“Did you all always know that you wanted to… Do this?”
“Hell no,” Walker said. “I just wanted to get rich. I went into the rodeo because Cody got rich doing that.”
Rich. Well, of course, he was rich. He couldn’t be building something like this if he wasn’t.
Though she had the distinct feeling, based on the way Walker had said that, and based on everything that Cody had told her, that they hadn’t started out that way.
“And after that, you decided that you wanted to have a ranch.”
“We inherited a ranch,” Lila said. “I guess we could’ve turned around and sold the land, split all that up, but then…”
“It made more sense to just run it,” Cody said.
“I see.”
“Cody is the one who got it into his head to make this a luxury resort. The tourism here has gotten more and more fancy over the years. A lot of people come to this part of the state to ski, and he visited some places in Montana and Wyoming, got a sense for what people are looking for.”
She looked at Cody, who was so abrupt, so abrasive when she tried to talk to him about anything, that he certainly hadn’t given her the impression he was the one with the insider knowledge on how these kinds of resorts ran.
“What made you want to do that?”
“Just another way to make money,” Cody said.
“Oh. Well, I guess that’s important. But why?”
As far as she could tell, this was a big ranching operation even without the resort. Walker had already said that he and Cody had a substantial amount of money. Why did they need more? Yes, that was human nature, generally speaking. But there had to be something driving a person.
Not in a superior way, but Marlowe wasn’t the kind of person who just wanted more and more money.
She was looking for something. But money wasn’t it.
She’d been lucky, she supposed, because part of taking on the kind of work that she had meant that she had a built-in place to live most of the time when she took a job.
Maybe that had been part of her calculation, though she knew there was something deeper, too.
Still, she wanted security. Not wealth.
It didn’t take a psychologist to look at all the ways in which the kinds of jobs that she took gave her an instant sense of security. All-encompassing roots that surrounded her completely. Sometimes felt like they were strangling her, sure, but that was better than being alone, insecure, adrift.
She fought against that feeling now, which threatened to overwhelm her.
Maybe that was why she had married the first man she had ever dated. The only man she had ever dated. Security and roots. His family…
“Everybody wants money,” Walker said.
“Yeah. Of course. Everybody wants to be comfortable. I just meant it seemed like maybe you had that already.”
“That’s not enough for me,” Cody said, his voice hard. “What I want is to show everybody. Even if they don’t care. Even if they’ve forgotten at this point, I want to show them that I was always just as good as they were. Better. And if it takes money and land, notoriety, to prove that, then we can do that too.”
“Hell yeah,” Lila said, taking a sip of her lemonade and leaning back in the chair.
Marlowe realized then that she had forgotten about her sandwich.
She was wondering if they should transition into small talk so they could eat in peace, but there was something about this family that made her feel like they’d never engaged in small talk a day in their lives.
Only big things, and then, likely silence if there was nothing big to discuss. She didn’t know why she had that impression.
Only that she did.
