19. Jake
Jake
Dalton appeared in the barn with an expectant look on his face. We were just finishing mucking out the stalls, and I was set to arrange for the blacksmith to come and look at the horses’ hooves. After all that rain and hard riding, it was right to make sure they were still sound.
I glanced over my shoulder at Jesse, who was on his cell phone with someone. He lifted his chin at me, which meant he wasn’t bothered by my having visitors during work hours. He seemed very casual about it all as Dalton tugged me toward the open door of the little office in the barn.
“You’ve got the prettiest eyes,” I said, not holding back, in spite of having a bit of an audience.
“I’m driving down to Denver to pick up a young man from the Center.” A flush in his cheeks let me know he didn’t mind what I’d said. “Lucas asked me to go. Would you like to come with me? I have money for coffee for the road.”
His eyes twinkled as he pulled out a folded twenty-dollar bill. As if the coffee, and not his presence, were the real draw.
“I need to stop by my apartment and also my work,” he said. “Then we’ll go to the Center to collect Xander Brooks.”
I didn’t care what order we did things, and the idea of seeing where Dalton lived filled me with apprehension. His apartment was where he’d be getting back to at the end of the weekend. His apartment and his job and his whole life.
I’d be on the ranch without him. Would he look at me once in his rearview mirror and then not give me another thought? The idea of it just about made me say no.
“Sure,” I said, in spite of my misgivings. “Let me ask—”
“Lucas suggested it,” Dalton said. “You and I are spending the whole day together.”
I made him wait until I’d washed up at my bunkhouse and put on a clean shirt.
Then we got into his sleek blue four-door, which had sat undriven for a good deal longer than it should have.
The interior was dusty and still and hot.
We opened the windows, and he started the engine, and away we went, two fellows on a road trip.
At first, I didn’t understand why we were stopping in town, but he went inside the coffee shop and returned with two drinks. He held one out to me.
“Iced lattes,” he said. “My favorite.”
The cool coffee was mighty good and eased the tightness in my throat. Time was rushing too fast toward an end I’d known was coming but that I didn’t want.
When I’d first met Dalton, I’d never imagined I’d feel this way. Like I’d lost my footing and any handholds I might have grabbed, tumbling pell-mell down a very steep hill.
What I wanted was to be at the top of that hill with Dalton in my arms. Looking at me with those summer-blue eyes, fair hair wispy around his temples. His arms tight around my waist, him smiling as though he’d finally found what he hadn’t known he was searching for.
We drove out of Chance along Highway 287, headed toward Denver. A town I’d not seen in twelve years but that I would now visit again, with Dalton as my courage.
Dalton drove like a middle-aged man, but I thought I knew why: he didn’t want to get where he was headed. So I didn’t say anything about that. Instead, taking a good, hard suck of the iced drink, I looked at him, at the haze of tree branches out the open window beyond his head.
“So, about your brother,” I said. “And those tax papers.”
I couldn’t quite ask him to tell me about himself, because there would have been desperation in my voice, the desire that he would tell me everything about himself. Let me know him better, have more memories to take me into a bleak, Dalton-less future.
Instead, I asked about this one thing, so I could hear him talk, so I could figure out why the conversation had sounded like Dalton had withstood it as he would have a beating. “He didn’t sound very helpful.”
“Cadmar is the farthest thing from helpful.” Dalton kept his eyes on the road. “But he and Ansley, my other brother, are all the family I have left, so I still take their calls. For some reason.”
I raised my eyebrows and nodded at him that I was ready to listen.
“I told you that they blame me for my parents’ deaths.
Which I understand, and I even agree, on some level,” Dalton lifted a hand from the wheel to wave it briefly in the air.
“I mean, I know rationally that I didn’t cause the accident.
But the thing is, I loved my parents, but I don’t miss them. And that makes me feel guilty.”
He paused to look at me, and maybe he was concerned that his feelings would make me stop caring for him. That could not be less true.
“That sounds complicated,” I said. “What were they like?”
He talked while he drove. I listened, barely noticing the pretty scenery of the foothills as they spread out to the high plains. The way the sky suddenly became quite tall overhead, filled with blue, laced with clouds, the land only a green sliver along the horizon.
He told me about his childhood. Of always being last in line, just about invisible. An unwanted child. Maybe a mistake. A son who could never measure up, no matter what he did. Of being forced into a finance career, which he didn’t enjoy.
If I compared that with being in foster care, I couldn’t decide which was worse: living with strangers who never even pretended to love you or living with your blood family, with the expectation of being loved, and never getting it.
Maybe there was no comparing the two, because all misery was the same in the dark.
“Cadmar was the executor when they died,” he said.
“My brothers got everything, which was only to be expected. I ended up with a check for five-thousand dollars and twenty dusty acres outside of Scottsbluff. South of it, I think. Dusty on account of the well that went dry long ago.” He sighed.
“And now I’m stuck with the tax bill for the property.
Which was what the phone call was about. ”
I’d heard the exasperation in Cadmar’s voice and earnestly hoped I’d get to meet him so I could teach him a lesson about how to appreciate a younger brother.
In those long-ago days, I’d wished as hard as I could for a brother or sister. The fact that Cadmar had one, such a strong, giving, good-hearted one, and treated him like shit made my blood boil. But I wanted to focus on Dalton. To enjoy today, instead of moaning about what I soon wouldn’t have.
“What do you mean, dry well?” I asked.
We were on I-25 now, and Dalton was driving faster. I felt like an old fogey with my nerves on fire, unused to such speeds.
“There’s an old barn, I think, and a shed of some kind,” Dalton explained.
“A single-wide trailer, if the pictures are to be believed. And a metal windmill. One of the sort you see in artistic black-and-white photographs. But the well’s been dry for years, so the land is worth nothing.
Which is why I got it, and not my brothers. ”
I nodded. I knew the type of windmills he meant. But I wondered where he was getting his information from.
Out the front window I could see the Denver skyline, rising up as clunky as a child’s building blocks from flat land all around it and, as the road dipped down, the S-curve that went around the downtown area. A place I’d not thought of in years and now, gazing at it, barely recognized.
“Scottsbluff, you say.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You can just about see the monument from the property. At least that’s what the description said.”
“Your property is right over the Ogallala Aquifer.”
“The what now?” he asked as he took an exit that circled around and sent us on an overpass over the highway and right into downtown.
“That windmill should work.” He navigated a curving, three-lane street that zigged and zagged around skyscrapers, and I forced myself not to grip the seat. “There’s bound to be a well with water in it.”
“No, it’s dried up.” He pulled into a vast, blacktopped parking lot that stood like a dark square in a checkerboard of buildings and empty lots.
“No,” I said. “It’s not. Scottsbluff, to my recollection, is right over the deepest part of the largest freshwater aquifer in the States.”
“It is?” He turned off the engine and looked at me. “How do you know so much about it?”
“I look for property on and off. Scottsbluff comes up,” I said.
“And yes, you should be able to prime that well and get the pump going. Irrigate fields. Grow anything you like. Keep stock. Water your animals during the driest summer. Dig an irrigation ditch to send water to your cottonwoods, if you had any.”
“Huh,” he said. “Well, we’re here.” He pointed through the windshield at an ugly brown building about ten stories tall. It had large, cream-colored blocks painted on it, like someone had wanted to decorate but hadn’t put any energy into it.
We got out into the summer heat of a paved area without any shade.
Luckily, we didn’t have far to go to reach the ugly building, which was, of course, blasting AC hard enough to make me feel like I was in a deep freeze.
Whether that was better than being in the dry sauna outside, I couldn’t rightly decide.
In the lobby, I saw people in suits and fancy shoes, some with tassels. All polished to a high gloss. People looking a whole lot like Dalton had when he’d first arrived at the ranch.
The two of us, in our blue jeans and worn cowboy boots, looked distinctly out of place. Not that I cared for my own sake. I’d be back at the ranch before nightfall and staying there. But these were Dalton’s people. It was right that he would want to fit in.
“We’re on the sixth floor,” he said.
A metal-paneled elevator took us up, and we were greeted by a receptionist who checked us in.
Dalton had to borrow a temporary access card because he’d left his in the bunkhouse, and I was given a paper guest pass to stick to my shirt.
The whole thing bordered on ridiculous, in my mind, but what did I know.
“Better get it over with,” Dalton said under his breath, looking at me. His face was white. His hands were fists.
“What are we doing?” He looked like he was getting ready for a battle.