Chemo twice a week.
Side effects manageable some days, brutal others.
The oncologist uses words like “responsive” and “monitoring” and never says “cured” because cancer doesn’t work that way.
“They give you a timeline?” I ask. Hating the question. Having to ask it.
“I didn’t ask for one.” Earl takes a sip of coffee. “Timelines are for project managers. I’m a rancher. I work until the work’s done.”
I almost smile.
The stubbornness is so completely Earl that it circles back around to comforting.
This man is not going to die on anyone’s schedule but his own, and even then he’ll probably argue with God about the timing.
From somewhere behind the house—the barn, I think—comes the ringing sound of metal on metal.
Hammer on anvil.
Steady, rhythmic, the particular tempo of someone shaping steel.
The sound is so familiar it hits me like a time machine.
Earl at his forge.
Earl teaching Rose to hold a hammer.
Earl bent over the anvil in the orange glow of hot iron, shaping shoes while two teenage girls watched with wide eyes.
But it’s not Earl at the forge. It’s Bex.
“She’s working a client horse,” Earl says, following my eyes toward the sound. “Building her book. She’s good. Better than I ever was, though don’t tell her I said that. Her head’s big enough.”
The ringing continues.
Even and sure.
The sound of someone who knows exactly how hard to hit and where.
“She dropped everything,” Earl says. Quieter now. The humor fading into something heavier. “Had a life up in Amarillo. Clients. An apartment. Routine. Two days after the diagnosis, she was at my door with a truck full of tools and a look on her face that said if I tried to send her away she’d burn the place down.” He shakes his head. “That girl. She’s been taking care of people since she was old enough to understand that nobody was going to take care of her.”
I know the story.
Not all of it—nobody knows all of it except Bex and maybe Rose—but enough.
Deadbeat parents.
The kind of childhood that teaches you self-sufficiency as a survival skill rather than a virtue.
Earl and Rose pulling her in, giving her a place at the table, feeding her the things her own family couldn’t or wouldn’t.
She grew up hard because she had to, and some of that hardness never softened, and the parts that did were the parts Rose touched.
“She’s the only one who came back,” Earl says.
He doesn’t look at me when he says it.
Doesn’t need to.
