Kate
Outside, a spring storm whistles across the dead grass and pelts the house’s metal roof with thick curtains of rain. Naturally, the men are working regardless of the storm, because ranch work doesn’t stop even when Mother Nature is doing everything in her power to kibosh it.
I stare out the large kitchen windows at the porch swing twisting and rocking with sporadic wind gusts that swirl around in the covered porch, pattering delicate raindrops on the glass panes.
So many things changed after Odessa’s birthday last week—good and bad.
Good: I’m going to curl up beside my husband and sleep tonight, then hopefully wake up with his hands on me like I have every morning since he asked me to move back into the bedroom.
Bad: I’m not entirely convinced by his insistence that talking about how much easier things would be if he was gone was nothing more than talk.
But right now, down the hall and behind the closed door of our bedroom, he has my laptop propped up on two stacks of books at the foot of the bed.
He’s meeting with a therapist for the third time this week and, just as during his other appointments, there’s a thrum at the base of my brain when I think about it.
Not panic. Not dread. More like…a heightened awareness, as if I’m waiting to hear a tree fall somewhere deep in the woods.
Which is why I’m aimlessly stirring a giant soup pot filled with chili, dragging my wooden spoon along the bottom of the pot, and staring at the jittery wood swing.
The chili doesn’t need to be stirred, per se, because it’s been at a low simmer for the better part of the day, with Beryl watching it like a hawk.
She knows I need a distraction, but when I nearly chopped my finger off after she tasked me with dicing onions, she decided this was a safer activity.
It’s for the best, anyway. If I started crying over onions, I’m afraid the tears would quickly become about something else, and they might never stop.
So Beryl’s seated on a counter stool, casually chopping onions on a chunk of butcher block.
The best part about the men being gone overnight is that the wives get to enjoy some much-needed girl time.
Apparently when the boys were young, the ranch housed a couple families—including Red’s—but by the time I came into the picture, this entire place was overrun with masculine energy.
Sure, the occasional woman would come around until they realized dating a man who’s as committed to the ranch as these guys are wasn’t all they thought it would be.
But now we have a girl gang of sorts. Outside of Jackson and our kids, these girls are the best thing to ever happen to me.
Cecily leans back in her chair, pregnant belly rounded out under a tight-fitting T-shirt, flipping casually through a seed catalogue. She glances up at the window and her entire face scrunches. “I can’t wait for some nicer weather.”
“Trust me when I say the cool weather is a blessing during pregnancy. You don’t want to be massively pregnant in the middle of summer.
” Blair tops up her coffee and leans against the counter, taking a long swig while simultaneously checking the video baby monitor set up in Rhett’s room, where her daughter’s taking a nap.
Her words pinch my heart. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to think about pregnancy or babies without feeling a touch of grief over everything I lost. I should be spending the summer pregnant and complaining about the heat while I sit with my swollen ankles in the cool river.
“I want to get the garden planted before I’m too pregnant to bend over,” Cecily says. “Was hoping the weather would cooperate so I could get things in the ground sometime in May.”
“There are a lot of kids around here who never pass up an opportunity to dig in the dirt,” Cassidy chimes in from her end of the dining table.
She’s making a futile effort to keep Rhett and her toddler, Hazel, from mixing all the Play-Doh colors together—the sort of thing you give up on altogether after enough time as a parent.
Rhett’s head pops up. “Can we use exabators?”
“Toy ones,” I clarify.
Rhett shakes his head. “No, the big one. I know how to drive it.”
The other day, Red took him in the ranch’s mini excavator to help get him out of the house, and that’s all he’s been talking about ever since.
Cecily laughs. “You know, I’ve been asking Uncle Austin to make me a couple new garden plots. I’ll get you the keys now. Aus won’t mind at all, I’m sure.”
Rhett promptly drops his Play-Doh and swipes his hands across the front of his jeans as he hops off the chair.
My spoon clunks against the side of the pot. “She’s joking, buddy. No excavators for you until you’re older.”
“How old? Five?”
Blair juts her thumb upward, indicating he needs to pick a bigger number.
“Seben?” Rhett squints at his aunt. “Daddy lets Dessie drive it.”
“Lord help us all,” Beryl mutters with a snort. “That girl should not be permitted to operate heavy machinery.”
“We’ll talk about it when you’re seven,” I say. “Until then, go back to your Play-Doh.”
He rolls a ball of blue and red around on the tabletop for a second before looking at Hazel and asking if she wants to play with toy excavators in the living room.
“Be quiet—Daddy’s talking to somebody on the phone,” I remind Rhett.
The two take off at a run, bare feet slapping against the hardwood floors, while Cass gets to work meticulously trying to separate the Play-Doh. Again—futile.
A rare moment of silence in a kitchen that’s typically bustling with laughter and music and the whir of kitchen gadgets for the majority of the day.
And I can hear Jackson’s sonorous voice stretching the length of the hallway, the rise and fall of his deep timbre.
I can’t make out the words, even when I strain to hear them.
“I’m glad he’s talking to someone.” Beryl scrapes tiny onion pieces from the cutting board into a mixing bowl.
“Me too.” I give up on the chili stirring, setting my spoon down and popping the lid back onto the pot.
I need to move farther from the kitchen entry.
Farther from where I might catch part of his conversation, because I promised myself I wouldn’t eavesdrop.
He’s been sharing a lot from his therapy sessions, and that’s trust I refuse to break, regardless of how desperate I am to know everything he’s feeling.
So I slip past Blair’s long, lean body and fill a cup with coffee. I’m tempted to go for something stronger, given the circumstances, but with half the women in here either pregnant or breastfeeding, I’ll stick with nonalcoholic options in solidarity.
Odessa charges in, pink cheeks and flyaway hair, holding her school water bottle with something suspiciously dark—and chunky—sloshing inside. She tosses her backpack to the ground with a lightened sigh.
The smooth roll of my wrist stirs cream through the dark liquid in my cup. “Hey, Dess. How was school? And what’s in the bottle?”
It’s definitely not the water she left here with this morning.
“Mom,” she says, urgent and serious. “The rain made a pond under the cattle guard at the end of the driveway. I found a tadpole and I want to grow it into a frog.”
She holds the pink water bottle up and squints at the cloudy liquid, twisting and turning the plastic bottle around in her hands, looking for the tadpole. Blair sets her mug down and strides toward her, then crouches to get a look at Odessa’s science experiment.
My brows pull together. “I don’t think you can grow a tadpole in a water bottle….”
“Especially when the ‘pond’ you pulled it from is probably mostly cow pee.” Blair laughs.
Odessa glances at her hands and quickly wipes them on her pants. “Well…Rainbow Sparkles needs a place to live. Oh, I’ll put her in the bathtub with clean water.”
“You will not.” I make a mental note to double-check all tubs and sinks before bed tonight. “How about an old ice cream pail? We have a couple clean ones in the pantry.”
She thrusts the water bottle into Blair’s hand and heads straight for the pantry.
“Girls in STEM.” Blair jostles the water bottle, holding it directly in front of her face to track down the elusive tadpole somewhere in the mingling rainwater, cow urine—probably shit, too, if we’re being honest—and mud. “I love it. Maybe one day she’ll be in the clinic with me.”
I chuckle. “Whether she’ll be there as a patient or a doctor remains to be seen.”
“Probably both.” Cecily shrugs, reaching across the table with a groan to grab a box of crackers the kids opened earlier. “At least that’ll be convenient.”
There’s a kerfuffle inside the large walk-in, with the metal twang of crashing pots and pans, followed by the faint sound of Odessa assuring us she’s okay.
“Definitely both,” Cecily corrects herself.
Laughter hums through the kitchen, warming my bones. Moments later, Odessa saunters out from the pantry with a white pail tucked under her arm. She lets out a giant exhale that makes the hair fallen loose from her ponytail flutter against her forehead.
The plastic rings hollow when she plunks it onto the kitchen table and makes a grabby hand in the general direction of Blair. “Lady Rainbow Sparkles, please.”
Cassidy makes an impressed face. “Oh, now she has an official title.”
“Princess Lady Rainbow Penelope Sparkles,” Odessa deadpans. “The third.”
“Oh, good. She brought home two tadpoles none of us knew about before this one.” Beryl snickers, slowly rising from her seat and giving Odessa’s hair a loving pet on her way to check on the simmering chili. Evidently she doesn’t trust my stirring abilities today.
Blair hands over the water bottle, peering into the bucket as Odessa slowly dumps the questionable liquid into it.
“You’re sure there was a tadpole in here?” Blair leans in closer, pulling a face at the smell emanating from the water.
“Yes.” Odessa reaches in and stirs the muck around with her hand, much to the utter disgust and objection of her aunts. “I know she was in here. I saw her.”