Redeeming the Rancher Read online

  “Not one photo of me as a small child exists anywhere. My father had just moved to New York with Daniel. My mother and I stayed on a few more weeks in Amsterdam, presumably to sell the house, I’m not sure. It was more like an estate or an old castle, hundreds of years old because that was what impressed people. More bedrooms than I remember, but I loved it there. I was happy. For a time, they were happy, too. I suppose the extra space insulated us from those who didn’t understand how a woman of substantial means could marry a man with none then drive him away.”

  Olive’s words were bitter; her delivery was anything but. Her matter-of-fact tone, her unwavering strength as she navigated the past told him she had made peace with the truth long ago. This time, when he looked into her eyes, he didn’t see Daniel. He saw her memory.

  “One night there was a fire. It was so fast, there wasn’t time to grab anything of value but my mother’s paintings. I watched the inferno for hours. The juxtaposition between the dark, looming structure where everything seemed providential and the blinding flames was something I never forgot—it inspired the piece that started my career. Later, I realized that not having a past preserved in photo albums or memory books was a gift, a little like George Langley’s infinite nows.” She glanced at the painting. Her features had fallen. “Sculpture can’t be tucked away or forgotten. It has movement and rhythm and a message. Sculpture is like a song of the present—the pervasive mood of a culture, their fears, their dreams, their fragility. Then, in twenty or fifty or a hundred years, when we’re gone, the song will still be there for those who want to listen.”

  Wes knew, in that moment, what it was like to suspend the world—inside a painting of shadows, inside a small-town bookstore under the light of a single bulb. More than drinking or gambling or outdoor adrenaline rushes or sex, more than the things he always chased to find his equilibrium, she gave him his out. Olive, with her glimpses into alternate world, her balance of fantasy and realism, her profound take on humanity and heartfelt interaction with others. Olive was his amnesia. But she also shifted him off-center and brought closer the same darkness that she slayed for him.

  He glanced at her lips, already tasting them in his mind, wondering at his interpretation of her kiss. Taking away her pout, the sadness that had set in as she spoke not of her own misfortune but of George Langley, ensuring his message wouldn’t be forgotten, became his priority.

  Her gaze slipped low on his face then searched his eyes, more courage waging war with isolation. She leaned forward. Behind her glass mask, her eyelids slid closed, all he needed.

  Lights clicked off in the book section.

  Wes pressed his lips to hers before the moment passed.

  Slightly sticky from the cocoa, infinitely sweet, her lips were the most potent amnesia of all. The kiss was modest in every way but how it defiled his intention to let her go to New York, get his head on straight when she wasn’t around. He thought to get one taste, to get free of this hold she had over him, to realize that intimacy here tasted wrong, like kissing a sister. But there was deceptive purpose in the way she kissed him back—feather-touch, timid, the slightest hint of a fanciful world to come.

  And he was gone.

  Nearby, a polite throat-clearing drove them apart.

  Chet. Bookish type. Debate team state champ.

  Wes could take him.

  Olive smiled. Her front teeth took a nip at her bottom lip. “We should go.”

  They slipped out into the cold. Wes made an excuse to return, said that he might have dropped something. A small lie that sat bitter on his tongue, given their pact to always be honest. Inside, he told Chet he’d be back for the painting, not to sell it to anyone else, not even Olive.

  When he rejoined her beneath her canopy of lights, he asked her to stay for Christmas. He remembered Nat and his bull—the nemesis that broke his collarbone and the loaded words that had come from his mouth. He didn’t know how details of his worst day in the service—his life—would help him get past the guilt, but he knew it was past time to try.

  Wes had grown tired of his carbon copy.

  * * *

  If someone had told Livie that the missing inspiration for her sculpture’s most important piece would come during the seconds right before she was kissed, she would have said that such a seed, planted at a project’s conception but growing untamed inside a moment of pure bliss, was impossible. She had only to look past her own far-reaching distrust of happiness to find evidence that her theory was true. Even dismissing the outliers of mental illness—the Van Goghs, the Sylvia Plaths—people as far back as Aristotle and Milton intuited the correlation between the maudlin and creative genius, a state which Livie knew modern research supported. Simply put, happy people were less inspired.

  So why, on the cusp of being exceptionally kissed, had Livie experienced her greatest breakthrough yet?

  Twelve hours later, she still had no explanation, but the moment sparked something inside her so incandescent, so electric, so scorching, she had yet to sleep. Part of her dismissed the flash as something that came from accepting Wes’s invitation to stay for the holidays and realizing she would not lose momentum. In truth, New York seemed cold after Close Call. Another part of her was so glad to put the foam molding behind her and sink her fingers into clay, she explained away the euphoria as a natural byproduct of leaving the draining planning stages of a project. The smallest, most miniscule part suspected that she might be wrong. How could something that forged an impenetrable and divine connection between cognition and emotion—as Wes’s kiss had—be bad?

  At dawn, she sneaked out of the barn, watched the sunrise, and nearly wept. Fatigue. Beauty. Her project becoming reality. She had learned the closest hill had the best cell phone reception, but it was a place so sacrosanct to the Meier clan that she kept her distance from the family burial plot. She called her father in New York to tell him she wasn’t coming and asked him to box and ship Daniel’s letters. The ones where he spoke of Close Call, of Wes, would be the most healing. Wes was Daniel’s hero. Her hero. Wes was her statue, her inspiration, and it was long past time he viewed himself in that light.

  For if he could feel it, she could capture it. Close enough to witness, to mine it so others could feel it, too, when they looked upon her bronze. Close enough to use, but far enough to walk away. Because the greatest part of her knew that falling in love would ruin her as an artist.

  * * *

  Two days before Christmas, Livie awakened in the middle of the night, certain she had heard the porch door hinges creak. She held her breath, waiting to see if she heard the sound again.

  Wind buffeted the house and scraped its bones. Then, silence.

  Livie sat up in bed and peeked out the window. The surfaces looked the same as always. She pressed her fingertips to the glass. Like reaching into the ice bin.

  Snow was nearly unheard of in Close Call, but that hadn’t stopped the ranchers from speculating. Leading up to the plummeting temperatures and the oncoming front, most of the ranch’s holiday traditions were postponed to allow time for extra feedings and creating makeshift shelter belts for the cattle to huddle behind. She had taken on all the house chores to free Mona and January to help. Livie had learned that in times of stress, as he had when she first arrived, Wes roamed the property at night, sometimes awake, sometimes not.

  Down the hall, Wes’s room was empty. His truck keys still hung from a nail in the hallway. After a search of the living areas yielded no sign of him, Livie dressed in warm layers, left a note in the kitchen, grabbed his coat and boots by the door, and headed out to look for him.

  An icy blast slammed her cheeks. She shivered, fully awake, and walked faster, draping his jacket across her front. Within moments, she crossed both barns, a shed, the firepit, the storage closet beneath the back porch, and the gravesites—his most common sleep haunts—off her mental list.

  Inside a cluster of live oaks, she crouched behind a rock to escape the biting wind, to think. The family ha
d talked about the wind blocks over dinner—how substantial they were, if they would hold—but most of them were in pastures too remote for him to walk to. Nat mentioned a deer blind they used to use as kids, but she was only half paying attention to the conversation, and finding it in the dark would be a needle-in-haystack search. She was about to return to the house to get reinforcements when she heard a mumble.

  “Wes?” She turned toward the sound.

  Snagged in the underbrush, barefoot, dressed only in pajama bottoms, Wes sat with his back to a tree. He had buried himself in leaves and branches. Dirt masked his face.

  Camouflage.

  Her chest compressed, partly from finding him, partly from finding him in this state. She didn’t want to sneak up and touch him. Clearly jacked for combat, he might startle or attack. If she knew his rank, she would call it. If she had something to bang against the nearby trees, she would create a racket. With few options left, she sang. Loudly. Out of tune. Wrong lyrics.

  “We tend to smell and we say y’all.” Livie sang about fishing and deer blinds and a bunch of mumbles in between. When she got to the part she knew, she brought it home. “If you ain’t into that, we don’t give a daaaaammmmn.”

  Wes shuffled. She walked slowly, crouched close. In the dark, his expression was lost, but his voice came to her strong and even inside his strong drawl, slightly judgmental. “That’s wrong.”

  Livie might have smiled, but she was in no mood. Flakes flew and her pajama pants headed south the more she tried to help him from the brush. She slipped his coat over his broad, naked shoulders and rammed on his boots then pointed him in the direction of the house. Inside his coat, she looped her arm around his back.

  She didn’t let go. Not once.

  “You’re wrong,” he told her again when they were halfway home.

  “You can teach it to me on the way back.”

  Teach it to her, he did. All the way back to the house, loud enough in the kitchen to rouse Willie and January. They helped him out of the coat and boots in a strangely silent drill that was all too familiar. Willie tried to take it from there. Wes wanted none of it. He held Livie’s hand like a lifeline.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered to Willie. “I’ll take him.”

  He led her to his bed.

  Livie took off her coat and crawled in beside him. The smell of earth and mud overwhelmed her. His skin was still impossibly cold. She did her best to remedy that with covers, tucked strategically, but Wes wanted none of it. He tugged her close so that their limbs were intertwined, their faces close.

  “Amsterdam has to go.” His syllables were slurred.

  His words were a detour of the subconscious, the same part of him that recycled his past, nothing more.

  But winter had set in. The wind buffeted the house and the brittleness of it all settled in Livie’s bones.

  A whisper came on his final sigh into peace. “Nemo Residio.”

  No man left behind.

  Her nose stung with unshed tears. She wanted to answer a quiet, here…everyone is here, but they had agreed long ago to be honest. Instead, she held him until his exhales turned long and steady and she had memorized his exquisite face for her sculpture. Then she held him longer.

  9

  The storm came. The cattle held. That was thing about the cold in Texas—it rarely stayed.

  On Christmas eve, Mona and January kicked into high holiday gear to make up for time lost. Baked cookies and vanilla fragrance sent the house into sugar overdrive. Mona blasted country holiday tunes by some George, whom she claimed as her King of country music, presiding over the Lone Star State in his belt buckle and chords that never really stretched much. January was in charge of decorating the tree, freshly cut by Nat and a few ranch hands at first light on the property’s far reaches. Willie gave Livie a botany lesson about the cypress—a short, stocky Carolina Sapphire that looked like a fat tumbleweed with blue tips. And everyone else who had a pulse on the ranch and wasn’t looking after cows circled around the homecoming of the third Meier brother, Chase.

  Fresh off a rodeo competition in Las Vegas, Chase had arrived that morning with all the fanfare of an artist honoree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When introduced to Livie, Chase refused a handshake and went straight for an embrace, saying he already knew enough about her to know she was family. He showed a genuine interest in her process, wore a gold and silver buckle that could double as a satellite dish, carried the fragrance of someone who had elevated cow-handling to an art—and big money—and lavished extra attention on those of the female persuasion, clearly the charmer in the family. She never did figure out who had been feeding him all the insider information.

  Livie hadn’t seen Wes smile so much in days. She wondered how much of his sleepwalk he remembered, if any.

  As welcome as everyone made Livie feel, the concept of family overwhelmed her, and she wanted to give them privacy for the short twenty-four hours Chase was home. She escaped to her art for a good part of the morning. In the long hours she had put in on the clay, the joining narrative took shape. She had saved the soldier for last; having seen Wes in nearly every element but a uniform, the final details eluded her.

  January sent Willie to convince Livie to knock off early, to join them for lunch, and to decorate the tree. Willie said they voted him the safest choice not to violate the artist’s rules. Also, refusing Willie would have been like refusing a cold beer and mealtime grace around these parts. It simply wasn’t done.

  After a midday meal of homemade tamales one of the ranch hands’ wife had gifted the family, Livie helped with the tree.

  “There must be another box in the attic,” said Mona. “I’m not seeing the ornaments from when the boys were young.”

  “I’ll find them,” said Livie.

  As the pinnacle of the sprawling ranch house, the Meier attic was substantial—the length of at least two rooms and enough height at its center for the brothers to stand comfortably. The air was tight and stale and heated by a single-paned window at the far end. Iron and wood objects dating back to their grandfather’s day sprouted on either side of a middle walkway like an ancient garden and existed alongside early gaming systems and sports trophies—modern artifacts from the boys’ generation. Her intrusion on the hallowed space incited a blizzard of dust motes inside the afternoon beams of light.

  Livie zeroed in on boxes substantial enough to hold decorations. She was an explorer in a foreign land, picking her way through, aiming to leave the landscape precisely as she had discovered it. Box after dusty box netted nothing but craft supplies, old cookbooks, and enough Future Farmers of America awards from all three of the boys to wallpaper the room.

  A larger box that seemed out of place, almost clean, snagged her gaze. Likely too substantial for ornaments. Still, she lifted the flaps.

  Blackish, royal blue, and red fibers, folded neatly inside a thin dry-cleaning bag crowded the contents and covered plaques, a desert-pattern combat utility uniform and cover, and a much older Army-issue green uniform. Chevrons and metals and dog tags, each in their own velvet-lined boxes with clear lids filled the remainder of the space but for the most arresting artifact: a Marine dress cover—pristine white on glossy black, the gold-plated cap emblem.

  The very same Daniel had once worn.

  She knelt beside the box. Her pulse quickened and challenged her instincts. As a sculptor, to feel was to create. One minute with the combat utility cover, the very same her bronze would wear. Then she would return it.

  Reverently, she pulled out the utility cap, careful to keep it safe, clean, preserved. Her fingertips mapped the eight stitched points, the brim. She closed her eyes.

  “What are you doing?”

  Wes’s locked and loaded voice came on like sniper fire—one bullet, straight to her heart.

  The cover slipped from her grasp and tumbled onto the dusty floor. She scrambled to take hold of it again, but he was there, snatching it from her grasp. He tossed it into the box and closed
the flaps as if it were a bomb and the only way to keep it from detonating was out of sight, out of mind.

  “I’m sorry, Wes. I just wanted—”

  “You had no right.” Between the rafters that bisected the room, he paced what he could of the attic. The narrow strip was a pen to a bull. “You don’t stop, do you? You just keep pushing and pushing. First with the barn, then Daniel, then this. I don’t eat. I hardly sleep. You represent everything I’m trying to put behind me, and just when I think I get to a place where I might be okay with you being here and you don’t remind me of the guy I killed every time I look at you, you push into territory you have no right to understand.”

  The guy I killed.

  There were no words. Livie tried. They were all buried under a massive pile of guilt at the line she had crossed, at putting Wes in a position to relive his trauma simply by existing. He had no more killed Daniel than if he had ordered him to draw breath, but getting him to see that required him to step away from his crazy penance long enough to forgive himself.

  Her knees barely held her weight as she stood. She was numb, what came of that deceptive connection between cognition and emotion. A floorboard shifted beneath her and snapped the frail stillness. When she spoke, the voice that left her was low, husky, controlled.

  “You don’t get to stockpile all the hurt, here. You may have lost a combat brother, but I lost a brother, too. A real brother who was the biggest part of the last time I knew happiness. I may have no right to your territory of grief, but if you look close enough, mine looks a whole lot like yours. And it doesn’t make other people feel bad about theirs.”

  Six years of guilt played out on Wes’s face, lines that marred his sculpted features. He lifted the box and carried it down the attic stairs and free of the house.

  The hinge on the porch door betrayed his silent retreat.