Colt #2
Shortly after five o’clock, I stroll through the front door of my parents’ home not far from Wells Canyon.
Betty rushes past me, eager to get to the kitchen for a scrap of food.
With a swift kick, my boots join the pile of shoes gathered near the front door, and I head toward the boisterous laughter coming from the family room.
Family dinners have been a thing since I was a kid, and Mom insisted they continue even after my uncle sold his farm and everyone went their separate ways.
The crowd has changed over time, with the addition of spouses and kids, but on the first Sunday of every month, there’s food on the table and extended family around it.
“You did not bring fast food to family dinner,” Mom says, sliding an arm around my waist and pressing the side of her head to my chest. An open palm smacks hard against my gut, momentarily knocking the wind out of me.
With a groan, I rub the tender spot. “Give a working man a break, would ya? Everybody loves chicken nuggets, anyway. We can put them on a fancy plate.”
“Nuggets?” my younger brother, Beau, shouts from the iPad propped up on the fireplace mantel.
I can’t keep track of where in the world he and his girlfriend are; they’re touring around playing country music.
He’s seen more of the world in the few months they’ve been together than I’ve ever seen on television.
I reply, “So fresh there’s still steam coming off ’em, too.”
The second the box opens, Betty’s sitting on my feet with anticipatory drool hanging from her lip.
I gently shoo her away in order to get close to the camera, a nugget pinched between my fingertips.
A swirling trail of hot air obscures my brother’s face, and when it clears, I can see him salivating thousands of miles away.
“Here, I’ll give you one.” I hold the nugget up to the camera, and Beau goes along with a few pretend bites while his girlfriend laughs at him in the background.
“Fucking delicious,” he mutters, doing a pretty good impression of somebody talking with their mouth full.
“You’re an idiot.” I pop the chicken nugget into my mouth. Regret seeps from my burning taste buds, and I breathe in and out rapidly to cool things off before I spontaneously combust.
Cackling, Beau calls me an idiot at the same time somebody claps a hand against my back, sending me reeling forward with a sputtering cough. Betty’s on top of the mess before Mom has the chance to see it littered across her carpet.
“How’s the ranch treating you?” Uncle Chuck asks.
Once I’m through the coughing fit induced by the chicken caught in my throat, I brush a couple tears from under my eyes and choke out a “Good.”
“Good, good. No secret talent that’s gonna take you out touring around the world, making a ton of money like your brother?”
“None that I know of yet.”
“Damn, too bad. Was hoping between the two of you, you’d fund my retirement. You owe me winters in Florida for basically raising your asses while my brother was out gallivanting around the damn country.”
Though he did a hell of a lot more than any other man did for me and Beau, it’s a bit of a stretch to say he raised us. That was Mom. But Dad’s sitting in a recliner not quite ten feet away, so Chuck’s clearly trying to get under his skin. Brother shit. I get it.
“Well, crap.” I suck my teeth, pointing to my brother on the screen. “Beau better get it together, because I was counting on him for winters in Florida, too.”
“Neither one of you would last a day in the heat.” Beau takes a bite of something crunchy, and I squint to see what.
“It’s dinnertime and you’re eating Oreos? Mom’s gonna whup your ass.” I give him a tsk-tsk with a wag of my finger before carrying on to the kitchen, ignoring his argument that it’s not dinnertime where he is.
The small kitchen smells overwhelmingly like homemade bread, as per usual.
My mom missed her calling as a world-class chef, and we’re the lucky bastards who reap the benefits of her skill in the kitchen.
Although my parents only moved to this house a few years ago, if I ever win the lottery, I’ll buy my mom a new place with a kitchen four times this size and give her all the kitchen gadgets she could ever need. It’s the least she deserves.
My stomach’s rumbling and the singular chicken nugget isn’t cutting it. So I immediately grab a bread knife and home in on a loaf sitting unattended—seemingly still warm, even.
Until the sting of a damp kitchen towel across my ass sends me lurching forward with an embarrassing squeal. “What the hell was that for?”
I give my ass cheek an invigorating massage, trying to ease the sting.
“If you cut that one, it’ll be gummy inside. It needs to rest.” She shakes her head, pushing the loaf aside and plopping down a perfectly round sourdough. Followed closely by the sharp noise of the ceramic butter bell sliding the length of the speckled counter.
Once I have three thick slices of sourdough with butter stacked on a plate, I sink into an empty chair at the well-loved wooden kitchen table, opposite my cousin Fiona and her baby.
“She’s the sweetest little muffin.” Mom leans in to sniff the baby’s hair on her way to hand me a cold beer. “Isn’t it so nice to have a baby around here?”
“More meatball than muffin, if you ask me.”
Fiona kicks me hard under the table. “Nobody asked you, asshole.”
Jesus Christ, today seems to be Take Your Unchecked Aggression Out on Colt Day.
Groaning, I cup my rapidly bruising shin. The tablecloth gets in the way of checking to see if Fiona’s wearing steel toes tonight, but I suspect she might be. “Meatballs are great! Ma’s whole family is Italian. We love meatballs.”
Fiona twists her mouth, slowly standing and muttering something under her breath as she walks away. She’s not even wearing shoes.
“Well, she’s not getting a Christmas card from me and Betty this year,” I say to my mom after the steel-footed mama bear is out of earshot.
The look she gives is enough to make me recant that statement, and I take to digging into the delicious bread instead.
“How’s work been, bud?” My mom takes Fiona’s place at the table, sipping her evening espresso.
I grew up obsessed with horses and rodeos and cowboys and this entire lifestyle.
My mom did her damnedest to put the kibosh on it, wanting different for her kids than her husband, I suppose.
But the harder she pushed me to try team sports or take up a hobby or apply to colleges in the city, the harder I dug my heels down into the stirrups.
Now that I’m nearly thirty, she’s come to accept there’s no changing my mind.
Which I’m thankful for, because the last thing I ever want to do is disappoint her.
For a hot minute after I first started at the ranch, I considered quitting to make her happy.
Only reason I didn’t was because Beau followed me there, and I had loyalty to my younger brother that I couldn’t abandon.
I hold up a finger to pause until I’ve swallowed. I try to limit my choking on food to once daily.
“Not bad.”
She clearly wants more, judging by the slow nod and unwavering eye contact. But the weekends are so damn uneventful, I can’t find anything worth mentioning.
“Jonas has been killin’ it lately. Threw him on the back of a horse the other day, and the kid took to it like he’s been riding his whole life.
I took a video to show Whit, actually.” My ass lifts from the chair slightly so I can grab the phone from my back pocket.
After a few seconds, I’m showing my mom the short video I took on the trail.
“I mean…about fifteen minutes after this, he fell off. But he did get back on eventually.”
Her eyes grow wide. “He fell off? How did Whit take that?”
Between the family group chat and a longstanding online Scrabble game, I check in with Mom daily.
She knows the basics: Denny asked me to pick up Jonas one day, and in the weeks since then, he’s become my sidekick at the ranch.
I told her about how Whit chewed my ass out for wearing an inappropriate shirt—and she took Whit’s side—but that’s where I stopped.
She doesn’t know that Whit is a fucking smoke show. If I told her that, she’d be pressuring me to ask her on a date or something. She’s surprisingly chill to hang out with, so it’s not that I’m opposed to the idea, but Whit has zero interest in me.
“Once she confirmed he hadn’t hit his head and nothing was broken, she was okay.
She seemed pretty surprised I even told her about it happening, considering he wasn’t hurt.
” I pick at the crust on my piece of bread.
“Remember that time you had to throw Beau over your shoulder at the fair and carry him out because he got mad and planted his ass on the ground?”
She rolls her eyes at the immediate recollection.
Beau was around Jonas’s age. Way too big to be easily carried, and he knew it, so he parked his ass on the ground when it was time to leave the fair.
Mom surprised us both by chucking him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes and marching his ass through the closest crowd of preteen girls she could find.
“Thought I was gonna have to do that with Jonas after he fell off. I think Betty would’ve kicked my ass for laying a finger on that kid, though.”
She laughs. “When you have your own kids, Betty’s not going to leave their side for a single second.”
“Yeah, probably won’t even let anyone near the kid.”
She glances down at the last of her espresso. “Assuming Betty’s not too old by that point…”
Here we go.
“Kind of hard to give you grandchildren without a woman in the picture, Ma.”
Betty must’ve heard her name, because she trots through the open doorway, coming to settle at my feet. I break my last slice of bread in half and lean down to give part of it to her, followed up with a head pat.
“You know, the sweetest girl started coming to my book club. I could see if she’s single.”