Chapter 7
CADE
The truck rumbled as it passed over frozen potholes, through fresh powder, and angled toward the county highway that bled into the local town.
Pineville was a handful of minutes one way, and a smaller town lay another handful in the other direction.
Which only increased the appeal of the Iron Creek ranch.
Close enough to civilization, but not too close.
My thoughts wrapped around the business I needed to conduct. Confirm probate at the courthouse, discuss the estate account at the bank. Technically, the ranch wasn’t mine until the paperwork was finalized, but it was on the way. Until the deed came through, Kinoshi had most of the work.
But I had a financial picture to piece together, and rather quickly.
The furnace I’d been harping on Morgan to fix was just about to give out, which is why he’d relied on the wood-burning stove most of the time.
Despite all my best efforts, my more responsible thoughts spun away from business and onto a most distracting topic.
Noelle.
Namely, the tear streaks down her cheeks. Lily asleep in her arms. The domestic tranquility of it killed me. I wanted to wrap my arms around both of them, promise comfort, warmth, safety. I had exactly zero right to them, but it didn’t matter. I already knew I’d do anything for Lily.
And wasn’t that weird, given I just met them? These protective instincts were a bother.
All the same, I hoped Noelle took my offer.
The sincerity behind it was real enough.
There wasn’t enough time for me to run the ranch at full capacity, let alone reconfigure the interior of the house.
Luckily, Cody and Wyatt were handy enough with tools, and winter was slow for them.
They needed to stay busy in between bouts of online homeschool work, and they needed the money.
House foreman, I thought. I need a house foreman.
The blinker clicked in bland monotony as I slid onto the highway.
I had planned on inheriting the ranch, but I hadn’t planned on how I’d feel.
It seemed like I might experience anything except this heavy dread and a new, looming weight of responsibility for a young woman and her baby.
The adding of another stone to my backpack, a plate to already exhausting armor.
Really, nothing would change. Everything I used to do was still on my list.
Except, now it was mine.
Which changed everything.
I slowed as I neared the courthouse. Too late to go back now. I owned a ranch and I needed to figure it out. The bank caught my attention as I pulled into the parking lot, grateful it was on my errands route. As ugly as this reckoning might get, I had another reckoning coming up after it.
One with my sister Cora.
A flurry of auburn hair flew at me a couple of hours later.
Laughing, I caught my sister, Cora, and gripped her to me. She held me close, flooding me with memories of her as a little girl, when I was the older brother who knew no wrong. She beamed up at me after pulling away, her hands on my arms.
“How are you?”
“Good.”
“You’re home safe from Florida!”
“Thank heavens.”
Her boyfriend, Hawk, waved from the table, near a laptop, a cup of abandoned coffee, and a plethora of drawings scattered around. Cora grabbed my hand, tugged me out of her apartment doorway, shoved me into a recliner, and snapped the TV off.
“Tell me,” she demanded, all levity gone.
I knew exactly what she meant.
She’d waited almost two days for my full report on what I found in Florida, so my grace period had expired. Hawk drifted to her side, set a hand on her knee, and pulled her close. She went willingly. I leaned forward, propped my elbows on my knees.
“I didn’t see Mom, but I found where she’s been, and I spoke to a few people who have seen her, or know her.”
“Who?”
“A pastor, a few workers at a homeless shelter she may have stayed in. When I spoke to other people who frequented the same shelter, they were reluctant to speak about her. Another middle-aged woman was a fount of information, though. She’s how I found a man named Pastor Mike with a local church that does a lot of outreach to homeless people.
He thinks he recognized Mom in the pictures I showed him. ”
Cora absorbed that with fluttering eyelashes and bemused stupefaction, like none of it felt quite real. I might have been speaking about a neighbor, not our mother.
Her relationship with Hawk was still fledgling, but I couldn’t imagine anyone better for Cora.
Hawk’s mother, a woman they called Bette, had stepped in as an immediate maternal fixture for Cora recently, and that was a good thing.
There were some things I could give Cora, but a lot more that I couldn’t.
Hawk and Bette satisfied the height of what lay out of my reach.
“What did Pastor Mike say?”
“We discussed a few details that confirmed the woman he knew was likely our mother. I left my contact information, in case they run into her again. Mom doesn’t sound very lucid.
I also spoke to the local county office.
They can’t give out information, but I did look up public arrest records to see if she was in them. ”
Her brows rose.
“And?”
I shrugged. What was there to say? Little had changed for Mom, who lived in a delusional world from which she hadn’t emerged, to my understanding, in almost a decade. Her mental health had been a dam bursting, and then a landslide.
We lost her to both.
“Same as we saw here,” I concluded, and tucked away the list of miscellaneous arrests for petty crimes to the back of my mind.
Cora didn’t need those details. Mom wasn’t violent, but she wasn’t well, either.
In the past, officers pulled her off the street when she went into one of her fits, and she usually left the jail in the morning after settling down.
Brimming tears and a sweet nod followed.
The urge to hug the pain out of Cora was near physical, but Hawk had already wrapped his arm more fully around her.
She curled like a koala into his side. But, as always, Cora didn’t give in to massive emotions.
Her practical side allowed them. She stared out the window at the wintry landscape while tears streamed down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Cora,” I said, for lack of anything else. This was the one problem I could never really fix. Food, shelter, and clothes through her young years? Managed it. College tuition? I figured it out. Boyfriends? Taught her well. Art?
Well, that was her gift, but I could always help her figure out how to get the resources into her hands to let her creative streak fly.
Our mother?
I got nothing.
Hawk said, “Thank you, Cade. Knowing will be easier, I think.”
Cora nodded, sniffled.
I don’t know if I agree with that, I thought.
The entire trip to Florida felt like a waste, yet something I had to do.
I learned nothing new. Didn’t see Mom. And yet .
. . that also felt like the best ending.
Seeing Mom was like looking into the face of my worst self, and understanding that a shadow side existed to everyone.
Some of us fought it.
Some of us couldn’t.
And only fate seemed to know who landed where.
The ugly algebra of Mom’s mental health issues and the way our emotions wrapped around her were an ugly tangle in themselves. I cleared my throat, eager to change the subject, but grateful to have my reporting done.
“In the meantime, I have a . . . situation added to the situation at the ranch.”
Cora brightened. “Oh?”
“Old man Morgan’s will confirmed what I thought—the ranch is mine.”
Cora’s eyes widened. True joy perfused them as she swiped her tears free.
“That’s wonderful, Cade!”
“It is for me.”
“But . . . what about his family?”
I snapped two fingers. “Bingo. His granddaughter, Noelle, and four-week-old great-granddaughter, Lily, flew out for the reading of the will. Noelle seemed . . . rather surprised that Bart didn’t inherit.”
“Who could blame her? Her family anticipated receiving it, right?”
“That they did. I don’t know what she’ll choose, but I’ve offered to let her stay, if she can help me oversee house repairs and renovations.
The ranch house needs a lot of work. A lot of work.
Which doesn’t cover updates to the barn and the equipment, and caring for the animals.
I did my best the last several years, but Morgan made it hard to do more than keep everything afloat. ”
“You’ll figure it out, Cade. You always do, and you always have.”
“Thanks.”
“Let me know if you need any help,” Hawk offered. “I’d be happy to come work with you.”
“Thanks. I need to make sure the furnace doesn’t stop first, then I’ll get a plan going.”
“My brother Noah is looking for a reason to hide in the mountains for a while, and he’d probably work for free in exchange for a place to stay. He lacks nothing; certainly not money, so let me know if you need another worker.”
“That is an offer I may take you up on.”
After we had stabilized heat, water, and plumbing, the greater picture would come together. Until I got that barn window replaced, I would be sleeping on a cold couch in the house and praying the heat stayed on.