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“He knew that?” She hid the surprise in that by saying immediately, “He messaged me about that — Keefe did, about not having the results.”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t very good at things like that, apps or on the computer or even on the phone. So I checked with the company right before we came out here. They had a record of sending the results and he should have had them. They said they’d send another set to him.”
Sure, do it for a Kenyon, when they’d stonewalled me. Though, in fairness, she was asking for a repeat send to the test-taker, rather than the results. Still...
“You told your father Keefer Dobey was the architect of your turnaround.”
She frowned. “I never said that.”
“Not in so many words, but didn’t you say how important that time with Keefe up the trail was to you?”
“Sure. And Keefe was nice, especially because he didn’t shout at me, telling me how stupid I was or what I’d done wrong. He just kept quiet. That was a nice change.”
The sharpness of that gave another glimpse into how she’d been as a guest last season. The staff of Elk Rock Ranch had my retroactive sympathies.
Then she sliced a look toward Diana and me, and my sympathies extended to her.
“Your dad?” Diana asked with perfect neutrality.
“Yeah. After Mom died. Before that, he wasn’t that interested in me. It was... I was so mad at her for leaving me with him. Dying was a release for her. I knew that. Not just from pain...” She stared at her hands for three long breaths, jerked her gaze up to us, then back again. “From him. And, yeah, she was under heavy meds, but she said it more than once. She told me she would have divorced him if she wasn’t dying.”
Robin wasn’t asking for sympathy. She had it. And not just on the tough-on-a-girl to lose her mother at that age level.
Still, how much had her mom known what she was saying? Because that was a heck of a burden to put on your daughter.
Damage to the father-daughter relationship didn’t seem to be all Randall’s doing.
Although the damage to the relationship with his wife might have been, so indirectly, this, too, could have been his fault.
Chicken or egg. We couldn’t know.
“So, yeah, it was a nice change to be up there with Keefe not after me about something, everything.
“I don’t remember anything particularly wise he said. He’d be quiet for a long stretch, then he’d ask what I saw. And then sometimes rambling, stories about how to do things I never in my life considered doing or about this outlaw and the woman who loved him and how he’d died and she disappeared, all in this low-key mumble that said it was okay if I didn’t listen, it was okay if I did.
“It was... different. I was different. I don’t know how to explain it.”
She shifted. “Maybe it was the physical pain. Finally feeling in my body the way it felt inside. I was back in sync. Pieces of me together again. From looking up at the tops of the trees and the sky.”
We let her be quiet for as long as she wanted.
“The weird thing is, as I got better physically and that pain mostly went away, so did a lot of the other pain. I never expected that. Not all of it went away — either kind of pain. They say I might be able to predict changing weather patterns with my leg for the rest of my life. Just like I still feel sudden jolts or lingering aches of Mom dying. But I can walk and I can ride and I can live.”
She said again, “I don’t know how to explain it.” This time, she added, “But I don’t need to.”
We’d just encountered her father in her.
****
As we left by the back door, we said thanks to Krista, and I added a question. “Were Randall and Robin here all Monday night?”
She pursed her lips, then a quick head-shake.
For a second I thought—
“No way I can know one way or the other. We’re in the private quarters and unless a guest calls us, or a fire alarm goes off, we don’t have contact until the morning. Privacy for them, privacy for us.”
