14. The Drive
The Drive
LILA
Wilder Ranch to Promised Land Ranch — Morning
He has coffee ready when I come out.
Two thermoses in the cupholder. The truck is already running. Jake sits in the driver’s seat, looking at his phone—directions, probably, even though we both know these roads. It’s the kind of thing you do when you want to be useful before the useful part begins.
I put my bag in the back and get in.
He hands me a thermos without looking up.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Ninety minutes,” he says. “Give or take.”
“I know.”
He sets the phone down and pulls out of the Wilder Ranch drive.
Pete stands at the barn door. He raises his coffee.
I raise mine.
We drive.
I’ve been awake since four. I didn’t try to go back to sleep. What was in my head was already awake and wasn’t going to wait. The gate. The ranch. Tommy at the fence, watching the truck come up.
I’ve been preparing for this for weeks without naming it.
The notebook. The comparisons. The questions I asked Jake about Wilder Ranch—never entirely about Wilder Ranch. All of it leading here. This drive. This arrival. Whatever comes after.
I am ready.
I think I am ready.
I drink my coffee, watch the fence line slide past, and think: Two years: two years and a ninety-minute drive.
* * *
The Panhandle opens the way it always does—suddenly, completely—as soon as you clear Amarillo and the land takes over. Flat in every direction. Sky enormous. The road stretching ahead until it disappears into itself.
I grew up on roads like this. I know how they work, how distance lies. How the land shifts color as the morning moves. How the silence inside a moving truck on a straight Panhandle road isn’t empty—it holds something. Weather. Space.
When I was young, that space felt like confinement. Now it feels like something I’ve been missing for years.
Jake drives the way he does everything—without excess. Hands steady. Eyes forward.
We’re twenty minutes out when he says, “Tell me about your father.”
Not what happened. Just tell me about him.
I look at the road.
I’ve told people the practical version. Immigrant from South Korea at twenty-four. Built a cattle ranch on hard land. Raised two children. Kept his books to himself. Died before we settled things between us.
Jake isn’t asking for that.
“He was precise,” I say. “Everything in its place. He could look at land and tell you what it needed. The way some people can look at an animal and know what’s wrong. It wasn’t learned. It was just how he saw.”
“Like you,” Jake says.
“Like me.” I look at my hands. “I didn’t understand that until I watched you and your father working together. I recognized something I’d seen my whole childhood and never named.”
Jake says nothing. He’s listening.
“He wasn’t easy to talk to about things that mattered,” I say. “The work—he could talk about that all day. But anything underneath…” I look at the horizon. “Either he didn’t have language for it, or he chose not to use it. I never knew which.”
“Did you try?” Jake asks.
“Toward the end. A few times. When I could tell something was wrong—not with the ranch, but with him. He’d redirect. Cattle. Weather. Tommy. Every time.” I pause. “I kept thinking there would be more time.”
“And then there wasn’t.”
“And then there wasn’t.”
The road stretches on.
“The last time I talked to him was three months before he died,” I say. “A normal call. How are you, how’s the ranch. He said everything was fine. I said I’d call again soon.” I look at my thermos. “I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
I consider it.
“Because every call was the same,” I say. “And I kept waiting for the different one. The one where he said what was underneath. I knew it wasn’t going to come from him. And I wasn’t ready to be the one to start it.” I pause. “Then there were no more calls.”
Jake drives.
He doesn’t tell me I should have called.
He doesn’t tell me it’s not my fault.
He doesn’t try to fix it.
He just holds what I said.
That is the most useful thing anyone has ever done with it.
“Jim said the closing can still happen,” I say. “On my side.”
“He’s right.”
“I don’t know what that looks like.”
“You’ll know when you’re standing on the land.”
Not reassurance. Not comfort. Just belief.
I hold my thermos and look at the horizon.
This is what it is to be heard.
Not fixed. Not redirected. Just heard.
I didn’t realize how long I’d been waiting for that.
* * *
We stop for gas at a small station between Amarillo and the turnoff.
One pump. A small store. A hand-painted sign for ice and bait that’s been there for decades and will be there for decades more. The woman behind the counter moves slowly, like she’s seen everything that passes through here.
Jake fills the tank. I go inside.
It smells like memory—cold soda, motor oil, something steady and unchanged. I used to come here with my father. He’d buy me orange soda. We wouldn’t talk much on the drive back.
It was enough.
I understand that now.
I buy water and a bag of something and stand at the counter.
“Passing through?” the woman asks.
“Heading to Promised Land Ranch.”
She nods. “Know it. Korean family built it. Good operation back in the day.”
Back in the day.
“My father built it,” I say.
She studies me. “That so? You’re the one who went to Nashville.”
“Yes.”
“Heard about that.” She bags my things. “Your brother’s kept it going.”
“He has.”
“Good man.” She hands me the sack. “Your father was a good man, too.”
I meet her eyes.
“He was,” I say.
She nods and turns away.
I go back outside.
Jake leans against the truck. He reads my face but doesn’t ask.
“She knew my father,” I say.
“People out here know everyone.”
“She said he was a good man.”
He nods.
We get back in.
We drive.
* * *
The last stretch is mostly quiet.
Not empty. Earned.
I watch the land pass. Jake’s words come back: You’ll know when you’re standing on the land.
I haven’t stood on this land in two years. I’ve been back to the house, to my mother’s kitchen, to the porch. But not the pastures. Not the fence lines. Not the places where my father worked.
I was visiting.
I wasn’t returning.
There’s a difference.
Today is the return.
I look at my hands and remember his. The calluses. The way he held tools, wire, rope. I can’t remember anymore whether he looked more like that when he was working or when he was still.
I should know.
I should know more.
That’s the grief—not just that he’s gone, but that I chose distance, and now the distance is permanent.
Jim’s words come back.
The closing has to be handled on your end.
I’m starting to understand.
* * *
Promised Land Ranch
I know where we are before I see the sign.
The road dips slightly. The dry creek bed runs along the left. The fence line begins, a quarter mile out, with cedar posts my father set twenty years ago. Some replaced. Most not.
The land is in my body.
I didn’t know that until now.
I thought I’d left it, that I’d chosen what to carry. But the body keeps its own record. The road. The posts. The grade.
“Slow down,” I say.
Jake slows without asking.
I study the fence. A sagging section near the creek. A leaning post my father always meant to fix. New wire against old. Tommy’s work layered over my father’s.
The ranch has been holding itself together.
“Turn here,” I say.
Jake turns onto the ranch road.
The gate comes into view. Iron pipe. Welded letters across the top. My father made them when I was four. He let me touch them after they cooled.
Remember this. This is ours.
PROMISED LAND.
The paint is faded. The iron rusted in places. The structure is still solid.
Jake stops the truck.
He doesn’t move.
He lets this be mine.
I get out.
I walk to the gate and put my hand on the iron. It’s warm from the sun.
My father is here. In the metal. In the posts. In the land itself.
I’m here, I think. I came back.
I open the gate.
Jake drives through.
I close it behind us and get back in.
The ranch opens ahead. The barn needs paint. The house is unchanged. The pens stretch out in the distance. Wire down on the east side.
And a figure at the fence.
Tommy.
I haven’t seen him in two years.
He’s lean, darker like our father, with our mother’s light eyes. He stands the way our father did—still, attentive, waiting before reacting.
Something has settled on him in these two years. Not age. Weight.
He isn’t smiling.
He isn’t frowning.
He’s just watching.
“Okay?” Jake asks quietly.
“Yes,” I say.
I’m not sure that’s true.
But I’m here.
I get out before the truck fully stops.
Tommy walks toward me.
We stop a few feet apart.
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
“You’re here,” he says.
“I’m here.”
He nods. Looks at Jake.
“Jake Wilder,” Jake says, offering his hand.
Tommy shakes it, assessing.
“You run Wilder Ranch.”
“Yes.”
“Good operation.”
“So is this one,” Jake says. “From what Lila’s told me.”
Tommy looks at me. Something shifts.
“Come see it,” he says.
He turns toward the barn.
Jake looks at me.
I glance back at the gate—still standing, still solid, my father’s letters across the top.
Then I follow my brother.