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Maybe it would be a reasonable thing to do.
Maybe it was something he should consider.
Giving her access to the road...
And that was how he found himself going back down the stairs. He did not go into his office. Instead, he went out the front door. Instead, he got in his truck and began to drive down the road.
Toward his parents’ graves.
He parked his truck in the middle of the gravel road, because he could do that. The sky was pink, the sun going down. It was late, but these endlessly long days in the summer meant that the sun was still hanging on.
He took his hat off and looked down at the graves.
“Hey,” he said. “I know it’s been a while.” He bent down and brushed some leaves clinging to the headstone away. He hadn’t stopped by in at least a month. Sometimes grief was hard like that. Sometimes he didn’t want to stop and feel it. Other times he did. “I should come by more. It isn’t like you don’t live close. I know that I really made a mess of things with the soybeans. You would’ve called that a sissy crop anyway, Dad. You would’ve hated it. You’d like the cows, though. But I got this woman, and she wants to help out with things, and you would’ve been suspicious of her, too, because she’s full of book learning from a college in California. And what the hell is a California school supposed to teach anybody about ranching, is what I want to know. And I think it’s what you would ask, too.”
He cleared his throat. “So yeah. I don’t really know. But this is our spot. And I don’t think I really want people here. And they’d have to drive by to get to the barn. Have to cut in some new gravel. I don’t know.”
He wasn’t expecting an answer—he just wanted to be here. Because the office made him wish that he had never inherited the ranch. And this... Being able to stand on the plot of land where his parents were at rest, being able to connect with them while he looked at the mountains, while he looked at the sky, that was why he liked this. It was why he liked being here. Why he valued it. And he needed the reminder today. Because the truth was, if he let Quinn Sullivan into his office, he might end up changing his mind about everything. Because she might just give him what he needed, and he didn’t really know what to do with that.
If he let her into his office, he might have to bleed out some of his issues, and he really didn’t want to do that.
He never talked to his siblings about it. It wasn’t that he was ashamed.
He was self-diagnosed through the internet, which was the thing that kind of irritated him, because he would love to be that crusty old guy who said this generation was soft and always looking for excuses. But for him, it wasn’t an excuse. It wasn’t an excuse. It was something that made the whole of his life make all kinds of sense.
Dyslexia, sequencing disorders, dyscalculia. All those things. They had shown him that his brain just wasn’t put together the way that a lot of other people’s were, but that didn’t mean that he was dumb.
Knowing that, though, didn’t solve the issues. It didn’t erase the shame that he felt.
He wondered...
Like the cut on his arm he’d had to dress on his own, he’d often wondered. If his mother hadn’t gotten sick, if his father’s sole focus hadn’t been that sickness, then the loss. If either of his parents had lived...
Would they have discovered his issues sooner?
Would someone have helped him?
It didn’t matter. He’d had to become an adult and take care of the people around him.
He’d had to bandage his own wounds, and his siblings’, so they wouldn’t feel the loss in the same way he did.
Anyway, he’d figured out what was wrong with him eventually.
It didn’t take away the mistakes that he’d made in the past.
But it had helped him come up with some work-arounds, so there was that.
But he didn’t want to talk to Quinn about the fact that he struggled to read even basic sentences. That he used voice and audio to get most everything done.
Because it was bad.
Because hell, when he was out on the range, he didn’t really think he was stupid, but when he had to deal with this kind of stuff, it felt like he was.
Quinn was a shining emblem of those issues, of his failures.
And it made him a bit feral.
Or maybe it was life that made him that way. Some kind of unavoidable combination of things, and he was just kind of a difficult monster.
