Of course she’d wanted what she’d wanted, didn’t everybody feel that way? Wanted what they wanted and never mind the other person? Not Austin. He’d tried to give her what she wanted and failed. Tried to be the man he saw in her directed comments, the wishful thinking he saw in her dark eyes.
He’d loved her with his whole heart, flattered by her attention to his young, nerdy, accountant-wanna-be self. Ecstatic as she’d singled him out from his friends in high school, cutting him off as easily as a trained sheepdog might. He was not immune to being wanted by her, had not been aware, back then, what her true intentions had been.
And maybe Mona hadn’t known herself what she was doing but perhaps, guided by Glamour magazine articles about how to improve your man, felt she’d set her sights on a good man while wanting him to be a better man. Her kind of man. The man who would save her from a life working in a paper box factory or a sugar beet mill.
No. He did not want to think about Mona any longer. All of this was a river of regret he did not need to be headed down over and over again. He’d call Mr. Bledsoe, Mona’s lawyer, first thing Monday morning, and work out a better version of his custody rights to see Bea. He had to put this behind him, but since Mona had been part of his young adult life for so long, it was hard. Still, he had to try.
Looking up, focusing on the grey-black road that stretched out in front of them, squinting to see the single white line that marked the edge of the highway, he thought he heard a smallskree-skreesound coming from the engine. He didn’t know engines, so instead of saying anything, he took a swallow of his coffee and straightened up, feeling like he was at a party he forgot he was attending.
“So where are we?” he asked, unable to think of anything more stimulating to say than that.
“We’re just coming up on Platteville,” said Clay, pointing with his forefinger, keeping his hands on the steering wheel. “It’s about two hours from here to the ranch, give or take. Last time I drove to Denver was after I had just started at the ranch and Leland needed me to pick up a shipment that didn’t make it all the way to Wyoming, I borrowed Leland’s truck to do it. He’s got the sweetest silver F150, but I guess I got overexcited, because I almost came home with a speeding ticket. Hence you’re getting a ride in Ladybelle, rather than Leland’s juicy ride.”
“Ladybelle,” said Austin, gazing with only half-interest at the tall, round, silver water-draped grain silos glinting by the window at speed. Who named their car? He never had, but he found it a little sweet that this young cowboy with his split lip and black eye would take the time to give his old yellow truck a nice name.
“Yeah,” said Clay. “We used to have two mares, Lady and Belle, but they got too old to be ridden so regularly as they might be on the ranch. For horses like that, rather than put them down or sell them to the dog food factory like some ranches did, Leland always donates them a rehab riding school. You know, the ones where little kids in wheelchairs or kids with palsy can ride a real horse? They were the first two horses I rode at the ranch, so I named my truck after both of them.”
“Really?” Austin’s mind seemed to stir to life, being affected by an onslaught of ideas and images he’d not been expecting.
“The rehab ranch is south of Denver,” said Clay. “Parker, I think.”
A small silence filled the cabin as Clay drank his coffee, and Austin cupped his in his hands. It was his turn. Clay had just spilled out a plethora of information about himself, about Leland, about the ranch. In polite company, at least at accounting offices where Austin had worked, when a co-worker shared you had to share back.
The only thing Austin had to share was the fact that his life was in ruins, his head was still whirling from Mona’s infidelity, and his heart was full of pinholes of grief and he only wanted to cry and shrink down until he became invisible. But the rest of the world wasn’t like that. You had to get up and keep walking, keep acting human until you felt human again.Act as if it’s true until it becomes true, someone had told him, though he couldn’t remember who.
“So, accounting, huh?” asked Clay, not taking his eyes from the road, though Austin could feel Clay’s attention shifting between him and the road, between Austin’s continued silence and the whisk-whisk sound of the wipers on the windshield. “Is it hard? I only took basic stuff in college, too much in a hurry to graduate and get a job on a ranch, I guess.”
It reallywasAustin’s turn.
“I like the orderliness of the numbers,” he said, blurting the first thing that came to his mind, regardless of how banal. “I’m not an obsessive guy, but I enjoy making sure that all the numbers in the columns balance as they should.”
Clay raised his eyebrow as he looked at Austin with a half-grin. It was at this point that Mona, however much she appreciated Austin’s income and could brag to her mama bear friends about her CPA husband, would wave a manicured hand and declare that it was too boring to listen to him go on about how it actually all worked.
“Not obsessive, huh?” asked Clay with a small laugh. “All those tiny details, you’d have to be obsessed, at least a little bit, to enjoy that kind of work. I mean, right?”
Taking a long, slow sip of too-sweet coffee, Austin did his best to focus on where he was. On what Clay had just said. On what he meant, which was probably miles away from what Mona would mean. Maybe he needed to trust that a new job, a new life, brought with it new expectations, new interactions. Sometimes, things stayed with you even though you wanted to let them go, though. Change was never easy. Still, he had to try.
“I guess I might be, at least a little bit.” Austin took another sip of his coffee and looked out at the rain. At the passing scenery, the low fields, the silver-streaked rails of the train track that ran parallel to the road. “I like numbers. I like order.”
In the back of his mind, he knew that what all of that offered to him was a kind of mental stillness. If everything was lined up, then everything would work as it should. Though, even though he thought this, felt it, even though he worked hard at that orderliness, Mona had shredded through this part of his psyche with razor-sharp efficiency, leaving Austin with nothing but emptiness.
“That’s probably why Leland hired you,” said Clay. “He’s that kind of guy. You know, a place for everything and everything in its place. You’ll like working for him, though, I think. Even though sometimes—” Clay broke off, shaking his head, and Austin seized the moment to turn the focus of the conversation back to Clay.
“Sometimes what?” asked Austin. Then, to keep the ball rolling, he added, “Sometimes bosses can be part of the problem.”
“Oh, no,” Clay said as he straightened up sharply, as though Austin had poked him with a straight pin. “Leland’s the best, by far, of anyone I’ve ever worked for. It’s just that I’m all full of woe an’ stuff on account of I can’t be customer facing, not with this black eye.” Clay took his hand off the steering wheel long enough to gesture to the left side of his face. “Which means that, at least this week, I can’t go on trail rides or teach riding lessons and especially I can’t drive the chuckwagon for Levi.”
“The chuckwagon?” asked Austin. He had a vague notion what that was, but only a vague one. He’d been so grateful for the offer of a job that would take him far, far away from Denver he’d barely glanced at the ranch’s website.
“The chuckwagon is like a little food truck for the little cattle drive we take guests on,” said Clay, smiling. “We only take ten head or so of cattle, and we don’t go very far, but guests love it. We sleep out under the stars in canvas tents and eat Levi’s good cooking in the fresh air. And I’m just pissed that I’m going to miss it, even if it is my own fault.”
“And how is it your fault?” asked Austin.
“Well, Leland doesn’t like any of his staff fighting. Only I got into a fight with Eddie Piggot.” Clay shrugged as if amazed at his own foolishness. “He was in the kitchen of the Rusty Nail hitting some kid that works for him. Might have been his stepson, I don’t know. Then he said crappy things about the ranch and stuff, and I just didn’t want to put up with it anymore. You know?”
Sometimes things shifted in Austin’s mind, like they were doing now, all of a sudden, sharp and unexpected. Whereas only a second before Clay had been an average two-dimensional person, albeit dressed in cowboy boots and sporting a cowboy hat, now he was someone else. Someone with depth and ideas and the heart of a knight set to rescue a boy hapless enough to be working in the back kitchen in a bar in a small town.
“That’s not right,” said Austin. “I mean, what you did was right, but what Eddie Piggot was doing was wrong.”
