I stood by his bed and just looked at him. He looked so broken, so battered and beaten up that I could barely recognize him. For a minute, I almost thought about walking out of the room and demanding that they check for a DNA match or something to make sure it was really him, but deep down, I knew they’d probably already done something to positively confirm their identities. I sat down in the chair by his bed and took his hand, trying not to sob uncontrollably.
“Hey, Daddy. It’s me. I’m here.” I tried to pull myself together enough to talk. “I love you, Dad. I love you and Mom so much. And, if you can hear me, I need for you to know how much I need you both. I need you to pull through this.” Suddenly, everything I hadn’t done yet started running through my mind. Things I wanted my parents by my side for. My first movie. My wedding. Grandkids. They had to pull through. But what if they didn’t? What if this was my last chance to tell them everything I never told them? I cried uncontrollably for a few minutes, then tried to calm myself down. Something deep inside knew I needed to tell my father what he meant to me, just in case.
“Dad, I know you can hear me. You’ve always heard me, you and Mom both have always listened when I talked. And, I can never thank you both enough for that. Thank you for all the time you spent with me, the lessons you taught me, the love you always make me feel. You and Mom are the best parents a daughter could ask for. I hope you know how grateful I am for you both. I love you, Dad.”
Before I could think anything past that, the heart monitor sounded an uninterrupted tone. It took a second to sink in before I screamed for help and smashed the button as many times as I could. Nurses and doctors stormed the room and shooed me out, closing the door. I pressed my face to the glass and yelled for them not to let him die. Sara and Emily must’ve heard the commotion because, at that moment, they both came and dragged me away from the door. Tears silently ran down Sara’s face, and Emily was even sniffling. When they’d gotten me to the waiting room, I slumped into a ball and just wailed. I couldn’t tell you how long it was, but eventually, a doctor came out to us.
Doctors only come out when it’s bad news.
My dad was gone.
Two hours later, Mom was, too.
***
I was beginning to realize that I couldn’t stay at Emily’s house forever. I plopped into the front passenger seat of her car.
“You don’t have to do this yet, you know,” she told me. “You can keep borrowing my clothes and stay with me forever if you want.”
“No, it’s okay. I have to do this,” I assured her.
She nodded and drove to my house—a house which I was now the sole owner of. When she pulled into the driveway, I looked at her. “Come in with me?” She didn’t say a word, but instead, got out of the car and walked over to open my door. She offered her hand, and I took it to step out of the car. I wouldn’t have made it through the front door if it hadn’t been for her. I wouldn’t have made it through the last few days, really, without Emily and Aunt Sara.
We approached the front door of my house, and I fought down the hot lump rising in my throat. You know, the kind where you’re trying to choke back tears, but you’re failing miserably. I pressed my key into the lock, turned it, and pushed the door open. The aroma of Mom’s potpourri hit me like a brick wall and the tears spilled over my cheeks. It was going to be harder than I thought.
I stepped into the house and took a look around. Bad idea. The first thing I laid eyes on was my dad’s old typewriter. “I can’t do this,” I told Emily. “Em, I can’t do it.”
She squeezed my hand and told me just to hold on for a few minutes. “Keep it together long enough to grab a few bags of your stuff, and then you can fall apart. I’ll be here to put you back together. Come on.” Guiding me up the stairs she knew so well, Emily pushed open my bedroom door and went straight to my closet, pulling out the eight-piece luggage set Aunt Sara had sent me as an early graduation gift. She opened each of the suitcases and started packing them with my clothes, shoes, and makeup. All I could do was pick up the jewelry box my dad had given me and put it in the overnight bag before wrapping the scarf my mom had made for me at Christmas around my neck.
When the bags were packed, she helped me lug them down the stairs and plunk them into the trunk of her car. I locked the door to the house again and slid into the front seat next to Emily.
“You okay?” she asked, putting a hand on my arm.
I shook my head. “No. But maybe I will be, eventually.”
“You know, you don’t have to hold it together for me.” God, she knows me. Hearing those words broke the floodgates and I bawled like I hadn’t before. I don’t think I had really let it out before that moment. Sure, in the hospital I’d lost it, but when the doctor came out and told us they were actually gone, I was just numb. At the funeral home visitation the night before, I was out of tears to cry and screams to scream. But in the car with Emily, I finally let myself actually feel it.
She didn’t say a word, just sat there silently with a hand stroking my hair as I melted down. I needed that.
If I hadn’t had that breakdown, I wouldn’t have been able to make it through the funeral that afternoon. Thankfully, Aunt Sara had made all of the preparations, because I was too busy blaming myself to do a damn thing. She had said that the reason my parents were on the road that day was to pick up some last minute supplies for the surprise graduation party they’d planned for me to come home to. If they hadn’t been trying to finish getting the party ready for me, they wouldn’t have been on the road and they’d still be alive.
After the service, Aunt Sara asked how I was holding up. She knew I was essentially living with Emily because there were so many memories of my parents in the house I grew up in that I just couldn’t stay there.
“You need to be with family now more than ever,” Aunt Sara declared.
I couldn’t argue with her. Only, the family I wanted was gone.
She insisted I come spend the summer on the family ranch in Alabama. A part of me remembered the ranch from when I was very young, maybe four or five. I had memories of riding a horse for the first time ever with my mom there. It dawned on me that I hadn’t seen my grandma in at least ten years. Filming didn’t start until August, and anything that needed dealing with on that front was being taken care of by Jason, my dad’s second in command at his agency—something else I now owned and didn’t know what to do with. Nothing was keeping me from going and I couldn’t just sit around wallowing.
Two days later, I got in my car with the bags Emily had packed for me and the plane ticket Aunt Sara had left for me and I watched it all fade in the rearview mirror.
Airport, here I come.
Chapter Four
Noah
“You’ve got to be joking. Please tell me you’re joking,” I begged. Every year since going pro, I’ve gone back to my parents’ ranch in good old Stevenson, Alabama, to give them a hand when the PBR circuit broke for the summer. June and July are usually a little too hot for bull riding. As I was packing up the day after my last event, I noticed that my absolute favorite boots were literally peeling apart at the soles. Not willing to say goodbye to them just yet, I stuffed them into my bag and angrily zipped it shut, hoping Mom would know where to take them to get them repaired.
Of course, leave it to Jamie to come into my room just as I start letting a string of expletives loose, including a few very crude words I wouldn’t normally say in front of a lady.
“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” she blurted out.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” I retorted. I opened my bag again and showed her the boots. “Do you see this? They could talk to you,” I complained, flopping the sole like a mouth. “My favorite boots, and unless the mother I kiss with this mouth can fix them, they’re done for.”
“Never cross a cowboy and his boots,” she teased, shaking her head.
“You’re damn right!” I stood up and stretched. “So, what’s up?”
“Whadda
ya mean?”
“Why’d you come to my room?”
“Well, it isn’t your room anymore,” she pointed out. Damn, I thought, she has a point there.
“You know what I meant. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Just coming to see if you need any help getting ready to leave.” She raised her eyebrows and said “help” the way some guys might say, “Do you wanna get out of here?” when they meet a hot girl at a bar—suggestively.
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.” I’m normally not the type of guy to beat around the bush, but the truth is, I didn’t even know. Ever since the night before my birthday when something snapped in me, I had no idea what I wanted anymore. I didn’t particularly want to do anything with her, but part of me wasn’t against it, either. And, that talk I knew we were going to need to have hadn’t yet happened. So, I went about my business making sure I had everything ready to carry down to my truck. She sat on the bed and commented on how my “rippling muscles” made her melt. To say she was laying it on thick was an understatement.
I told her to keep it in her pants and grinned. “I need to get Ella ready for the two-day drive home. I can’t be distracted by the likes of a vixen such as you.”
She laughed and slid off the bed to follow me. I grabbed a handful of oats from the oat bucket and fed them to Ella out of my palm before I gathered all of my gear and piled that into my truck with the things from my room. Then, I backed my truck up to my horse trailer, hooked it up to the hitch, and came back to Ella. “Well, what do ya say, girl? Ready to go back to ‘Bama?” A little part of me knew she wasn’t since she hates the trailer, but we’d only be driving for about eight hours before staying with a PBR friend at his farm in Oklahoma for the night. I guided her out to the trailer, and, after a little bit of coaxing and some bribery with a couple of apples, she climbed in and I shut the door behind her.
Turning to say goodbye to Jamie, I opened my mouth to speak, but she jammed her lips against mine. When she’d had her fill, she laced her fingers through my hair and took a deep breath like she was steeling herself to say something. “I’ve wanted to say this for the last two years, but I never had the balls. I want to come back to Alabama with you.”
My mind reeled. She wanted to travel over a thousand miles with me so she could spend an extra two months screwing my brains out. I mean, I’d never been cold to her, but I didn’t think that I’d led her to believe I had feelings for her like that. To me, it was always a friend with benefits type of situation. Apparently, not to her. It was definitely time for that talk.
“Jamie, what do you think this is?” I questioned.
“What do you mean?”
“This,” I said, pointing back and forth between us. “What do you think this is?”
“Well, I don’t know what it is now, but I know what I want it to be. Are you saying you don’t want it to be more?”
I took a deep breath and tried to come across as respectfully as I could. “No,” I finally admitted.
“No, you’re not saying that or no, you don’t want it to be more?”
“No, I don’t want it to be more. Jesus, Jamie. Why the hell did you spring this on me right as I’m about to leave? This was something we should have had time to talk about. Now, I just seem like an ass.”
She shifted her weight and looked away. “I thought it’d be weird if you said no. And, it is.”
“Did I send you some kind of mixed signals that made you think I wanted to be in a serious relationship?”
“Yeah. No. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anyway, have a good trip. See you in August.” She waved a hand and turned to walk away. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back into a hug.
“I’m sorry, Jamie,” I whispered with her head tucked under my chin. She sniffled and told me not to worry about it. We both said goodbye again, and I got into my truck to start the drive home. As I turned on the radio and put the window down, she came up and leaned in the window to kiss me one last time, on the cheek. I tilted my hat to her, pressed my foot on the clutch, and put my truck in drive. I glanced in the side-view mirror and watched her walking away.
***
Two days and twenty-one hours of driving time later, I was pulling up the long gravel driveway to the ranch where I grew up. A few short honks of my horn brought my parents out to greet me, Mom showing more obvious excitement than my dad. She ran up to my truck, and I’d barely shut the door before she was squeezing me and planting kisses on my face. A cliché Mom move.
“I missed you so much! I’m so proud of my little member of the Ninety Point Club!” she squealed between kisses.
“Missed you, too, Mama.” I blushed as I hugged her back. “By the way, do you think you could take a shot at fixing my favorite boots? They’re in pretty poor shape.”
“Well, I sure can, but what kind of first question is that for a boy to ask his mom after being away for six months?”
“He ain’t a boy anymore, Karen,” Dad noted, stepping up to us. “And, nobody can come between a man and his boots. Leave some love for his old man; you ain’t the only one that missed him, now.” He slapped my back and said, “Welcome home, son. Congrats on the ninety-one. It’s impressive work.” He pulled me into a quick hug.
“Thanks, Pop. It’s good to be home.”
“Ella doing alright?” Mama asked, peeking through the openings of the trailer to look at my mare.
“See for yourself,” I told her and opened the door and led the horse out. She patted Ella on the nose a few times and then offered to take her to the stables while I carried my stuff inside. I let her take the horse and looked to my dad. “You going to help me or just stare at me like I’ve got ten heads?”
“Sorry, I just can’t believe my boy’s already twenty-two. It’s happening so fast.”
“Oh, don’t go getting all sentimental on me, now, Pop,” I told him, unhooking the trailer so I could get to the tailgate of my truck. I thrust my biggest bag into his arms and asked if he could handle it. After calling me a few names, he turned and lugged it into the house. When he came back out, he tossed me a water bottle.
“Drink up, you look dehydrated,” he commanded. I unscrewed the cap and started to gulp while Pop continued talking. “By the way, Sara just got back from visiting New York. Sad, though. Her sister and brother-in-law passed while she was up there.”
“Christ, what happened?” I asked, putting the cap back on the water bottle and taking the rest of my bags out of the bed of my truck.
“Car wreck. Tractor trailer slammed into them,” he divulged. “Anyway, she wants to know if you’ll give Jackson riding lessons to help take his mind off of his aunt. That kid’s got a big heart.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “On one of their horses or is he gonna ride one of ours?”
“No, not horses—bull riding lessons.”
“Oh,” I said, mildly surprised. “Yeah, that’s fine. I didn’t take him for a bull riding kind of kid.”
“Well, everybody’s gotta start somehow.”
“Fair point. When am I starting these lessons?”
“You’ll have to ask her about that one. Gimme your keys; I’ll put the trailer away while you take everything inside and get washed up for dinner,” he offered, holding out a hand. I tossed him the keys and carried my things inside.
After a delicious home-cooked meal of my mom’s famous fried chicken with green beans, mashed potatoes, and biscuits, I laid down to sleep in my own bed. It was good to be home.
***
The next day, I woke up just after dawn and went down to the stables to find Pop already there, shoveling hay to the horses. I opened the stable doors and let them out to graze one at a time, then grabbed a shovel and started cleaning the stalls. We were about halfway done when a sharp whistle—the kind my teacher used to bust eardrums with when she wanted the class to quiet down—cut across the pasture. I turned to find Sara approaching the stables. I waved and flashed her a smile, and when she reached us, she gave me a hug a
nd said, “Long time, no see, Runt. How’s that bull riding going?”
“Perfect,” I said. “I broke ninety just the other week.”
“Noah, that’s outstanding!” she exclaimed, giving me a light punch on the arm. What was it with women and punching me? “Did your dad ask you about giving Jackson lessons?”
“Yeah, he did. Sounds like fun,” I told her.
“Well, with a score like that, looks like he’ll be learning from the best! When do you want to start?”
“Whenever works for you guys is fine with me.”
“Alright, sounds good. I’ll let Jackson know. He’ll probably want to start ASAP,” she chortled with a wink. Having finally finished putting the hay out, Dad walked over.
“What brings you here, Miss Sara?” He tipped his hat to her.
“Well, I was wondering if you’d mind helping me fix a hole in Mom’s roof. She tells me it leaked during last week’s thunderstorm.”
“Sure thing. How’s she holding up?”
“Oh, you know my mother, she’s always positive about things. Says we ought to celebrate their lives more than mourn their deaths. That reminds me, my niece is coming today. I have to pick her up from the airport in Chattanooga at one. I wanted her to come here for the summer, maybe clear her head from all the bad stuff she’s dealt with in the last week. She needs to get her mind straight before she starts filming her first movie in August. She’s the actress I was telling you about.”
Oh, great, an actress and a city girl, I thought. Forgive me if I only come around to interact with Jackson while she’s here.
“Right,” Dad replied. “Lisa’s husband was an agent, wasn’t he?”
“Yeah. That’s how Laci got started in acting. Anyway, I won’t keep you guys. Just wanted to come welcome Runt here home from the big show and ask about Mom’s roof. Thanks, Hank. I appreciate the help.”
“Anytime, Sara. I’ll come over and take a look at the roof in about an hour. Just let us know if you need anything else. We’re here to help.”
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