“Like a baby. Woke up every two hours and cried.”
I snort.
That’s Earl.
The man is being eaten alive by cancer and he’s still the funniest person in any room.
Rose got that from him—the ability to make you laugh when you wanted to cry.
I didn’t get it from anyone.
My parents didn’t do humor.
They did vodka and screaming and the occasional well-timed disappearance.
Everything good in me—every skill, every steadiness, every scrap of decency I’ve managed to hang onto—came from this kitchen table.
This man.
This family that took in the feral kid from the bad house down the road and fed her biscuits and taught her how to hold a rasp and never once made her feel like charity.
Earl was the first person who ever looked at me and saw something worth keeping.
Rose was the second.
“Chemo’s at two,” I tell him. “I’ve got a client out past Fredericksburg this morning, but I’ll be back by noon to drive you.”
“I can drive myself.”
“You threw up in the Walmart parking lot last Tuesday.”
“That was the Walmart’s fault. Place makes everyone sick.”
“Earl.”
He looks at me over the rim of his mug.
The stubbornness is still there—it’ll be the last thing to go, long after everything else.
But underneath it there’s a softness he only shows me and Rose.
Showedme and Rose.
“Fine,” he says. “You can drive. But I’m picking the radio station.”
“Deal.”
He goes back to his paper.
I drink my coffee and look out the window at the ranch that’s falling apart piece by piece—paint peeling off the barn, fences sagging where the posts have rotted, a section of roof on the equipment shed that’s been patched so many times it’s more tar than tin.
Earl couldn’t keep up with it even before the diagnosis.
Now it’s drowning. He’s drowning. And I’m bailing water with a coffee can.
I packed up my apartment in Amarillo in two days.
Loaded my farrier rig, broke my lease, called my clients to let them know I was relocating.
