“Doctor say anything new?”
“Same thing he’s been sayin’. He wants to replace the dang thing in a few months.”
I nod. I already knew that. I spoke to Dr. Bradley after his appointment this afternoon.
“You gonna listen to him this time?” I ask.
“I reckon I ain’t got much choice. Teetering around on that cane is getting difficult. It’s surgery or a wheelchair at this point.”
It’s a relief to hear. The old man is proud and stubborn, and he doesn’t really like or trust doctors. Not since, according to him, they let his Della die.
“That’s true.”
He takes another bite, chewing slow.
“You worry too much, Porter,” he says.
“Someone has to.”
“You got enough on your plate, running that place.”
That place.
He means the Belicourt.
The place the Garrison family has run for three generations.
The place my father used to manage before he stepped down to run for one of Wyoming’s state senate seats. Leaving the responsibility sitting squarely on my shoulders.
“I can worry about more than one thing,” I tell him.
“Well, stop. I can worry about myself.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
He chuckles.
Then we fall quiet again.
I glance around the room. The furniture remains the same. The photographs on the wall are the same. One shows him and Grandma standing in front of a massive herd of cattle sometimein the ’70s, both of them younger than I am now. Another is of my mother sitting on a horse as a teenager. And there’s one of me when I was about six years old, grinning wide, my front teeth missing, holding a fishing pole. Grandma took that one. She used to take pictures of everything. Now they’re all that’s left of the life they built.
I clear my throat.
“You ever think about selling the place?”
The words hang in the air like a thundercloud. It’s the same question I’ve asked him the last seven years.
He doesn’t look at me.
Just keeps eating.
“You bring that up every time you come here,” he says.
“Because it makes sense.”
He snorts. “For who?”
“For you.”
