Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Bex
Haven’t slept more than four hours straight since I moved back.
The guest room at Earl’s ranch has a mattress older than I am and a window that faces east, so the pre-dawn glow hits me right in the face around four whether I want it to or not.
But it’s not the mattress.
It’s not the light.
It’s the house itself—the sounds it makes in the dark, the settling and creaking of old wood, the way the hallway floorboards moan when you step on the third one from the bathroom.
I know these sounds the way you know your own heartbeat.
I grew up in this house more than I grew up in my own.
The difference is that now, at 4:30 in the morning, I can hear Earl coughing through the wall.
Not the dry, bark-like cough of a man who’s been breathing Texas dust for sixty-something years.
This is wet. Deep.
The kind that starts in the bottom of the lungs and drags itself up like something trying to climb out.
It goes on for thirty seconds, a minute, while I lie in the dark and count the gaps between each one and try to remember what the oncologist said about when a cough becomes something to worry about versus just the chemo doing its job.
Everything about this is something to worry about.
Stage 3.
The words sit in my chest like shrapnel.
The coughing stops. I hear the creak of his bed frame, the shuffle of slippers on hardwood, the bathroom door closing.
He’s up.
Which means I’m up.
Which means another day of pretending I have any idea what I’m doing.
I swing my legs off the bed.
My boots are on the floor where I left them—always within reach, a habit from a childhood where leaving fast was sometimes the only option.
My hands ache before I even flex them.
Knuckles, fingers, the deep muscles of my forearms that do the work of gripping a horse’s hoof against a thousand pounds of resistance.
A farrier’s hands.
Earl’s hands, once. Now mine.
I pull on jeans, a flannel, a thermal underneath because October mornings in the country still bite before the sun gets involved.
Braid my hair back without looking in the mirror because the mirror in the guest room is the same one Rose and I used to stand in front of as kids, and some mornings I can’t look at my own reflection without seeing the ghost of a twelve-year-old blonde girl standing beside me, both of us giggling while Earl hollered from the kitchen that the biscuits were burning.
A couple of weeks back in Sharp and the memories haven’t gotten easier.
I don’t think they’re going to.
Earl’s ranch sits on eighty acres of rolling limestone and scrub oak about four miles outside of town.
It’s not much by Texas standards—not a working cattle operation, not a showplace, just a piece of land that one family has held for three generations through stubbornness and will.
Earl ran horses here for decades.
Bred some, trained some, shod all of them.
He was the best farrier in this part of the state before his back started going, and even after that, he kept working until the arthritis in his hands made it impossible to hold a rasp steady.
That’s when he taught us.
Rose and me, sixteen years old, standing in this same barn while Earl demonstrated how to position yourself under a horse’s belly without getting killed.
Rose was terrified.
I was thrilled.
She had the gentle hands—could calm any animal, could coax a hoof up with a whisper.
I had the strength and the stubbornness.
Together we made one decent farrier.
Separately, Rose went on to teach elementary school and I went on to make it my life.
The barn is the first stop every morning.
Five horses left on the property—Earl’s old string, none of them young, all of them fat and spoiled and used to a man who can’t take care of them anymore.
I feed, water, and muck stalls.
Check the paint mare’s left front where she’s been favoring it.
Make a mental note to trim her next week.
The work is automatic—my body knows the choreography even when my brain is still sitting at Earl’s kitchen table trying to understand words like “staging” and “metastasis” and “treatment protocol.”
By the time I’m back inside, Earl’s at the table with coffee and the paper.
He looks like a thinner version of the man I remember—same sharp blue eyes, same jaw, same way of holding himself like the ground underneath him is his and always will be.
But the flesh is going.
The chemo is eating him from the inside out, stripping away the bulk that used to make him look like a man who could wrestle a steer to the ground one-handed.
His wrists are too thin.
His cheekbones are too visible.
He’s wearing a flannel that used to fit tight across his shoulders and now hangs off him like a flag on a still day.
“Morning, girl.”
“Morning.” I pour coffee. Sit across from him. Try not to stare at the way the light catches the new hollows under his eyes. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like a baby. Woke up every two hours and cried.”
I snort.
That’s Earl.
The man is being eaten alive by cancer and he’s still the funniest person in any room.
Rose got that from him—the ability to make you laugh when you wanted to cry.
I didn’t get it from anyone.
My parents didn’t do humor.
They did vodka and screaming and the occasional well-timed disappearance.
Everything good in me—every skill, every steadiness, every scrap of decency I’ve managed to hang onto—came from this kitchen table.
This man.
This family that took in the feral kid from the bad house down the road and fed her biscuits and taught her how to hold a rasp and never once made her feel like charity.
Earl was the first person who ever looked at me and saw something worth keeping.
Rose was the second.
“Chemo’s at two,” I tell him. “I’ve got a client out past Fredericksburg this morning, but I’ll be back by noon to drive you.”
“I can drive myself.”
“You threw up in the Walmart parking lot last Tuesday.”
“That was the Walmart’s fault. Place makes everyone sick.”
“Earl.”
He looks at me over the rim of his mug.
The stubbornness is still there—it’ll be the last thing to go, long after everything else.
But underneath it there’s a softness he only shows me and Rose.
Showed me and Rose.
“Fine,” he says. “You can drive. But I’m picking the radio station.”
“Deal.”
He goes back to his paper.
I drink my coffee and look out the window at the ranch that’s falling apart piece by piece—paint peeling off the barn, fences sagging where the posts have rotted, a section of roof on the equipment shed that’s been patched so many times it’s more tar than tin.
Earl couldn’t keep up with it even before the diagnosis.
Now it’s drowning. He’s drowning. And I’m bailing water with a coffee can.
I packed up my apartment in Amarillo in two days.
Loaded my farrier rig, broke my lease, called my clients to let them know I was relocating.
Drove six hours south and walked through Earl’s front door and said, “I’m here.”
He cried. I didn’t.
One of us had to hold it together, and I’ve had a lifetime of practice.
That’s what you do for your family.
You show up, but not everyone understands that.
Driving into Sharp is a controlled demolition.
Every street is a tripwire.
The elementary school on Pecan Street where Rose taught for four years—they put a memorial bench out front with a little plaque.
I saw it my first day back and had to pull over because my vision went sideways.
The diner on Main where Rose and I used to split a plate of chicken-fried steak and gossip about men who didn’t deserve the air we wasted on them.
The church at the end of Cypress Lane where she married Lee in a white dress that cost more than my truck and a smile that lit the whole room.
I was her maid of honor.
I stood beside her at the altar in a blue dress she picked because she said it made my eyes look pretty, which was a lie because my eyes are brown and nothing makes brown eyes look pretty in a bridesmaid dress, but that was Rose.
She could make you believe anything.
I believed we’d grow old together.
Not in the romantic sense—in the way that only women understand.
The plan was always the same: she’d teach school and raise babies and live on that little piece of land Lee was going to build on.
I’d work horses and come for Sunday dinners and spoil her kids rotten and be the aunt who taught them to cuss and gave them back to their mother sugared up and wild.
We’d sit on Earl’s porch when we were seventy and drink sweet tea and talk about nothing the way we always did, because with Rose, nothing was always enough.
That was the plan.
The plan died on a two-lane highway in the rain, and nothing’s fit right since.
I need feed.
That’s why I’m driving into town—not for nostalgia, not to torture myself, just fifty-pound bags of senior horse feed because Earl’s old string is burning through it and the last delivery got screwed up.
Simple errand. In and out.
I can handle Sharp in small doses as long as I stay focused and don’t let my eyes linger on the places where she used to be.
Holcomb’s Feed & Farm Supply sits at the corner of Main and Route 12, same as it has since before I was born.
Same gravel parking lot. Same hand-lettered sign. Same bell above the door that jangles when you push it open.
I’ve been coming here since I was tall enough to see over the counter, tagging along with Earl while he picked up horseshoe nails and sweet feed and let me choose a candy bar from the jar by the register.
I push through the door.
The bell jangles.
I smell grain dust and leather and the particular funk of a building that’s been storing animal feed for fifty years, and for a split second I’m twelve years old and Earl’s behind me and everything is still whole.
Then I see him.
Lee Simms, or as most know him—Banshee—is standing by the register.
The physical shock of it stops me three steps inside the door.
Like walking face-first into a wall you didn’t see—the kind of impact that doesn’t hurt right away because your body is too busy processing the fact that the world has rearranged itself without your permission.