Sagging where the posts have rotted, leaning in sections where a good wind would lay it flat.
Earl would have had that fixed before the first post went soft.
Earl would have been out there with a post-hole digger and a level, cussing at the cedar and the caliche and whatever grandson-he-never-had wasn’t there to hold the wire while he stretched it.
The barn next.
Paint peeling in long strips, exposing the gray wood underneath.
The equipment shed with its patchwork roof.
The round pen where Earl taught Rose and Bex to shoe their first horse—the rails are warped, one section down entirely, the footing gone to weeds.
The house.
Still standing, still solid in the way old Texas ranch houses are—built to endure things that kill lesser structures.
But the porch sags at the south end.
The gutters are pulling loose.
The garden Rose’s mother planted forty years ago is a tangle of dead stalks and overgrowth.
This place is dying.
Not from neglect—from absence.
From one man getting sick and the hands that kept it alive getting too weak to grip the tools.
From a daughter who would have inherited it lying in the cemetery on the hill outside town.
From a son-in-law who drove away after the funeral and never came back.
The shame hits me like a punch to the gut.
Physical. Heavy.
The kind that makes you want to turn the truck around and drive until you run out of road, because running is easier than standing in the wreckage of your own failure and admitting you caused it.
I park. I sit.
I look at the house where my wife grew up and I think about every Sunday I should have been here and wasn’t.
Then I get out of the truck, because that’s what you do.
You get out.
You walk forward.
You face the thing you’ve been running from, even when every cell in your body is screaming at you to leave.
Earl is on the porch.
Rocker. Blanket across his lap. Coffee in his hand.
He’s watching me walk up the steps the way a man watches weather come in—patient, unsurprised, like he knew it was only a matter of time.
He’s thin.
