“It’s nice to see you smiling,” he said, “and sitting in that chair.” She was only in her father’s chair for a moment, and suddenly realized that he wasn’t going to walk in and give her hell for sitting there.
“I was just in here for a minute,” she explained to Thad and he shook his head.
“Maybe you should move into this office. It would give you more space and a bigger desk,” he said. But it was also symbolic. She was the boss now. And this was the boss’s office.
“Maybe I will,” she said, and smiled at him. There was a new confidence about her that Thad could see growing day by day.
Kate moved into her father’s office that afternoon. A few people looked startled when they saw her do it, but it felt right to her. Thad came by at the end of the day, to drop off an expense sheet, he gave her a thumbs-up, and she laughed at him. She felt giddy with excitement. She liked the feeling of sitting there. She had earned it.
* * *
—
The following day, Kate ran home at lunchtime to make herself something to eat. She looked up the hill and saw a truck delivering furniture to Gemma’s cottage. She wondered what she’d ordered, went inside to make a sandwich, and took it up the hill to eat while she visited her, and was stunned when she walked in the front door. There were bright modern paintings on the walls, a vivid red couch that added punch to the room, big plants in handsome cachepots in two of the room’s corners, end tables, a small round dining table with brass chairs, and a Moroccan rug on the floor with a straw background and red embroidery. The room looked suddenly exotic and fun and stylish, like something you’d see in a magazine, and wished you lived there. When she peeked into the bedroom, it was cotton candy pink with a big plastic chair and pink night tables with a matching chest and a small round pink rug. The whole room looked like a candy box, and Gemma came out of the bathroom carrying a large pink plastic poodle and saw her sister.
“What do you think?” She looked enormously pleased with herself.
“It’s fantastic! I love it! Where did you find all this great stuff?” It was feminine and modern and young, and Gemma looked a little sheepish.
“I had it staged. I called them yesterday. It was so depressing the way it was. I’ve used them for parties before. I picked everything online. It’s all rented. And when I get tired of it, I can change it, or send it all back. Or buy it if I make some money.”
“Does it cost a fortune?” Kate had never seen anything like it before, but you had to have Gemma’s eye to pick the right things and make it work.
“It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it. Instant happiness, instead of dreary old furniture, or buying things you’ll get tired of anyway.” Kate looked around, admiring the effect, and they went to sit in the kitchen, which was all red and white now, and there was a small red lacquer table big enough for the two of them. They’d even put in a small red refrigerator, which fit the space perfectly.
“Forget acting. You should be a decorator. I should have you stage my place, but I wouldn’t know what to do with all my grungy old furniture.” She’d used the leftovers from the ranch hands’ bunkhouse and it looked it. Gemma was delighted with her new décor, and the two of them sat and talked while Kate ate her sandwich before she went back to the office.
Caroline loved it too when she arrived that afternoon, and Gemma suggested she do the same in her cottage, which was bigger than Gemma’s and had three bedrooms.
“Actually, the kids and I are going to Ikea tomorrow to see what we can do.” None of the cottages had ever been fully furnished or decorated, because neither of the girls had ever used them except for a night once every year or two, or less often in Caroline’s case. But suddenly the cottages had become useful, and they wanted to make them livable. Caroline had promised to let Morgan pick the furniture for her bedroom, and at Ikea they couldn’t go too far wrong or do too much damage.
It was beginning to feel like home, or a fun second home for all of them. Juliette came to take a look too when Kate told her about it, and she loved the effect. She knew that Jimmy wouldn’t have liked it. It wouldn’t have looked like a ranch to him, but it was what the place needed, and what they needed to feel at home there, a youthful feminine touch, which expressed their personalities. Juliette smiled all the way back to her house after she saw it. She liked having the girls there, and the children. She was almost sorry she was going to France for the summer. She liked being there with them. And Jimmy would have liked seeing his girls there too. It was Kate who was bringing them together, and getting them back to the ranch, and that was the whole point. It was a family operation and they owned it jointly now, with Kate running it, and the benefit of everything her father had taught her.
“Change is in the air,” Thad said as he walked past her house, after helping Gemma install a light fixture she had bought at the hardware store.
“My father would have hated it,” Kate said to Thad and they both laughed.
“Leave it to Gemma to have the cottage ‘staged,’ and have it looking like a feature in a decorating magazine. She’s got an eye, though,” he said admiringly.
“She painted our room purple and orange once. Our father almost killed us. He made her repaint it white. She looked like a snowman when she finished. He wouldn’t let me help her.”
“He’s not here anymore,” Thad said gently. “You can paint the place any color you want.” It was good to be reminded, and she nodded, as he walked back to his own tiny house behind the barn.
Her sisters had brought light into her life, and Kate realized that she needed it. They all did. It was a new regime, and she was going to have fun with it, just like Gemma had done with the cottage. It was exactly what they needed, a woman’s touch, because she was running the ranch now, not their father. He had finally lost control of them, and sadly, he had to die to do it.
Chapter 6
It took Gemma and Caroline a few days to settle in. Gemma loved the new décor in her cottage, and managed to fit everything in, although it was barely bigger than a dollhouse, but she enjoyed spending time there when she wasn’t with her sisters or outdoors. And Caroline’s trip to Ikea with Morgan was fruitful. Caroline had an eye for design too, and following Gemma’s example, she went a little wild, picking things she liked. Morgan got the lavender bedroom she’d wanted, and they’d picked a cowboy theme for Billy. Caroline didn’t know how much time they’d be spending there, probably not much, but the rooms looked comfortable and inviting, fresh and new when they’d finished. They borrowed a truck from the ranch to bring everything home. The dilemma was assembling the furniture once they brought it back, but Thad and the kids pitched in and figured it out, Gemma lent a hand, and by that afternoon, like magic, the little guesthouse was decorated. They even had rugs and curtains. Kate was vastly impressed with the effect both her sisters had achieved, and Morgan said she liked it better than her bedroom at home. They had bought new pots and pans too, and bright colored china and glasses, towels, and large framed photographs to put on the walls. Gemma’s little cottage was fancier, but Caroline’s had a good look too, and they had fun doing it.
Thad was making himself available to both girls, and was impressed with what they had achieved in a short time. The day after Caroline arrived, all three sisters and Morgan and Billy went out to dinner, and went bowling afterward. Caroline acknowledged that it had been a good idea to spend some time at the ranch before they went to Aspen.
“I used to hate coming here,” she admitted, as the kids bowled and they waited for their turn. It still reminded her of her father, but with a space of their own to retreat to, it no longer gave her that oppressive feeling. He had taken up every inch of space wherever he was, not only physically, but psychologically. She always felt like she couldn’t breathe when she was around him. “It feels better now,” she admitted to her sisters, although her children said they missed him. She was embarrassed
to admit that she didn’t.
Billy had loved the idea that he had a real cowboy as a grandfather, in contrast to Peter’s very East Coast intellectual parents. Peter’s was the kind of family Caroline had always wanted. His father was a publisher and his mother had been a political journalist before she retired. They had a house in Maine where she and Peter took the kids for a week every year at the end of August, and spent time with his sister and her three children. She was a physics professor at Harvard, and like Peter, her husband was in high-tech finance.
Their childhoods had been very different from Caroline’s, and at first she had felt like trailer trash when she was around them. Born in Texas, and raised on a ranch in Southern California, she didn’t have the same highbrow background they did. Jimmy had been uncomfortable around Peter’s parents when they met at the wedding, which Peter and Caroline had insisted on having in San Francisco, where their friends were. It was a small affair at a stuffy club that was affiliated with Peter’s father’s club in New York. Jimmy had worn cowboy boots and a Stetson with a suit to the wedding, and at twenty-two, Caroline had nearly died of embarrassment, compared to the well-tailored dark blue suits of Peter’s family and guests from New York, and Boston, where his mother was from.
But the marriage had worked well, despite their different backgrounds. Caroline deferred to Peter for most big decisions and even small ones. Their children went to the best private schools, and after the first few years, Peter stopped teasing her about what he called her redneck background. He had been impressed by the ranch, although they seldom went, and acknowledged that her father was an interesting man, and not nearly as simple and modest as he pretended to be. He was a powerhouse, and had an extraordinarily good grip on the concepts of finance, and had made some very successful investments with little advice from anyone, just using his own instincts. The two men had never become friends, and Peter had never warmed to him but acknowledged that he was worthy of respect. Jimmy was a smart, straightforward man from a simple background who had made a huge success of his ranch, without the benefit of Harvard Business School or the East Coast establishment Peter had grown up in. Whether one liked him or not, Peter gave him credit for what he had achieved. Peter always respected financial success.
It had taken his parents longer to warm up to Caroline, but they finally had and admired her steady success with her young adult books. Her publisher father-in-law was particularly impressed by them, once she won the Printz Award, and started making real money for them. Young adult books were very much in demand. Material success was important to Peter and his family, it was their yardstick of someone’s merits, and determined whether or not they liked people. Peter emphasized those same values to their children and Caroline didn’t agree. But it was how Peter had been brought up. And in spite of Peter’s materialistic views about money, he was a good and attentive father and loved his children. And he was attentive to Caroline too, although he wasn’t demonstrative or overly emotional around other people. He was warmer with her in private.
It was their third night at the ranch when Kate broached a delicate subject. They’d had dinner at her house, which Caroline and Gemma cooked, and the children had gone back to Caroline’s house to play videogames on their new TV. They were enjoying the freedom of being on the ranch, able to go wherever they wanted to. Kate had given them both bikes to ride, and Thad was proving to be an excellent babysitter, assigning them chores, and riding with them whenever possible, or taking them in his truck when he had some task to perform at the far reaches of the ranch.
“I was thinking we might take a ride down to Santa Barbara.” Kate opened the subject with caution, knowing it was a sensitive issue for Caroline, and for them all.
“Am I correct in assuming you don’t just have shopping in mind?” Gemma inquired, as she poured them all another round of wine. Kate had purposely waited until they’d had dinner, and at least a glass of wine, so they’d be more relaxed. She saw Caroline stiffen when she nodded. Their father had been dead for six weeks, and in some ways, it seemed like a long time, and in others, it felt as though his funeral had been yesterday. There were already noticeable changes in their reactions to the ranch, without his powerful presence. Neither of Kate’s sisters had ever been willing to spend a week there since they’d left. They never lasted more than a few days when their father was alive.
“I just think we should follow up on what we discovered. We can’t spend the rest of our lives knowing that our mother is alive, fifty miles away, and not finding out more about her, and why we never knew she was alive,” Kate said calmly.
“We never knew because our father obviously lied to us,” Gemma said bluntly. She was angry at him about it.
“I’d like to know why he lied. Maybe she’s some awful derelict and he was protecting us from her our entire lives. Maybe she’s a drug addict or a criminal of some kind. But if she is, I want to know,” Kate said. “I think we should know. Or at least I want to. I would have checked it out sooner, when we found out right after Dad died, but I wanted to wait for you two. It affects all three of us, it didn’t feel right to just rush into it without you.”
“God knows what she is. We may have her on our necks forever after this, trying to bilk us for money. That could be part of why he steered clear of her. Something big must have happened for her to give up custody, and relinquish her parental rights,” Gemma said, wondering.
“Maybe he forced her to do that,” Caroline said in a soft voice, having a lesser opinion of her father than either of her sisters. “But whoever she is, I don’t want to know her. She wasn’t here when it counted, and I don’t think we need the headache now of a brand-new mystery mother in our forties.”
“You’re only thirty-nine,” Gemma reminded her. “And according to my latest bio, I’m only thirty-five, thank you,” and then she turned serious. “Dad may have been tough, but he was an honest, honorable guy. He wouldn’t have ‘forced’ her to do anything. He never ‘forced’ us, even though he had strong opinions. He may have been responding to a bad situation out of necessity.”
“He pressured us into doing what he wanted. That’s as good as forcing us. He wanted everything his way, Gemma, and you know it,” Caroline countered.
“You never stood up to him, that’s why he pushed you around. You had to go toe to toe with him, he respected that.” Caroline was a small person, with a meek personality, especially in her youth. She had spent most of her childhood afraid of him, terrified sometimes, although he’d never laid a hand on any of them. But one look, his voice, his clear commands were enough to send Caroline scurrying into the bushes.
“You’re the only one who ever stood up to him,” she said to Gemma and glanced at Kate, who had never opposed him either, and always did his bidding, “and you’re the only one he would take it from.”
“I never gave him any choice,” Gemma said matter-of-factly and knew that what Caroline had said was true. It was the advantage of being his favorite. He put up with a lot more from Gemma than he had from the others. They had never gotten away with what she did, and they all knew it.
“Well, this isn’t about him, it’s about our mother,” Kate reminded them. “And about us.”
“Of course it’s about him,” Gemma interrupted her. “It’s about what the hell happened to make her disappear from our lives. They were divorced and we never knew it, and she’s been living in Santa Barbara for God knows how long, after he told us she was dead for the last thirty-nine years. I’d like to know what the hell happened, who and what she is, and why he lied to us for our entire lives.”
“That’s what I want to know too,” Kate agreed, and they could see Caroline shut down just talking about it.
“Well, I don’t. So you two can go. Count me out. If you’re going to Santa Barbara for that, I’ll stay here. You can tell me about it later,” she said, and took a long sip of wine. Kate noticed that her hand wa
s shaking. The thought of it affected her deeply, just as the memories of their father did. He still upset her even now.
“Why do you get to go underground?” Gemma confronted her. “You let us do the dirty work of going to see her and you stay home? How does that seem right to you? You want to be a no-show as usual,” Gemma said harshly, annoyed about it. “This isn’t easy for us either.”
“I’m not a no-show. I just don’t need to open Pandora’s box and see what’s inside. She’s obviously not a good person if they got divorced and she abandoned us, and signed away her rights.”
“And how do you feel about Dad? How good was he to lie to us for all these years? I’d rather have known that I had a bad mother, even if she was in prison for murder, than to think I had no mother and she was dead. Maybe he needed to keep her away from us as kids, but he could have told us the truth as adults, and he never did. If he weren’t dead, and Kate hadn’t gone through his safe, we wouldn’t even know about her now, and we have a right to. Don’t you want to know about her for your kids? She’s part of their gene pool, and ours. What kind of woman is she? Why did she give up her rights to three kids? You weren’t even a child then, you were an infant. How the hell could she walk away from all of us? And what did he have on her if he made her do that? I think I’d rather know if I’m related to a murderer, wouldn’t you?” Caroline couldn’t even imagine Peter’s reaction, if that was the case. It had taken years for him to swallow her being the daughter of a cowboy, let alone of a murderess. He had finally let go of her humble origins and now she would be adding to it, if she told him. And she had finally earned her snobbish parents-in-law’s respect. She didn’t want to jeopardize that either.
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