The Bride

by S Doyle

  It was complicated. I wanted someone older and more seasoned. Someone who could be a mentor to Ellie. Someone like her father.

  The problem was, a man like that might be unwilling to live in the bunk house. Especially he might be unwilling to share space with Javier and Gomez, even if it was on a part time basis.

  Maybe a divorced rancher? Although I had to say there weren’t many people that fit the bill around these parts. We were going to have to make our search country wide. Thankfully with the internet, that wasn’t as much of a problem as it might have been in the past.

  Then there was the Ellie factor. I didn’t often let myself think it, but there were times I couldn’t avoid it. She was beautiful. Not just pretty. Not just cute. She was beautiful and growing more so each day as she matured.

  She was going to be eighteen. The sole owner of a multi-million-dollar cattle ranch, and stupid hot.

  The man we found who was going to work for her, respect her, keep his hands off her… Well, I wasn’t sure who that was other than me. Which is why I was going for age. The older the better.

  For her.

  “Drink?” she asked me. I gave her a chin nod and she was off. She knew what I liked. A while later she came back with a Corona and lime for me, lime already pressed inside, and a cup of what appeared to be punch.

  “Is that spiked?”

  She smiled a did this jiggle thing with her eyebrows. “You bet your ass it is. And not a word from you. It was spiked last year too, and Dad didn’t have any problem with letting me have a cup or two.”

  She was only going to be eighteen in the next few months, not twenty-one, but still I didn’t really have a problem with it. I had started drinking when I was eighteen and no one thought anything of it.

  In fact, unless you were being unusually stupid the twenty-one age limit was for the most part ignored in these parts.

  Pete’s was the only bar in town, and on Friday nights it was filled with as many under-twenty-ones as over. If you got stupid and got kicked out, your fake ID was confiscated. Otherwise, Pete looked the other way.

  It occurred to me I might actually run into Ellie at Pete’s once we were divorced. I had only been a few times in the past year, but it was a place I liked to go on occasion. I hadn’t let her, but once she graduated that’s were where her friends would most likely hang out on the weekends.

  She would want to hang out there too.

  That would be cool. Sharing a beer with her out in town. And strange, because she would also be my ex-wife.

  Because it was one of those things I thought about all the time when she counted down the days.

  I thought about getting my hands on twenty thousand dollars. I thought about the feeling I was going to have when the land was mine again. I thought about how the hell was I going to fix the house, because it was a mess, find enough cash to start buying up cattle, and have a place to actually move into. I thought about a lot of things. Exciting things. Things that drove me forward to making my own dream come true.

  And then I thought about how I would miss Ellie. Miss her. It wasn’t wrong of me to think it. We lived together. She was my roommate. We ate together, worked together, watched TV together. Of course I would miss having her in my life.

  Had things been weird since the towel incident? A little.

  I struggled for a while to figure out what it was. I knew she was a virgin, so yeah my dick was the first one she probably saw. Maybe that had freaked her out. Or the weirdness of seeing me basically naked. We’d always been close but never intimate.

  Since then I could tell she was more cautious around me. She had this sweatshirt thing I’d never seen before that she started wearing at night, complaining the house was too cold. When the temperature had never bothered her before.

  When I said something she decided was sexist—I did it a lot mostly to egg her on—she used to rub my arm and tell me what caveman I was and how sorry she was for my next wife.

  Not one touch since the towel incident. And I had said a lot of sexist things.

  I hated the shift.

  In our not-normal world, we had found a way to be normal.

  Janet accused me once of falling for Ellie, and I was so damn proud to say that I hadn’t. That she’d been wrong. That all men weren’t assholes with dicks and no brains. That it didn’t matter that Ellie was beautiful because she was still freaking seventeen. And that when she turned eighteen that wasn’t going to magically change anything either.

  I wasn’t a man waiting for a number.

  Not going to lie, when I went to Missoula for those few days this past summer I had felt a little… guilty wasn’t right. Awkward, maybe? Not because I picked up some girl in a bar and basically had nonstop sex with her for three days. That I had no guilt over.

  I had needed that, and it felt good. It was just that coming home to Ellie reminded me that I wasn’t so noble I couldn’t abstain for sixteen months while we got through this thing.

  So I was a man, and I did have a dick. But I wasn’t some damn animal who couldn’t restrain myself with my brain when I needed to.

  Yay me. The problem was, since the towel thing, despite her caution, Ellie had been giving me these looks.

  Sometimes I would actually catch her staring at me, like she didn’t even know she was doing it, and I wanted to know what the hell was going through her head.

  Only I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know for a second that she had thoughts like that. Which if I verbally communicated to her she would say was sexist.

  She was going to be eighteen. She was allowed to have sexual thoughts. I was a man who was very much in her world. I wasn’t an asshole, but I knew I was attractive to most women.

  I had had zero problem picking up… what the heck was her name? Sherry? Shari? Something like that.

  It was not unheard of that she’d seen me and realized I wasn’t some eunuch she was living with. I wasn’t her father. And though we’d basically been raised together I wasn’t her brother.

  Which sucked if that turned into some kind of crush. Imagine having a crush on your husband, only to have him turn around and divorce you in a couple of months.

  Because that had to happen. I could not stay in that house one day past her eighteenth birthday or everyone would think something was going on. That something had been going on.

  No, I was leaving on April twenty-third, and I really hoped when I did, I didn’t hurt her.

  “I’m going to go mingle,” she told me.

  “I’m going to stand in this corner and drink my beer.”

  Her head tilted in that way it did when she was disappointed in me. “You’re so predictable. Do you realize that about yourself?”

  “I do.”

  “It’s a party.”

  “And I’m here. Don’t overdo it on the punch.”

  She sighed. “Kay.”

  I did as I said I would. Nursed my beer because I was driving and checked out the room of people. The same room of people who were here last year, all in different sweaters.

  “Hi Jake.”

  “Mrs. Nash,” I said as she walked over to me. “No Mr. Nash?” There was never Mr. Nash when there was Mrs. Nash, but still I had to ask because it was polite.

  “At home with the kids. I’m coming here for a while, then he’s going to another party later and I’ll take the kids.”

  Right. Because Riverbend didn’t have about twenty age-appropriate babysitters.

  “How is Ellie doing?”

  It was a common enough question. No one ever asked her directly. So much easier to do it with me. It pissed her off actually and I could see why. I wasn’t the boss of Ellie. I wasn’t the caretaker of Ellie.

  I was only her partner. For this part of our lives.

  Still, I had to be polite so I gave the standard answer. “She’s doing great. Grades are good and she’s learning a lot about ranching.”

  Mrs. Nash smiled. “No, I meant how is she doing?”

  R
ight. Because not eleven months ago Ellie had lost her dad. Sometimes as strong as she was, even I forgot that.

  “She’s okay. She’s strong. She’s determined. She’s more of a rancher than I would have thought. Takes to all of it, even the ugly stuff. She hates to go in my room for any reason, I think because it makes her sad. If our laundry gets mixed up she leaves my stuff folded outside my door. She cries at the weirdest things on TV and I know it’s because something reminded her of Sam. If I ask her if she wants to talk about it, she lifts her chin three feet up in the air and says she’s fine. Like her dad. She’s grown up a lot. And in a way that’s good, because come April this all falls to her, but in a way I’m sorry she didn’t get to experience her senior year. I doubt she’ll go to the prom. She didn’t bother with the homecoming dance. She’s focused. Which is important. Mature for someone so young, which is also important. But she’s not as goofy as she used to be. She doesn’t laugh as much. It bothers me sometimes.”

  Mrs. Nash made a sound in the back of her throat and I looked at her.

  “Jake Talley, I’ve known you your whole life and those are more words in total than you have ever said to me.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood why that was important.

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “She’s lucky to have had you through this.”

  Yeah. She was. I didn’t say it because I thought it would make me sound like a jerk, but regardless of what weirdness was happening now between us, Ellie and I were solid.

  We were family.

  For another one hundred and eighteen days at least.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  It was late. We were driving home from the party. I could tell she was drunk on punch and eggnog. It was ruthless of me really, but I thought it might be the best way to get to the truth with her defenses a little down.

  “Go for it,” she said. She was twisted a little in her seat, on her side and looking at me, smiling.

  “Did you have fun tonight?”

  “I did.”

  She said it like it was a surprise.

  “Is that because you’re hopped up on punch?”

  “Yes,” she laughed. “No. It was nice to be around… people who know us. Who get us. Who don’t think we’re weird.”

  “Ellie,” I had to tell her. “We’re weird.”

  “I know. Even the way we showed up at the party. Me with a bottle of wine. You driving and being all manly. Like we were some normal married couple celebrating Christmas with the neighbors.”

  “Do you think of us that way?” I asked it gently because I knew this was poking into a sensitive area.

  “No,” she answered quickly. “I know we’re not. We are so not a couple.”

  “You’ve been acting a little different with me lately, and I wanted to make sure…”

  Now she was tilting away from me. “Make sure what?”

  “Ellie, are you really ready for April? For the divorce. Because it’s going to happen. I can’t see any way around that.”

  She nodded. “I know. I’m ready for it. I want you to have your chance. You’ve worked so hard this year to make my place a success and to teach me everything you know, you deserve to be able to put all that work into something of your own. I know you have to go and do that.”

  “I’m not dying, you know. I’m going ten miles south, remember?”

  Again a nod, only she was looking out the window, not at me.

  Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe this had nothing to do with a crush or seeing my dick or any of it. Maybe she was pulling away because she was scared about being on her own.

  “Talk to me, Ellie. What are you thinking?”

  She leaned her head back. “Sometimes it just hits me. I’m really all alone.”

  That made me immediately angry. “You’re not. You’re always going to have me.”

  She looked at me then, her smile gone, and I could see it in her eyes. All the sorrow and weight of her grief had changed her. Made her older, made her wiser. I missed goofy Ellie, but serious Ellie was a woman to be reckoned with.

  “I’m not, Jake. I’m not always going to have you. And you, you are not always going to have me. I think we need to realize that. We think April twenty-second isn’t going to change anything, but it is. We should start preparing for that now.”

  I didn’t say anything. How could I when I was essentially trying to get to the same point. Of course I had been worried about potentially hurting Ellie.

  I really hadn’t considered how I was going to feel.

  I thought I was going to feel like shit.

  Thirteen

  Ellie

  March

  On a scale of one to ten, it was a full-on ten. Possibly maybe ten and a half.

  Except I never do this. I never break the scale because I think it makes the scale invalid. Then any number is acceptable and representative of being bad or good.

  What’s the difference between eleven and a thousand, really?

  But for the first time, this seemed to warrant it.

  Remember my obsession with the weather? I had started to ease up once we rolled into March. The worst cold should have been behind us.

  They called this an anomaly. A major Arctic air mass that moved down over the Rockies with virtually no warning.

  Right now the temperature was twenty below freezing, and it was snowing hard. The wind gusts were brutal. I couldn’t feel my hands despite being covered with heavy work gloves. I couldn’t see the house from the barn. I couldn’t see the pen from the barn, where Jake was working to save the calves.

  All I knew was that this was bad. Because according to every prediction we’d gotten before the satellite kicked out, it was supposed to get worse.

  Which made this storm on a scale of one to ten a full-on ten. And maybe a half.

  I tried to focus on my work. I needed to put blankets on Petunia and Wyatt, make sure they had plenty of food. I had to thaw the trough water with boiling water I had hauled from the house to break up the ice so they could drink it. This would have to be done throughout the day and night as the water started to freeze almost immediately.

  Of course, not realizing what was coming, Javier and Gomez had left before the storm. While their help would have been huge, we also didn’t have to worry about the generator powering the house and the bunk house.

  All we had to do was make sure we could keep the calves as warm as possible. Which meant moving them from the pen to the barn. As many as we could fit. Jake knew from past storms the barn could hold about thirty.

  We had nearly ninety calves born so far. Eighty-nine, to be exact.

  One by one Jake was hauling them across his shoulders from the pen to the barn. He’d made it through seven. And those seven had taken him almost three hours.

  The barn door opened and the blast of cold and fury hit me in the face, but I pushed through it to get to Jake. He was hooked to the line that ran between the pen and the barn. I unhooked the karabiner and he lifted the calf off his shoulders and pushed it deeper inside the barn.

  He was bent over and breathing hard through the mask he wore over his face. He also had ski goggles over that to keep the snow out of his eyes.

  I handed him the thermos of hot coffee I had brought with the boiling water. Then I said it. The thing I had to say. “You have to stop.”

  He lifted the goggles over his eyes, looked at me, and shook his head.

  “It’s getting dark and the temperature is dropping. The wind gusts have to be at least a hundred miles per hour. You can’t keep doing this.”

  He stood and rolled his shoulders. Each calf, especially the older ones, had to weigh at least sixty pounds. Jake was strong, but no man was that strong.

  “It’s too cold,” he said. “And projected to stay that way for too long. We have to save as many as we can.”

  “Then let me help.”

  “You can’t lift a calf, Ellie.” He barked it. Like he was angry at me for being so weak.


  “What about the rope? I can tie it around the neck and lead it.”

  He’d shot it down before. The calf would be too skittish. It wouldn’t be easily led. Especially with these gusts, but I didn’t see any other way. “I have to try. You’re not going to be able to do this yourself.” Then I said the thing we were both thinking. “They are my calves, Jake. This happens next year, I would be doing this anyway. Alone.”

  He looked at me, and no lie it was so creepy with that mask hat on. Like he wasn’t Jake underneath it but some kind of mean bank robber. A mean bank robber who knew I was right.

  “Hook up.”

  I pulled my own hat down over my face, found an extra set of goggles and grabbed the rope. Then we opened the barn door together. The cold was so intense. More powerful than anything I could remember. Then again, any time these storms flared up in the past I had been safely inside, while Dad and Jake had done all the work.

  Those days were gone. My land. My cattle. My work. I had about a foot of belt around my waist that was hooked to the karabiner. I clipped the hook to the line that ran from the barn to the pen.

  Jake shook it a few times to make sure it was secure, then hooked his own line and did the same.

  I didn’t have to be told the importance of staying connected to the line. This would prevent a gust from taking me off my feet. It would make sure I got to the place I was going, which I couldn’t see, and most importantly it was how I was going to get back.

  Jake moved out first. He knew I would be slower and probably thought he could do multiple trips there and back to my one. Still my one, was one more run he didn’t have to do.

  It literally felt like I was pushing up against a wall of wind that barely moved. Step by step I plowed through the fury of it. Finally when I was as close as a foot to it, I saw the fence lines of the pen. The rope line allowed us to climb over it, and into the mix of animals. The line also ran from one end to other so I could move my way into the center in search of the freezing calves. I found one, hooked the rope around his neck in a loose noose, and started to pull.