She walks to her truck, opens the door and sits behind the wheel for a full minute before she starts the engine.
I know she's crying in there because I can see her shoulders shaking through the tinted glass.
The Escalade pulls away. Gravel crunching. Dust rising. And then nothing. Just the land and the sky and the hawk still circling overhead like it's been watching the whole time.
I sit in my father's chair and I don't feel relieved.
I feel like I just amputated something that's been dead for years but was still attached.
***
The sun is halfway down when I hear the diesel.
Not the Escalade. The throaty rumble of a three-quarter-ton Chevy hauling a two-horse trailer, coming up the ranch road too fast, the way Dakota always drives because she inherited my lead foot and her mother's disregard for speed limits.
She pulls around to the barn first.
I hear the trailer door open, hear her talking to the horse the way she talks to all of them—low, steady, the tone she uses when she's coming down from competition adrenaline.
She's good with horses. Better than she knows. Better than I tell her, because telling Dakota she's good at something just makes her push harder, and she's already pushing hard enough to break.
Ten minutes later she comes up the porch steps.
Dusty. Arena dirt on her jeans, her boots, the brim of her hat.
Sandy hair pulled back in a braid that's come half undone.
She's got my jaw and my eyes and the stubborn set of my mouth, and right now that mouth is pulling to one side the way it does when she's reading a situation.
She looks at me, looks at the empty chair and looks at the Maker's Mark bottle I set on the rail an hour ago and haven't opened.
"You look like hell, Pops."
"Thank you."
She drops into the chair next to me—Jolene's chair, except it's not Jolene's chair anymore, it's just a chair—and pulls off her hat.
She runs a hand through the loose pieces of hair at her temples.
She smells like arena dust, horse sweat, and the leather conditioner she uses on her tack, and it's the most honest smell in the world.
"How'd you do?" I ask.
"Second. By a tenth." She says it like it burns. Because it does. Dakota doesn't do second.
"You'll get it next time."
"Damn right I will." She eyes the bourbon. "Are we drinking or are we staring at it?"
I hand her the bottle.
She cracks the seal—she knows I haven't touched it yet, knows what an unopened bottle on the porch rail means—and pours two glasses without asking for ice.
Hands me one. Takes a sip of hers and leans back, and for a minute we just sit there, father and daughter, watching the sky do what it does in central Texas at the end of a long day.
Gold bleeding into orange bleeding into something deeper that doesn't have a name.
"You going to tell me, or am I going to have to guess?" she says.
