Tess scrunches up her face. “I didn’t know your parents had siblings?”
Shit.
“Oh yeah, Mom's side.” I lie.
Her eyes narrow in disbelief, and she tentatively takes the slip of paper from me, looking down at the sizes written there.
“And she needs everything?” Tess asks, looking around her store, “What’s her style?”
Expensive.
“Anything,” I tell her, “But yes, she needs everything.”
“Alright,” Tess begins to wander off, “You can just wait at the front.”
“Thanks,” I call to her, but she’s already disappeared in the racks of clothing. I head to the front and sit on the pink couch in front of the windows, resting my elbows on my knees. It’s the first time I’ve actually sat down and done nothing all day.
Tess repeatedly comes back and forth, placing items on the counter before she disappears to get more, and twenty minutes later, she places the last of it down and slips behind the register.
There are four piles of clothes plus a pile of underwear, a pair of cowboy boots, a hat and some sneakers.
“Is this enough?” She asks, eyes on the piles. I should imagine it’s plenty. “I got a bit of everything — some sweaters, shorts, a couple of dresses, you know?”
“It’s fine,” I grunt, trying not to think about how much it’s going to cost me.
“I’ll ring it up.”
A sweat breaks out on the back of my neck as the figure on the little outdated screen keeps going up and up and up.
“Total is one thousand two hundred fifty-three.”
My shoulders sag in defeat. “Do you do payment plans?”
I see pity flicker across her face. “I can for you, Knox.”
“I can pay five hundred bucks now.” I pull out my credit card, “I was planning an early summer sale on some of my livestock anyway after the drive in a couple weeks. I can pay the rest then?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” She smiles.
She begins to bag the items for me, and I place them down on the floor to free up space for her to pull out the card machine. I’m pretty certain there’s enough on this card to cover five hundred today, but that’ll be this card done now until I cansomehow pay it back. The transaction goes through, and she hands the card back.
“Listen, you need anything, give me a call, okay?” She says as I bend to pluck up the bags.
“I’ll be fine,” I head out into the afternoon sun, the beams beating down on the glossy black paint of the Chevy my father used to drive back in the day. It’s been looked after well, which is why I’ve never needed to replace it. I shove all the bags into the passenger seat and back out onto the quiet street. It’s twenty minutes to the ranch, thirty if I take the scenic route around the back and across, beneath the shadows of the mountains. It’s an unmaintained dirt road, but fuck, it’s one of my favorite places to be, always has been. In the height of summer, when the sun beams down, it turns the leaves a vibrant, almost unreal green, and a crystal-clear spring, fed by melting snow and overflow from up the mountainside gurgles through the forest.
It brings me the type of peace the ranch used to, in the middle of the night when the skies are clear, and you can hear the owls and the crickets, but the ranch hasn’t brought me anything other than debt and stress since we started losing money. Every day, it gets harder and harder to resist the pull of selling it. The millions I’ve been offered will pay off the debts on the landandget me a new ranch somewhere far from here.
But the history. The memories. The generations of Carters before me who worked this land will be mowed over, torn down and forgotten. The gravesof my ancestors will become unmarked; it’ll be erased from the books and become some big factory that doesn’t care about the animals, the land or the humans that work for it.
It will lose respect.
I decide to take the back road, slowing my truck to a crawl as I turn onto the unbeaten path, gravel and dust kicking up behind me, dirtying the paint and leaving dust up the sides.
By the time I pull to a stop ahead of the main house, the ranch is gearing up for the night; the horses are being placed in the stables, the goats too while the chickens remain free to roam.
I’ve no idea what to expect to find from Elena when I enter the house. Another bottle of whiskey taken from the office? Her asleep in my bed? I’ve no doubt the rules I put in place only a couple of hours ago will be ignored.
She’s a woman who has always gotten what she wants, with no limits, no rules and no restrictions.
