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She shook her head and shuddered. “Disgusting. Everyone in town loved Mom. It was a disgrace.”
She looked my way. “Sorry.”
“No, please. Go ahead and talk.” Especially if it meant she stopped grilling me. But also, I was curious about her since she didn’t seem to mind sharing. “What was your mom like?”
She sighed. “Mom was… She was great, I mean. She loved me. I don’t know why she put up with Dad, but they loved each other, I guess. In their way. He was never awesome, but at least when she was alive he tried. He never made a secret of the fact he wanted a son. But she had a really hard time getting pregnant with me. There were a lot of miscarriages. It was a miracle she managed to carry me to term, so she always called me her miracle baby. But she had a lot of problems and had to have a hysterectomy a couple years after I was born. Which meant Dad was stuck with just me.”
“Parents suck,” I offered. And then, because it seemed safe, I shared, “My mom’s pretty much a nightmare. Of course I didn’t realize it till I was older, but she’s a narcissist. So growing up, I was just really confused and hurt a lot of the time by how she was treating me. It sucks.”
Ruth looked surprised when she glanced my way again, probably because I’d said anything about my past. I was a little surprised, too, frankly.
“Yeah? So what’d you do when you realized why she was like that?”
I let out a breath. “Well, by that point…” Screw it, I decided to just go ahead and tell her. “Well, when you grow up with a narcissist, the problem is, it can screw up how you relate to people. You end up picking relationships that feel familiar. So of course I was with a guy who was one too.”
Ruth’s eyebrows went up. “Shit.”
“Yeah.” Understatement. “Which was so funny because when I graduated high school and went to college, I was thrilled to get out of her house. I didn’t know she was a narcissist, but I knew it didn’t feel good to live there. I thought, oh, I’m finally free! And then I just went and jumped from the frying pan into the fire…” I trailed off and shook my head, looking out the window.
“What’d you go to college for?”
I rolled my eyes. “Literature. I was so clueless. I couldn’t have picked a more useless degree.”
Ruth shrugged. “I don’t know. I was always shit at English, but I admired the kids who were good at it. I was dyslexic but it wasn’t like I had teachers around here who recognized that kind of thing. They just barely passed me. It was my mom who helped me learn to read more than my teachers.”
“Wow, that’s amazing. Your mom sounds really cool.”
Ruth nodded and swallowed. “She was. I miss her. All she wanted out of life was to be a mom and have a big family and instead she got stuck out on this lonely ranch with my dad who barely talked.”
“And you. She had you.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Ruth said. “Just doesn’t seem like much of a life.”
Now she really had me confused. “But… Then why do you want to stay on the land so bad?”
She frowned. “Because… well, I’m the last of us. Of the Harshbargers. It was originally Hirschberger, but they changed the spelling during World War I to make it sound less German. My ancestors came here in the 1840’s with a wave of German immigrants. They were badasses seeking a better life. My great great grandmother married Hermann Hirschberger after her husband died on the passage over and had three sons, only one of whom survived to adulthood. They renamed him Hermann Jr when his older brother died and he bought the ranch and built the first farmstead. Each generation fought and barely managed to keep hold of it. There were so many tragedies… And then for it all to end like this with me. God, it makes me sick.”
She was staring straight out the front now, her jaw tight.
“But it wasn’t you,” I said, sitting up in my chair. “It was your dad. There wasn’t anything you could do by the time you got control of things, it sounds like.”
She shrugged. “Maybe there was some way I couldn’t think of to hold onto it. Maybe if I’d been smarter or tried harder, I could’ve gotten the bank to extend the loan or something…”
I raised my eyebrows. “Well, it sounds like you were pretty tricky in whatever you did to keep hold of the bit of land you did, where the house is. The twins definitely weren’t happy about it.”
She grinned at that. “Fuck yeah. I’ll never forget the look on Jeremiah’s face when he realized.” She laughed out loud. “Thanks, I needed that. See, I knew we’d be friends. And look! We’re here.”
