him to date but he feels it wouldn't be right."

It turned out he went to Viet Nam in the last year of the war, and when he found out I had been in the Army for twenty years, he was happy to find someone to talk to. He had been a member of a LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Platoon) outfit and had some really hairy stories to tell.

As Ben wasn't busy during the cold weather, he started coming up to "help" me do some of the work on the house. He'd sit there and tell me about one of his escapades while I was painting or sanding or whatever the current task was. Of course, he would have a cup of coffee or sip a shot of my Stranahans. He got to like it so much he gave me a couple of bottles for Christmas.

One night we were sitting in front of the fire watching the paint dry, drinking from a bottle of Knob Creek he had brought up the hill with him. We had come to be close and I was down in the dumps, feeling like I was on the blue side of lonesome. He was easy to talk to, so before I realized it I had told him all about Jenny.

"I never had a problem like that, Jack, but I've lived some ... enough to know there are no short cuts or magic tricks that makes things better. Hell, I ain't got over Martha's dying yet and there are days I think I never will. I know Dana worries about me but it's just so damn hard. You will work your way through this. I can see you are a strong man ... too good a man to be pining away for a woman that done you wrong and don't deserve you."

He looked into the fire for a minute, and then continued, "Say, are you interested in Dana? I mean as a woman?"

That sure came out of left field and caught me totally off guard. The truth was, I had started paying more attention to her. She was certainly attractive, pretty even. She was almost as tall as I was with a slim, wiry build. I'd talked and ran with her enough I knew she was flat out smart and easy to get along with. Several times while I was supposed to be working on my book, I'd catch myself looking out the window daydreaming about her. She hadn't shown any overt interest in me so I never asked her out—just kept it at the daydream stage.

Like he was reading my mind, Ben continued, "She's a cute enough gal, but she acts like she's not interested in men. She was married right after she finished college. She was hired as the assistant women's cross-country and track coach at CSU Fresno. She met a guy and she thought she loved him. Two weeks after the honeymoon they got into an argument because he thought she was flirting with another guy. He wound up giving her a black eye and a cracked rib.

"She didn't do anything about it but she swore to herself that no one would ever do that to her again. A month or so later she was cooking his eggs when he started shouting at her that she was doing it wrong. He shoved her against the stove and slapped her hard. She grabbed the skillet with her bare hand and hit him as hard as she could in the face. She burned her hand bad and broke his jaw and burned his face with the hot oil.