Chapter 8 Josie
eight
Josie
Three months later, I'm on the porch with coffee and the hills going gold in the early light.
Three clients now, two small and one mid-size, and I'm choosy in a way I've never gotten to be before.
I work from the kitchen table most mornings with the sounds of the ranch carrying across from the south pasture.
Horses, the occasional shout between hands, Carl's laugh.
I'd thought I'd miss the structure of an office.
I don't. Turns out I've confused structure with safety, the same way I've confused caution with living.
Lucinda calls me family three weeks in. Matter-of-fact, the way she says everything, like it is already true and she is just confirming. Carl teaches me to two-step on the ranch porch on a Saturday in June and declares me a natural. He's not wrong. I have a good partner.
I'm at the ranch every morning. That's the part I hadn't fully anticipated: how much I would love the work itself.
Not just Carson, though yes, obviously, emphatically yes.
The barn in the early morning. The horses.
The particular satisfaction of watching a nervous guest get on a horse for the first time and come down ten minutes later changed in some small irreversible way.
I know what that looks like from the inside. Turns out that's useful.
Carson lets me help with beginners in June.
Doesn't make a production of it, just says you want to come?
one morning when a family is coming in for their first lesson.
I stand beside him and watch him work, and at some point he hands me the lead and steps back, and I find myself talking a nervous twelve-year-old through what her fear is doing and what to do with it.
The girl has the same set jaw Josie from two months ago has. I recognize it. I tell her so.
She gets on the horse.
Lorna at the diner doesn't charge me for pie.
Stops about a week in, looks at me sideways when I try to bring it up.
"It's pie," she says. "Don't make it weird.
" I do not make it weird. The whole town is like that.
It takes getting here to understand that small doesn't mean small-minded.
It just means everyone already knows your business, which I've decided is less alarming than it used to sound.
It is late August when he takes me back to the ridge.
The bluebonnets are long gone. The Hill Country in August is dry gold grass and hard blue sky, air still and hot and smelling of dust and cedar. We ride up in the early evening, the light going amber, and Bonnie knows the way now.
He's been quiet all day. Not the comfortable quiet, the working-something-out quiet. I've learned the difference.
We stop at the top and let the horses graze.
I stand at the edge of the ridge and look down at the ranch, at Saddlehorn in the distance, at the long roll of the Hill Country going dark green to gold in the slant light.
This view. The first time I see it I am on a horse for the first time in twenty-two years and I can't quite believe either thing is happening.
Now I stand here and feel the ground under my feet and the warm air on my face and the simple fact of being in my own life and I don't take any of it for granted.
He reaches into his jacket pocket.
I turn.
He is holding a ring. Simple band, pale stone, something that catches the fading light and holds it. His face is doing the thing it does when he's worked up to something. Jaw set, eyes direct, steady.
"I had a whole thing planned," he says. His knee won't let him kneel and he doesn't try. He just holds it out, his calloused hand open. "But all I've got is this: I want every ride. Every morning. Every night." A beat. "Marry me."
“Yes!” I don’t need a single second to even think of it. Marrying him, loving him, feels as natural as breathing. I know he’s the one I want to spend the rest of my life with.
He slides the ring on and pulls me in and I press my face against his chest and feel his arms come around me.
Behind us the horses graze on in the amber evening, unhurried, and the Hill Country goes out in every direction, enormous and patient, like it's been waiting for us to figure this out all along.
His hand comes up to my hair.
"You're not scared," he says. Almost surprised.
I look up at him. "Of this? No."
And I mean it. The girl who is afraid of everything, of horses and change and her own wants, she goes the way of the spring bluebonnets. Something grows in her place that I like better. Something that knows the fall is worth it.
His mouth finds mine. The sun goes down behind the ridge and the stars come out the way they do in Texas, like they've been there all day just waiting to be seen.
Below us, the ranch lights come on, one by one. The little warm squares of the cabins. The stable lanterns. The fire pit where Carl will be building the evening blaze. All of it exactly where I'm supposed to be.
I keep my hand in his.
Welcome to Wild Vista Ranch, where cowboy boots are a way of life and hearts run wild.