The Cowboy's Baby: Devlin Brothers Ranch

by Joanna Bell

  Right away a message popped up on the screen:

  Contact Blocked

  Goddamn. So it was true. She really did it. She really fucking did me like that.

  I sat there for about twenty minutes, too stunned to do anything. Eventually, something my football coach once said popped into my head:

  "No half-measures."

  I didn't really understand it at the time, beyond getting that he was pissed because he didn't think we were trying hard enough on the field. But as I sat in my truck that day with the Rocky Mountains looming up in front of me it sank in what Coach Hank meant. If you're going to do something, do it. Not halfway. All the way. Rip the fucking band-aid off, let it sting and get the fuck on with your life.

  I was so young then. So full of bravado even as my heart was shattering into a million pieces.

  But I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I had no choice but to do it. I think it was about honor, in the way so many of the impulsive acts of young men are. She left me and my ego couldn't take the blow. I walked out to the middle of the bridge as the sound of the wind in the cottonwood trees filled my ears and threw my phone into the river.

  And then I got back into my truck and drove to California.

  Chapter 20: Hailey

  4.5 Years Later...

  For a couple of minutes between the staging crew leaving and the doors opening to the public, the Levinson Gallery was quiet. Everything was ready, my paintings and drawings hung, the entire space bathed in the kind of twinkling, flattering light the rich spend their entire lives bathed in. Outside, a light snow fell steadily. My family would arrive soon. And so would everyone else – the critics and the buyers and the art scene hangers-on desperate to get a look at the work of the young woman the New York Times called "the most promising talent in the Fischer Institute's latest crop of graduates" after our graduation show.

  My first solo show. The first solo show of anyone in my class if you didn't include those sponsored entirely by wealthy parents – which I didn't. Candy Levinson, independently wealthy gallery owner and art world guru, swooped in one day before graduation as I put the finishing touches on a mountain landscape and watched me work for a few minutes. I didn't even know who she was at the time – only that she had the eccentric style and unshakably confident air of someone born into privilege and entirely at ease with it.

  She introduced herself, asked to see my portfolio and, after a brief look through it, pronounced me a genius deserving of a solo show.

  6 months later, as the Christmas lights went up around New York, that solo show became a reality. There was no respite for me after graduation, no trip to the family home on Cape Cod or carefree summer months. My family didn't have a home on Cape Cod and we certainly didn't have the savings to take any time off work. We had a cramped apartment in Brooklyn and an only slightly less cramped half of a duplex in New Jersey between us, both rented.

  We also had each other. Tiago was in North Dakota working in the oilfields, but my mom, my cousin Lili and my aunt Sandra all came with me to New York, ripping out roots sunk deep into the Montana foothills to support a dream we all knew might never come true. I owed them. They said I didn't, of course, because that's what people who love you say when they help you. But I did. And one day, I hoped to be able to pay them back.

  There I was in Candy's gallery, half worried no one would show up, half worried they would (and that when they did, they would all collectively decide my work was awful) and chafing in a too-tight cocktail dress and brand new heels I could barely walk in.

  "Stop worrying!"

  I jumped and turned around to Candy smiling at me as cold winter air and cigarette smoke wafted off her.

  "You're as nervous as a whore in church," she continued. "I told you it's going to be fine. It's going to be better than fine. It's going to sell out within –"

  "Don't say it!" I screeched, too late to stop the possibly jinxing words from leaving her mouth.

  ***

  As it turned out, Candy Levinson was one hundred percent right. The show sold out within fifteen minutes of the doors opening and a distinct air of unreality settled over the evening. Things like that didn't happen – especially to girls from small towns in the middle of nowhere. There must have been some mistake. The buyers were all going to change their minds the next morning and cancel their purchases. A meteor was going to crash into the gallery that night and destroy all my work.

  I stood on the main floor with a glass of champagne clutched in one hand and listened as the guests, most of whom didn't have the faintest idea that I was the artist, moved from painting to drawing to painting, murmuring their approval as they went.

  Was I rich?

  "Everything?" I asked Candy a few minutes later, still not convinced every piece had sold.

  "Everything."

  "Like, everything? The new stuff and the stuff from –"

  "EVERYTHING."

  "How much?" I continued, my mind racing with possibilities, ways I could pay back my family for all their sacrifices.

  "Well, there's the 9 new pieces and the ones from the graduation show –"

  "No," I interrupted. "How much money?"

  "Oh!" She replied, nodding. "Of course. Uh, after the gallery's cut? I'd say about a hundred thousand. Does that sound right? A hundred thousand? It must be about that. You must understand that it's your first show, Hailey. It's about building hype more than it is about making money."

  Candy sounded almost apologetic. She must have forgotten who she was talking to. I wasn't one of the famous established artists or film producers she was used to. I was Hailey Nickerson from Sweetgrass Ridge, Montana – and a hundred thousand dollars was more money than I had ever dreamed of having to my name.

  I was on the verge of asking another question when I spotted a little blond-headed boy walking through the front doors followed by Lili, my aunt, and my mom.

  "Mommy!" He yelled when he spotted me, breaking free of his grandmother's grip and racing up the stairs to wrap his arms around my legs.

  "Hello my love," I smiled, ruffling his hair as he turned to gaze curiously up at me. "I'm glad you're here. I was waiting for you."

  "You look pretty," he replied, running his hands over the lace fabric of my dress. "You don't have any paint on your dress."

  "That's true," I laughed. "I had to get dressed up fancy tonight – it's a big night for us. For all of us."

  "Why?" He asked as I picked him up and the rest of my family joined us.

  "Because all those paintings are your mommy's," Lili said, pointing one of the larger pieces out to him where it hung on the gallery wall below.

  "And every single one of them is sold," Candy added, wrapping a proud arm around my shoulder and enjoying the wide-eyed reactions.

  "What?" My mom asked, looking from me to Candy and then back to me again. "Are you – is it true?"

  "They're sold out?" Lili added quietly. "All of them?"

  "All of them," Candy confirmed. "Every single one."

  What a moment. My heart was so full of pride I thought I might burst. Or cry. How many years had I dreamed of it? Not of a sold out show. Not even of a solo show. But just something I'd created hanging on the wall of a gallery somewhere. And there I was – there we were – all of our decisions validated, all of our bets beginning to pay off, the future suddenly brighter and more full of possibility than it had ever been.

  It was almost exactly four and a half years since I last saw Jackson Devlin, and four years since I gave birth to the beautiful son he'd never met. I called and messaged him repeatedly in the days before I left Sweetgrass Ridge and then, increasingly panicked, for weeks after that, even when a message telling me I was blocked started to pop up, and then finally a recorded message informing me the number was no longer in service.

  I knew he wouldn't be overjoyed about the suddenness of my move to New York but I thought once I explained the circumstances he would understand. I remember thinking he might even be ha
ppy. He wanted kids – maybe not at that time but he wanted them. I thought we would work it out. I thought it would be easy to work out. It was Jackson himself who seemed flexible about our arrangements when we talked about the possibility of me going away. He said he wanted me to go. He even said he was open to moving with me.

  Besides, we loved each other. I was 18 – still naive enough to believe love was enough, that any problem could be solved if two people loved each other enough.

  But love wasn't enough, and I soon began to doubt that Jackson ever loved me at all. He ghosted me so brutally I cried myself to sleep every night for months. He didn't take a single call, didn't reply to a single message. And then he changed his number.

  A few weeks after I gave birth to Brody, my mother confessed that before we left Sweetgrass Ridge, Darcy Devlin paid her a visit to say that Jackson had been told about my pregnancy test purchases and, having finally decided to dedicate himself to taking his ranch work "seriously," no longer wanted anything to do with me. Whether or not I was pregnant. Although my mom seemed reluctant to go into details, she also hinted that there had been some kind of vague threat to 'make life difficult' for us if we stayed in town.

  I missed him, but the period of acute mourning that darkened my first summer and fall in New York was in the past by then, replaced mostly by a burning anger at the man who let me down so cruelly. I also had a 12 week old baby who enjoyed sleeping even less than he enjoyed having his diaper changed. I was an exhausted, emotional, over-worked new mother. Maybe if I'd been better rested, I would have questioned what my mom said. Maybe I would have doubted Darcy's assertion that Jackson was dedicating himself to Devlin Ranch. He hated working for his dad – didn't he? Maybe I would have looked into it further.

  But I was too overwhelmed at the time to think anything of Jackson Devlin but the worst.

  ***

  So much water under the bridge. So many lonely nights spent wondering why, torturing myself with the what-ifs and the could-have-beens and I still – still, after all the pain he caused – couldn't stop myself from glancing towards the gallery doors that night, as if he was just going to saunter through them in his work boots, grinning that lopsided grin of his.

  Chapter 21: Jackson

  "With the hair, not against it," I repeated.

  The teenage girl in front of me casually ignored my instruction and continued to brush in the wrong direction until the horse got irritated enough to toss its head and shift its back end just enough to knock her flat on her ass.

  "What the fuck?!" She screeched, looking up at me like I did it.

  "I told you," I replied, shrugging and not bothering to help her up.

  What was her name again? Sky? Skylar, I think? Yeah, Skylar. 15 years old, nose already done, not truly at fault for her awful character – that was more her parents' doing – but insufferable nonetheless.

  "My father isn't going to be happy about this," she informed me as she dusted straw and dried horse shit off her formerly pristine jodhpurs. "You shouldn't even be making me brush the horses in the first place. I come here to ride, not to –"

  "It's part of riding," I sighed, looking down at my watch to check the time. Still 30 minutes to go. Maybe I could get the spoiled brat to clean out a few stalls? "I don't understand how you got to 15 without anyone explaining why it's important to groom a horse after a ride."

  "Grooming the horses is for the stable hands."

  "It really isn't, though."

  I don't know why I was bothering. I'd been at Sea Vista Ranch for almost 5 years – more than enough time to acclimatize to the overindulged children of southern California's elite. It was actually a decent job apart from said overindulged children. The ranch owner – my boss, Lacey Sharrock – was a hippie dippy older woman with a kind heart and a column of cold steel running the length of her spine. She paid me well, joking that it was only my ability to charm the bored Malibu housewives who paid a premium for riding lessons that made it worth it.

  "Why are you such an asshole?" Skylar asked, hands on her hips and a flirtatious smile just about playing on her lips.

  "I'm not the asshole here," I replied, grabbing another currycomb and brushing the horse myself.

  Skylar waited for a minute to see if I was going to flirt back. When it sunk in that I wasn't, she decided to continue the argument.

  "Yes you are! Do you know how much my dad pays for these lessons? He's not doing it so I can do your job for you."

  "It's not my job. It's your job. You're not a horse-rider if you don't know how to properly groom and care for your horse."

  "Oh yeah? I'm not a horse-rider? Then what am I?"

  My attempt to psychically communicate with the horse, promising a whole bag of juicy carrots in exchange for knocking Skylar on her ass again, went unheard. And before I could inform the girl that without knowing how to groom her horse she was just another spoiled, empty-headed Malibu brat in a sea of spoiled, empty-headed Malibu brats, Lacey appeared in the barn.

  "What's going on here?"

  "Your employee is being incredibly rude," Skylar replied hurriedly, somehow managing to look down her nose at me despite my being at least a foot taller than her. "He's too lazy to brush the horse himself, so he was trying to get me to do it."

  I watched Lacey suppress a smile. "Is that so?"

  "Yeah. It is. And now look at him! He thinks this is funny! Look – he's laughing at me. I don't have to come here for riding lessons, you know. I could go to Hidden Acres. I could –"

  I couldn't take another second of her shrill, irritating tone without snapping and saying something I was going to regret, so I walked out of the barn and into the perfect golden light of a late Malibu afternoon.

  California turned out to be everything I hoped it would be on the day I left Sweetgrass Ridge, Montana on a swirling torrent of my own righteous sense of betrayal. The days came as if on a conveyor belt, each as sunny and warm as the last – and the next.

  But even California couldn't heal every wound. When I first arrived I just kind of assumed that the pain was finite, that it had an end point sometime in the near future and that when that end point was reached I would move on with my life. Find myself a woman without a head full of ambitious plans that didn't include me, eventually buy a house with the money I was slowly managing to squirrel away from the job at Sea Vista, maybe even have a couple of kids.

  Problem was it was 5 years and the end point still wasn't in sight. I told myself it was OK. Sometimes, I even believed it. After spending my first year on the west coast wandering around in a daze of bewildered loneliness I just decided I wasn't going to do it anymore. I wasn't going to allow myself to do it anymore. To feel it anymore. Sure it was still there all the time, lurking just below the surface like a fever waiting to flare up into something much worse – but that didn't mean I had to acknowledge it. It didn't mean I had to live my life in fear of it. And so I didn't.

  Well, I thought I didn't.

  ***

  "What the hell was that about?"

  I took the cowboy hat off my face and blinked. Lacey.

  "Shit," I said. "I must have dozed off."

  "Ya think?"

  My boss sat down next to me on the wooden bench that sat on the high point of the property. "You have to be a little more diplomatic with these kids, Jackson. They're not used to being told no."

  "Maybe they should get used to it," I mused, gazing out at the glittering Pacific. "I'm doing them a favor if you think about it. Getting them ready for the real world. Their asshole parents aren't going to do it for them."

  "Their asshole parents pay your wages."

  I turned to look at Lacey. She was good-looking, and I don't even mean in a 'for her age' way. The women in Malibu didn't age well – they didn't age at all. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her expression was serious.

  "I know," I conceded. "I just – sometimes the people here drive me crazy. How can she be as good a rider as she is and not know
how to groom a horse? It's not like –"

  "Oh she knows how to groom a horse just fine," my boss cut me off, smiling knowingly. "That wasn't about horse grooming – that was about teenage girls being really bad at flirting."

  I scoffed. "If that was flirting I feel sorry for any of the boys she gets her claws into."

  Lacey smiled. "I don't think we have a single female rider between the ages of 14 and 90 who isn't in love with you, Jackson. Sometimes I wonder if I should start charging them extra for getting a stern lecture from you. After you were gone she asked me if you had a girlfriend."

  "Jesus."

  We sat on the bench in comfortable silence. Skylar was the last lesson of the day.

  "I should probably get going," I announced a short while later, aware that Lacey was probably going to invite me to stay for dinner but eager to get a few errands done before it got too late. "I need to go to the laundry and then to –"

  "You still haven't bought a washing machine?" She chuckled. "Surely I'm paying you enough to afford a washing machine."

  "You are," I replied, standing up and stretching my arms. "It's just easier to pay someone else to do it."

  "You need to get yourself a girlfriend."

  "To do my laundry?" I teased. "That's a little sexist."

  I wanted that to be it. I had things to do. So did Lacey. But she didn't usually bring up the topic of my non-existent love life in a lighthearted way. I knew she only did it because she cared, but that didn't change the fact that I had less than zero interest in discussing my lack of female companionship.

  "You know none of the ladies believe me when I tell them you're single?" She continued, getting up and walking with me to the truck. "Some of them have beautiful daughters, you know – and they're not all spoiled brats. Jennifer Larsen's girl just graduated from USC. Maybe you could –"

  "Lacey..."

  "What?"

  "You know what," I replied, turning to face her. "When I want a girlfriend I'll get one, OK? Now I've got to get to the laundry before –"