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“Oh, fine,” Ruth said. “Then tell me what it was like where you came from. Let me live vicariously through you.”
Her head swung my way, immediately making me nervous that she wasn’t watching the road. “Unless you’re on the run from something. Did you rob a bank? Commit petty larceny? Breaking and entering? Did you poison a lover?”
“What? Jesus, how long have you been thinking about this?”
She shrugged. “My mom always told me I had an overactive imagination.”
“God, well, it’s not any of that, okay? I’m just a boring, normal ol’ person. I just needed—”
“Needed a change of scenery, blah blah blah.” She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you said.” She slit her eyes over in my direction, suspiciously.
I shook my head. “What even is petty larceny?”
“The fuck I know,” she said, laughing. She punched me on the shoulder. “Lighten up. You wanna be Miss Mysterious, fine. But I’m an open book. You can ask me anything, I’ll tell you, no problemo.”
“Okay.” I shifted on the truck bench to look at her. “What’s a strong woman like you doing clinging to this ranch when you’re obviously capable and motivated to get what you want when you put your mind to it?”
I still thought it was impressive the way she’d outwitted the twins to keep her small slice of the property—the most important slice, in fact. I just didn’t understand why she’d done it.
“Oh, you won’t dish on your story but then you want me to spill mine?”
I shrugged. “You don’t have to, no pressure. I was just curious.”
She laughed. “I’m just fucking with you. I’m not good with boundaries, if you can’t tell. It’s a problem. I used to be really concerned with doing everything right and not stepping on anyone’s toes. But then Dad was an asshole who screwed over the entire town and almost everyone I knew turned on me, so I stopped giving a fuck.”
I frowned. “So why don’t you leave?”
She scoffed. “And give them all the satisfaction of driving me out of town? Never.” She all but spit out the last word. “This is my home. This land has been in my family for four generations. Four generations. Then last year my dad goes and gambles what should have been my birthright into the ground because he didn’t think a daughter was important enough to save it for.”
I could tell she was seething, even just talking about it. And I felt immediately bad for asking. “Look, I’m sorry. I of all people should know I have no business to pry.”
But she went on as if she hadn’t even heard me. “Yeah, I get it, Mom was the glue holding us together, and when she died it all sort of fell apart. He and I were just going through the motions the past few years. At least I thought we were. I kept trying to get him to listen to my ideas about sustainable ranching but he could not give less of a shit. It’s been working my way for thirty years, Ruthie, it’ll hold out another year just fine,” she intoned, lowering her voice in imitation. “And another. And another. Except it wasn’t. And he just refused to look at the numbers. The only thing he ever wanted to do was be done by five so he could hit up the gambling halls and try his luck with the desperate bar bunnies.”
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.”
