“Everyone dies. But hopefully I’ve got some time.”
“My mom died.”
Walter nodded, not daring to look up at the boy. He was too old for this. Too uneasy in his sobriety. Too lost in his feelings for Sandra. He couldn’t add Ben’s grief to his already full plate.
Full plate. He nearly laughed at himself. There was nothing on his plate. Not one damn thing. Scaring away nurses? Ignoring Sandra? Trying every damn minute of every damn day not to drink?
He needed distraction. He glanced sideways at the boy and saw a kid so twisted with grief he didn’t know where to go.
He’d been there. Spent years in that place. Turned to a bottle to make it better.
“I’m real sorry about your mom. And your dad.”
“I barely remember him.”
Walter nodded like he understood, but he didn’t. No one could.
Silence stretched and pulled so hard that Walter shifted just to break the soundless scream in the air around him.
Ben collapsed cross-legged next to him and reached for a cloth. “Everyone wants to talk about my feelings.”
He said feelings the way Walter would say feelings, like it was a bad word.
“I don’t.” Walter wanted that clear.
Half-heartedly, the kid rubbed at the brass on Jack’s small saddle.
“You won’t get any mildew off like that. You gotta really go after it.”
The kid put some elbow grease into it and Walter nodded in approval.
“But no one wants to talk about my mom.” The kid attacked the leather, his hand a blur, his face red.
He wants to cry, Walter thought.
“What if I forget her too?” the boy whispered.
Oh. Oh Lord. Please let me do this right. Please.
“Your mom is a hard woman to forget.”
“Then why doesn’t anyone want to remember her?”
Because it hurts to remember. It was why he drank. But there was no explaining that to a nine-year-old.
“You know that creek that separates our spreads?” Walter asked, putting the tee-shirt back in the bucket and squeezing it out.
“Yeah.”
“You know how it rises when it rains?”
“Mom always told us to stay away from it after the rains. She said it was dangerous.”
He laughed. “Well, I figure she would know. I had to save her and a nearly drowned calf one year. She couldn’t have been much older than you.”
“What...” The boy stopped rubbing the saddle, his hands fists in his lap. “What happened?”
“There’d been a big storm the night before. Scattered all our new calves to hell and back, and she was chasing one down and they both got too close to the creek.”
“She fell in?”
He looked up at the boy. “Your mom? Hell, no, boy. Annie Stone jumped in after that calf. Got caught in a tree limb that had fallen across the water and I found her about an hour later, screaming her head off.”
A muscle twitched in the boy’s face—a smile maybe.
“Where was the calf?”
“On the side of the creek, waiting for her. Two of the saddest animals I’ve ever seen.”
Again, that little muscle twitch in the corner of Ben’s mouth. And then, slowly, he reached into the bucket and rinsed out his cloth. He bent back to his work, but calmly. The frantic emotion gone.
“Work on the white stuff on the bottom,” Walter said, passing the saddle to the boy and picking up the bridle.
“You know any more stories about my mom?”
Oh, God, so many of them were lost to the booze and the years. But there were a few pieces he still remembered.
“She had a dog—”
“Pirate. She told us a lot about Pirate.”
“Did she tell you Pirate nearly killed my dog, Duchess?”
Ben’s eyes opened wide, and the smile was real, no longer a twitch, and Walter felt something warm and strange in his chest. Like the sun coming up after a long, cold night. “Keep working, now,” he chastised Ben, and the boy got back to scrubbing. “I’ll tell you what I remember about your momma and that Pirate.”
Friday morning Jeremiah dropped off the boys at school, like he did every morning, no matter what was going on. It was something Annie had always done and he’d worked really hard to make sure he could do it too. The boys took the bus home in the afternoon, but he drove them, every morning, twenty minutes into town.
Today he raced back to the ranch to interview a new housekeeper. They had a little cottage out back, and hopefully he could convince someone to come and live on the land.
He didn’t know how the boys would react, but he couldn’t do this alone anymore.
Halfway over the pass he dug out his cell phone and called Lucy.
“Hey cowboy,” she answered, and blood pooled below his waist.
“Hey yourself. I’ve got to cancel Ben coming over to your place today.”
“Why?’ she asked quickly. “Did he say something?”
“Ben? Say something? No. He has a parent–teacher conference. Could we maybe do it Monday?”