Nick
The turn off the highway comes back to me before the sign does.
I slow the truck and take the familiar road toward the ranch, passing stretches of pasture broken up by old oak trees and fence lines I’ve known since I was a kid.
The place has changed over the years, but not enough to make it unfamiliar.
There’s still that same long gravel drive leading toward the house, the barn sitting farther back behind it, and cattle scattered across the pasture like they don’t have a damn thing in the world to worry about.
I glance in the rearview mirror.
Leah is asleep with her head against the window, one hand resting loosely around the plastic emesis basin she’s carried since we left Dallas. The scarf around her head has slipped slightly above one ear, and even asleep, she looks exhausted.
Beside her, Grady is out cold in his booster seat with his glasses crooked and a blue Slurpee stain around his mouth.
My whole world is sitting in the backseat of my truck.
The thought settles somewhere deep in my chest.
By the time we pull up to the house, there are trucks and cars parked everywhere. My brothers are here, my sister, their kids, their grandkids, enough Crawfords to populate half of Parker County. Grady wakes the second I turn off the engine, while Leah takes another moment before opening her eyes.
“You okay?” I ask.
She nods, although I know better than to believe her.
Inside, the house smells like smoked meat and whatever my sister has been baking all morning. Everybody wants introductions, but I get them through the crowd and into the living room first.
Mama is sitting near the windows in her wheelchair.
Grady catches my hand before we reach her.
“Dad,” he whispers. “Is that the wheelchair you told me about?”
“Yeah, partner.”
He studies her for another second. “And she can’t talk because of her brain?”
“That’s right, but remember, we keep questions like that between us.”
His eyes widen behind his glasses. “Oh. Right.”
He presses one finger over his lips.
Mama’s face changes when she sees me. Her smile isn’t what it used to be, but I know it when it comes.
“Happy birthday, Mama.”
I kiss her cheek before bringing Leah closer.
Leah kneels carefully beside her chair and takes her hand.
“Happy birthday, Mrs. Crawford. I’m Leah.”
Mama looks at her for a long moment before curling her fingers around Leah’s.
That alone nearly does me in.
Later, while everyone starts getting ready for the barbecue, I carry our bags into my old bedroom. Leah follows and closes the door behind us.
“I don’t feel good.”
I turn immediately.
Her eyes are already wet.
“I’m so tired, Nick. I don’t want to ruin this weekend, but I feel terrible.”
I pull her against me carefully.
“You’re not ruining anything.”
“I want to go downstairs.”
“Then we’ll go downstairs. And if you last ten minutes, we stay ten minutes. If you need to come back up here, I’ll bring you a plate and sit right here with you.”
She looks up at me.
“Nobody downstairs expects you to pretend you’re not sick, darlin’.”
Her forehead settles against my chest.
“I hate this.”
“I know.”
I kiss the top of her head.
“But you don’t have to be good at having cancer for my family to love you.”
Leah decides she wants to come down for dinner after all, although I make her promise that the second she gets tired, nauseated, overwhelmed, or just plain sick of being around Crawfords, she’ll tell me.
She lasts longer than either of us expects.
We spend most of the evening on the back porch with paper plates balanced on our knees and enough barbecue spread across the tables to feed everybody twice.
My family wastes absolutely no time giving Leah an education in Nicholas Crawford before he learned how to defend himself, and apparently eighty-five years of Mama’s life can’t be celebrated without discussing every humiliating thing I did during the first fifteen of mine.
My brothers tell her about how they’d already be halfway through a day’s work while I was still wandering around behind them asking questions, convinced I was helping because somebody had given me a bucket to carry.
My sister remembers me following Mama everywhere, and one of my nephews swears there’s photographic evidence somewhere of me wearing nothing but cowboy boots and underwear while trying to rope a lawn chair.
“I was four.”
“You were six,” my brother corrects.
“Fuck off.”
Leah laughs so hard she has to press a hand against her stomach, and I immediately look over.
“I’m okay,” she assures me, still laughing.
Every time another story starts, her hand finds my thigh beneath the table, giving it a little squeeze while she looks up at me with this bright smile that makes the embarrassment worth it.
There’s something about watching her learn these pieces of me that gets under my skin in the best possible way.
She listens like none of it is insignificant, like the stupid little boy running around this ranch is somebody she wishes she could have known too.
Out in the yard, Grady has been absorbed into the younger generation so completely that I’ve barely seen him since dinner started.
One of the great-grandkids takes him toward the fence to see the cattle, and twenty minutes later they’re all down by the pond bothering the ducks, Grady’s little bald head easy to pick out among them.
Mama sits near the center of everything, watching the chaos with that quiet smile of hers.
At some point her blanket slips from her knees, and before I can get up, Leah reaches over and fixes it for her.
Mama catches her hand.
Leah smiles and keeps holding it.
And sitting there with my mother on one side, Leah beside me, and Grady running across the same yard I grew up in, I realize I can’t remember the last time coming home felt this much like home.
By the time we get Grady settled into the guest room, he’s barely awake enough to get through brushing his teeth. Leah sits on the edge of the bed while I tuck the covers around him, and he reaches one sleepy hand toward her.
“Night, Mrs. Harrison.”
She takes his hand and kisses his knuckles. “Goodnight, sweetheart.”
“Love you.”
“I love you too.”
His eyes are already closed before we make it to the door.
I walk Leah down the hall to my old bedroom with my hand at the small of her back. She’s exhausted, but there’s something peaceful about her now that wasn’t there earlier, and when I pull back the covers, she climbs in without arguing with me for once.
“There she is,” I murmur. “Finally learning to follow directions.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
I lean over her, intending to kiss her forehead, but she catches the back of my neck and pulls my mouth to hers instead.
The kiss starts soft, almost sleepy, until she kisses me again and her fingers slide into my hair. I brace myself above her carefully, mindful of everything her body has been through, while her mouth moves against mine with a tenderness that makes my chest ache.
“I love you,” she whispers against my lips.
“I love you too, darlin’.”
She kisses my cheek, then the corner of my mouth before settling back against the pillows.
I pull the blanket over her and tuck it around her shoulders.
“You coming to bed?”
“In a little while. I’m gonna look around downstairs for a bit. Hang out with my brothers and sister.”
“Okay.”
I brush my thumb over her cheek. “You need anything before I go?”
She shakes her head, already sinking deeper into the pillow.
“Go. I’m fine.”
I kiss her once more.
“Get some sleep.”
Her eyes close as I switch off the lamp, and by the time I reach the door, her breathing has already begun to even out.
I leave Leah sleeping upstairs and wander through the house without any real destination, letting myself look at things I haven’t bothered looking at in years.
Eventually, I end up outside Dad’s office.
Nobody has changed much since he died. His desk is still angled toward the windows overlooking the pasture, the old leather chair tucked behind it, and the cowhide rug beneath my boots is the same one I used to lie on when I was little while he worked.
I don’t remember when I stopped doing that.
Probably around the same time I started understanding that Dad didn’t particularly want me around.
I step farther inside.
For most of my life, I figured Dad looked at me and saw the thing that took Mama away from him. She’d been a barrel racer before she had me. Horses were her whole life, and then I came along, the pregnancy went bad, and everything changed. She survived, but pieces of her didn’t.
Dad never blamed me out loud.
He didn’t have to.
At least, that’s what I always believed.
I’m turning to leave when something beside the bookcase catches my attention.
There are pictures pinned to the wall.
My pictures.
One of me graduating high school. Another from college.
My medical school graduation announcement is tucked beneath a photograph of me holding my diploma, and beside that is an article about my residency.
There are more after that, things I don’t even remember sending home.
Newspaper clippings. Hospital announcements.
A picture of me in scrubs somebody must have printed off the internet.
My entire fucking life is on this wall.
I reach for the medical school picture, but stop before touching it.
“Wondered where you went.”
My brother appears in the doorway.
I look back at the wall. “Did Dad do this?”
“Yeah.”
“All of it?”
He comes farther into the room and looks at the pictures like there’s nothing remarkable about them.
“Man, Dad loved the hell out of you.”
I laugh once, but there isn’t anything funny in it. “He had a funny way of showing it.”
“He had a funny way of showing everything.” My brother leans against the desk. “He was a hard-ass. Always was. But every time somebody came into this office, he found some excuse to tell them his youngest boy was a doctor.”
I look down because suddenly I can’t keep staring at that wall.
All these years, I thought I knew what Dad felt when he looked at me.
Maybe I never did.
It doesn’t erase anything. It doesn’t give us back the conversations we never had or make me miss him in some new, uncomplicated way.
But standing there, I realize I do miss him.
Maybe I always have.
My brother pats my shoulder.
“We’d love to see you around here more, Nick. All three of you.”
I nod, still looking at Dad’s wall.
“I think I’d like that.”
He squeezes my shoulder before heading toward the door.
“You up for taking the horses out tomorrow?”
I look at Dad’s picture one last time before following him.
“Yeah.”
And this time, I mean it.
“I think we’re ready.”