Chapter 5 – Kaitlyn
FIVE
KAITLYN
The view out my childhood bedroom window growing up was of the Swinging D in the far off distance. Not the Lodge, of course – but the arch of the gate announcing the start of the property.
But I always knew the Lodge was there. Behind that arch. The two story, seven million square foot stone and beam house where generations of McGraws grew up to terrorize generations of Calloways.
Every year, the McGraws had big Christmas parties and branding parties and post round-up parties. The whole town would be invited, except for us. Or maybe we were invited, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t hear of us going.
And I got to watch all of the comings and goings from my bedroom window.
But I’d never been inside of it.
Crazy how one spunky Calloway widow in eighteen hundred-whatever, who wouldn’t sell her land to the asshole McGraw cattle baron, started this whole thing.
Add in some duels, some romances gone wrong, a bootlegging showdown, a couple of attempted murders, and a few kidnappings, and here we were. Hundreds of years into a hostile feud.
Now, Leroy McGraw was trying to change it all from the grave.
I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t living it.
Harmony must have heard Tag’s pickup truck pulling into the gravel that framed the front of the house, because by the time we got out of the truck, both families had poured out onto the porch.
I stopped in my tracks.
Mom.
Honestly, I hadn’t expected the sight of her to hit me so much.
She stood in front of everyone, wringing her hands. Her once bright red hair was a little more grey, but everything else about her was exactly the same. The green eyes that all my sisters had. The compact body capable of making wild art, fixing fences, and herding alpacas in the same day.
She’d always been a fun mom. Zany and loving. But somehow…distant. With me, anyway. I watched the way she seemed to know my sisters. Anticipate their needs and moods and be right there to comfort or share in some joyful, dumb moment. But I always felt outside of all of that.
A stranger to my mom.
It wasn’t intentional, I knew that. And I never said anything, because Mom and her sensitive soul would be devastated if she thought she’d done anything wrong.
What would be the point in that? I blamed it on my brain and my mathematical ability, which meant I bent more toward logic than emotion. That just wasn’t my parents.
But, standing here, looking at my mom and sisters, who I thought always looked like a coven of witches, I could admit, it hurt .
My childhood had hurt.
It was my dad who had been there when I needed to feel loved and accepted and appreciated, despite being different.
We had inside jokes and loved listening to the Padres’ games in the garage. I had no idea what that team meant to him , but that was his team. He visited me at school once. Showing up at Columbia in an old suit, like he was there to impress. Thinking about it gave me a painful twist in my chest.
Three of the McGraw brothers came out to stand beside my sisters.
Carter, the oldest, a widower, I knew, with three kids.
Ethan, handsome enough if you liked really successful surgeons who gave it all up for love, which I suppose had its appeal.
And, Mac, the youngest of those assembled, the tragic Romeo to my sister’s Juliet.
Missing was Seth, who was my age. Harmony had told me he was off somewhere recovering from a minor rodeo injury, but would soon be back on the circuit. Which, wasn’t every cowboy always recovering from some injury or another?
And, of course, Eli, who was our brother Boone’s age, wasn’t there.
He and Boone had actually joined the military together, and they were both stationed somewhere overseas with their units.
It was always tough getting the story from Boone where he was, I wondered if the McGraws had the same issue with Eli.
Regardless, this was some hell of a welcoming committee.
“This is some greeting,” I whispered, unsettled by all the attention.
“You’ve been gone a long time, Sunshine. Nothing wrong with welcoming home the prodigal child,” Tag said .
“Why are they just standing there looking at me?” I asked.
“Why are you?” Tag shot back.
Fair.
I lifted my hand in a wave, and like I’d shot off a starting gun, Harmony sprinted off the porch and wrapped me in her arms. It was like being slammed back into my own body. My own life. This. Here. In her arms. My nose in her hair. This was home. It had been so long.
“Thank you for coming,” she whispered into my neck. “You’re going to save all of us.”
“No pressure,” I said, pulling away, but I was still smiling. It was hard not to smile around Harmony. “I want to see this will.”
“Right. Of course. But first, we have to tell you something.” Harmony’s face fell, like what she had to tell me might be the end of the world.
“It can’t be that bad,” I said, with a laugh.
“It’s not…great.”
“I’ll do it,” Mom said, slowly descending the front steps. “It should be me.”
She had the look of a woman headed to the gallows. Which was not a look Mom wore that often. A cold chill spilled down my spine.
What the hell had I come home to?
I felt a tug on the back of my linen dress and Tag pulled me back toward him and dropped his head toward my ear. “You need me, I’ll be waiting.”
I looked at him over my shoulder. “You going to protect me from my mother?”
His face was grim too, and I realized that they hadn’t just brought me home to save the Swinging D.
They had also brought me home for this .
Whatever news they were about to drop on my head. News so bad, even Tag was worried about me.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I pressed Tag. “What didn’t you tell me in New York?”
“Not my job to tell you anything, Sunshine. It was only my job to bring you home.”
“Sunshine, come inside,” my mom said, waving me toward her. “We can talk in the living room.”
I looked again at Tag, trying to read something in his expression, but he gave me nothing.
I walked towards my mother with heavy legs.
Sick of this feeling, this old Smarty Sunshine feeling of always waiting for some shoe to drop.
Bracing for some new torture coming my way.
So what if there was some bad news? I ate bad news for breakfast. Bad news was a major part of my job. And I was fucking excellent at my job.
I put my chin in the air and remembered who the hell I was.
“I go by Kaitlyn, now,” I said. Mom looked at me like I didn’t even make sense. “As a name. People in New York…they call me Kaitlyn.”
“Honey,” she said, and after ten long years, she wrapped me in her arms, pulling me down against her.
Sudden and strange tears bit into my eyes.
She smelled the same. Patchouli and Earl Grey Tea.
“You can call yourself whatever you want, but the first time I looked into your face after they pulled you from my body and put you on my chest, I knew you were nothing but Sunshine.” She leaned back and looked into my face.
The tears in her eyes made me nervous. “Now, let’s go inside and get this done. It’s about time.”
Tag
I watched the whole family follow Monica Calloway into the house after Sunshine. I knew, of course, what they were going to tell her. What Monica had been too scared to tell Sunshine her whole life.
I didn’t like the word coward, and it wasn’t a term I would use to describe Monica, who was as much a force of nature as any of the Calloway women.
But, it was cowardly that she never told Sunshine that Leroy McGraw was her biological father.
“Thank you for bringing her home,” Ethan said, coming down the steps toward me, rather than going with the clan inside.
I shrugged. “Sunshine chose to come for her own reasons. All I did was put the idea in her head and give her a ride.”
Ethan had been my best friend growing up. My partner in crime, and I was thrilled he was back in The Gulch. He turned and we stood side by side, squinting up at the house.
“Sometimes it’s hard to believe anything good can come out of what my old man had planned.”
“You and Harmony,” I told him. “That’s good.”
“Yeah, that is good.”
There was no denying the bone deep satisfaction in his voice, and I was happy for him. I really was.
I wasn’t one to pine. Or think about shit like the future and family.
My dad was getting on me about the whole thing, a wife, grandchildren, and all that bullshit.
And, every time he did, I reminded him that none of that had gone so well for him, so what was there to recommend it to me?
I remembered my mom and dad fighting. I remembered Mom crying.
I sure as hell remembered her leaving. I remembered the long days I was left to my own devices while Dad worked, before I was able put on the work gloves and work alongside him.
There had been times, I felt like collateral in a fight I never asked for, and certainly never wanted.
The work was what you could count on. The work and the animals and the land – that was satisfaction for me.
Marriage was for other people.
“She should have been told,” I said, not that it mattered now. “When she wasn’t a kid anymore, she should have been told.”
Ethan didn’t have any control over that, I knew. Like everyone else, he only found out a couple weeks ago he had a half-sister.
Ethan lifted a brow. “When has Sunshine ever been a kid?”
Amen to that.
“How do you think she’s going to take this?” Ethan asked.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “But, one thing I do know is, you lot better be good to her. She’s been treated like an outsider in this town for too long.”
I felt Ethan looking at me like I’d stunned him, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t care what he thought, what mattered was how that family treated Sunshine now that she was family.
The front door to the Lodge crashed open, rattling the glass in the windows.
“Jesus,” Ethan breathed. “What-”