Until the sting of a damp kitchen towel across my ass sends me lurching forward with an embarrassing squeal. “What the hell was that for?”
I give my ass cheek an invigorating massage, trying to ease the sting.
“If you cut that one, it’ll be gummy inside. It needs to rest.” She shakes her head, pushing the loaf aside and plopping down a perfectly round sourdough. Followed closely by the sharp noise of the ceramic butter bell sliding the length of the speckled counter.
Once I have three thick slices of sourdough with butter stacked on a plate, I sink into an empty chair at the well-loved wooden kitchen table, opposite my cousin Fiona and her baby.
“She’s the sweetest little muffin.” Mom leans in to sniff the baby’s hair on her way to hand me a cold beer. “Isn’t it so nice to have a baby around here?”
“More meatball than muffin, if you ask me.”
Fiona kicks me hard under the table. “Nobody asked you, asshole.”
Jesus Christ, today seems to beTake Your Unchecked Aggression Out on Colt Day.
Groaning, I cup my rapidly bruising shin. The tablecloth gets in the way of checking to see if Fiona’s wearing steel toes tonight, but I suspect she might be. “Meatballs are great! Ma’s whole family is Italian. Welovemeatballs.”
Fiona twists her mouth, slowly standing and muttering something under her breath as she walks away. She’s not even wearing shoes.
“Well, she’s not getting a Christmas card from me and Betty this year,” I say to my mom after the steel-footed mama bear is out of earshot.
The look she gives is enough to make me recant thatstatement, and I take to digging into the delicious bread instead.
“How’s work been, bud?” My mom takes Fiona’s place at the table, sipping her evening espresso.
I grew up obsessed with horses and rodeos and cowboys and this entire lifestyle. My mom did her damnedest to put the kibosh on it, wanting different for her kids than her husband, I suppose. But the harder she pushed me to try team sports or take up a hobby or apply to colleges in the city, the harder I dug my heels down into the stirrups. Now that I’m nearly thirty, she’s come to accept there’s no changing my mind. Which I’m thankful for, because the last thing I ever want to do is disappoint her. For a hot minute after I first started at the ranch, I considered quitting to make her happy. Only reason I didn’t was because Beau followed me there, and I had loyalty to my younger brother that I couldn’t abandon.
I hold up a finger to pause until I’ve swallowed. I try to limit my choking on food to once daily.
“Not bad.”
She clearly wants more, judging by the slow nod and unwavering eye contact. But the weekends are so damn uneventful, I can’t find anything worth mentioning.
“Jonas has been killin’ it lately. Threw him on the back of a horse the other day, and the kid took to it like he’s been riding his whole life. I took a video to show Whit, actually.” My ass lifts from the chair slightly so I can grab the phone from my back pocket. After a few seconds, I’m showing my mom the short video I took on the trail. “I mean…about fifteen minutes after this, he fell off. But he did get back on eventually.”
Her eyes grow wide. “He fell off? How did Whit take that?”
Between the family group chat and a longstanding online Scrabble game, I check in with Mom daily. She knows the basics: Denny asked me to pick up Jonas one day, and in theweeks since then, he’s become my sidekick at the ranch. I told her about how Whit chewed my ass out for wearing an inappropriate shirt—and she took Whit’s side—but that’s where I stopped.
She doesn’t know that Whit is a fucking smoke show. If I told her that, she’d be pressuring me to ask her on a date or something. She’s surprisingly chill to hang out with, so it’s not that I’m opposed to the idea, but Whit has zero interest in me.
“Once she confirmed he hadn’t hit his head and nothing was broken, she was okay. She seemed pretty surprised I even told her about it happening, considering he wasn’t hurt.” I pick at the crust on my piece of bread. “Remember that time you had to throw Beau over your shoulder at the fair and carry him out because he got mad and planted his ass on the ground?”
She rolls her eyes at the immediate recollection. Beau was around Jonas’s age. Way too big to be easily carried, and he knew it, so he parked his ass on the ground when it was time to leave the fair. Mom surprised us both by chucking him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes and marching his ass through the closest crowd of preteen girls she could find.
“Thought I was gonna have to do that with Jonas after he fell off. I think Betty would’ve kicked my ass for laying a finger on that kid, though.”
She laughs. “When you have your own kids, Betty’s not going to leave their side for a single second.”
“Yeah, probably won’t even let anyone near the kid.”
She glances down at the last of her espresso. “Assuming Betty’s not too old by that point…”
Here we go.
“Kind of hard to give you grandchildren without a woman in the picture, Ma.”
Betty must’ve heard her name, because she trots through the open doorway, coming to settle at my feet. I break my lastslice of bread in half and lean down to give part of it to her, followed up with a head pat.
