by Ali Parker
“You sure you’re here for your brother?” Her giggle snapped me out of my daze, and I realized I had let my gaze linger back over to Ted’s table.
“I’m sure.” I turned to meet her eyes. “Is there anyone he’s been leaving with?”
“Ted or Bailey?” She put a hand on her hip and leaned against the bar seeming quite pleased with herself.
“My brother.” I sneered. “Have you seen him with Lacey?”
“No, not since they split. He leaves with different people here and there. No one specific, though a couple of girls did get into it about a week ago over him. He seems like a real heartbreaker himself.” She wandered off to pour another drink.
I didn’t want to think of my brother being anything like that. It reminded me too much of Ted, but then again, those two had been friends. Me and Bailey were only eleven months apart, and both of us grew up with all of the Dawson boys. Our families used to be close, and our dads were best friends until Empire Communications had approached us about the communications tower they wanted to put on our land. That was years and years ago, right after our mother died. I glanced back to Ted and remembered the night we broke up.
I’d wanted to go to our senior prom, but he didn’t, and as much as I tried to convince him, he wouldn’t budge. Bailey understood how much going to prom meant to me so he arranged for his friend Andy to ask me. I had waited on Ted, hoping he’d change his mind, but when he didn’t, I had to accept the other invitation. Bailey was going with my best friend Katie, so we were all set for a fun night as nothing more than a group of friends dressing up to go to a party. Ted made sure he ruined that.
He looked so cocky sitting across the room, and it infuriated me that I couldn’t catch him staring at me. I hated the way he made me feel. I hated that a small speck of my heart might still belong to him. I tried to smother it with each thought. Denial was easier than the heartbreak he’d given me in the past.
As Bailey joined Ted at his table, I downed my drink and slipped out of the bar before they noticed me there. I didn’t feel like a confrontation with either of them.
Chapter 3
Ted
"Are you serious?"
I stared at my father where he was sitting across from me at his desk, his hands folded in front of him in that evil genius way that always made me nervous. Because he is many things in this world, but neither evil nor a genius is one of them. When he tries to combine them, he is either trying to make a point, or there are going to be disastrous consequences. Sometimes both.
"Absolutely. You said that I'm expecting you to do too much work. Your brothers have more or less confirmed that there is a lot to do around the ranch and that things might get done more efficiently if there was more help. So I'm telling you that you should go ahead and hire a new hand."
"I didn’t think I’d ever see the day when you’d suggest it."
"You are the one that brought it up, and I’m not able to tend to your mother and pick up anyone’s slack, so I think that you should.”
I sighed, knowing that this would be one more thing on my heavy plate. “I don’t know if I have time to interview people. Couldn’t you do the hiring?”
Dad shook his head. “When I said I wanted you to take over running things, I meant just that. You will run it. You can interview and hire them. That way you know it is someone who will do the job the way that you think they should do it. You will be responsible for handing out the jobs and making sure they get done. Now that David's gone, and I’ve put you in charge, I’m not going to make those kinds of decisions."
I took a deep breath as the gravity of it all set in. I had always been prepared to work with David, under David as the head, but I never expected to be doing the work without him there to help me. It was all happening at once and to say I was overwhelmed was an understatement. I felt like I was standing there waiting for the big catch. Like I had to hire him within the next 30 minutes or that the hired hand had to fit in a certain height range so that we could dress him like David to assuage my mother's empty nest syndrome. It seemed too simple, too ideal to actually be happening. I was never that damn lucky.
"Why are you still standing there?" Dad suddenly asked, and I jumped a little, wondering how long I had been standing there staring at him.
"I was waiting for you to say something else."
"What else did you want me to say?"
I opened and closed my mouth a few times, hoping that one of the times I did, something was going to come out. When nothing did, I shook my head and started out of the office. I wasn't even sure how to go about finding someone interested in working as a hand. Most of the men looking for work came around earlier in the season, and by now, I assumed most of the capable guys already had herds to work and ranches to handle. All of our hands had been family, and my cousins were all married and been out of the ranching business for years. It wasn’t like the good old days when I could call up a few of them to hang out. Now everyone had their own lives.
I knew all about the infrastructure of running the ranch. I was more than capable of taking care of the cattle, how to market them to buyers or source them from suppliers, and I could damn sure fix a fence. But I didn’t know how to go about hiring someone to do those things for me. I always kind of thought that was the beauty of having a family ranch. You bred your workers, not hired them. Of course, I had been the one to run my mouth about needing extra help, so here I was having that help handed to me as long as I could find the person myself.
As I walked out of the house and back toward the fields, I went over the whole situation in my mind. I had never been accused of being a people person. I wasn’t sure what to look for in a worker, other than if they would listen and keep their mouth shut and keep working. I decided I’d have to get the word out somehow and figured it might take more than a few flyers in town. I needed to get that computer running, and the only thing I’d managed so far was to have the internet connected. Maybe I was more like my old man than I wanted to admit. I hated my new cell phone, and I had only used it a few times to talk to my family. I took it out of my pocket and wondered if there was an app I could use to make hiring easier. I shoved the device back in my pocket and decided to deal with it later.
"What are you thinking about so hard?"
The sweetest voice I’d ever known broke through my rumination, and I looked up sharply.
"Lauralee?" I looked up to find her looking bored with me already. She rarely spoke to me, and I’d about grown tired of trying to get her attention. The last time she was over I had pinned her against the magnolia tree out front and tried to get her to catch me up on how she’d been, but was unsuccessful. She’d only come over to check on Mama and bring us something to eat. She’d do as much for a stray dog, so I should have known it didn’t mean anything.
She stared up at me with big, blue eyes, and I got the usual strange feeling of nostalgia for my youth that she’d always given me, mixed with the bitter discomfort of our unfortunate breakup.
She glanced down at herself before back up at me with the slightest hint of a smile.
"Do I look that different?" she asked.
I looked at her for a few seconds, taking in the well-worn boots, dirty jeans, and loose plaid shirt, and then lifted my eyes to the old hat that I'm sure contained all of the hair I remembered as being long and thick tucked up under it.
"No," I told her, "you pretty much look like I remember you looking when you were about ten. You know, before you realized you were a girl."
She got a look on her face that held an emotion I couldn't quite decipher and crossed her arms over her chest.
"Is your mama around?" she asked.
I guess she had decided that the warm and fuzzy reunion portion of the morning was over.
"Yeah. I think she's in the kitchen. Why?"
"She's who I'm here to see," Lauralee said, stepping around me to head up toward the house.
"Any particular reason?" I called after her. "Or just visiting?"
She made a sound in her throat that was somewhere between a sigh of exasperation and a laugh of derision and kept walking. "I don't have much else to do these days, Ted. Other than look after my alcoholic brother. You wouldn’t happen to know what’s got into him lately, now would you?”
I jogged to catch up and fell into step beside her. “I don’t, but why are you so free all of a sudden? You never have time to come see me.” I couldn’t help but flirt with her, and a strange part of me liked to push her buttons. That redheaded temper was my favorite until I pushed it too far.
"It ain’t like Daddy will let me do anything other than housework, and I’m all caught up on that. Besides, he hired a couple of hands this season, but I can still work twice as hard and three times as fast as any of those men. Bailey and I have been taking care of that ranch our whole lives. I think his separation with Lacey is pushing him to drink too much, and it’s getting out of hand."
There was a touch of bitterness in her voice that said there was more behind that complaint. I probably should have channeled my protective nature and found out what was going on with her, but at that moment, I was stuck on her mentioning her brother and the cranks in my mind were working too quickly for me to get into anything emotional right then. I didn't have a whole lot of practice getting emotional with girls anyway. That was best left to her visit with Mama.
"Bailey isn’t running things now that he’s back home?" I asked.
Lauralee let out a sound that was absolutely a sigh of exasperation and sped up her steps a little.
"No. Things were fine when they separated, but then she ran off with Steven about a week back, so he's drinking and sleeping at home again."
"Steven?" I asked. "He drives a tractor. And not well."
"And now you are up to date on my family's yet unending quest for answers."
I had stopped walking, and she was several yards ahead of me when I shook my head and started after her again.
"But he drives a tractor, Lauralee. A tractor that he crashes or gets stuck in a ditch at least once every other week, and he has to be rescued so he can make it up to Kinsey's."
I was shocked that all of this hadn't made its way into the incredibly active gossip at the bar, but it was entirely possible I’d been the only one to miss it all. Listening to the women prattle on about the comings and goings of the people in the town wasn't exactly my primary focus when I was at Kinsey's, and though Bailey had talked to me several times, he never mentioned it. She sighed again, and I started to feel a touch of concern for her lung health.
"How do you think Lacey met him?"
"She went out to rescue him?"
Lauralee stopped and turned to me with a pained expression like she was not going to be able to tolerate another minute involved in this conversation.
"Yes. Bailey was already drinking and wanted to listen to this skinny little wailing girl that they've got replacing David, so he sent Lacey to get Steven."
I nodded."Never send your girl after a drunk man on a tractor."
Lauralee rolled her eyes and started walking again. "I'll remember to stitch that on a sampler."
I hurried my pace to stay with her. "I remember when your Granny was trying to teach you to do that. You still keep up with that?"
"No. Look, Ted, it was nice seeing you, but I've really got to get up to the house to see your mama and then get back to the ranch and help Granny with lunch."
She quickened her pace as if it were a signal for me not to follow her. That was fine with me, though. My plan was finally coming together in my head. I decided that hiring the best hand I could and whipping the ranch into better shape than it had been in as long as I could remember was going to be the way to show my family that I was serious about the family legacy, and Dad could trust me to take over. And now I knew who I needed to hire.
I was going after Bailey.
Chapter 4
Lauralee
I tucked the quilt Ted's mother had handed me under my arm and started toward the door.
"Thank you, again," I said. "Granny will be excited to have it back."
"It was no problem at all. I was happy to do it for her. It’s one thing I can do sitting down, so that makes Mr. Dawson happy. He’s quite the doting husband these days. I imagine once I fully recover, he’ll get back to normal.” She rested her hand on her chin and gave me a sideways glance. “I remember when she taught me to quilt. It's sad that she can't do it herself anymore."
"I know. Her eyes aren't strong enough anymore to see the tiny little stitches."
I patted the quilt that I remembered being in my grandmother's bedroom from the time I was a little child. It was covered in patches and repairs now, including the section Mrs. Dawson had stitched back together.
I was almost past the barn when I heard Ted in the office.
"He would be perfect."
"Have you talked to him about it?" his father asked.
"Not yet. I only now found out he’s available."
"So what are you planning? Walking over there to his working farm and asking him if he’s looking for work?"
"Bailey and I were buddies in school. That should break the ice a little."
I stopped still at the mention of my brother. It irked me a bit that Ted had cited his friendship with Bailey as the reason that my brother would be willing to help him rather than the fact that he and I had dated, but considering the fact that our awkward little encounter out in the yard had been our first conversation that didn’t end in a fight, I guessed their friendship was more applicable.
Ted suddenly burst out of the office and found me standing there. He gave me a strange look, and I patted the quilt under my arm.
"Quilt," I said.
"Uh-huh," he said back.
This deeply meaningful and heartwarming moment over, Ted turned and started toward my gate.
"What are you going to ask Bailey?" I called after him.
He didn't answer me so I followed him. This seemed to be the basic theme of our interactions for the day, so I figured I would go along with it.
"You said that he just came home, right?" he finally said when we had gotten to the gate.
"Yeah."
"And your father has already hired new hands to take care of the ranch?"
I fought down a little bit of bitterness and nodded.
"Yes."
"So Bailey is probably looking for work, right?"
"Why do you ask?"
"With David gone, there is more work to be done around here than the three of us can handle on our own. If Bailey is looking for work, he would be perfect to come help out here. It would keep him busy and pay a good wage. Do you think he would be interested?"
"If you want work done, why don't you hire someone else?"
Bailey wasn’t going to be any more use for the Dawson ranch than he was for our own.
"Isn't that what I said I wanted to do just two seconds ago?"
"I meant someone other than Bailey."
"Bailey is a good worker, and he is right on the next ranch over."
I let out a frustrated breath and watched him walk ahead of me, heading toward my family's ranch. I wasn’t going to let him know that Bailey hadn’t made it back home. He could figure that out for himself.
The next morning I walked the path between our houses again, fully anticipating hearing obscenities spewed at me in the very near future. Bailey was too busy soothing his aching heart with moonshine and bad music to even think about taking up a ranch hand position, much less could he comprehend me when I’d mentioned it to him in his drunken fog. It was up to me to break the news to Ted and make him another offer. I only hoped he’d take me seriously so I didn’t have to pull a Mulan and dress up as a man and fill out an application myself.
I mostly dressed like a man anyway, and I wasn't really defending anything more than my own sanity by picking up where my brother had stumbled off and taking the position at Ted's ranch. If my father wasn't going to let me wo
rk on my own family's ranch, at least I could do what I loved somewhere and make a little bit of money doing it to put toward starting my own someday.
I closed the gate behind me and turned around in time to see Ted coming out of the barn leading his horse. My breath caught in my throat in spite of myself. Damn it all to hell, he still got to me.
I had tried for years to get Ted out of my mind and forget how he made me feel every time I looked at him. Seeing him in the early morning partial sunlight, his jeans fitting every inch of him and his button-down shirt showing off a body that had more than grown up since the last time we played tag in the fields out behind the house, however, was not doing good things for my determination. Ted had gone from the adorable teenage boy that wouldn't take me to prom to the man who had never even apologized for punching my date.
I’d begged him for months about prom. We’d been going steady for a year before, and my dream was to wear my mother’s teal blue prom dress. It was so glamorous, and when I wore it, I felt like a movie star. I had begged Ted to take me until I was blue in the face, but he refused, telling me he wouldn’t be caught dead in a suit, much less dancing at some lame ass prom. He’d offered up a steak dinner instead, but I’d refused. When Bailey set me up with his friend, who hadn’t found a date, Ted seemed to understand, though I should have noticed how unusually quiet he had been about it.
Poor Andy looked so uncomfortable in his tux when he arrived to take me out, and I was sure it matched my awkward attempt at walking in heels. The fantasy of it had been so much better that disappointment settled in when we arrived at the gym. Before we could make it to the sidewalk, Ted came out of the parking lot and didn’t waste any time attacking Andy. One punch had the boy off his feet, and I stood screaming as Ted pounced. I tried pulling him away, but he pushed me off, knocking me on my ass, and splitting my mother’s dress clear up to my hip. I’d never been so embarrassed. He tried to get me to leave with him, but I refused. Luckily, Bailey had stood up for me and managed to calm Ted down long enough to get me out of there and back home.
