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One
Laney
“No one asked you to come back.” My mom’s two-pack-a-day–roughed voice cut through the years to make me feel like I was seventeen again instead of twenty-seven.
Thanks for the reminder, Ma.
She was with me in the far pasture doing what ranchers usually do—fix fence. Another one of my shirts was ruined, thanks to catching it on the barbed wire on the section we were repairing. I was cranky after getting roused at the ass crack of dawn to go chase cattle off the road and back into the pasture.
Ma’s dog, Portia, yapped around us. Portia wasn’t the cattle dog we needed, but thanks to her prickly personality and sharp little teeth, we couldn’t get another dog, and the only barn cats that stuck around were good at hiding and staying out of Portia’s reach.
Now it was noon and already ninety degrees out in a dry-as-hell summer. The sun beat down on my ball cap. I had pulled my hair back in a ponytail and through the back of the cap. I rarely wore my hair down these days. The old habit of tossing it up with one of the eight hundred hair bands I left lying around had come back as soon as my plane from Dallas touched down.
No one from Dallas would recognize me. In Texas, I was more likely to be seen in sandals and a sundress. In Coal Haven, North Dakota, I had manure on my cowboy boots.
Thinking of Texas always made me think ofhim. I wasn’t ready to think about him. I’d been avoiding thinking about him for over five hundred days. Someday I’d have to, but today was not that day. It’d been shitty enough.
No one asked you to come back. No, Ma. No one had asked me to stay in Texas either.
I shot Ma the saccharine smile I knew she hated. “You’re welcome.”
Ma took out her silver vaping pen and sucked in a breath as she glared at me. I’d had the audacity to complain about losing another shirt, and that unlike most people my age, I was running out of beater shirts while my nice ones hardly left the closet. I’d have to wear my three-hundred-dollar ADEAM top to brand cattle at this rate.
But Ma didn’t like complaints and excuses. Rich, since she was full of both.
“We woulda been fine.” She tossed the wire stretcher into the bed of the 1996 Silverado.
Woulda been fine. Sure.
I finished packing up supplies and started chucking them next to the stretcher. They clattered, and I didn’t care where they landed. At one time, I would’ve been more particular, but I had a lot more stuff to expend my energy on, my mother being one of them. Sweat ran from my hairline, tracked down my collar, and soaked my sports bra. A tank top sounded nice right now, but I hadn’t wanted a barb to the armpit. Once in my life was enough for that particular experience.
My jeans clung to my skin like they’d been sprayed on, thanks to the heat. Honestly though, I didn’t mind fencing. It was better than sitting behind a desk. But I wouldn’t turn down a little AC right now.
My stomach rumbled, but I sighed when I recalled what was in the fridge. Fifty-plus years of eating bologna sandwiches on white bread for lunch hadn’t made Ma sick of bread or bologna. I couldn’t stand either. But Papa worked out of town and used it as an excuse to eat out of town.
When I first came home, I’d bought what I liked to eat, only to have one or both of my parents tease me about my preferences or eat every last ounce of my hummus and pita chips. Papa had bitched about the fancy food as he chewed a mouthful of my chips, oblivious to the frustrating irony.
Since the ranch hadn’t exactly replaced my previous income, I couldn’t afford to feed the rest of my family the way I’d grown accustomed to eating. I choked down bologna and white bread every day.
I’d have thought I’d be used to the routine, but the longer I was home, the more I was reminded why I lit out of town as soon as I had my diploma in my hand.
At the time, I had thought it had been due to other motivations. Like breaking up with my longtime boyfriend and watching him go stupid over the new girl in town. But no. That ex had passed away years ago, and his widow, Kennedy, that new girl I had resented for years, was now my best friend.
Odd how things turned out.
Like how I’d come home to help keep the ranch from folding after my perfect brother, Kane, had tried to bury a bullet in his head and survived. Thanks to his low-caliber choice of destruction, the bullet had only grazed his skull. He’d suffered a concussion, temporary hearing loss, and flesh wounds. But he wasn’t taking over the Diamond UU Ranch like my parents had planned since the day they’d learned they were having a bouncing baby boy. Their expectations had driven him into a lonely existence.
It wasn’t uncommon for young farmers to still live on their family land, but Kane hadn’t been able to go to college when he’d graduated. He’d been stuck on the ranch, the fences as good as prison walls.
In the end, the suicide attempt had given him what he’d wanted—freedom, an out from an eternity of watching over cattle and a life under Ma and Papa’s thumb. It’d finally gotten all of us to realize he’d been living in his own personal hell.
Guilt gnawed at my stomach as I climbed into the driver’s side of the pickup. Would I have seen what was going on if I had stayed in Coal Haven? I’d never know, but Kane was alive and well now and that was the most important thing. Ma got in the other side and patted her lap for Portia to jump on. A cloud of vape smoke blew across the cab. Ma had the window open, but the breeze blew her strawberry-scented exhale right into me.
I opened my window until I could rest my elbow on the door and, if needed, hang my head out.
I hadn’t minded the smell at first. Ma vaped as much as she had chain-smoked. I wasn’t sure there was any benefit to the switch, but she loved telling everyone how she kicked her smoking habit. No one asked about her new strawberry perfume.
I bumped over the pasture, sticking to the tracks that were almost permanent after all these years.
