Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
JENSEN
We go out to the stockyards, Landis and I, on Saturday night.
When we pull up, I can already tell it’s going to be one of those nights we stay out too late.
The pole barn is packed, bodies like sardines in a can.
Landis stands outside for a second, having a smoke.
He’s going to fight tonight, third round.
A truck door slams, and Deacon appears out of the darkness, his middle son following at his heels.
Gage Ryder is hell on wheels, not unlike my Julie-Mae.
He’s the spitting image of his father, buzzed head and tattoos up one arm.
I’m just waiting for him to do something terrible and send Freya into a spiral.
Although, with four boys, she’s pretty well used to chaos.
Deacon pauses at my elbow. “You fighting, Landis?”
Landis jerks his head. “Yeah.”
“Della know?”
He gives him a look that reminds me of myself. Landis doesn’t look anything like me; he’s the spitting image of his biological father, not a drop of Della in that face except his dark gaze.
He’s big, a little broader than me, with brown hair and a handsome face, too handsome to have come from me.
There’s a smooth quality to his voice that gave me a jumpscare when he hit puberty, because it’s identical to Leland’s.
I could tell that shook Della up. Now, I think it’s healed her, getting to see that face on somebody who loves her, who’d never hurt her.
He forgot a lot of what happened in Kentucky, being only four when it all went down, but it became pretty evident to everyone we weren’t related, and the kids at school started pointing it out. I don’t know who said what to him, but one day he came home with a question that broke my damn heart.
“Did you want to be my dad?” he said, fresh off a day at middle school. “Or was it just because you married Mom?”
I stopped what I was doing to stare at him across the room.
“Who’s woken up with you every night you’ve gotten sick, kid?” I said.
“You did,” he said, voice quiet.
“There’s your answer.”
Della answered his questions as he grew, but a lot of them died down when he grew big enough, his peers stopped bringing it up. It was hard to tease a kid standing a head taller than everyone else and several inches wider in the shoulders.
“Jensen.”
I blink, tearing my eyes from Landis, who’s talking to Gage by the door. Deacon jerks his head.
“Come on. Let’s get something to drink,” he says.
We enter the deafening room just as the first round ends.
In the interim since I met Della, they put up a real pit, sunken into the ground with a fence around it.
I never got a chance to fight in it. Around the time Julie-Mae came along, I decided it was probably time to stop fighting recreationally.
I didn’t have much to feel angry over anymore.
Landis, though, he took a shine to it the minute he was old and big enough. That concerns me, just a little bit. I know why I started fighting in the stockyards, but I don’t know what it is that fuels him.
The boys head over to watch the fight, but I hang back with Deacon to get a beer.
He’s in a good mood tonight, as am I. The first haying season is done, and he sold off a handful of horses the other week and made his entire paycheck for the year.
Everything is going right in his life. Mine isn’t doing too bad either.
“I didn’t think I’d get here,” says Deacon abruptly.
I glance around. I’m not so sure what’s special about the bar in the stockyards. “What’s that?”
He leans on the bar, tapping his bottle. “I was just thinking about it last night. I guess I kinda thought me and you would do something dumb. Accidentally go lights out before we ever had a chance to have the kids.”
My gaze roves over our sons by the pit. They’re all grown up. Landis is a handful of years older than Gage, but they’re still pretty close. If I squint, they kind of look like a copy-paste of us, just in the way they’re standing.
“That why you knocked Freya up so fast?” I say wryly.
“You’re not any better.”
I shrug, because I can’t dispute that. Our first baby was by accident, and so was our second.
That’s just how life shook out for us, and that’s fine by me.
I was ready to have a baby with her the minute we touched down in Montana.
Our life together has been good. I have no regrets over anything we’ve done since we met.
The crowd roars, signaling an end to the fight. I glance at the board—Landis is up next.
I never got as nervous for my fights the same way I get nervous for his. I’m proud. He’s a good fighter. But I kind of hate that sometimes, I have to stand there and watch somebody beat the shit out of my kid. Luckily, that doesn’t happen much anymore.
“You good? You seem kinda tense.” Deacon glances at me.
I shrug. “I’m good.”
He studies me, eyes narrowed. I shrug, watching as Landis and his opponent stand outside the ring talking as they wrap their hands. I think he’s somebody he’s fought before, but I can’t place his name. This should be an easy fight. They’re both about the same size, and they both look ready to go.
The referee pulls back the corner gate, letting them enter.
The crowd is closing in, but I can see over their hands from my vantage point at the bar.
Landis doesn’t like me to get close. He says it makes him lose his concentration, but I think he’s just worried I’ll interfere if he gets pinned.
I glance over at Gage, hovering at the edge.
He should be more worried about him—he’s a hothead when it comes to shit like this.
The whistle blows.
“Patterson,” says Deacon.
“What?”
“That’s the last name of the other fighter? I couldn’t think of it.”
I jerk my head. “Yeah, I thought he looked familiar. He local?”
“Believe he’s out of West Lancaster.”
The crowd gasps. We both lean in to see Landis step back and do a lap, his opponent on the ground.
It takes a second, but he’s up, clearly winded.
I don’t think this fight is going to take very long.
Landis is the opposite of me as a fighter: big, carrying a lot of bulky muscle, and slow.
But when he makes contact, it’s curtains down, show over.
He’s got a punch like being kicked in the face by a horse. I’d know, I trained him.
They go in. I see it coming, like a whistling train down the tracks. The fighter fumbles, doesn’t move in time, and bam—Landis has him down, flat on his back.
The referee crouches over him then raises a hand, signaling the end.
Landis waits until his opponent is up and shakes his hand.
Then, he climbs out of the pit, clearly disappointed.
I get the feeling. Part of the reason I ended up retiring is that I got better than a lot of the local fighters and there wasn’t any challenge to it.
Landis is good enough to fight professionally.
He comes up, wiping the sweat off his face.
“Good match,” I say.
He shrugs. “Maybe I should fight in the city sometime.”
“You can. You have to get on the roster for those. I can call the guy…what’s his name?”
“Isn’t he also named Jensen?” Deacon says.
“Yeah, you know, I think you’re right.”
Gage appears, slapping Landis on the shoulder. “Let’s head into town. All they got is beer here tonight.”
They both want to hit the bar in West Lancaster before it closes. I’m not really a late night drinker anymore, but when we go out to the stockyards, I allow for a little more free rein than usual. Deacon glances at me, and I nod, grabbing my hat.
“Yeah, let’s go.”
It’s about three when I finally get home and sink into bed beside Della. She rolls onto her side, throwing an arm across my chest. In the dark, I lift her hand and kiss her knuckles. She sighs and snuggles close.
Then, it’s morning, and I’m peeling my tired ass out of the bed, wishing I hadn’t gone so hard last night.
I’m not hungover, just too old to be up all night.
It takes a cold shower and a cup of coffee in the kitchen to put some life back in me, but I’m back in the saddle by the time the front door opens.
My eldest daughter, Delia, walks down the hall. She got all my looks, light brown curly hair and blue eyes. A quick smile and a smart mouth came along with that too.
“Hey, Dad,” she says, setting her purse down. “I’m just stopping to drop off some eggs.”
Ever since they got chickens, she’s always trying to get people to take the eggs off her hands.
All she does is get chickens, have too many eggs, and then keeps buying more of those damn birds, like that’ll help somehow.
Her husband doesn’t say a word about it either.
He’s turning her into an egg distributing menace.
“We have enough,” I say, pulling out a chair.
She sinks down, sighing. Her hand rests over her belly, almost nine months along at this point.
Her husband is a good guy, some twice removed relation of my retired lawyer, Jay Reed’s, family.
He worked up on Sovereign Mountain for a while then came down to train horses with Deacon.
Maybe a little older than I would like at thirty-two, but I have absolutely no leg to stand on in that department.
“You want some coffee?” I ask.
She nods, blowing out a long breath. “This kid won’t sleep. I’m churning like a cement mixer all night.”
I laugh, because she really is just a female version of me, right down to the construction references.
“You sound like your mother when she was pregnant with you.”
“I don’t believe I was ever this wild.”
I set the percolator up and lean on the counter. “Not as bad as Julie-Mae. I think that was Della’s worst.”
Delia gets a look on her face, but as soon as I look over, it’s gone, replaced by a sweet smile. I narrow my eyes.
“Wait…I thought Julie-Mae was with you,” I say. “She doesn’t work morning shift.”
“She went out for coffee or something,” she says. “In Knifely.”
“We have coffee here.”
She smiles, hands folded on her belly.
“Delia,” I say. “Where is your sister?”
“She’s having coffee in Knifely.”
“With who?”
There it is, the guilty look that tells me I’ve hit the nail on the head. I turn the percolator off and set a hot cup on the table, sinking down into the chair beside her like this is an interrogation room.
Normally, I stay out of my children’s dating lives.
Whatever they do is up to them. But Julie-Mae always goes right for the worst kind of men—the renegades, the cast off fighters at the stockyards, the cowboys on a one night layover in South Platte.
In the last year, I’ve had to pick her up in the middle of the night more times than I can count.
Delia clears her throat, shrugging.
“You’re a real bad liar,” I say.
She mumbles something. I give her a stern look.
“Fine,” she says, pursing her lips. “Gage.”
“What?”
“She’s talking to Gage Ryder.”
I sit up. “Oh, no, we are not doing this.”
She lets out a sigh, although I’m not sure if it’s at the situation or at being pregnant. I pour an extra cup of coffee and grab my hat off the table, fitting it on. Delia heaves herself up, following me down the hall.
“Dad,” she calls, “please don’t.”
“Don’t what?” I stop, looking back.
“Don’t overreact.”
“I am underreacting,” I say, yanking open the door. “I will be back with Julie-Mae. You can put the eggs in the fridge.”
I let the screen door slam and head down the front drive.
To my left is the employee housing I built when we expanded and started raising more cattle.
The construction business has been passed off to a full time company that operates it.
I wanted to be at the ranch more often when the kids were little, so I hired a manager and got it working without me.
Now, Landis acts as my ranch manager and lives in the secondary house just over the hill.
I consider seeing if he knew about this, but I kind of think he would have said something.
That stops me. What the fuck am I doing?
I run a hand over my face, wondering why this has me upset.
Out of all the people Julie-Mae has gone out with, Gage Ryder is the least problematic.
Do I like it? No, but she’s not in danger.
Maybe I need to take a beat and talk to Della about it.
She’s always the voice of reason when it comes to these things.
I take a breath, looking out over the mountain range. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember what I experienced as a teenager and young adult is just that—my own experience. Even after all this time, I have to check myself and remember I’m all good now.
And my kids are alright.