Chase knew the family had conspired to send him riding back to the ranch with his brother. The two-seater 1939 pickup left little room to squeeze in bullshit. And Wes could extract it with the best of them.
“Why not mention the knitting and drum circle on the north pasture to benefit Nigerian orphans?”
Chase gave a middle-finger scratch on his left cheek. Totally unimaginative, given their creative history of flipping each other off, but he felt off his game. Had been ever since the flame-haired mayor made it her personal mission to keep his business out of town and drive his brain to distraction. The double-team of her mesmerizing physical display in the hall of the municipal building and the glint of moisture in her eyes when the meeting took on a spirited life of its own desensitized him to the realization that she had completely hosed his business timeline and made him look bad to his investors—as if he wasn’t up to the task he’d so confidently taken on.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Wes. “The volunteer team is a good idea, and it’s about damned time we had one, but this one has sophomore year-Chase all over it.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Remember when you came home and told Dad you wanted to become a vegetarian because Ivy Makepeace was a vegetarian? He laughed you out of the house. Then we all got in line and laughed you back to your senses. It’s like you are incapable of being smart and infatuated at the same time.”
This time, Chase got creative with his middle fingers, fiddling with the lit radio dials.
Wes laughed.
“I’m not infatuated with Gretchen de Havilland. She’s standing in my way. I have to turn up the charm a little.”
Wes shook his head. “You are in so far over your head with this one. She’s got more letters in the diplomas on her wall than you had in your sugary breakfast cereal.”
“I can be…intellectual.” Chase straightened his tie.
“Who wears the helmet to work?”
Even before the professional ruling that all riders born since 1994 were required to wear helmets, Wes protected himself. Yancy’s gospel. Still, the jokes got old.
“Just work on changing her mind, not her clothes. She’s good people, brother. And she’s been through a lot. This is personal for her, if you remember.”
Chase tracked the road’s center dashes in the headlights, turning Wes’s words over and over in his mind until they blurred into one yellow stripe and he remembered what Wes was talking about. When he did, he felt like road kill—thwomp—under the tires. Way back in early elementary school, before girls snagged his attention, before daily barrel practice at Yancy’s, before his own family had experienced acute loss, Gretchen de Havilland’s mother was T-boned by a drunk driver and killed.
Fuck.
How could he have forgotten? No wonder her mindset was so Prohibition. She wasn’t fighting him from some moral high ground. She was simply fighting him from a place of avoidable loss.
They reached the ranch after dark. Willie brought out the reserve samples Chase had brought from the distillery. Nat distributed shot glasses shaped like boots—their father’s favorites when he celebrated. Chase didn’t much feel like drinking. He retired to his room—the same one he’d had as a boy all those years ago when he barely noticed a shy redhead with pigtails and glasses. Wes was right about one thing. Gretchen was different than the girls who normally threw themselves at him. But his brother was wrong about something else. Very wrong. Chase could be smart. And if infatuation came along for the ride? Well, he had ridden meaner bulls than that.
4
On a quiet street in the best small American town, Gretchen padded out to her front porch, hair damp from the shower, slippers and button-down pajamas keeping the cool April air at bay, and joined her father on the swing. Bias aside, who could argue? In a place where silence had a sound, thoughts had room to breathe, and everyone cared for one another like family, her protectiveness could be, at times, fierce. She had felt it on this night, perhaps more than other nights, after the display at the meeting. So Chase had been right about embracing the unplanned. That didn’t mean he was right about changing the character of the best small American town.
“I was thinking about moving some of this porch stuff out.” Her father closed his copy of the latest police procedural to hit the bestseller list and took a sip of warm milk from the mug in his hand, the way he ended each day. “Maybe donating it to the senior center for their new garden.”
“Why?”
“More room.”
“This is my favorite place. I won’t allow it,” Gretchen said in a mock-princess tone—the one she affected when they joked about her having the keys to the kingdom.
Her father chuckled and removed his reading glasses.
She absorbed the sway of the swing and matched the cadence through her heels. With early-onset physical ailments, her father seemed frailer these days. She was glad to be here to pick up the slack.
“These tiny light strings in the rafters are perfect for when we host out-of-town guests so they can find our address,” said Gretchen. “And that wicker sofa over there has the best sunset view in Marin County. Also, it’s Lincoln’s domain.”
Their black Labrador perked up at the mention of his name. His brass tags clinked together. He blinked at Gretchen with adoring wet eyes, often her most captive audience. Definitely her number one fan.
“Your mother always did know how to make a home feel welcoming.”
“And all the plants?” She stroked a broad, waxy leaf of her mother’s prized container citrus tree that usually yielded one cherished lemon per year, despite being outside a tropical growing zone. “There isn’t anything that doesn’t grow here.”