“Sorry,” the nurse says. “But you really need to go.”
I nod and exit through the same doors I walked in. Debby stands. “How’s he look?”
I shake my head as I try to find the right words. “Different.”
“Why don’t we head out to the farmhouse. We’ll get you set up in your old room.”
“You’re not staying here?” I say.
She glances at the chairs around us. “Hon, I can’t sleep in these chairs. Your father is going to wake up tomorrow full of vinegar that he’s still stuck in that ICU. I’m going to need some sleep if I’m going to handle him.”
She’s got a point. I remember when he broke his leg on a colt he was training. He yelled and grumbled for weeks and finally sawed the cast off himself so he could ride again. And that was just a broken bone. Something as serious as a widow-maker is really going to piss him off.
I run my hand through my hair, exhale. “Lead the way home.”
The sleet from Texas finally shows up as Debby turns Pearl Ann, her mint condition champagne-colored F-150, into the front gates of the property I grew up on. As if this day hasn’t provided enough of it, emotions are rising up in my chest again. Snapshots of youth, the day the bus dropped me at these gates and my father was waiting, not my mother.
Debby presses a button on a remote on the visor, and the white iron gates swing open. Last time I was here they were still manual. It’s been too long, almost a year.
We ease past the small red barn on the right, the horses all tucked into their stalls. Debby, again unlike my mother, loves those horses as much as my dad does. The one time I remember my mother riding, she took a nasty fall. I was eight years old, and my father, with me in the front seat, raced her to the emergency room. I was terrified. My father kept saying “She’s not going to die. She just broke her collarbone.” As if that type of injury were minimal. That injury kept my mother from painting for months, and it seemed to drive a wedge between them that I can only recognize as an adult, looking back. And then two years later, she was gone.
“Nice upgrade with the electric gates,” I say as we drive toward the farmhouse.
“Your dad thought it was time.” The wipers squeak against the windshield as ice pellets hit the glass. She adds, “Especially after all that business with the school.”
A chill settles on my skin. “What do you mean?”
She follows the narrow blacktop road through the woods. “Oh, he was just being careful. In case, you know, someone came out here looking for him.”
I look over at her, but she doesn’t meet my gaze. “Did something happen?”
“He’s just seen a car hanging around that looked suspicious. That’s all. Anyway, your dad already had everything in place to make the gates electric, so he just pulled the trigger and finished it.”
Her voice is way too light for the words coming out of her mouth. She knows my line of work. She knows my father’s line of work. If my father was worried enough to get those gates upgraded quickly, he probably had a good reason.
Debby pulls into the long gravel drive up to the farmhouse. “Do you think we need a sheriff’s deputy to drive by every now and then?”
“Heavens no,” she says.
She pulls into one of the open garage bays, parks, and turns the truck off. She looks at me. “This is why we didn’t want to tell you your father’s been worried. No need to assume there’s trouble.”
I square my gaze onto hers. I want to tell her how completely stupid it is to make assumptions. Twenty-five years ago I thought I was going to ride the bus home from fifth grade to find my mother, and instead I found a driveway filled with police cars and an ambulance. My father stopped me from running into this house. Our housekeeper had called him when she arrived and found my mother already turning blue. A ruptured aneurysm, my father told me when the coroner’s report came back.
Debby breaks my gaze and climbs down from the cab of the truck.
I let it go, for now. This is a conversation for my father anyway.
I follow Debby into the mudroom off the garage door. Cubbies are filled with Ariat boots, spurs, and tack cleaner. The smell that hits me is immediate. Leather and dirt. It’s the smell of my youth. But there are other smells in this house now. Something sweet and new. Debby. She and my dad renovated the farmhouse over a year ago. It looks completely different.Even the front door has been moved, as if moving it could erase what happened behind it.
As I walk down the brick-floor hall to the kitchen, I feel the bones of this house in my bones, the memories as sturdy and strong as the studs in the new walls, and it’s all I can do not to turn around and race for a hotel. I like to keep my thoughts moving forward, but this place always drags me backward.
As Debby and I enter the kitchen, three barking dogs come racing in. Uno, Dos, and Tres, my father’s three miniature blue-merle Australian shepherds. They jump and squeal and wiggle around our feet.
“Hey, boys,” Debby says, petting them all.
I push my carry-on next to a wooden, rectangular antique kitchen table surrounded by six chairs. The round table is gone. Then I bend to the dogs and let them nuzzle under my hands and lick at my face. These three came into the picture before Debby resurfaced. My father heard about a litter down the road, and he couldn’t make up his mind, so he brought the three boys home. Figures. He’s more comfortable with boys. He damn near turned me into one.
After my mother died, I was left to be raised by Southern men. My grandparents on both sides had passed away years before. My father, my uncles, and my boy cousins taught me to spit, cuss, and be unapologetically confident. Something I discovered was a rarity for my sex at school, where my peers were demure, apologetic, and grateful. Grateful. If I could pinpoint one trigger word of mine, that would be it. As if I should be grateful for my success. As if I should be grateful I could outrun any boy on a quarter-mile track. As if I should be grateful I had my mother as long as I did.
