Page 30

When I return Sugar to her stall after a successful thirty-minute ride around the ranch and find my dad leaning against the opposite stall, I know the time for avoiding him has come to an end.

Ever since announcing the pregnancy, I’ve managed to not be alone with either of my parents.

I don’t want them asking questions I don’t have the answers to yet, and I don’t want to hear anything negative they may have to say about Elsie.

I know they love her like their own daughter, but after the comments Cooper has made, I’m worried they’ll also feel protective of me.

“Hey, son,” Dad says, and adjusts his hat on his forehead.

He might be nearing sixty, but he still has a full head of dark brown hair that’s just beginning to streak with gray.

His skin is weathered from years spent in the sun, and there are deep creases beside his eyes and around his mouth from a lifetime of easy laughter.

He looks like he was formed right out of the mountains and dirt around us, a piece of the land just as unmoving.

I dust my hands off on my jeans and close the stall behind me, stalling for time. It clicks into place, echoing through the barn, and I finally meet my father’s eyes. “Hey, Dad.”

“I’ve hardly seen you since you moved back home.” He says this without any judgment, just a touch of sadness in his sandpapery voice, and guilt pricks at me for avoiding him. I feel it settle like lead in my stomach.

I glance down at the dirt and drag my boot through it, watching a line form in its wake. “Yeah, things have been crazy.”

That’s not entirely true. Things at home have been slow moving. Two steps forward, one step back. I feel like things are getting better between Elsie and me, but we’re healing at the rate of a deep cut without stitches. It’s as frustrating as it is rewarding.

“You’re going to be a dad,” he says.

I lift my gaze back up to his.

He’s still leaning against the opposite stall, one leg bent at the knee and resting on the stall door. There’s a small smile tugging at his mouth, lines crinkling the edges of his eyes. “I’m so proud of you.”

My lips twitch. “I put in a lot of work for it.”

He rolls his eyes at me, fighting back his smile. He’s always been so much quicker to laugh than Mom, but I always find it just as rewarding anyway. “I’m sure,” he says. “But I meant I’m proud of who you’re becoming, and I think you’re going to be an amazing father.”

His words hit me in places I didn’t know were vulnerable, places that have been wounded for possibly longer than I’ve known.

When things went south with Elsie, I blamed myself, even though she told me she was the one who needed to figure things out.

I thought I wasn’t doing enough for her, or I was doing too much.

That something about me was wrong. I’d lie awake in that tiny bed in the cabin on the ranch and stare at the ceiling, questioning myself and my choices and what I could have done differently until my eyes burned from the need to sleep and my heart was pounding hard enough in my chest that I could hear it.

It wasn’t until I moved back home that I started to realize that even though I definitely needed to work on some things, she wasn’t bullshitting me when she said all that.

She does have things she’s working through, things that don’t involve me.

Still, there’s a wound beneath the surface that hasn’t quite healed yet, something I think may always linger just a little, a scab that could easily be picked at.

“Thanks, Dad,” I say, voice hoarse, and smooth my hands down the legs of my dusty jeans to hide their trembling. The denim scratches against my palms, rough and familiar.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he says, and turns on his heel, heading for the big barn doors without waiting to see if I’m coming.

I follow after him, dirt kicking up beneath our boots, and we step outside into the blinding sunshine. I have to blink at the change in brightness, but I soak it in, nonetheless.

Summer is officially on its way here. Every day is warmer than the last, and I love the feeling of the sun on my skin and the wind in my hair.

I love all the seasons in Montana, but summer is my favorite.

I always feel like I’m coming alive—defrosting—when the snow melts and the wildflowers come out and the sun stays out in the sky longer, chasing away the moon.

This year is no exception. I’ve never looked forward to summer the way I have after this long, hard winter.

Dad leads us out into one of the pastures, and we walk through the tall grasses without saying anything.

My dad is like that. I know he wants to talk, to find out what’s really been going on in my head the last few months, but he’s quiet.

He bides his time. He gives people room to breathe, to think.

I’m a lot like him in that way. I’ve always been the one to give people the space to cool off, to not press when things are getting heated.

I’m only just now starting to realize there are times I need to push, people who need pushing.

I think he’s known that for a long time, because I’ve seen him do it with my mom and sister when they retreat into themselves.

Cooper, of course, has never retreated. He wears his every thought and feeling on his face and sleeve for the entire world to see.

Somehow, Dad has always known just what each of us needs. I hope when my baby gets here, I’ll have figured that out too.

In the distance, I hear a meadowlark chirp, and the grasses beneath us swish in the wind. It’s calm, the kind of day I always wish for when it’s raining. I want to lie down right here and take a nap in the sunshine. Or go get Elsie and bring her right back here for a picnic.

“How’s Elsie?” Dad finally asks, breaking the silence. He keeps looking ahead, eyes on the horizon, but I know he’s attuned to my every move. That he can read me like a book. It’s actually kind of comforting.

I think about his question for a long time.

A few months ago, I wouldn’t have known how to answer it.

I think that’s why he didn’t ask me then, when I came to him and asked if I could move into one of the cabins on the property that we rent out to people looking for a ranch stay while they’re visiting out west. I remember he asked then if Elsie was going to be safe alone, and I knew he meant safe from herself more than from some unforeseen threat.

And I knew the answer was yes, that as bad as things might be, Elsie was a fighter first and foremost. And then he asked if I was going to be safe alone, and I told him that I would be. That seemed to be enough for him.

He never asked how we were doing, if either of us were okay, because I think he knew we weren’t, and that neither of us was ready to talk about it. But I am now, and he knows it.

“Better,” I answer, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my worn-out jeans. There’s a flower in my pocket that Ruby gave me when she saw me in the pasture with Sugar after her riding lesson. I twist the stem between my fingers, feel the dampness against my fingertips.

He looks at me, catching my eye. “Really?” He doesn’t sound incredulous or disbelieving, just like he wants to make sure I’m honest, holding nothing back.

I nod, feeling more sure with the movement. “Yeah, she is.” Turning back to face the mountains ahead of us, I say, “She’s not her old self again, but I don’t think she ever will be.”

He makes a noise of agreement in the back of his throat, his eyes finding the horizon. “No, I doubt she will be.” He pauses for a moment, then asks, “Do you think you can love this new version of her?”

I stop in the grass, and he does too. His eyes are the same dark brown as mine, and right now they’re both serious and piercing.

“I never stopped,” I tell him, and it’s the truth. Even when we were both at our worst, my soul never stopped trying to find its way back to hers.

He holds my gaze for a long moment, as if searching for something in it. “Good.”

My shoulders sink, relieved, and we start walking again.

“I don’t need to tell you that marriage is hard,” Dad says, voice echoing through the pasture, brushing against the grass and lifting in the slight breeze. “Your mom and I have had our fair share of troubles over the years.”

I look at him, disbelieving. My parents are opposites in so many ways, but similar in all the ones that count.

My mom is fierce and loyal and stubborn as an ox.

Dad is easy-going, wise, and steady as the mountains our ranch was built around.

They complement each other, like opposite sides of the same coin.

I’ve rarely ever even seen them argue. Sometimes they will have these intense discussions with just their eyes, saying things only the other can decipher, and then a decision will be made and us kids will marvel at the way they made it.

I know they have to have had hard times, but I’ve never seen it. They’re steady, solid. Unwavering.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Dad says with a laugh that’s raspy from the years he spent smoking when we were kids.

It wasn’t until his father died of lung cancer when Cooper and I were preteens that he finally quit.

I remember the day he threw the cigarettes in the trash can in the kitchen and vowed he would never touch one again.

How he made Cooper and me promise we wouldn’t either.

“I am surprised,” I tell him.

He shakes his head, looking at me with the bemused expression he used to wear when I was a teen and thought I had life all figured out. He was right; I did regret those nipple piercings that Cooper somehow talked me into.

“Son, you aren’t married for over thirty years without having your problems.” He’s quiet for a moment, eyes trained on the mountains ahead. “Your mom almost left me when she was pregnant with you and Cooper.”

I stop dead in my tracks, and when Dad realizes I’m not following, he does too. He pushes his hands into his pockets and stares at me, like he’s gathering his courage. “I wasn’t always a good father. Hell, sometimes I’m not now, but back then, I definitely wasn’t.”

I want to interject, tell him that when I lie awake at night, worried that I’m not going to be a good dad, it’s because I’m not sure I can live up to him and the example he’s been for me, but before I can say something, he speaks again.

“I was an alcoholic, or I was on my way to being one, at least. The ranch wasn’t doing the best at the time, and your mom and I were already arguing a lot about it.

She thought we should sell some of the cattle, scale back, and I thought we shouldn’t sell the only thing making us money.

Then she got pregnant during our worst performing year, and I started drinking more.

I would get up earlier than usual and work myself to the bone and then drink myself into a stupor at night.

I wasn’t kind to her. I didn’t take care of her how I should.

” He sighs at the big Montana sky. “She was carrying twins, for heaven’s sake, and I wasn’t pulling my weight around the house at all. ”

I swallow, heart twisting in my chest.

“She fell one day,” he says, his eyes taking on a pained look I’ve never seen on him before.

Not at his father’s funeral, although that wasn’t that surprising, since they didn’t have the best relationship. Not when I asked if I could move home. Never.

“She fell,” he continues, voice rougher, more resigned, like he’s slipped back into a memory in his head.

“And I was at the bar in town until late, and she couldn’t get a hold of me.

She broke her ankle and had to call an ambulance to get her.

I didn’t know until I got home and found the note she left me.

” He scrubs a hand beneath his eyes, and my heart moves up into my throat at the sight of it.

“When I finally got to the hospital, she told me I had to quit drinking or she was leaving.”

His eyes finally settle on mine, glowing with intensity. “I quit drinking that day, haven’t touched a drink since. How could I, when losing the best thing to ever happen to me was on the line?”

His words pierce me, the same ones Elsie and I said to each other just a couple of weeks ago, and I know how he must have felt then, faced with losing my mom.

I always knew my dad didn’t drink, but growing up, when we asked him why, he just said there were things more important to him than drinking.

I nod, unable to form words against the lump in my throat. It’s thick and heavy, and I can feel tears pricking at the backs of my eyes because of it.

“Months later, after you were born,” Dad says, his voice husky, “I asked her if she still loved me after everything.” He smiles then, even though it’s wobbly.

“She said she never stopped. I—” he cuts himself off, clearing his throat.

“I needed to hear that, even if I didn’t deserve to.

You make sure Elsie knows that too, okay? ”

“I will,” I promise and mean it, because I know Elsie feels guilty over making me leave. I know she doesn’t regret it, that she still thinks it was for the best, but that she feels remorse over the way it hurt me. And I never want her to doubt that during all of that, I never stopped loving her.

Dad nods and clears his throat again. He wipes his eyes one last time with the back of a hand, his skin wrinkled from long days in the sun. “Good. Good,” he repeats. “Our Elsie needs to know she’s loved no matter what.”

My heart returns to my throat once more at his statement. I love how much he loves her, how much my entire family does, and I wish she knew that too. I wish she didn’t think their love, my love, was conditional.

I don’t think that’s what her parents intended for her to learn while she was growing up, and I don’t even really think it’s true, but I know it’s what she’s internalized.

And I know what I need to show her moving forward. She asked me to leave once, and I did it because I thought it was what she needed, but I’m not leaving again. This isn’t our first rodeo, and one way or another, we’re going to find our way back to each other.