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Turning back to the others, who’d remained in their spots, I said, “Interesting conversation. But are you raising cattle? I thought this was a guest ranch.”
“It’s not a guest ranch. It’s a dude ranch,” Wendy said sharply. “Dudes are what we have here. There’s nothing pejorative about the word. It means they don’t know ranch life and that’s why they’re here. You don’t go seeing a rancher spending his vacation at Elk Rock. We like dudes. We love dudes. We need dudes.” The last of those statements rang truer than the others. “That’s what we call them and that makes us a dude ranch.”
Okay... I’d stepped into some Wyoming vocabulary controversy I hadn’t heard of before. I did it less often these days than when I arrived two years ago, but it still happened. And there was no app to translate.
“Dude ranch,” I repeated, an acknowledgment that might also be heard as an apology. I’m getting so tactful I’m going to be recruited by the diplomatic service. “So, no cattle? But you have horses for riding for the—” I swallowed guests and said, “—dudes. Where are they?”
“Pastured out for the winter.”
“You must need a lot of hands come summer time to help, right?”
“Of course.”
“Same people year after year?”
“No.”
Brenda expanded on Wendy’s brief responses. “We’ve got a steady pipeline of college kids. We try to keep a mix of those who’ve been here before with a few new ones so we don’t have complete turnover when the older ones graduate and we lose them to year-round jobs. That way the experienced kids help train the new ones. We pin down which ones are coming back, then open for new hires. A lot of times the returners or even alums will recommend their friends. We try to have a few kids who aren’t part of that — guess you could call it legacy — string. Fresh blood.” She chuckled. “Because, just like with breeding cattle or horses, sometimes one line will peter out eventually, so you don’t want to rely all on one. Need a couple strings runnin’.”
Made sense. Even if it was likening hiring college kids to breeding cattle or horses.
“Did Robin work for you?”
“Her?” Wendy scoffed.
Again, leaving Brenda to fill in. “Told you, she was a guest last summer. Not one anyone would’ve thought would ever be back, not until after her accident and all that happened. Changed a lot.”
Wendy huh’d. “Yeah, like her even being with her father.”
“She did complain a lot about him. You’d’ve thought she hated him more than anything to listen to her last summer when she was here.”
“She said she hated him,” Wendy said, disparagingly. “Didn’t take any thinking at all.”
“It’s why she took to Keefe so strongly, I suspect. Opposite of her dad.”
Wendy clicked her tongue, expressing scorn nearly as strongly as her snorts did. “Anybody here’d be the opposite of him. Don’t get a lot of hard-charging CEO types working at a dude ranch. A few come through our staff who will be that later, but not while they’re here. And they don’t stick around to work all their lives here, like Keefe did.” Her voice changed, shifting toward Chamber of Commerce talk. “That’s one reason people come to dude ranches — to get away from all that. Whether it’s people trying to get away from the boss for a week or two, or even the boss, trying to get away from the pressures of being the boss.”
From what we’d seen of her personality, if she’d gone into another business, Wendy could have been a hard-charging CEO type herself.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines.
“Some of ’em never get away from it because they carry it with them,” Brenda spoke under her breath, but plenty loud enough to be heard.
Wendy pretended she hadn’t heard. “Sure don’t want to surround themselves with more of the same while they’re here. So we encourage our staff to be firm when it’s a matter of safety and what’s good for the horses, but not to be tossing around a lot of orders.”
“No danger of that with Keefe.” Brenda shook her head slightly. “He wasn’t slow.” She sounded like she’d defended him from that description and I recalled Wendy’s mouthed sloooow-leeeee from yesterday. “More like he just wasn’t interested in what he wasn’t interested in, and a lot of that had to do with the practicalities of life.”
“What she’s not saying is she took care of those practicalities for him, right down to keeping him in clean undies.”
A flush swept up Brenda’s creped throat, into her cheeks, and up her forehead.
Wendy didn’t appear to notice and she clearly wasn’t praising Brenda for this. “Laundry, shopping, cleaning his cabin, cooking for him more often than not, too.”
“Just helping a friend.” From stiff and defensive, her voice strengthened. “Besides, all that left him free to do all the things you needed him doing, especially off-season without other hands around to do your bidding.”
“Bidding? You mean trying to keep this place going and keeping both of you in jobs?”
“I didn’t mean—”
