The Cowboy's Baby: Devlin Brothers Ranch

by Joanna Bell

  "Thank you for helping me," I said quietly, taking the glass of orange juice she offered. "I – well it's what you said. I'm fucked up. I'm really fucked up. It's weird because I knew I was fucked up, you know? I just – I just didn't realize how bad. I'm sorry for ruining your night."

  She waved her hand dismissively and sighed. "It's nothing. I would have ruined it myself if you didn't get there first. I'm kind of trying to 'get back out there' – ugh, I hate that phrase."

  "Really?" I replied, feeling terrible for all the shitty, unfair assumptions I'd made about the woman who was giving me orange juice in her kitchen when she would have been perfectly within her rights to kick me in the balls and leave me in the alley covered in my own puke and blood. "Someone broke your heart?"

  She nodded. "Oh yeah. Didn't just break it. Carved it out of my chest with a rusty butter knife, threw it on the ground and jumped up and down on it a few times for good measure."

  "Shit," I replied, setting the juice on the table because the smell was starting to make my stomach feel sour. "Me too."

  "Oh yeah?" Breeze looked up. "I thought it might be something like that."

  We sat in silence for a little while and then she told me that the guy who stomped on her heart was getting married the next week and her girlfriends had been pressuring her to get out there and meet someone new.

  Maybe it was because she was a stranger. Maybe it was because she was kind or because I felt a sort of kindred spiritedness in our heartbroken states. Whatever it was, something made me confess – truly confess, for the first time in 5 years – what went down in Sweetgrass Ridge with Hailey.

  "Damn," she said about an hour later, when I'd gotten to the part where I threw my phone into the Yellowhead River and drove to California to spend the rest of my life pretending everything was fine. "So you just, like, never spoke to her again?"

  I shook my head. "Nope. For awhile I thought she would contact me – you know, to apologize or tell me why she did it or whatever. But she never did."

  "That's crazy!" Breeze exclaimed. "I mean, I couldn't do it, but I totally understand how that could mess a person up."

  A grey and white cat sauntered into the room and looked me over before sniffing my knee. "You couldn't do what?" I asked, scratching the cat behind the ears.

  "I couldn't live with not knowing. That would torture me. You said there were no signs at all? Yeah, if that was me I would have flown to New York to confront her."

  "I could have done that. But I didn't want to give her the satisfaction. What was I going to do, show up crying about why did you leave and oh I'm so sad and please come back blah, blah, blah? She fucking left me without a single word of an explanation – not a hint, nothing. Fuck her."

  "Yeah. Fuck her. And fuck Mike, too – Mike's my ex."

  I smiled wearily. "Yeah, fuck Mike too."

  ***

  I called Lacey at just past noon to let her know I wouldn't be at Sea Vista that day. I think she was feeling guilty, wondering if she was responsible for how sad and hung-over I must have sounded, because she didn't even give me any shit for it. And then I left Breeze's apartment a little later, making a note of the address so I could send her some flowers or something as a thank you for taking care of me.

  I took a taxi back to the bar to get my truck and then drove all the way to my place refusing to look at the gallery brochure as it sat next to me on the passenger seat.

  How's that working out for ya? Just pretending shit's not right there in front of you?

  "Not very well," I replied out loud.

  Now I was talking to myself.

  The voice inside my head wasn't wrong to question my tactics, though. The truth was, it wasn't working out for me at all. I was 27 years old and I hadn't been with a woman for 5 years. My job wasn't awful, but it wasn't going anywhere either. Not in Southern California, where I would have had to work at it for decades before I could afford even a modest house in a half decent neighborhood.

  So what the fuck was I doing?

  I thought I was building a new life. A life without Hailey. But as I turned onto the road that led to the tidy little apartment block where I lived, it occurred to me that what I was actually doing was hiding. Not building something meaningful or learning to find happiness in unusual places but just fucking hiding, like a goddamned coward. Hiding from the pain and shame of being ditched by the girl I loved so completely it was like I didn't even know how to be myself without her. Hiding from the baggage of my family and the responsibilities that came with being Jack Devlin's son. And most of all, hiding from myself. Waking up every day and living a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.

  The truck's engine was starting to make an unsettling rattling sound whenever I turned right. It started up again as I turned into the parking spot at the bottom of the stairs to my apartment. I turned it off and sat where I was, my mind immediately running through the possibilities, how much it would cost to get fixed, whether or not I should just get a new vehicle.

  But the truck didn't matter and I knew it. I reached out and grabbed the brochure as a first gesture towards emotional sobriety. The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, right? And then I looked once more, in the clear light of day, at the photo of the girl I'd spent the last half decade of my life trying and utterly failing to forget.

  It was surreal. The curve of her cheekbone brought back the way it felt to run my finger over that exact spot, a memory so immediate and intense it was if I'd just been with her a couple of hours ago. And yet when I looked at the photo again it suddenly all felt so far away and so long ago.

  "Why did you have to go?" I asked the girl who destroyed me as thoroughly as a bomb set off under my bed would have done. Her image smiled impassively back at me.

  "I miss you," I continued, my voice hoarse. "Oh God Hailey I miss you so much."

  Chapter 23: Hailey

  The solo show turned out not to be a lucky one-off. People wanted what I was creating. They wanted it so much they started calling Candy after the show to offer sums of money that made my head spin to even contemplate just to get their hands on one of my pieces. And they didn't stop. Another show was scheduled almost at once – in Los Angeles, 6 months later. It was all happening so fast.

  I won't pretend I expected it or that it didn't affect me, that it didn't fill me a kind of confidence in my own abilities that I'd never experienced before. It was intoxicating to be the Next Big Thing.

  It was also nerve-wracking. Suddenly everything mattered – because everything was possible. A year before I was a penniless single mother and student, dreaming of being able to support my family but not ever imagining it would actually happen.

  And then it did happen. I saw the fulfillment of all my artistic dreams on the horizon and it kind of scared the shit out of me. What if no one bought the new work that was going to be shown in L.A.? What if the art world discovered I wasn't who they thought I was? That the talent they were fawning over was just a quirk of the light, a mistake?

  The first thing I did with the money from the New York show was put fifty thousand of the $110,000 it made me – which was about $108,500 more than the most money I'd ever had before – into a savings account for Brody. The rest went in the bank. It was a lot, but I lived in New York and I had a child. It wasn't anything like enough to go crazy.

  Then I spent the next 6 months in the studio, working my ass off. It was a strange time, a liminal period in my life, the transitional moment between landing at the airport and stepping out into a new territory, a new life. Everyone wanted to interview me, the art world glitterati had nothing but praise for my work, rich hedge fund jerks were calling Candy by the hour to beg her to arrange a commission. And while all of that was happening I myself was still living pretty much the same life I'd been living for the past 5 years: my family and my work. I stayed in the shabby little basement apartment in Queens that I'd been sharing with Lili since my senior year at Fischer, and my mom and aunt
Sandra stayed in the rented duplex in New Jersey. I kept buying the off-brand ice-cream at the supermarket and staring through the windows of the expensive boutiques and department stores rather than going inside.

  And underneath all of it, all of the relief that comes with success and knowing you might just be able to do the things you want to do for the people you love, ran an undercurrent of sadness at the life – or lives – not lived. I missed Montana. New York was everything everyone said it was – frenetic and competitive, the kind of place where there was no second place, you either won or you lost. Something about the city left me exhausted sometimes, aching for the big open skies and brooding Rockies of my home. I missed fresh air and simplicity. I missed the sound of the wind in the cottonwoods.

  I missed Jackson Devlin.

  Believe me, I tried not to. Being extremely busy helped with that. Whenever my mind started to wander all I needed was a quick glance at my to-do list. My family helped too, treading delicately around the subject of my son's father and watching what they said around Brody himself. A critic who came to my first show wrote something in her review about a "sadness" in my work, something about it appearing to be the work of a much more mature artist, someone who had experienced more of the "darkness" of life. That bothered me. It was a good review overall, in full agreement with all the others in its certainty that I was the big new thing in the art world. But that one line got under my skin. I asked Lili about it one evening after Brody was in bed.

  "Huh?" She replied, looking up from her phone. "What review?"

  "The one I showed you. The one that said I was 'sad.'"

  "It didn't say you were sad," she corrected me – she and my mom and aunt were if anything even more proud of my press than I was – "it said there was a sadness in the work."

  "Yeah but that's kind of the same thing, isn't it?"

  Lili narrowed her eyes, sensing that I was doing more than making conversation. "Well, I don't know – are you?"

  "Am I what?" I replied, even though I knew what she was asking.

  "Are you sad?"

  I shook my head, glancing towards the bedroom door where my son slept peacefully. "No. That's why it was such a weird thing to read about myself. Everything is going so well right now – better than I ever hoped it would. I've got Brody, I've got you and my mom and your mom. I have so much."

  "But you don't have a man."

  I actually laughed, more out of surprise that she actually said it out loud than anything being funny.

  "I know you don't like to talk about it," she continued, and I felt a little wisp of defensiveness rise up in my chest. "But –"

  "What do you mean I don't like to talk about it?" I replied. "We can talk about it. It's fine. I'm just so busy. I dated that guy last year, remember? From class – the sculptor?"

  It was true, I dated one of my fellow Fischer students. It never turned into more than a few nights out and some awkward, off-putting kisses outside my apartment, but technically I had dated someone.

  "Hailey."

  "What?!"

  We fell momentarily quiet. Light from the streetlight outside the building shone in through the window and highlighted a pile of Brody's toys on the floor where he'd left them.

  "You're right," I said quietly a few minutes later. "I guess I don't like to talk about it."

  "I know," Lili replied. "You've never liked to talk about stuff like that. And it's not like I was making some dig – I haven't exactly had the most successful personal life since we moved here."

  We were cousins, but we weren't really similar at all. Lili was emotionally open, easy with her own sadnesses and joys. When the guy she'd been dating for a few months abruptly ghosted her a few months back she came home from work that night and openly cried about it in front of me. Openly crying about things in front of other people was my personal nightmare.

  "You miss him, right?"

  I felt my entire body go stiff. "I – " I stammered. "I, uh –"

  "It's OK, you know. It's OK to think about it, Hailey. I'm not saying he's worth missing, or he's not an asshole or that you're not a thousand times better off without his ass in your life. I'm just saying it's OK to think about it. He was your first love. He's Brody dad. Anyone would think about it – it wouldn't be human not to."

  The little girl who couldn't stand to be vulnerable still lurked inside me. She wanted to get up off the sofa and walk out of the room, to immerse herself in the details of the show in Los Angeles – to do anything, that is, except talk about Jackson Devlin.

  "I try not to think about it," I said slowly, searching for neutral words. "I mean – I try not to think about him."

  "I know you do. So do I – it just makes me angry all over again."

  "And sometimes," I continued, because I had the feeling if I didn't say it then I might never say it, "sometimes I even...yeah, it's what you said. I – I –"

  "You miss him," Lili repeated. "You miss how it used to be."

  Thank God it was mostly dark in the living room. Lili couldn't see my eyes redden or sense the lump forming in my throat at the sudden rush of memories just talking about Jackson had managed to unleash. Not memories from after things went bad. Memories from earlier than that, when everything was very, very good. Memories of steaming up the windows of his ridiculous, flashy pick-up truck and eating canned chili straight out of the can in his trailer, both of us convinced we had it better than anyone else on earth because we had each other.

  It was so good with Jackson. Perfect, really. There were no red flags, no signs of what was to come.

  "Yeah," I whispered. "I guess I do. I just – do you know what I still don't get?"

  "What's that?"

  "Why. I don't get why he did it. He didn't get along with his family – especially his dad and stepmom – and he didn't really care about inheriting the ranch. Sometimes he even acted like it was a burden. I don't get it. I don't – I don't understand. He even talked about moving here a few times!"

  My voice was trembling. I wasn't crying, the tears hadn't spilled down my cheeks – but I was close to it.

  "Families are weird like that," Lili said, sighing. "It's like a version of a man telling his mistress he's going to leave his wife and then never doing it. People always say they're going to cut off this family member or that one but they hardly ever do it. Jackson is a Devlin. And everyone in Sweetgrass Ridge knows what the Devlins are."

  "What are they?"

  "People with money and power. And no matter who they say they are or what they tell you, people with money and power never do anything to lessen it. Trust me."

  I rubbed my forehead, thinking. Lili was right in a general sense. I might not have known it 5 years before, but I knew it after my time at Fischer and working with Candy.

  "He didn't seem like that though," I said lamely. "I'm not saying you're wrong – you're not. But I'm telling you, Jackson never seemed that way. If he was lying the whole time, well, he sure did a good job."

  "He was probably lying to himself just as much as you. He probably believed everything he told you when he was saying it."

  I picked a thread off one of the cheap throw pillows on the sofa. "What an asshole."

  "Uh-huh," Lili agreed immediately. "A real prime asshole, too. Right up there at the very top of the asshole pile."

  I knew she was right. I knew I was right. But the difference between what you know and what you feel is often so much bigger than you wish it was. Jackson Devlin was an asshole. He was the kind of prick who could ghost someone he knew might be pregnant with his child. He was all of those things we all said he was.

  Unfortunately, he was also the man whose laugh – just his laugh! – made my heart swell, whose hand on the small of my back made me feel safer and more loved than I ever thought it was possible to feel, whose self-possession and confidence always belied his age. He was the boy who offered to help me with my ruined cupcakes a million years ago, and then had the patience and maturity not to yell at me when
I essentially told him to take his offer and shove it.

  The same boy who grew into the man who ran for the hills at the first serious, adult obstacles of our relationship. I thought we would be able to handle it.

  Apparently not.

  ***

  That night, as I lay in bed next to his sleeping son, I told myself that somehow, some way, I was going to have to learn to live with the fact of what Jackson Devlin did to me – and to reconcile it with the happy memories that still seemed to float so inconveniently close to the surface.

  Chapter 24: Jackson

  "What the hell happened to you?"

  My left leg was covered from ankle to outer thigh with a thick smear of fresh horse shit.

  "Wasn't paying attention," I replied, hanging the saddle I was carrying on a hook in the tack room. "Stepped in a nice, fresh pile – lucky I didn't break my damn leg."

  It was a deceptively ordinary-feeling day. A couple of lessons that morning, work with one of Lacey's new rescue horses in the afternoon and then an early quitting time, because I had to go home and shower all the ranch stink off me before going to see Hailey Nickerson's show.

  And maybe Hailey herself.

  It wasn't about confrontation – that's what I told myself, anyway. It was about putting the past to rest. It was about closure. It was about getting over shit in a real way, so if in the future I ran across a photo of her in another brochure or on the internet, it wouldn't send me into another spiral of regret and anger.

  Sure, I'm making it sound a little more noble than it was. But my drunken night out in Los Angeles had, once the hangover subsided and my knuckles healed, got me thinking in a new way. I was living my life in a perpetual state of running away – and I was done with it. Done with hiding from myself, done with pretending I wasn't in pain when I was.

  What a relief. For the first time since Hailey left me I was feeling hopeful again – about the future, about my life. I was 27 years old. She was 22, finished with art school and, from what little I'd been able to glean online, doing pretty well. On some evenings when I was feeling extra magnanimous, I could even get to where I almost felt happy for her. It was what she wanted, wasn't it? Career success? I mean, obviously it was what she wanted – she was willing to throw away a man who truly loved her to achieve it.