Page 20 of Broken Reins (Whittier Falls #4)

Twelve

Ford

T he next morning, I drove out to see my mom.

As I got out of my truck, the sound of a diesel engine rumbled somewhere nearby, probably my father’s old pickup coughing its way down the back road.

The world was gray, the mountains shrouded in clouds, and the grass so heavy with frost, my boots crunched on it as I cut across the front lawn.

I stood in the yard a long time, looking out at the fields.

What used to be a herd of a couple hundred Red Angus cattle was now maybe two dozen, all bunched around the one working water trough.

The fence that separated pasture from pasture had gone gray with age and lack of care.

In some places, it sagged all the way to the ground, and the weeds ran right up and over like they owned the place.

I remembered building that fence with my father, remembered how he made me tamp every post myself, never mind if my arms gave out or my hands blistered and bled.

He’d say, “You take shortcuts, you get a crooked fence, and you only have yourself to blame.” I’d hated him for it at the time. Now I hated that the lesson had stuck.

The house looked the same as it always had, except for the air of neglect around it.

It was a plain white two-story with a tin roof, the kind that baked you in the summer and froze you solid come January.

The porch sagged enough that I could see where last year’s snowmelt had pooled against the steps and warped the boards.

My mother used to keep flower boxes under every window—pansies and petunias and the occasional spiky ornamental grass—but now they were mostly empty, dirt packed down hard with only a few stubborn shoots fighting through the crust.

I circled the house, not sure what I was looking for.

Maybe proof that there was still some life here.

I checked the barn, found it empty except for a stack of brittle hay bales and a few broken tools.

I ran my hand along the barn wall, feeling the grooves and knots in the wood, remembering how I used to sneak out here at night and watch storms roll over the hills, lightning lighting up the world like the end of days.

When I finally went back to the front door, my hands were shaking from the pain of it all.

I figured it was unlocked, but I knocked anyway, out of habit. No one answered.

The smell hit me again as soon as I stepped inside. Not just dust, but the sharper chemical tang of bleach and alcohol and something else I couldn’t name, something faintly sweet and rotten, like flowers left too long in a vase.

The television was on, set to a low volume. A weather channel showed off storm systems heading this way. I remembered my mom watching the weather every day, even though the sky outside told you everything you needed to know. Now the TV was just background noise, a stand-in for company.

They’d moved a hospital bed into the living room, pushing the coffee table and chairs off to the side. The bed was cranked up, and the blue blanket was tucked in so tight it looked like it was trying to pin its occupant to the mattress.

My mother lay there, eyes closed, face turned to the window.

She looked smaller than the last time I’d seen her, almost weightless, like she might drift off if someone opened the window.

Her hair was even paler than the previous week, and there was a spot on her cheek where the skin was so thin I could see the blue vein underneath.

Her hands rested on top of the blanket, fingers curled inwards, nails short and unpolished.

I stood in the doorway, watching her breathe, not sure if I wanted her to wake up or not.

After a few minutes, her eyelids fluttered and she turned her head in my direction.

“Morning, Mom,” I said, forcing my voice to sound easy. “You look good.”

She smiled, the effort making the skin around her mouth bunch up like crumpled tissue paper. “Liar,” she whispered. Her voice was barely there, but it had a humor in it that made me want to sit down and cry.

I pulled a folding chair from the stack in the corner and set it up by her bed. I sat so close my knees bumped the metal frame.

She reached out a hand and found mine, her skin cool and dry. She squeezed, and I squeezed back.

“Couldn’t sleep much last night,” she said. “Your father snores like a chainsaw. Could hear him all the way down here.”

I huffed a laugh. “Some things don’t change.”

We sat for a while, neither of us saying anything. The air was thick with everything I didn’t want to talk about.

She was the one to break the silence. “You see the fence?”

“Yeah.”

“You fix it?”

I shook my head. “Not yet.”

She made a face like she was disappointed, but I could tell she didn’t mean it. “It’ll hold. For now.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

She let go of my hand and brushed at a spot on the blanket, her fingers trembling. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I was worried you wouldn’t come.”

“I said I would.”

She looked at me with eyes that were still sharp, even if the rest of her wasn’t. “I know you did. But you hate it here.”

It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer.

She studied my face, searching for something. “Your father’s out back,” she said, finally. “He pretends he’s still running the ranch. Pretends I’m just tired, or lazy, or stubborn.” Her mouth twisted into a smile.

“He won’t come inside until dinner. You have time.”

I nodded again, feeling like a child who’d been sent outside to play.

We ran out of words after that. She closed her eyes and let her head rest against the pillow, but didn’t let go of my hand.

Hours passed, I didn’t know how many, I just sat there watching her sleep. Sometimes checking my phone or scrolling the news, but mostly just sitting vigil.

Eventually, the afternoon sunlight came in through the window, striping the bed with gold. I remembered sitting in this room as a kid, waiting for her to finish making dinner, or listening to her hum along with the commercial jingles while I watched cartoons.

She drifted in and out of sleep, her breathing slow and shallow. I sat there, counting each rise and fall of her chest, listening to the creaks and groans of the house as it settled into another day of doing nothing.

I looked around at the machines and monitors, at the endless loop of blue sky out the window, and I wondered what it meant to keep a promise to someone who might not be around tomorrow.

I wondered if I’d ever learn how to do it right.

The clock ticked on, loud in the quiet, and I held her hand until it twitched and her eyes opened again.

“You aint got nothing better to do than sit around here staring at an old woman all day?”

I chuckled, but it was strained, even to my own ears.

I looked at the empty recliner in the corner, the old green one my father used to park himself in after dinner.

He would sit for hours, never saying a word, just drinking cheap whiskey and watching the news with the volume all the way down.

Sometimes I wondered if he was actually listening for something, or if the silence was what he wanted.

The recliner looked smaller now, or maybe I was just bigger.

“He misses you,” she said, reading my mind.

I stared at the floor. “I doubt it.”

“He does. He just—he doesn’t know how to be soft.”

“Doesn’t have to be,” I said, a little harder than I meant. “I’m not twelve anymore.”

She reached for my hand, missed, then tried again. I took her fingers in mine, careful not to squeeze too hard.

“He’s scared,” she said. “Always has been.”

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I let it hang between us, like a bad smell no one wanted to name. She’d always made excuses for him and this was no different. But there was no use arguing about it.

We sat for a long time. I traced the lines of her hand with my thumb. The TV flickered, casting weird shadows on the far wall.

“He hasn’t come inside all day. Who takes care of you?”

“Oh I got a nurse who comes most days. There’ll be someone here round the clock when . . . when it’s almost time.”

Almost time for her to die.

“Well can I help? What do you need, you thirsty? Hungry?”

“I could use some water now come to think of it.”

I leaned down to kiss her hand and stood. “I’ll be right back.”

The kitchen itself looked smaller than I remembered, but that might’ve just been me.

My head nearly brushed the cheap faux-wood cabinets.

Someone’d tried to update the place with a new microwave, but it looked out of place, like a spaceship parked on top of an abandoned house.

The far end of the kitchen was dominated by stacks of junk mail and a yellow legal pad with my dad’s scratchy handwriting.

Mostly numbers: gallons, pounds, acreages, sums that probably made no sense to anyone but him.

I grabbed a glass from the draining rack, filled it with tap water, and watched the bubbles spin up from the bottom.

My mother had always hated the taste of the well water.

She used to fix it with a splash of lemon, but I found nothing like that in the fridge.

A half-empty pack of straws sat next to the dish rack, so I grabbed one and dropped it in the glass.

Back in the living room, she was dozing so I set the water on the side table, then tucked the blanket higher up on her shoulders.

Her eyes opened, and for a second, I could almost see the old fierceness there—the same look she’d give me when I tried to sneak out of chores in the summer.

“You take care of yourself out there in that house, you hear?” she said, like she was reading my mind.

“I don’t want you moping around. Find something good. ”

“I’m trying, Ma.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Loud footsteps and the back door creaking open interrupted us.

My stomach dropped. I turned to see the silhouette in the doorframe: broad-shouldered, big as a bear, and rolling in the cold with the force of someone who never learned to knock the mud off his boots—my father.

He filled the space, his hair still mostly black but the silver running in thick at the temples now, making him look like the kind of general who won wars by breaking things and never apologizing.

His eyes landed on me and then immediately cut away, like even a glance might let me slip through a crack in his armor.

He stomped into the living room, peeled off his gloves, and dropped them on top of a pile of medical bills. Only then did he look me over, taking an inventory of everything from my face down to the boots I wore. His gaze didn’t linger, but it left a mark anyway.

“You’re back then,” he said, voice flat as a shovel scraping ice.

“Guess I am,” I said, forcing myself to stand my ground.

He didn’t come any closer, just stood there with his hand on his hip, a king surveying a failed kingdom. His other hand grasped a bottle of whisky.

The air thickened, heavy with the scent of livestock and sweat and something sour that might have just been resentment, left to ferment in the walls for years.

I stared at him, waiting for whatever judgment he was about to drop. He’d never been subtle about what he thought of me. But this was the first time I’d been a full-grown man in his presence, shoulders squared, heels dug in.

“You look like hell,” he finally said, eyes narrowed. “That’s what city living’ll do for you.”

I couldn’t hold back the tired laugh.

He grunted, unimpressed, then jerked his head toward my mother. “She eat yet?”

I shook my head. “I just got her some water, she wasn’t hungry.”

“Water’s not a meal,” he said, as if I’d failed a basic test.

I bit back the urge to remind him she’d just asked for the damn water and glanced at my mom.

Her eyes were shut again, mouth drawn in a tight line, but I caught the faintest twitch in her brow.

I wondered how many times she’d played this scene out, words and actions all scripted, nothing ever getting easier.

My father didn’t bother sitting down. He kept his boots planted on the worn patch of carpet and stared at the TV, though he couldn’t have cared less about the weather.

He didn’t even take off his jacket. The old barn-smell of it competed with the bleach and sanitizer and made the whole place feel stale.

He finally looked at me, sizing me up again. All the years I’d been gone, and nothing had changed except the faces got older, the voices a little rougher. I acknowledged with a kind of sick humor that no matter what I did, I’d never be anything but a disappointment to him.

He made some gruff noise at the back of his throat and gripped the arms of the old recliner, testing the frame before he sank into it.

It looked like an act of surrender, until he laced his fingers over his stomach and fixed me again with that cold, appraising look.

“You settling your business in California or running from it?”

“I sold the company,” I said. “Nothing to run from.”

He grunted and his eyes turned dark. “There’s always something.”

I didn’t answer, just watched the rainy weather radar whorl around Montana on the TV. My mother’s mouth twitched—maybe she was dreaming, maybe she was just barely awake enough to know the old patterns were alive.

“You got this from here?” I asked, nodding toward my mom.

“Now that’s a question. I been the one here, boy.” His voice was gruff, his eyes wild with unchecked anger. I wasn’t about to lead him into a fight right here in front of her hospital bed.

I kissed her hand again and stood. “I’ll check in tomorrow.”

He laughed, without humor. “You do that.” He took a long swig of the bottle and I left the room, walking out of the house, down the porch steps, and to my truck before I took another breath.