by Melinda Minx
We waited and waited, but the door didn’t open.
“Hm,” Silas said, “let’s go around back.”
We walked around the house, and as soon as we turned the corner to the backyard, I saw dozens of people on the grass, with the majestic mountains of the Rockies as the backdrop. People were grilling, and the smell of hamburgers and hotdogs was thick in the air. There were coolers on the patio full of beer and soda, and most striking of all was the way that everyone suddenly stopped speaking and turned to look at us. At me.
Every man in Silas’ family was at least 6’2” or taller. They were all ripped as well, even the older men. They had sharp cheekbones, and when they all stopped staring in shock at me and smiled, I saw where Silas got his winning smile from.
The women were tall too. Tall and beautiful. Some wore jeans and flannel, others wore more sophisticated dresses with jewelry and fancy hair-dos.
Then I saw an older man who was sitting on a lawn chair struggling to stand up. He was tall and strong, and his skin was dark like well-seasoned leather. His hair was as silver as a full-moon on a clear night’s sky.
His right arm was in a cast and sling, braced up against the space between his chest and belly.
He smiled at me and nodded. “So you’re my daughter-in-law? And this here is my grandson?”
Elijah came up behind me and held tight to my leg. Silas put an arm around me.
“We’re not married yet, Dad. Cool your jets.”
Silas’ father laughed. His laugh was nothing like Silas’. Silas had a warm and hearty laugh, while his father’s was wheezy and thin, more like it was making fun of you than laughing with you.
I wanted to add that we were not even engaged, and we’d barely even started dating, but with something like twenty pairs of eyes on me, this wasn’t the first impression I wanted to make.
“This is Elijah,” I said, patting his head behind my leg.
“And this is Emily,” Silas said, wrapping his arm tighter around me. “She’s a doctor. Doctor Engel.”
Silas’ father whistled and nodded. “Fancy.”
Two men were approaching us on either side of Silas’ father. I could tell at once that it was Wyatt and Wilder. Wyatt was wearing a cowboy hat and tight jeans, and Wilder was wearing what looked like very expensive European designer clothes, but with a Las Vegas flair of bright-red snakeskin boots.
They both smirked at me. Wyatt’s expression was more subdued, like he was trying to figure me out. Wilder—despite being a Poker player—looked like he had his cards much more on the table than his brother Wyatt, especially when his eyes ran up and down my body and his smirk grew into a full-on grin.
“Nice,” Wilder said, looking at Silas.
Silas stepped forward. “Don’t test me, brother.”
Wilder laughed and rolled his eyes.
“You think I’m all talk, Wilder?” Silas asked.
After our Jiu Jitsu lesson, I knew the way Silas was moving—the way he was adjusting his stance for a throw—meant that he was seriously considering going after Wilder.
Wilder shrugged, and Wyatt crossed his arms and gave me an apologetic look which told me this was about what he expected from his two younger brothers.
“I’m not saying that exactly,” Wilder said, “it’s just more that you probably aren’t gonna risk messing up your nice suit to put me into some kind of Jiu Jitsu hold.”
“Watch it, Wilder,” their father said, “he gives his old man so little money that he must have a lot saved up. He can certainly afford another suit if he rips this one handing your ass to you.”
“Keep your eyes up,” Silas said, “and don’t disrespect the mother of my child.”
Everyone was still watching us. It felt tense. Much more tense than I wanted a family barbecue to feel. Two women a bit older than me were grinning wide and eyeing each other. They clearly wanted the brothers to fight.
Wilder looked at me with a devilish twinkle in his eyes. He ran his tongue across his teeth and smiled so wide that dimples formed in his square jaw. He turned his gaze from me to Silas. “She’s an absolute MILF, brother—”
Silas was on him in an instant. Wilder didn’t even make a half-hearted attempt to defend himself. Silas used a technique very similar to the one he taught me, and he threw Wilder right over his back and onto the grass. Wilder was laughing, but when he hit the ground, his laugh was cut off, probably from the air being slammed out of his lungs. He gasped and coughed, his laugh going into a shallow wheeze. I thought it was over, but Silas sat down on top of him and pulled on his arm.
Wilder groaned as Silas pulled, and finally Wilder tapped the grass as if it were some kind of UFC match. Silas let go of his arm, but didn’t get off his brother.
Bella ran up and jumped on top of Wilder. She started licking his face, and Wilder just laughed.
“Sorry, Emily,” Wilder said to me from the ground. “I do think you are a very beautiful mother, but I only said that to push Silas’ buttons, not to disrespect you. I just wanted to see if my big brother still had fight in him.”
Silas rolled his eyes and got off Wilder, who stayed on the ground and started petting Bella. “Sweet little doggy! Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good little Corgi?” He looked at Bella and squinted. “Oh, you’re a girl, are you? Such a good girl.”
Silas reached down to help Wilder up. When Wilder reached for Silas hand, he pulled the hand away and laughed. “Get up yourself.”
Their father cleared his throat. “Well, welcome to the family, Emily.”
16
Silas
I stood with Wyatt out on the lawn. We each had a beer in our hands, and we looked out at the mountains as we talked.
Emily was talking to two of my aunts and some of my cousins, and Elijah was playing with the younger kids. I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure Wilder or my dad wasn’t talking to Emily. I didn’t trust either of those two alone with her.
“Glad you came,” Wyatt said.
I laughed.
“I almost wonder if Dad fell off that horse by accident.”
“What do you mean?”
“He kept complaining that you weren’t going to show.”
“You get why I didn’t come, right? I’d just found out I had a son. I figured I could skip the reunion this time around.”
He nodded. “I get it, but we didn’t know that. Even now that we know it, I doubt it changes things for Dad. He’s got blinders on, and he only sees a narrow view in front of himself. All he saw is that you didn’t show.”
“I did now.”
“Right,” Wyatt said, taking a sip of his beer. “After he fell.”
So Wyatt thought Dad broke his arm on purpose just to get me to fly out here? I shook my head. I didn’t buy it, but I couldn’t discount it either. It would be something Dad would do.
“Can you believe it?” I asked. “I have a kid.”
Wyatt shrugged. “You always acted like you’d never have kids, Silas, but I never saw it.”
“Never saw what?”
“I never saw you as the type to not have ‘em. Wilder? I can see him never settling down, but you? Nah, I knew you’d settle down once you found the right one.”
I laughed through my nose and shook my head. “You are some fucking philosopher cowboy, Wyatt.”
“I’m just good at listening to people. I don’t do much thinking or philosophizing, it’s just that when you really listen you know what people want, clear as day. You gotta be quiet to listen to horses and figure out what they really need. People ain’t much different.”
“I guess that’s why dad and Wilder never know what they want. They never shut up.”
Wyatt just nodded to that.
“You think you can do me a favor, Wyatt?”
He didn’t answer, he just turned to be and nodded.
“Can you listen and tell me what Emily wants?”
He let out a half-hearted laugh. “You gotta do that yourself, brother.”
> We were walking with my father and Wyatt to the stables. I walked next to Emily, and Emily tried to hold Elijah’s hand, but he kept running off ahead of us.
He was wearing one of Dad’s old cowboy hats. It was way too big for his head, and it kept slipping and eating up his whole head.
“We got some real gentle ones in the stable,” Wyatt said as Elijah ran up to him.
“I want a faster and stronger one,” Elijah said.
“You gotta learn to ride the gentle ones first, buddy,” Wyatt said, “the strong ones tend to throw people off them.”
“I can hold on tight like a cowboy,” Elijah said.
“Are you sure we can let him ride one?” Emily whispered to me.
“Wyatt will give him a real safe one,” I whispered back.
“You know what a real cowboy does, Elijah?” Wyatt asked him. “A real cowboy picks battles he can win. He finds a horse he gets along with real good, and he rides that one. Cowboys don’t want to ride horses that will buck ‘em off. Real cowboys ride horses with purpose, not for some rodeo show. So if you wanna be a real cowboy, then let’s find you a horse who likes you? Does that sound good.”
Elijah nodded. “Yeah.”
Dad cleared his throat. “I can’t believe it took you so long to come up here, Silas. My arm was really hurting. You’re like Scrooge McDuck up there in the fancy city, swimming in your piles of money. More than you know what to do with, but you can’t be bothered to send your father anything.”
“I did give you something,” I said, glaring at him.
“That? That? You call that something? In my eyes that was nothing, son.”
“I’ll really give you nothing next time then, so you know what it looks like.”
Wyatt sighed, and his shoulders heaved. “We’re doing fine. We do better when you or Wilder don’t give us a thing.”
“Ah,” Dad said, “here we go again. Painting me like some child who can’t handle his own finances.”
Wyatt and I gave each other a look. We both knew he couldn’t handle his finances, but we weren’t about to say that out loud to him. We were already in the stable now, and I used the opportunity to change the subject, hoping Dad wouldn’t bring it up again in front of Emily and Elijah.
“So here’s the stables,” I said, talking over Dad’s attempt to start a new rant. “We got over twenty horses in here.”
“He says we,” Dad said to Wyatt, “as if he’s ever here.”
“Here’s Bella,” Wyatt said, patting a horse on the muzzle.
“Bella?” Elijah said, “She’s got the same name as Bella! The horse has our dog’s name!”
Wyatt grinned. “I thought you’d like that. Coincidence, is all, but it’s one more little thing for you to like about her.”
Bella was a light-brown female with gentle eyes. I’d been away from the horse farm a long time, but I could still read a horse. Maybe not as well as Wyatt, but still better than anyone from the city. Bella wasn’t going to hurt Elijah.
“Let’s saddle ‘er up,” Dad said, giving me a stink eye.
For all of his earlier bluster, Elijah was suddenly very afraid when it came time to get up onto the saddle.
If I’d done that as a kid, Dad would have told me to “shit or get off the pot,” but I liked seeing this hesitation in my son. It meant he wasn’t going to charge headlong into dangerous or uncertain situations. Fear was good, because it meant you knew when to be cautious.
I kept a close eye on Dad. If he said a thing to my son, I wouldn’t go Jiu Jitsu on an old man with an already broken arm, but I would have to do something. I preferred to not have to figure out exactly what it was I’d do.
“Maybe we can go back inside,” Elijah said, putting his two pointer fingers together and looking down at the ground with embarrassment. “I think I have to pee.”
Emily looked up at me with a big, sympathetic frown on her face. I could tell she wanted to give in and call this whole thing off. I didn’t want to force my son to do something he wasn’t comfortable with, but I didn’t want him to regret missing an opportunity to do something he really wanted to do.
I grabbed an apple from a basket on the bench, then crouched down to meet Elijah eye-to-eye. “You really have to pee, little man?”
“I dunno, maybe.”
“If you do, I can show you a nice place to go pee behind the stable. You wouldn’t have to go all the way back to the house.”
He looked up over his shoulder, but all the other adults were doing a good job of pretending not to be watching him. “I’m scared of the horsey, Daddy.”
“This horse is older. Her show days are over, and she likes to just take it easy. She won’t hurt you, I promise.”
“How do I know she likes me?”
I handed him the apple in my hand, and I didn’t let go until he had a firm grip on it. “See if she takes the apple from you.”
“She’ll eat an apple? Bella the dog won’t eat apples.”
“Horses like fruit and veggies a lot more than dogs do.”
I guided Elijah back over toward Bella, but Elijah clutched tight to the apple and looked up at me suspiciously.
“It’s alright,” I said, “just hold it out for her.”
He held out a trembling hand, but I put my hand on his shoulder to lend him some courage. The horse sniffed at the apple, then opened her mouth. She gently probed the apple with her lips, and once she was sure that the thing this strange little human was offering her was indeed an apple, she pulled it out of Elijah’s hand, and only then bared her teeth and chomped down on it.
Elijah looked up at the horse with wide eyes and his mouth hanging open. His hand—which had been holding the apple—was still held out and frozen as he watched Bella chomp down on his offering.
Apple juice squirted out of Bella’s mouth and showered down onto Elijah.
He started giggling. “Eww! She spit on me! It’s so cool! Can I feed her another?”
“We don’t want her eating too much, but we can bring some more stuff out to feed her later if you want. After you ride her.”
“She ate the apple, so it means she likes me? Right, Daddy?”
I nodded. “That’s right, and did you see how gently she took it from your hand? That means she won’t hurt you.”
I saw Emily smiling down at us from the corner of my eye. I shot her a big grin and a wink, and then I helped Elijah up toward the stirrup. I could have just plopped him down right onto the saddle, but I wanted him to get the full experience. He brought himself up onto the stirrup, and after he’d done enough struggling and attempting to climb up with my arms keeping him from falling, I hoisted him up until he was plopped down securely in the saddle.
“See that thing poking up in front of you?” I asked. “That’s called the horn. You can hold onto that.”
“I’m on a horse, Mommy! I’m like a real cowboy now!”
His hat slipped again and fell over his eyes. I pulled it back up and set it on his head so he could see.
I walked him around a few times, holding the lead rope and walking Bella very slowly around the grass just outside the stable. I wanted to make sure Elijah was holding tight and not doing anything crazy before I had Bella walk any faster, or before I dared to let go of the lead rope.
“You want to try?” I asked Emily, gesturing at her with the lead rope.
“Me? Riding or walking it?”
I shrugged. “Either or?”
She shook her head and smiled. “I enjoy watching.”
“Let me take that lead,” Wyatt said. He tilted his head toward Emily and spoke to me in a low whisper. “Go listen to her.”
I took Emily by the hand as we watched Elijah ride with Wyatt guiding. Wyatt had Bella walk a bit faster, and judging by how animated Elijah got, he liked going faster quite a bit.
“Thanks for bringing us out here,” Emily said, resting her head on my shoulder. “It’s very nice.”
My dad coughed. “Had to break my arm to get hi
m to come out here. Once he’s through the honeymoon phase with you, you’ll have to be in the hospital to get this one to even start taking care of you.”
I clenched my fist with my free hand, then gently put my other on the small of Emily’s back. “Why don’t you go walk with Wyatt.”
She gave me a knowing look, and then I turned to Dad with a furious expression, but I waited until Emily was out of earshot to lay into him.
“What the fuck, Dad?”
“I’m just laying the truth on her! She needs to know what she’s getting into.”
“The only reason I didn’t come is because I had just found out I had a son. I was here just a few months ago, and I would have come to visit again soon. Once I’d figured out where things stood with Emily and Elijah.”
“I’d accuse you of just trying to buy my love with money, but you don’t do that either.”
“What is wrong with you? I was hoping that you’d be happy to see your grandson, and that you’d be on your best behavior so as not to scare off what I very much hope is my future wife. You’re doing a great job of working to fuck all of that up for me. And if you do, I swear I will never come back here. I don’t care how many limbs you break.”
He just snorted at me and shook his head. He had a look on his face as if he knew better. Like he was wiser and just saw me as some kind of snot-nosed punk who was talking a bunch of shit.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know I was a shitty father,” he said.
It was the first time he’d ever said something so truthful aloud to me. I was quite taken aback. Shocked even. The temptation to agree with him was strong, but I got a feeling he was trying to be real and forthright with me, and I knew that if I laid into him in this vulnerable state, that he might just close up again.
“Come on, Dad,” I muttered, waiting to see where he was going with this.
“You think Wilder would be a good father?” he asked me, tilting his head back toward the house.
I laughed.
“Wyatt would be,” I said, starting to see where he was going with this.
Dad shook his head. “Just because he’s good with horses doesn’t mean he’s good with kids. Wyatt’s able to be the way he is because he’s free. Tether him down and he wouldn’t be Wyatt anymore.”
