by Jess Bryant
“He went to bed early last night. He wasn’t feeling well so I’m sure he’s just sleeping in.”
“He didn’t feel well?” The tug of worry wiped away all her other emotions.
“He was tired. That’s all.” Arlene waved as if it wasn’t a big deal but she’d basically been raised by the woman and she knew that look of concern.
“Arlene you have to tell me what’s going on.”
“I’ll just go wake him. He’ll want to talk to you before you leave.”
“Arlene!” She frowned as she watched the older woman hurry from the room.
None of it made any sense. Her father went to bed early and slept in late. Her father looked old and the town thought he was sick. There was only one possible explanation but she couldn’t even begin to wrap her head around what it meant.
Her father had never really been sick in her entire life. She had vague memories of him having the flu when she was about eight. Other than that, he’d always been well.
Nothing had ever slowed him down. Not a cold, not that flu and not the time he got kicked by one of the bulls and cracked his ribs. Whatever was going on this time had slowed him down though and that scared her.
It scared her so much that she felt that urge to get in her car and just go again. This time it had nothing to do with wanting to avoid the man she’d let feel her up the night before. This time it had everything to do with that scared little girl she buried deep down that couldn’t stand the idea of watching her father fade away.
“Blue? Bluebell!”
The sound of Arlene’s voice yelling her name broke her out of her worry and sent a lead ball of fear straight to her gut. She was on her feet and halfway across the kitchen when Arlene came back into the room. The other woman ran straight into her and they nearly knocked each other over. When she got a look at Arlene’s face, the stark whiteness, the fear in her big eyes, the tears that were already pooling over her lashes she knew. She knew something was wrong.
“Call an ambulance Blue.”
“What?” She squeaked, not able to process anything fast enough.
“Call an ambulance.”
“What?”
“I can’t get your daddy to wake up. Call an ambulance.” Arlene held her shoulders and spoke straight into her face.
“Oh God… Daddy.” She tried to step past her but Arlene held tight.
“Call an ambulance.”
The next couple of hours were a rush of activity that Blue couldn’t begin to sort through. Arlene was crying. Ambulances wailed. Bobby showed up at some point and guided her through the steps that got her to the hospital over in Amarillo.
Very little of what she heard punctuated the fog of confusion and grief. Words like cancer stuck in her head, rattled around against shock and denial. The rush of information was too much to take so she blocked out as much of it as she could.
The doctors filled in all the blanks they weren’t aware she had. They filled in the answers her father had refused to give her. The answers he might have given if he’d woken up and come downstairs to breakfast like he was supposed to.
Lyle Carter was dying. He had pancreatic cancer, an advanced form that had already spread beyond the organ. He’d stopped responding to treatment.
She heard the doctors question what medications he’d been taking. She heard Arlene explain he took a lortab prescription for the pain but nothing else. She listened while Bobby explained the type of pain his employer and friend had been experiencing in his abdomen and back. She listened as it became obvious that everyone knew more about her father than she did.
Just as she always did when confronted with the adults that had helped raise her she felt like a useless child. Bobby and Arlene knew every time she’d skipped curfew or got detention. Even now, as an adult herself, she could feel their superiority.
They’d stayed on the ranch. They’d stayed in Fate. They’d stayed with her father and they’d known he was sick. She on the other hand had left and she hadn’t been back in years. Guilt heaved against the concern.
She should have been here. She should have come home more often. She should have known even if he hadn’t told her.
She was his daughter. She was the last of the Montgomery’s, the last of the Carter’s. She was the heir to the Montgomery Oaks Ranch and she should have been here.
She felt guilty that she’d stayed gone all these years. She felt guilty that she’d let the distance between them grow so wide. She felt guilty that deep down in that traitorous dark part of herself she knew she’d never loved the ranch enough, never wanted to be here enough to actually stay.
Even when she’d come home and seen how sick her father looked her first instinct had been to run. Even when she’d heard the gossip in town that he had been sick and she should have been here her first instinct was to go. She didn’t want to be here now and that was where her greatest guilt came from because she knew this time she had to stay.
Her daddy was dying. She couldn’t think of anything else. He was the only family she had so he had to be okay. She reminded herself of that as she listened to the monitors beep and watched his chest rise and fall in response. He was too strong to die on her. He had to be.
He was still relatively young. He’d always been healthy. He’d always been a survivor.
It was hard to believe in those truths when she had to watch her father lie in that bed with tubes running out of his body. Her heart squeezed tight and she shut her eyes and pulled in a deep breath. Tears beat at the back of her eyes for the hundredth time but not one fell. She told herself that he’d have been proud of her for that.
“See Daddy, no crying. I’m sucking it up.” She murmured.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. She was really good at pushing that urge down. She had years of experience.
A nurse breezed into the room wearing sunny yellow scrubs and a bright smile. Blue watched her hesitate, her smile fading a couple of degrees. The woman moved over to check the file at the end of the bed.
“Hi, I’m Sally.”
“Blue.”
“I’m sorry?” The woman’s head tilted curiously.
“My name is Bluebell.” She hated her name for the billionth time in her lifetime. “I’m his daughter.”
“That’s a pretty name.” She flipped through a page on the files, “Your father’s vitals are improving.”
“What does that mean?”
“He may wake up soon. We’ll have to wait and see but he appears to be coming around.”
“Good to hear. Thank you.”
“If you need anything, please just let me know.”
“Thank you.”
She figured that was the polite answer. There was no way to ask for a miracle and that’s all she needed. She needed her father awake. She needed him healthy.
Her day that was supposed to be spent on the road back to Denver was spent sitting in a hospital room where the only noise was the constant beep of monitors. During the waiting she called the newspaper and let them know she wouldn’t be back the next day. When they asked about her return she gave them the only answer she had. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone.
Bobby eventually went back to the ranch to make sure things stayed on track. Arlene eventually stopped crying and tried to apologize for not telling her sooner. She let them both go and stayed by her father’s side like she should have years ago.
She stayed by his side and she held herself tight. She wrapped her arms around her middle and prayed if she held tight enough the pain that felt like it was ripping her apart would ease. She held herself together just like she had when she was a little girl and there’d been nobody else to hold her when she cried.
She could hear her father’s voice in her head. It’d be easy to let go now, with him looking so frail in front of her, when the only family she had left was dying and she hadn’t even rated a phone call to let her know. It’d be easier to let it out than to push it down but that wasn’t how s
he’d been raised so she did what she always did.
She took a deep breath. She let it out. She held her father’s hand and waited for him to come back so she could be there for him like he’d never known how to be there for her.
It took a week. It took a week of sleeping in a hotel room in Amarillo. It took a week of buying clothes at the local mall and eating crappy hospital cafeteria food. It took a week of calling the newspaper back and extending her stay. It took a week for her to realize there wasn’t going to be a miracle and she wasn’t going back to her real life anytime soon.
It had been a week of her father coming in and out of consciousness and she still had no answers. Each time he woke surlier and grumpier than the time before and in heart wrenching pain. She tried to talk to him, to let him know she was there but he simply stared at her for long periods of time and then he turned away and faded back into sleep.
Arlene visited every other day, always crying, always bringing some sort of food that Blue had yet to work up an appetite to eat. She’d asked the older woman the same questions and gotten only tears and apologies. Her father hadn’t wanted her to know how bad it was and telling her shouldn’t have fallen to the cook in his employ that just happened to have helped raise her. She didn’t blame Arlene.
She blamed her father. She blamed him for keeping her in the dark and not confiding in her. She could have been there, should have been there and he’d taken that chance to be with her father away. Now she might never have another chance to make it right, to find some semblance of a real relationship with him. But the more she wanted to blame the guiltier she felt.
“Daddy?” She walked into his room to find him half-sitting, his dark eyes clearer than they’d been almost a week and a half later.
“Son of a bitch that hurts.” He scowled at the nurse.
“Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.” Nurse Sally was back on duty and gave her a reassuring smile.
Blue gave her a fake one in return and took her seat next to her fathers’ bed. No need to inform Sally that was simply the way Lyle Carter always woke. Surly by nature.
She listened to him curse some more and then, once Sally had given up getting him to eat anything and retreated she turned to him again. Calmly, she leaned forward and took his big hand in hers. His hand had always been so much bigger than hers and rough, calloused from decades of hard work. She squeezed lightly and to her astonishment he returned the gesture before he pulled away with a heavy harrumph.
“Daddy.”
“What?” He barked.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” It barely came out as a whisper and she waited for the same glaze to settle over his once lively eyes.
A long minute passed, “I was going to tell you at breakfast. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before though? The doctor told me you were diagnosed almost a year ago, that you took treatments. They stopped working. You have cancer and you didn’t even tell me.”
The tears worked their way into her voice but she kept them back. She wouldn’t let him see her cry. She wouldn’t let him break her so he could shut down but she had to watch him do it anyway.
“What are you still doing here?”
“What?” She breathed deep.
“What are you doing here? You need to go home.”
Her bottom lip trembled, “I am home Daddy.”
He snorted and turned his head to face the window. She hadn’t referred to Fate or the ranch as her home in a very long time. Now, it was the only place she could think to be. Maybe she had roots after all, except instead of being tied to the land that her father adored, maybe they were simply tied to the man himself. She steeled all of her resolve.
“I’m not leaving again Daddy. I’m going to be here. We’re going to get through this together. We’re family. We stick together.”
Silence was her only answer.
Almost two weeks after the confrontation with Devin after Molly McBride’s wedding, Zach was sitting in a corner booth at the Corner Diner, a clever name for the one place to get a decent breakfast in all of Fate. Normally he wouldn’t be anywhere near town at nine am but a promise was a promise so he sat drinking coffee with his brothers and waiting for their meeting at the bank to discuss a loan. He’d have rather a meteor struck down than go through with it.
He’d only agreed to go along because he’d dealt with the bank before. Years ago he’d gotten a loan for new farm equipment. Despite Riley’s business degree he’d insisted his older brother come along for the discussion of what they could get out of First National. The three of them had always been a team so they were going into this together despite Zach’s reservations about buying the Montgomery land.
In anticipation of the meeting over farm equipment he’d compiled bank statements, appraisal papers and everything else he’d thought might help. He hadn’t done any of that for this meeting. He’d promised Devin to look at buying the land, that didn’t mean he had to go above and beyond. He wouldn’t do anything to purposefully damage their chances though so there he sat in his slacks and polo instead of on his land in his boots and jeans.
Devin was rambling about adding more hands to the ranch to help with the new land and the stock they’d be able to purchase to graze it. He was half-listening. It was a fact that if they added the extra acreage they’d eventually need more hands and more hands meant they could buy more cattle and breed more as well. As far as he was concerned that was years away at best though if he mentioned that his brother would just scowl at him for raining on his parade.
Maddie McBride sidled over with a coffee mug and gave them a grin, “Morning boys. It’s been a while.”
“Morning.” Zach did his best to ignore the fact that despite their ages the people in Fate would always refer to them as boys. Together they were a group, the West boys or those poor West boys who lost their daddy. He’d hated it for as long as he could remember.
“Hey Maddie.”
“Good to see you again.”
His brothers were more polite. They returned the smile and the greeting since they’d known Maddie all her life. She was friends with Riley but she’d been batting her lashes at Devin as long as Zach could remember, not that his brother ever seemed to have noticed.
Seeing her opening, Maddie laid it on thick. Cooing over how handsome they all looked in their dress clothes. Offering to get them an extra biscuit or soft drink to go. Flirting as easily as breathing.
It had always been like that around Fate. Zach was mature enough to admit it wasn’t so much that they were great catches. Sure none of them looked like they’d fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down but the attention of the nice ladies of Fate came more from a lack of options.
It was a small town and couples married early. They were probably the last of a handful of single men over the age of twenty-five that hadn’t already been married, divorced and have a gaggle of kids following them around. Problem was, he didn’t foresee the status quo ever changing but the women of Fate had other plans.
That’s why he steered clear these days. The last thing he needed was one of them getting attached and thinking he was Mr. Right. He hadn’t had any problems finding someone to hook up with over the years but he’d taken his game outside Fate a long time ago. He wasn’t sure his brothers had wizened up to that trick yet.
As was natural in small towns, most of Maddie’s flirting came at the expense of gossip. She told them all about how Dana Wright was expecting a baby girl. She told them that the Newton family might be moving away because Mr. Newton got an offer to teach in Fort Worth. She told them about how Lyle Carter had been taken to the hospital in Amarillo and that Bluebell had refused to leave his side.
That was a story he’d heard at least a dozen times in the past few weeks, not that he gave a shit. Lyle Carter was dying, everybody in town knew it and like with most things everyone in town had an opinion about it. Working on a ranch of most
ly men he’d always assumed the gossip ran a bit slower but that hadn’t stopped his hands from gossiping as much in the barn as in the bars after hours.
Some of the nice people of Fate thought Carter was a mean old man who hadn’t bothered to tell his only daughter how sick he was. Others thought Bluebell was a spoiled little brat that had stayed gone until her daddy was on death’s door and only came back now to get her inheritance. Not that he cared but he wasn’t so sure where he fell.
“Zach, earth to Zach, did you hear me?”
He looked up into the almond shaped eyes that were staring at him with a hint of annoyance now and mustered up his best smile, “Sorry, Maddie. Just distracted by how pretty you look this morning I guess, what were you saying?”
She blushed. She stammered. He tried not to smirk. Maybe he still had a little bit of game after all.
“I was just saying my birthday is next week and we’re all going over to Sully’s for some drinks. You should join us. I’d love to see you there.”
“Really? How old are you turning?” He knew it was rude to ask a woman her age but he didn’t care.
Even if Maddie had been his type, which she wasn’t, he knew for a fact she was far too young for him. Some men might get off on having a pretty young girl flirt and fall all over herself for him. He wasn’t one of those guys. He liked his women old enough to know what they were doing and without any childish notions of love and marriage. Maddie did not fit that bill.
“Twenty-three.” She grinned, “You should come do a shot with me.”
He didn’t snort which was a miracle unto itself. When he’d been twenty-three he’d already been running the ranch for five years. When he’d been twenty-three he’d been trying to keep Devin out of trouble and saving every dime, nickel and penny he could scrape together to send Riley to Tech. He hadn’t had time for shots.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Your brothers are going to be there.” She blinked innocently.
“Oh they are, are they?” He tried not to frown when his brothers gave him the same innocent smirk.
