The gray undertone that the good days used to chase away has settled in permanently, like paint that won’t take a second coat.
But his eyes are clear. Sharp.
The eyes of a man who has always seen exactly what’s in front of him and called it by its name.
“Morning, son.”
“Morning.” I take the other rocker.
The one that’s been mine since before Rose and I got married, when I’d drive out for Sunday dinners and sit on this porch and listen to Earl talk about cattle and weather and the particular way Texas light hits the land.
A lifetime ago. A different man in this chair.
But the chair is the same and the land is the same and the man beside me is the same, just less of him now, the body withdrawing in increments the way a tide goes out.
We sit.
The quiet between us is the comfortable kind—the silence of two men who have said what needs saying and can exist in each other’s presence without filling the air with words.
The bay trots along the far fence. A hawk circles the south pasture. The coffee cools.
“I need to tell you something,” Earl says. His voice is thinner than it was six months ago but the authority in it hasn’t changed. Earl Dalton doesn’t ask permission to speak. He speaks. “I’ve been to the lawyer. Got everything in order.”
My chest tightens. “Earl?—”
“Let me finish.” He takes a sip of coffee. Sets it down carefully on the arm of the rocker—the practiced gesture of a man whose hands aren’t as steady as they used to be. “This ranch. The land, the house, the barn, all of it. I’m leaving it to Bex, and you. Bex gets ninety percent of it. You get ten.”
The air leaves my lungs.
“Rose was my only child. She’s gone. My wife’s been gone for thirty years. The only family I have left is you two.” He looks at me. Steady. Clear. The look of a man who has thought about this and thought about this and arrived at the only answer that makes sense. “You’re my son, Lee. You have been since the day you asked me for her hand in that barn and your voice cracked three times before you got the question out. That didn’t end when Rose died. It doesn’t end when I do.”
I can’t speak. My throat is closed and my eyes are burning and both of my hands—the left one bare, the right one carrying the ring—are gripping the arms of the rocker like the porch is moving under me.
“And Bex.” His voice softens. The way it always does when he says her name—the tenderness reserved for the girl from the bad home who showed up hungry and angry and stayed for twenty years. “Bex is my daughter. Not by blood. By my own damn choice. The same way Rose chose her. The same way you chose her. This land goes to our family. You two are my family.”
“Earl.” It’s all I can manage. His name and everything it holds—father, mentor, the man who handed me his daughter’s hand and trusted me with the most precious thing he had.
“Don’t argue with a dying man.” The ghost of a smile. “It’s impolite.”
I reach over and take his hand.
His fingers are thin—bony, fragile in a way that Earl’s hands were never supposed to be.
These are the hands that taught two girls to shoe horses.
The hands that built this porch.
The hands that held his daughter when she was born and held her again when they put her in the ground.
They close around mine with surprising strength—the grip of a man who is dying but hasn’t stopped holding on to the things that matter.
“Take care of the land,” he says. “Take care of each other. And when that baby of Shadow’s gets big enough—you teach him to ride. On this land. The way I taught Rose.”
“I will.” My voice cracks.
Earl pats my hand, lets go and picks up his coffee.
We sit. The bay runs the fence line. The hawk makes another pass.
