January 27
Luke
I ’m in the guesthouse office on a cold, overcast day doing business. Estate business, Canyon Life business, and bank business regarding a potential horse sanctuary. I sit at Dad’s desk, the top littered with insurance policies, estate papers, bank information, and notes I’ve written to myself. Most of the notes are about this horse park concept.
Am I really considering opening a second business eighteen hundred miles away from the first one? It sounds almost overwhelming, but it does tick a lot of boxes when it comes to doing the best thing for Sweetwater. I’m not sure if Hank at the inn will buy into it—but I’m also not yet sure the bank is buying into it, so first things first.
It’s four days until my deadline with Northcutt, so I’m hoping to hear from the bank any minute now—but in the meantime, I’m busy keeping other plates spinning. The estate lawyer asked for some paperwork I haven’t been able to find, so my next task is digging through Dad’s desk drawers and file cabinet. He was resistant to digitizing things, and now I’m the one paying for it.
As I open drawers and riffle through them, I think back to that surprising talk with Mom the other day. I’m still not sure I believe any of it, and think maybe she just exaggerated it all, if only in her own memory. If there’s anything about Dad and me that’s actually resonated since he died, it’s something Taylor pointed out—that maybe the one way we connected was through the horses. I guess that’s something—even if I wish there’d been more.
All I know is, despite everything, here I am, the one stuck cleaning up the messes Dad left behind.
Finding nothing business-related in the last desk drawer, I’m about to close it—when my eyes fall on a thin green binder with Luke written on it in black in my dad’s meticulous print. I pull it out and, underneath, lay binders bearing Tom and Aaron’s names as well. What the hell have I stumbled onto?
I open mine and discover…a scrapbook?
It’s not the kind with stickers or colored paper—it’s just a collection of things about me.
It starts with little articles cut from the Sweetwater Times when I was in middle school—accounts of football and basketball games where I’m mentioned or pictured. Dad highlighted my name in each, and in that same black print, labeled them all with a date.
Turning more pages, I find the same types of things from high school, with track meets added in. I discover a picture of me as prom king from the paper, followed by my letter of acceptance into the University of Kentucky.
How is this even possible?
I’m thinking that’s where it’ll end, since that was pretty much the last of my local accolades—but when I flip to the next page, I’m even more shocked to find a shot of me on a horse at the ranch in Utah when I was twenty-one. Maybe I texted it to Mom. Did he actually have it printed out to put here?
After that come a few other personal photos I sent to Mom—from the ranch, or from hikes in Zion. Somehow he got his hands on an article from the Springdale News in Utah featuring a picture of me hiking the Narrows. And one more page turn reveals an article in the Moab paper from when I opened the second store there.
That’s where it stops. It’s only twenty or thirty pages of memories.
And a glance tells me that both of my brothers’ are thicker—but who cares?
To think he took the time to do this, make this, astounds me.
And yeah, it’s still about accomplishments—which is why my brothers’ are bigger—but maybe that’s the only way he knew how to measure things.
All I know is, for the first time in my life I feel…almost worthy in his eyes.