Chapter 3
Ezra and the woman beside him reached the steps, and Tillman shifted his hat on his head.
It was then that the woman’s strides stumbled. He wore a nondescript button-down shirt, along with jeans and boots. With the hat on his head, he probably looked like any other cowboy she had run into that day. In fact, his shirt wasn’t that much different from the slightly lighter blue plaid shirt that Ezra wore.
Her pink sweatshirt acted like a beacon and made it easy for him to recognize her. That, and she didn’t wear a hat. Her long hair still flowed down past her shoulders.
Plus, she was tall for a woman, coming up to Ezra’s chin. Which would mean that she would fit just perfectly under his as he and Ezra were about the same height.
He shook the thought away. He was not tucking any woman under his chin, not ever again. Women were trouble. Heartbreak. All the bad things that he could think of. They weren’t trustworthy, they were fickle, and he wanted to say that he hated them, but that would mean that he hated half the world’s population. Although, at the moment, he supposed it was true.
“Tillman, I’d like to introduce you to my sister, Phoebe. I don’t know if you remember that I had twin sisters right behind me in birth order. Phoebe is the older of the two, and this ranch couldn’t run without her. She... She was right beside me when our parents died and shouldered as much of the burden as I did.”
“I don’t know whether I would go that far, and those days are over and past,” Phoebe said with a smile that, while it reached her eyes, looked a little strained. “I actually already met Tillman today.”
“You did?”
“I didn’t realize who it was,” Phoebe said easily as she stepped forward with her hand out.
Tillman took it in his, her fingers long and slender and cool to the touch. He shook it, a perfunctory shake that he knew he couldn’t get out of without being rude, but dropped it immediately, and stepped back in the guise of leaning a hip against the banister.
“We met as she was coming out of the jail this morning,” Tillman said, surprised that she could be so self-possessed and confident when she had obviously been locked up the night before. At least she didn’t appear to be inebriated anymore.
“Oh. Interesting the folks you meet in jail, isn’t it?” Ezra said with a grin that would never have flown back in the days when Tillman knew him. Ezra would have had the same reaction he had to anyone being thrown in jail. Not that he thought that a person who was in jail couldn’t be a good person, but they’d obviously made mistakes that showed that if they didn’t have a lot of character, they had a distinct lack of judgment at the very least.
Ezra and Phoebe, however, laughed at Ezra’s comment like it was hilarious. Phoebe nodded. “Sure is. Although, I hopefully won’t be there again for a very long time.”
For some reason, this made Ezra laugh again, which Tillman had a difficult time explaining to himself. Had Ezra changed that much? Back when Tillman had known him, he had been an upright man, and while not perfect, he had clearly wanted to serve the Lord and point people to Jesus with his life. In everything he did, he had had character and integrity and had inspired the people around him to have the same.
But now, he was laughing with his sister about her spending the night in jail? Or maybe the week? Tillman didn’t know when she had gone in. He just assumed she’d been locked up the night before at least.
“Phoebe will be the one that you’ll be working with on the rodeo. She doesn’t know anything more about it than I do. So, I’m not teaming her up with you because of her vast knowledge of how the rodeo works. That’s all on you.”
“That’s what I thought,” Tillman said.
“Rather, she’s very organized and good with details. She catches on quickly, and she’s familiar with every single thing around the ranch, just as familiar as I am, and not to belittle you, but I would say she’s just as good as you are too. We’ve just never been around the rodeo.”
“I understand. If she grew up on the ranch, that makes sense.”
“Yes. And she’s been running, first our ranch in Wyoming and now this one, with me for a decade and a half.”
“He gives me more credit than I deserve,” Phoebe said with an easy smile. “I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Cooking and doing the cleanup and the grocery shopping for full-time ranch workers is not easy.”
“And she helped homeschool our younger siblings once our parents passed away.”
Phoebe nodded, and a little bit of the glow faded out of her face, but she didn’t say anything more.
He had to cut her a little slack. Anyone who had lost their parents the way they had, with a family their size, maybe didn’t deserve to have a lapse of judgment but could be forgiven for one.
Of course, he’d had a major lapse of judgment, and he would like to be forgiven for that too. Although the only one that really needed to forgive him was himself. He still took himself to task for being so ridiculously na?ve when it came to Nicole.
Never again.
“Phoebe will be working hand in hand with you, by your side. The two of you will be responsible for everything that goes on with the rodeo, and you will be the point people. She can talk to you more about it, but basically, what you know, I want her to know, and what she knows, I want you to know. So, while you might not work together all day long every day, I definitely want there to be a time in the morning and a time in the evening where you both touch base, discuss what’s going on, and pick each other’s brains for the best ways to do things. We have...a lot riding on this for the ranch and for all of our futures.”
Ezra glanced at Phoebe, then back to Tillman. “It’s common knowledge that we were almost in the black. My brother had been able to get a large sum of money and things were looking really good. But we loaded up two pots of finished calves, high dollar beef, and there was an accident.”
Tillman flinched. Accidents involving animals were never pretty.
“A car wasn’t paying attention and moved to the left lane, hitting the first truck right on the steer tire, causing the tire to blow and that driver to lose control. He ended up upside down in the ditch. The second driver had to careen off the road to avoid hitting the car, and he ended up in the ditch as well.”
“And the woman had about $30K worth of insurance, I’d bet, which would not even pay for the clean up.” Tillman had driven truck for a while and knew exactly how these things went down. “And your underinsured on the truck policy was probably enough to replace one rig, if that.”
“Exactly. And we ate seventy-two beef at about five grand a head. Most of them were killed in the accident, but it turns my stomach even now to think of the ones that weren’t.” Ezra sighed. “It turns my stomach to think of the money that was lost as well. But that’s farming. We’re counting on the rodeo to bring in what we lost.”
Ezra didn’t have to say anything more. If the rodeo wasn’t a success, Tillman would be looking for a new job. As would everyone else on the ranch.
He wouldn’t wish losing a ranch on anyone. Having to sell his spread had been the second hardest thing he’d ever done. Having to give up full-time access to his children had been the first. It felt like they’d taken part of him with them when they’d ridden away with their mother, her boyfriend driving the car.
With everything in him, he had wanted to go after her, take his kids out of the back of the car, and keep them next to him, but the law was the law, and the judge had ruled against him. Rightly so since he had no house and, at the time, no job.
He needed to stop thinking about her. Being back on a ranch had brought all the feelings back. Where he would be with his, all the work that he had put into building something for his family, and having it yanked away from him.
He wanted to sigh in disgust. He wanted to stay away from women, and now, he had just been slapped in the face by the fact that he was going to have to spend, if not every day all day with another woman, at least a morning and evening appointment with her.
“Phoebe has noted all of our thoughts and ideas about the rodeo, and she also has the budget and knows exactly what the two of you can spend before we have to discuss it with the family.” Ezra lifted a shoulder and looked a little sheepish for the first time. “I wish it was more. And if this is a success, it will be more next year, but for this year, we’re going to have to do it on a shoestring budget. I’m sorry.”
“No problem. Sometimes it doesn’t take money, but just a little bit of elbow grease and some ingenuity to make things work. That’s what we’ll do this year. I will do it to the best of my ability.” Tillman could say that confidently. He didn’t go into a job thinking he was going to do anything less than his best, and with so much riding on this, he absolutely wasn’t going to do anything less than his best for his good friend and the person who had seen him when he was down and held out a hand to help him up rather than kick him as he walked by.
He had been surprised at the people who had done that.
“All right then, I have some other things I need to do, so Phoebe will show you where you’re going to stay and talk about what goes on at the ranch. If you have any questions, she can answer them as well as I can, and she has as much authority as I do.”
“But if there’s ever a disagreement, I always bow to what Ezra says.” These words were soft, and she said them with a smile, but they were firm as well.
For some reason, that made Tillman want to lean toward her. The fact that Ezra was content to allow her to have as much authority and say in everything that he did, but she insisted on giving him the last say. It was the exact opposite of what he would expect out in the world. A Christian principle that she had firmly, but quietly, insisted she adhered to. That she would put others ahead of herself.
Ezra smiled. “She’s not hard to get along with.” He gave her an affectionate squeeze with his arm around her shoulders, and she looked up at him with just as much admiration in her eyes.
It was just a second, and then Ezra nodded at Tillman and walked into the house.
“I had no idea when I ran into you this morning who you were. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. No problem.” Maybe when he was younger, the next words wouldn’t have come out of his mouth, but as he got older, he’d learned that sometimes it was better to face things head-on. “Is it a regular thing that you end up in jail? Will I be bailing you out?”
Her eyes got wide and her mouth dropped, and then she closed her eyes and laughed, shaking her head.
“You made the obvious assumption, but it’s not the accurate one.” She laughed again. “Come on. Let’s walk toward the bunkhouse. I’ll show you where you’re going to stay, and I’ll explain exactly what was going on.”
“All right,” he said, still not entirely sure what would have caused that reaction. Why were they laughing about incarceration? “My stuff is still in my truck.”
“All right,” she said, striding off the porch and waiting for him to catch up before walking beside him to his pickup.
He didn’t have a whole lot, just a few changes of clothes and his saddle and tack in the back.
“We can leave your tack there for now. I’ll show you where we can hang it later. It’ll probably be easier to just drive your truck to the shed rather than walking.”
He jerked his head but didn’t say anything as they walked to the bunkhouse, him carrying his two duffels and her with his backpack slung over her shoulder, which contained his comb, toothbrush, razor, and his Bible, so it wasn’t very heavy.
“There is a girl who lives with us. Her parents got divorced, and they’ve been struggling. They wanted her to go somewhere where she wasn’t going to be subjected to the fighting and squabbling that went on at their house. It degenerated from there into affairs and that type of thing, and...Mina is staying with us indefinitely.”
“All right,” he said, trying not to cringe when he heard about the divorce and the squabbling and the fighting. That had been his house for a while. And he hated it. He wasn’t a squabbling and fighting kind of guy. But Nicole had yelled at him, screamed at him more like it, more than once that he was a terrible communicator, he wouldn’t talk to her, and he didn’t give her time to say what she needed to say. He tried to be better, but it had usually degenerated into an argument, because what she had to say was so far away from the truth that he couldn’t let it go.
He’d like to think that if he could go back and do it over again, he’d be more patient, more considerate, a better husband somehow, but...he wasn’t sure whether that was true.
“She goes to school at the local high school. It’s not very big, but she’s involved in all the activities she can be. She’s just that type of girl. Outgoing, friendly, and social.”
“I see.”
“Well, one of the things that she was doing for her class was to raise money for a good cause, and that was by getting people to stay overnight at the jail, basically like a lock-in, only it was a fundraiser, where people donate money in order to have someone stay in jail all night. Just a fun twist on the normal fundraisers.”