“I like that. So look, right now I can’t afford to hire a full complement of hands. Not until we get the budget figured out with the lawyers and everything. All the funds are in trust for the kids, and I’m the administrator of the trust, so I’m going to have an operating budget, plus my own money that I make personally of course but?—”
Ellis held up his hand so the man could take a breath. “Now, Mr. Ichabod, I do understand. I’ve worked for all sorts of operations from a corporate mega ranch down in Texas to a twenty-acre hobby farm in Utah that had fifteen kids living on it. As long as you can paymysalary, I will work myself into the ground for you, and then we’ll go from there.”
Ichabod blinked at him, those pretty blue eyes, having ridiculously long lashes for a man. “You’ll have to pardon me if that sounds a little too good to be true.” Ichabod rolled his shoulders. “But then you’ve seen how my life is going lately.” He waved a hand vaguely toward where the Michael kid had disappeared. “Some of the kids are super happy to be here, and some of them would rather be anywhere else. Anyway.” He took a deep, deep breath. “So the job would be eventually a foreman’s job in a traditional sense, I guess, but right now it’s going to be jack-of-all-trades. We have some horses that need to be taken care of. I’d like to bring in some cattle because my father-in-law sold most of them off. And all of the house and outbuilding infrastructure needs work.”
“I can do it. And if I can’t, we’ll get day laborers to help us with some of the stuff that’s more difficult and pay it on a job-by-job basis. I sent on my references. Did you get them?” He had some good ones. The Four Sixes ranch in Texas had glowing things to say about him, and that hadn’t been easy. Some of the guys who owned that place, which was a corporate conglomerate these days, were a little less than complimentary. They did hire damn good cowboys though, and his managers there had been great guys. For Texans.
“I did. They looked absolutely acceptable. Did you like Texas?”
He’d loved the work and the people. The humidity, not so much. “It was hot with no mountains. People were great. I loved the bluebonnets.”
Ichabod bobbed his head. “Fair enough.”
“You a Colorado local?” He had to ask, because the guy sure sounded Colorado.
“Close enough. New Mexico. I came up here to Colorado for college. Met my husband Chris in Denver. We stayed there until well…now.”
Ellis was trying to find a way to ask what Ichabod did for a living, but he couldn’t think of a reasonable entry point for that.
“Right now, I’m focusing on the kids’ rooms and making sure I have a workable studio in the back. I have a couple of commissions that I’d like to get down before it gets too late, and my clients get mad.”
“You’re an artist?” That didn’t seem to track.
“A potter. I make…well, pretty much whatever they pay me to right now. I’m in the process of throwing a couple of big pieces for a hotel in Jackson Hole. But I do a lot of work with different galleries and stuff.”
“Well, that’s interesting…”
Ichabod rolled his eyes like dice. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it really, genuinely is fascinating. And it’s good work.” He sighed and stood. “Would you like to see the bunkhouse? Like I said, it’s in good shape.”
Ichabod poured off exhaustion all of a sudden.
“You okay, man?”
“Fine, it’s been a long couple of days. Moving is hard at the best of times, and I’ve been fighting with family members who are unhappy with me because the kids got left something that they wanted. And I have a teenager who misses his dad, and now he’s lost his grandpa, and to be perfectly honest, sometimes being the second dad isn’t enough.”
Whoa. That was…a lot. He was going to have to talk to Rick, tell him to back off this guy a second. It wasn’t like Rick wanted the land. He was a city boy, to the bone. It was investment money, pure and simple. “So they’re not…”
Ichabod shook his head and led him out the back of the house through the kitchen. He had to say, the kitchen was old and not fancy, but it was spotlessly clean. “The boys were Chris’s when we met. They were little, of course. I don’t think Michael even remembers before I was around. He was two going on three. But Zane was six. At six you can remember.”
“Yeah, I imagine so.” He hesitated again and then forged on like he had a right to. He might as well start out like he could hold out. “So, I don’t mean to pry—and if I am, tell me to mind my own business—but when I was out there on the front porch with those two boys, the younger one?—”
“Michael.” Ichabod nodded, leading him out the kitchen door and into a decrepit flagstone courtyard. Lord have mercy, this place.
“Hey, he said something to the other one?—”
“Zane,” Ichabod broke in.
“Right. He said something to Zane about how this was all his fault—he got in some trouble?”
Ichabod’s shoulders went up around his ears, and he blew out a breath. “Nothing serious. He’s not dangerous. He was getting in with a rough crowd of friends. You know, when we moved there, the neighborhood was ripe for gentrification, and so the houses were cheap for Denver.” There was a wistfulness in Ichabod’s expression, something that took some age off him. “Our house was a beautiful old Craftsman, but it never did take back off. There was a lot of crime and a lot of drug use. You know how teenagers can be — Zane was more than willing to act out some after his dad died. He was hurting bad.”
Jesus. He couldn’t imagine a kid losing his dad and having to deal with all this shit. “So Michael sees this as a way to get Zane out of there, I reckon?”
Ichabod nodded as they passed through the little wooden gate and into the pasture. “I think so, yeah. Zane really believesthat this is a ploy to get him away from his friends and that we don’t have to be here, but to be perfectly honest there’s no way we can maintain our house there and the ranch here. So, we had to sell and move. At least selling in Denver gave us a nice cushion to do some work on the house.”
Ichabod led him down past the first set of outbuildings, which looked to be a couple of horse barns and a shelter where both horses and cattle, hell maybe llamas, whatever they had at this place at one point could get out of the rain and not be stuck in a stall.
That worked for him. He liked lean-to situations, especially out here where the Roaring Fork could flood. He wasn’t much on putting horses in barns constantly.
