Chapter 5
Phoebe walked beside Tillman, thankful that she wasn’t squirming with embarrassment anymore. He had thought she had been in jail. Of course, that was the logical thing to think when he met her on the steps of the jail for the first time, having no idea who she was. Still, she supposed she just thought that people looked at her and knew that she wasn’t that type of person. That showed a level of delusion that, at thirty-six years old, she probably should have outgrown at least a couple of decades before.
Of course, people couldn’t look at her and tell anything about her character or her integrity or anything.
And there were plenty of good people who made mistakes and ended up in places they would never have expected to end up.
Maybe she was one of those people, in a way. Looking back over her life, there wasn’t much she would change, including taking care of her siblings after her parents died. But that had led to the fact that she hadn’t exactly been out where she could meet men and find someone to share her life with. She had children to take care of, siblings to raise, school to do, ranch work to do, and other than grocery shopping and church, and various homeschool activities, she never left the ranch.
It made her a little bit sad now, especially since her younger siblings had grown up and left. Some of them had come back, but Lois was talking like she might never come back, and it made Phoebe sad. She loved the idea of the whole family living and working on the ranch, seeing each other on a daily basis, living life together, doing their very best to make their little corner of the earth a place that shone for Jesus every day.
Hundreds of years ago, and any time prior to that, it was totally normal for children to grow up and stay close to the place where they had been born. It was only in the last century or so that kids had looked at where they came from and felt like they needed to spread their wings and go somewhere else.
Phoebe knew it was a very old-fashioned idea, but she longed for the time where family stayed together.
Of course, there were the families in the 1800s who traveled west, left their parents, their siblings, and everything they knew to take their kids and head toward the promise of a better life.
So maybe that idea was older than what she gave it credit for.
She just never had that urge.
“That building is where we eat. It also has some rooms in it for families who stay at our dude ranch. It has a big room with tables where we serve the meals. We still cook at the house, but one of the improvements that we’d like to make eventually is to add a kitchen area to that building so we don’t have to carry the food from the house across the yard. It’s not far, but still.”
“I understand. No one likes cold food.”
“Exactly,” she said. Although, she loved cooking in the big house. It wouldn’t be quite the same if she were cooking in a place where it didn’t feel like family lived there. An industrial-type kitchen. Although it would be convenient in a lot of ways. Pros and cons. Everything had them. There was never a decision that she made that was all pros and no cons.
And of course, every dark place had its beam of sunlight. It was like God knew humans couldn’t stand to not be encouraged, that they needed that little spark of light.
God was good, all the time, and He always sent the light. Sometimes it was just harder to see than others.
Beside her, Tillman strode, silent, although not afraid to talk when it was his turn. He had made several statements without her prompting, which encouraged her that maybe they would be able to communicate after all.
Ezra had described Tillman as quiet to the point of having to pry words out of him at times. It would be very difficult to put a rodeo together with someone who was unable to communicate with her.
She could hardly keep accurate, detailed notes and keep things organized if she didn’t know what was going on.
But she hadn’t been expecting this...feeling that seemed to be passing between the two of them. She felt it on the steps of the jail. Maybe it was what made her trip the second time. Just something odd about being in his presence. Something unsettling.
It wasn’t a bad thing, because she admired him. Not only was he appealing, although maybe not quite handsome. With the stubble on his jaw, the serious look in his eyes that were shaded by the brim of his cowboy hat, the loose, casual way he held himself, not slouching but not walking around with his chest puffed out like a peacock either. She’d never been attracted to conceited, arrogant know-it-alls.
Typically, she loved a man with a sense of humor, and Tillman hadn’t made her laugh, but this was his first day on the job, and a normal person would be nervous, although he did not seem the slightest bit bothered. He hadn’t needed a break and didn’t want to rest.
“If you ever miss lunch for any reason, if you’re out working and don’t make it in, typically the leftovers are in the fridge at the big house, and Alaska is almost always there. But if she’s not, right there is the back door, where you can go in and help yourself to anything in the fridge.”
“I probably won’t do that.”
“A lot of times, we assume that of the newcomers and take their food out to them. My brothers have no such reluctance, and if you’re working with one of them, they’ll drag you in by your ear most likely. Not too much gets between them and their food.”
“I think that’s typical for the male gender.”
“It seems to be typical for the female gender too, or maybe I’m just an anomaly.”
“You don’t look like you have a problem pushing away from the table.”
It wasn’t personal, not really. But he was commenting on the way she looked.
She didn’t take it in any way other than how she felt he meant it—a casual comment made in conversation that meant nothing.
“My dad was tall and thin. My mom was short and curvy. Well, not short, but shorter than Dad. It seems like us kids either got his frame or hers. I ended up with his, which most of the time is okay.”
But it had narrowed down her dating pool if she wanted to be with someone who was taller than she was. Not that she dated a lot, since her family didn’t really encourage that. But it had narrowed down the people that she allowed herself to be interested in. She didn’t really want to look down on her husband. And she assumed that her husband wouldn’t want to have to look up to her. Although, she’d seen couples like that and always wondered if maybe she’d fall in love and it wouldn’t matter how tall the man was.
Or maybe she should say that God would put the perfect man in front of her, and she hoped she was able to get past how tall he was to see that he was the one for her.
She was tempted to ask Tillman which side of the family he took after, since that seemed to be the way the conversation was going, but Ezra said that he never talked about his past and he hadn’t had a very happy childhood.
It seemed like someone like him should have had a happy marriage, but that hadn’t happened for him either. Some people just seemed to get all the bad breaks.
They made it to his truck, and she gave him directions to the pole building where they had horse stalls and kept their tack.
As she led him in, she pointed out some of their ranch horses, although most of them were out in the pasture. Only the ones that needed some special care were inside. Most of the stalls were empty.
“Any open hook on this wall can be yours. The other wall is where we keep the saddles that we use for guests. And occasionally we have a guest who brings their own saddle, and it goes on that wall as well. When something is hanging here, we know it belongs to a specific person, and no one else touches it.”
“Good to know. I’m kind of attached to my saddle.”
“I can’t believe you only have one.”
“I lost all my other ones in the divorce.”
Right.
He said it so flatly, so unemotionally, that she knew there was a whole well of deep, seething emotion underneath it. But she didn’t want to go there. She couldn’t imagine going through what he had gone through, losing his ranch, and it would have to have meant more to him than it would to her.
At least if she lost her ranch, she’d still have her family. But they worked so hard after their parents died to keep the ranch so their family could stay together. That had been the two main things in her life, ranch and family.
And Tillman lost them both.
He hung up his saddle, put his bridle on a peg as well, and she led him through a short tour of the barn, showing where the feed was and that type of thing.
As they walked through the other end of the barn, they came out in the bright sunlight, next to several high-top tables with two chairs at each of them.
“This is a nice place to sit. Typically the guests don’t go back here, and it’s relatively quiet.” She paused. “If you don’t mind, I was hoping we could sit at one of these tables and kind of hash out how we’re going to work things. We have a big job ahead of us, and I suppose we ought to talk about the burden of responsibility and everything.”
“We can, although Ezra told me that I would be doing everything that had to do with actual knowledge of the rodeo, and you would be keeping things organized and making sure the details were taken care of.”
“Yes. That’s exactly right. But I just wanted to make sure that you understood that while you and I are working together, and I’m technically in charge, if you need any time off, I’m the one who will approve that. I know you’re on salary, but I don’t think that making sure that you put in a sufficient number of hours every week is going to be an issue.”
“I really don’t know anything else other than getting up in the morning and going to work, and coming in at dark to go to bed.”
“That’s what I thought. That’s what Ezra said, and I wasn’t worried about that. But I think that since you’re the one with the knowledge of what we need to do, you’re the one that should be technically in charge. Does that make sense?”
His brows furrowed, and then he said, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we ought to sit down and talk about this.”
“Thanks.” She appreciated that he could shift gears, see that he wasn’t seeing the whole picture, and admit that maybe her idea had been right to begin with.
They settled at the table, and she pulled her phone out.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll just record what we’re saying, and then later tonight, I’ll take some notes, make a few spreadsheets, and do whatever else I think I need to do in order to get started with the organization end.”
“I don’t mind at all, and that’s actually a pretty good idea.” He sounded slightly surprised that she was getting into her job immediately.
“So I just told you that I would like for you to be in charge. I mean, not of me, but of the project. If that’s what we can call it.”
“Sure. We’re putting on a rodeo. That’s a big project.”
“And that’s the end goal. But there are lots of little steps to get to that end goal. I can keep track of the little steps, check off the things that we’ve done, but you are the one that knows, for instance, what type of pen we would need if we were going to do barrel racing, for example. What kind of layout we have to have set up for that, and whether we can do calf roping in the same area.”
“I haven’t seen all the buildings yet, but so far, I haven’t seen anything that’s going to work for those types of things. Ezra told me that we are on a shoestring budget, so I think the best thing to do is probably use a paddock that we have that’s about the right size. We’ll put up temporary bleachers, and we’ll make sure that the ground is appropriately prepared, mostly to keep the horses from hurting themselves in whatever aspect they’re being used. There is a certain way the ground should feel. It definitely should not be hard, and it shouldn’t be soft either, because a horse can catch a hoof and pull a tendon or break a leg. I’ve seen it happen.”
“Oh, that’s terrible,” Phoebe said and couldn’t contain her shiver. She had seen several horses put down, and it was never an easy thing. She’d seen grown cowboys crying over their horses, and she couldn’t blame them. When they worked so hard for a person, it was heartbreaking to know that there was nothing someone could do to help them get better. It was also terrible to see them in distress, fear, and pain.
“So... I’d like to know exactly what the budget is, and then I think we need to have a list of all the things you think you’re going to need, because I assume you’re going to have food, possibly even vendor booths set up, and that’s going to take money. I don’t want to spend more than what I have, but I also don’t want to cut corners that don’t need to be cut.”
She winced a little when he said cut corners. All her life, she’d been taught that it was terrible to cut corners, but when it came to finances, sometimes it was necessary.
They talked for a while, and Tillman was all business. His knowledge of the rodeo far exceeded hers, and maybe she shouldn’t have been impressed. Maybe anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of rodeo knew what he knew, but she was impressed nonetheless.
They’d been talking for a while when Phoebe’s stomach growled. She looked down at her phone to catch the time, and she gasped when she realized that two hours had gone by.
“Wow. You must be starving. I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize that we’d been sitting here so long.”
She felt like they had gotten an awful lot accomplished. They had some ground rules laid, and Tillman had obviously been thinking hard about it, because he knew exactly what he wanted, and he was able to rattle off a list of the things that he couldn’t do without, things that he wanted but if they absolutely couldn’t afford it, he could live without, and then things that would be nice to have if they had some extra money.
She hadn’t been nearly that organized. She didn’t have any clue about how much food she should budget for, or whether they should build booths for people or just rent tables, and how much that would cost.
“This is great to start with. I should be able to have some things set up by this evening, if we want to meet again today and go over things.”
“Ezra said we would be meeting morning and evening, and I thought that might be a little much, but to get started with, we can assume the evening meeting is to talk about what we got accomplished that day, and the morning meeting will be for discussion about what we’re going to do.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I thought. We also need to set a date for the rodeo, and...we need to set your schedule as well.”
She knew he wanted to say something different than what he was actually going to say, she could tell from the reluctance on his face and the way his folded hands tightened and his thumb twitched in agitation.
“I have to have a day off next week. I have a date for revisiting our custody agreement. Now that I have a job and a place to stay, and thanks to you and Ezra, I have a place for my kids. I’m hoping to get them for the summer.”
“That’s fine,” she said immediately. She wasn’t sure if his reluctance was a fear that they would think that he wouldn’t be able to do his job if he had his children with him or something else.
“Do you know how old they are?” he asked, his eyes narrowing, like he thought she might have been speaking too soon.
“Ezra told me that you were honest and you had character. He said that you are quiet, and I worried a little that I wouldn’t be able to have a discussion with you like we just had this morning. That worry is alleviated. He also said that you didn’t have the best childhood, and that you’d had a tough break with your marriage, nasty divorce, and you’re hoping to be able to see your children more. That’s all I know about you.”
There. She laid it on the table. She didn’t see any point in keeping things back when putting them out would make everything a little more clear for everyone.
He nodded, like he appreciated the fact that she wasn’t pulling any punches. “My kids are seven and nine.”
“All right. I guess I assumed that they were not toddlers anymore, but I could have been wrong about that. Still, we’d figure something out. This is a family operation. You and Stonewall are the only two people who aren’t married to a sibling or blood relations who work here.”
“I appreciate that. But there won’t be any other children for me.” That was said with a finality that Phoebe didn’t even think about arguing with. “My arbitration date is next Tuesday. It’s a six-hour drive there, which I can do Monday evening after I get off work. The meeting is at eleven AM, and I doubt it will last more than an hour. I’ll be back by Tuesday night, but I’ll need the whole day on Tuesday off.”
“Done.” Phoebe didn’t hesitate. “If you do get your children, and you need time to...take them somewhere, the dentist, the doctor, on a picnic, that time is yours. Family is more important than anything.”
“More important than even keeping the ranch solvent?”
“If I thought that was going to be a problem with you, I might not say it quite the way I am, but yeah. Your family is more important. Take the time you need to be with them.”
He stared at her, and not for the first time, she wondered what he was thinking. It was obvious something was going on in his head, but it was also obvious that she was never going to find out what it was.
Maybe he was surprised that she was putting family ahead of financial security, but in her experience, strong family meant financial security. Of course, his experience was completely different.
Not for the first time, she wondered what his experience had been. How had his family life not been good, according to Ezra? Phoebe knew she could probably ask Ezra, and while he wouldn’t tell her any details that he felt were confidential, he would tell her general things that everyone knew.
Had Tillman grown up in a single-parent home? Had he gone through a nasty divorce as a child? Had neither of his parents wanted him? Surely if he had lost both of his parents, Ezra would have told her, because that would have been something she and Tillman could have bonded over. She knew what it was like to lose her parents, suddenly and with no chance to say goodbye.
Regardless, it probably wasn’t going to change anything. He was keeping a very professional distance from her, and while she wouldn’t have minded being on friendlier terms, terms where she felt comfortable joking and laughing and talking about personal things, she supposed it was for the best. They would get more work done, and be more focused on their jobs, if they were less focused on the relationship between the two of them.
“Let’s go over and get some lunch, and I’ll show you around the rest of the buildings. We do have some lumber left over from some building projects, and you’re welcome to use any of that.”
“Did you guys just put these buildings up?” he asked as she stood up from her chair, and he waited for her before they set off to the big house together.
“Most of them were up when we bought the place. We put the pole building up for the horses and tack, but most of the buildings just needed some maintenance done to them, and we were able to use them. The barn where we keep the hay is the oldest building, and we almost tore it down. If we would have had more money, we would have. The wiring in it is spotty, and at least once or twice a week, something blows a breaker there.”
“Doesn’t sound safe.”
“No. We don’t let the guests go there. But we wanted to have small bales to feed the horses, and we needed a place to store it. A pole building would have been a lot better and a lot easier, but we have the bundles of hay stacked on the barn floor and in the loft areas.”
“I’m happy you said bundles. When you said small bales, I thought maybe I was going to be getting roped into baling hay, and while I’ve done it before, it’s hard work.”
“It sure is. But no, we have all the equipment to make bundles. That all came from Wyoming. We haven’t purchased anything new in a while, just trying to get things off the ground here.”
“There’s a lot of pressure, since it has to support twelve people.”
“Yeah. Our two younger siblings are still in college, and they’re paying their own way, with a few scholarships, but it’s still a lot of people for one ranch to support. That’s why we have so many different things we’re working on.”
“It’s smart to branch out.”
He didn’t say anything more, and they walked together to the kitchen, where she showed him how to go in the back door, where the refrigerator was, and she showed him the stash of sandwiches that had already been put there for the rest of the day.
“I know it feels a little bit weird to just walk into someone’s house and grab stuff out of the refrigerator, but we would really rather you do that than work hungry. We’re not trying to starve anyone. And we know with the accommodations that you have that you don’t exactly have the ability to go home and cook for yourself. If that were different, it’d be a completely different story.”
“Yeah. I see.”
He didn’t sound like he had been convinced of anything, and she made a mental note to make sure that she kept an eye on him and made sure he was eating. She wouldn’t want to walk into someone’s house and just get in the refrigerator, either. Maybe after he worked there for a while, he would feel more comfortable. She hoped so.
But for the time being, he already was slim and didn’t look like he had any weight to lose. She did not want him skipping meals.
The sandwiches were labeled, and she noted that he took two ham and cheese.
“They don’t put condiments on them, but they’re right there in the refrigerator door.”
He jerked his head, grabbing the mustard.
She took a turkey sandwich out and the mayonnaise. She also grabbed a bag of onions and lettuce.
“Sometimes we have tomato slices as well, but anything that’s in these bags are things that we can put on our sandwiches. Most of the time, most of the guys aren’t interested in putting any kind of vegetable on, but I really like lettuce and onion on mine.”
“I’ll take some onions too,” he said calmly as he stood beside her at the counter while she grabbed two paper plates and set her sandwich on one, getting a knife and spreading the mayonnaise on it and pulling some onions and lettuce out of the bags to stick on her sandwich as well.
“Sometimes I’m in a hurry and I don’t bother to do this, but even though I don’t think there’s too much nutritional value in lettuce and onions, it still makes me feel like I’m getting my vegetables for the day if I do that. And it soothes some of my guilt for putting mayonnaise on it.”
“Mayonnaise is in a food group all its own,” Tillman said, and for the first time, Phoebe got the idea that he might have been making a joke. Maybe he did have a sense of humor underneath that taciturn personality. She looked forward to finding out.