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It was big, with a chain-link fence around the perimeter, and an industrial-looking building. It was the cheapest place to get the kinds of things they needed for the ranch, and it sat where it did because many people used it, from various outlying areas.
And it was the strangest thing. When they got in there, she was...excited.
Interested in all the products they carried, and it made him wonder how long it had been since she’d left the damned house.
“Are you unfamiliar with feed?” he asked.
“Not at all. But we don’t do a lot with animals, so I haven’t had the opportunity to really spend a lot of time in stores like this one. I just think everything’s really interesting. Everything about ranching. It is an undervalued profession. Listen, I know that you think that I’m snobby, but I’m not. I am proud of the kind of work that we all do. People with office jobs think they’re better than the people out there working the land. In reality, we are all part of an ecosystem. We need people to work in offices, but they need us to work in the fields. I think that what we do is the closest thing to magic out there. You take seeds, and from those tiny seeds something amazing grows.”
This little rabbit of a woman spoke more words in a few minutes than most people he knew spoke in a day, and yet this monologue fascinated him, even when it shouldn’t.
She went on. “You raise animals, and there are so many things that can be done with them. Flour, salt, yeast, eggs, butter and water, and you have bread, but only when you put it together right. There is wisdom in all those things. I get it. You don’t think that I have the wisdom. But I have the passion. And I also took the time to figure out the best ways that I could support what we had. And that’s all. I’m just trying to help with that.”
He could see that she was sincere. She really believed that. She really loved all this.
With all of herself. And it was rare to meet another person who did.
It was especially strange to discover that they actually did have something in common. He’d heard her speak, he’d known she was Brian’s daughter, and he’d decided he knew who she was.
But he hadn’t.
But they were more the same than they were different. That was the weirdest realization.
Because they were both standing in a feed store like they’d rather be there than anywhere else on the planet, and she was practically in tears over the miracles of the land.
And that was the kind of thing that he’d felt in his soul from the time he was a kid. Though, he’d lost that over the years. Because the ranch had become something he’d had to do, and not the promise of a future.
That was the toughest thing.
When his mom had gotten sick, right at the beginning of her pregnancy with Camilla, he’d been sixteen.
Before then he’d had his dreams. Rodeo dreams.
He was going to get out; he was going to chase glory. In a place where all that mattered was what he could do on the back of a horse, not whether he got good grades.
What would it be like when he was grown and he didn’t have to take that hour bus ride into Mapleton to go to school anymore? To sit there all day in a classroom, when he hated it more than anything else, and felt dumber than a bag of rocks by the end of every day. Listening to teachers go on and on at him about how he just didn’t try or didn’t apply himself.
Like it was his fault the words were backward and he couldn’t put numbers in order. Like it was his fault that he could sit there and stare at a page for an hour and not get any of the information. Like he chose for it to all be so hard he couldn’t get a grip on it at all.
They all acted like he chose that. And it had never made any sense to him at all. Why it seemed easier to think that a kid was stupid than that maybe you needed to change the way you were teaching them. But that was what happened to him.
And he had been champing at the bit for the day when all he would have to do was get up in the morning and ride.
Leaving school had come sooner than he’d expected, but it hadn’t been a dream.
He’d lost his parents, and along with the grief had come the reality of being responsible for everything. Everything and everyone.
And the death of his dreams, too.
He was thirty-six now. You didn’t join the rodeo at thirty-six.
It was fine. His life was here now and it didn’t matter.
In the scheme of things, it didn’t feel like the worst thing.
The people he’d lost, the years he’d lost with them, that would always matter more.
He could remember distinctly when he’d gotten cut on some barbed wire after his mother had died. He’d gone into the bathroom to get the first aid kit, and as he’d fixed the wound, he’d realized he didn’t have a mother anymore.
