Chapter 7
Everyone’s a little worse for wear by the time ten rolls around the next morning.
A bottle of Tylenol is passed around at lunch, which consists of the greasiest, cheesiest smashburgers Grace has ever seen, alongside crispy sweet potato fries, pickle spears, and heaps of ketchup.
It coats her stomach like something out of a dream, allowing her to keep the pill in her system and, eventually, feel less like she rammed her head into a concrete wall.
Waylon spares no sympathy for her. In fact, it’s almost as if he knows she’s hungover and has chosen to shame her for it.
He side-eyes her as she familiarizes him with the saddle they’ll be using, letting him get used to the way it feels against his body, the way it smells.
Though he does all she asks, it’s with an air of judgment.
When he grunts at her toward the end of the session because she’s repeated the same movement with the saddle nearly twenty times, Grace rolls her eyes.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she grumbles, walking back into the barn to hang up the saddle on its hook.
“I’m allowed to have an off day.” Waylon blows out an unsympathetic huff through his nose.
Toward sundown, all the ranch hands are gathered in one of the hangars, some shooting the shit while others work on servicing one of the compact tractors.
Grace joins them once she’s gotten Waylon situated and smiles gratefully at Raymond when he hands her a cold beer upon walking up.
She looks around, curiously surveying the state of everyone—all having seemed to sweat out their hangovers for the most part, at least enough that they’re already steadily working through a case of Bud Light.
One of the first people she notices is Cooper, who is standing near the tractor in question with June and Forty, engaged in a conversation that has his brow furrowed in concentration.
He nods intently as they both take turns speaking at him, both with adamant hand gestures.
Grace watches the interaction with a slight fascination, trying to decipher what they could possibly be talking about.
Caleb ambles up next to her and clinks his beer against hers.
He follows her line of sight and nods knowingly.
“It’s a bad idea, if you ask me,” he says cryptically.
Grace glances over at him. “What is?”
“Trying to train that city boy how to be a ranch hand,” he says, pointing his beer in Cooper’s direction.
“Is that what they’re talking about?”
Caleb nods. “They want him to shadow us. Learn the ways of the ranch.”
Interesting. Grace didn’t realize that was something a Caldwell would need to learn. Seems like it’d be a given considering where he grew up. “Does he not spend a lot of time here?”
Tossing back a couple of glugs of beer, Caleb shakes his head. “Not since he left for college some years back. Word is he flunked out of business school.”
Grace takes a swig of beer; it’s crisp and tastes like yeast-flavored water, but she relishes in the coldness rushing down her throat. “And now he wants to live here and, what, work on the ranch?”
“Probably just some performative bullshit,” Caleb says, shrugging. “The Caldwells are a funny bunch, Grace. The kids all tend to march to their own, very unique drums.”
Less concerned about prying Caleb for information, Grace asks a question she’s been wondering about since she got to Halcyon. “There’s a girl, right? I saw a picture in the main house, but no one ever talks about her.”
Caleb nods. “Caia. They’re all still bitter that she moved across the country and stayed there.”
Imagining any rifts in a family as idyllic as the Caldwells is strange, almost unfathomable. “Do they speak to her?”
He shrugs. “She comes around for holidays sometimes, but it’s never for long. Would rather spend her days in board meetings, I guess.”
Grace tucks that information away, and then—she can’t help it—the curiosity spikes and tumbles out of her mouth without a second thought. “And Crew?” He’s absent from the current activity, probably off somewhere barking orders at someone. “You all seem to respect him.”
Caleb nods. “It’s different with Crew.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t run off to college in the city to find himself. He went to war. Twice. And now he’s taking care of his parents’ place. He isn’t cruel, or careless, or stupid like too many people in our world tend to be. He’s a commander. Of course we respect him.”
She’d been rocking back and forth on her heels absently, but at his words, she goes still. “What?” she asks dumbly.
Caleb clocks her surprise, then looks back over to Cooper, who is now hunched over the hood of the tractor next to Forty. He looks like he’s studying every part, every coil, every function. Forty points, then speaks, then points, then speaks.
Caleb’s voice is a little gruffer when he says, without looking at her, “He did two tours in Afghanistan.”
Grace’s mouth gapes slightly, lips snapping shut only when she realizes she’s staring at him, dumbfounded. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“Not surprised,” he continues, seeming to sense her shock. “He doesn’t talk about it much. And I wouldn’t ask, if I were you.”
Grace nods, waving it off. “Wasn’t planning on it.”
Cooper reaches under the hood to touch something, only to jump backward, flapping his hand and grimacing. Forty shakes his head, exasperated.
Caleb snickers. “Told you,” he says, then walks away to join the others.
Grace watches them for a beat longer, surveying the way Cooper looks wholly unaccustomed to the more gritty parts of ranch life.
Like when he grimaces as he wipes grease onto his jeans, leaving streaks of black and gray.
He looks up from the damage with nothing short of horror in his expression, and Forty throws his head back and howls with laughter.
· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·
Though his inexperience—or rustiness, maybe—leads him to stick out like a sore thumb among the other hands, Cooper does seem to put his best effort toward catching on to everything.
He sleeps in the bunkhouse and rises with everyone before the sun, which earns him a modicum of respect right off the bat.
The beds, though significantly plusher than the one Grace slept on at Braxton, probably feel like plywood compared to his bed in the main house, but he doesn’t complain.
He does the dishes after breakfast and even cleans out the gunky coffeepot—a task that was horrendously overdue.
Crew snaps orders at him in the same manner he does everyone else, unconcerned that he’s speaking to his little brother.
In fact, his eyes seem to sparkle when he announces Cooper’s tasks for the day—Crew looks almost gleeful to send him to pull out a mile-long patch of stubborn weeds with Caleb and Mikey.
When they trudge into the bunkhouse for dinner that evening, Cooper looks like he’s ready to pass out.
Any semblance of neatness he’d come into this journey with is long gone; his clothes are almost as haggard as his hair, and the five-o’clock shadow on his cheeks is quickly ticking toward midnight.
He gets a few slaps on the shoulder—a gesture of solidarity from the other, equally unkempt ranch hands.
Grace is standing at the stove, warming up leftover chili from the night before in a stockpot, when he ambles up to the sink to wash his hands.
“Smells great,” he says over his shoulder, eyeing the steam that emanates from the pot. “I’m starving.”
Grace chuckles. “I bet. Y’all get a lot done today?”
Cooper flicks the excess water off his hands before reaching for a dish towel. He leans against the counter and shakes his head. “It feels like the weeds are growing faster than we can pull them out of the ground.”
Knowing all too well how insurmountable that specific task can be, Grace gives him a conspiratorial look. “That’s the point, you know.”
Folding his arms over his chest, Cooper asks, “What?”
She shrugs, looking back to her task. “At my old place, weeding used to be at the bottom of the barrel for duties. Reserved for anyone who managed to piss off the foreman.” The chili begins to bubble, morsels of onion and tomato rolling to the surface alongside the ground beef and pork.
She gives it a good stir and then turns around to face Cooper, who still looks confused by her statement.
She smiles and says, “Crew’s fucking with you.”
Cooper’s mouth hangs a little loosely, but then he sighs and throws his head back.
“Of course he is.” His jaw tenses, and he looks as though he’s scheming on the best way to enact his revenge on his older brother when Caleb and Mikey walk into the kitchen, their stench immediately masking the warmth and richness of the simmering chili.
Cooper glances at them, then straightens up. “So, what’d you two do?”
Mikey, gulping down water from a metal canteen, kinks a brow. He gasps for breath once he’s sated, and wipes his mouth before saying, “What do you mean?”
“To get put on weeding,” Cooper says. He jerks his chin toward Caleb and says, “Apparently y’all did something to piss off my brother and that’s why we’re out there pulling weeds that will grow back ten times taller by the morning.”
“Ah.” Caleb nods. “Yeah. We, uh…” He trails off, like he’s trying to decide if he should even broach the topic. Grace tilts her head, waiting for him to fess up.
“Well, you see,” Mikey cuts in, setting his canteen on the counter so he can use both of his hands. “It went like this—”
“They took the compact tractor on a joyride last weekend and blew out the clutch,” Grace supplies, knowing that if he had his way, Mikey would tell the story as though it were some epic saga full of adventure and intrigue.
“Wait,” Cooper says, looking between the three of them. “That’s why the tractor is out of commission? That’s why I have first-degree burns on my fingertips?”