Texas Homecoming Read Online Free PDF Page B

make him aware of the difference now. Her grandmother never stopped reminding her that the Wheelers were poor whites who didn’t have any class or enough sense to know they were trash.
    Cade wasn’t stupid. He ought to
know
he was so poor that he was beneath the notice of a diViere. Still, she had to admire the way he brazenly forced the world to take him as he was. He didn’t appear to have lost any of his self-confidence, but he clearly didn’t like chipped and cracked dishes.
    She couldn’t afford to stand there speculating about his last four years. She put a large bowl of black-eyed peas on the table, then reached for the stewed peaches.
    “Where’s the milk?” he asked.
    “Sweet is in the springhouse. Sour and buttermilk in the pantry.”
    DiVieres always drank wine with their dinner. She expected that was gone, too.
    “Where are the glasses?”
    “You lived here for twenty years,” she snapped, wrestling with the hot fruit to keep from burning herself. “Can’t you remember where anything is?”
    “It’s been a long time. Besides, you’ve been doing the cooking for two years.”
    “And everything is exactly where it was when I came.”She set the hot bowl on the table and turned to him. “Your grandfather said he wouldn’t have any Mexican wench messing about in his house. He said everything had been put where it was by a good American woman, and I was to leave things alone if I knew what was good for me.”
    She turned back to put the stewed corn in a dish. She hadn’t meant to say anything to Cade. She’d intended to walk away from his ranch with her head held high, but here she was about to burst into tears.
    “I was in lots of houses during the war,” he said. “None of them did things the same way, but it didn’t seem to make any difference in getting the food on the table or making it taste good.”
    She didn’t have time to decide whether he was trying to make her feel better or trick her. The men poured into the room as if they’d all charged the door to see who could get there first.
    The old man won. “Where’s the coffee, girl?” he demanded, going straight to the chair at the head of the table.
    He said this every night to irritate her. Pilar set the pot next to his plate without a word.
    “No wonder your ranch went bust,” he said with a derisive hoot. “You with your highfalutin ancestors and you still can’t count. You’ve set seven places. There’s only six men here.”
    Pilar wondered if the old man was finally getting senile. She knew she’d only taken out six plates.
    “I set the extra place,” Cade said.
    “What for?”
    “Pilar.”
    “What’s gotten into you, boy? You know the help doesn’t eat at the table.”
    “Where does she eat?”
    “I don’t know. What does it matter?”
    “I imagine it matters to her.”
    “She’s not paid for it to matter.”
    Pilar didn’t want to eat with the old man. His griping would give her indigestion, but his remark about being paid made her furious. She opened her mouth to speak, saw Cade looking at her, and closed it again. She turned back to the stove. The biscuits were ready to come out.
    “How much do you pay her, Gramps?” Cade asked, an edge to his voice.
    “She gets paid plenty. Now sit down before the food gets cold.”
    “How much?”
    Pilar turned back. No one else had sat down at the table, not even Cade’s uncle. The power base had shifted on the Wheeler ranch. The old man might own the place, but Cade was going to run it. He’d stepped right into the job without asking anyone’s permission.
    In the past she would have attributed that to his arrogance, his assumption that whatever he did was right, but there was nothing of arrogance or conceit about him now. Only confidence.
    “He doesn’t pay me anything,” Pilar said. “I take care of him and your uncle in exchange for his letting me and my grandmother live here.”
    “Sit down and eat,” the old man grumbled. “I’m hungry.”
    “She