Epilogue - Jake
Iwanted to call our new place Sunrise Ranch, after the way I felt about Dalton from the first moment I laid eyes on him. I thought to lie and say I’d picked the name because the land sloped south and east, like it was built to greet the sun coming over the horizon.
Which was true, but not as true as the way my heart curled around my feelings for Dalton, which he returned to me with open arms and bright smiles, the depth of love I saw in his blue eyes each time I looked at him.
So I told him the truth and gathered him in my arms while he blushed and stammered.
Then he kissed me hard, there in the cool shadows of the barn.
We lived in my bunkhouse for the rest of the summer while the house was being built near the bend in the river. The building took so long that I thought we might have to buy an old RV to live in while it was finished, but though it was hot, the rain held off, and the house went up, bit by bit.
Dalton worked on cleaning up the finances and accounting for Snow Creek Ranch, and then he set us up so that the property we were buying would be incorporated and bring us tax breaks and all kinds of benefits, none of which I properly understood. Dalton promised to teach me more, over the winter.
We quarreled sometimes, which was to be expected, living in such close quarters for so long, but we always made up afterward. Dalton was as easy to live with as a spring day, though he woke up slow and liked his coffee fancy at all times.
The day the house at the bottom of the slope was finished, the air was crisp with fall, and we planted cottonwood cuttings in a line that followed the curve of the river.
The house was simple, with two bedrooms on one side and the kitchen and living room on the other.
We had a washer and dryer set in an area just off the kitchen, leading to the mudroom, which led to the outside.
There was a front door to the wrap-around porch Dalton had insisted on once he’d learned about my someday dream of having one.
“That’s going to cost extra,” I had said along about summer’s end, protesting this as we sat at the Dairy Queen, and I shoveled ice cream into my mouth while Dalton poked at his Misty Slush. “We don’t need that.”
“You deserve extra,” Dalton said. His mouth was red from the flavored ice and so kissable that I kissed him, rising up, leaning over the red metal table. I tasted sugar on his lips, the coolness of his tongue. “And I mean to see that you get it.”
Thus we had a wrap-around porch, with plenty of places for folks to sit, and the ceiling of the porch was painted pale blue to keep away haunts, Dalton said, and it was pretty in a way I’d not thought possible. Not possible for me, not with the way I was raised.
Dalton had ideas, that was for sure, a cunning sense of what might work, such as putting a rubber mat over the top of the dryer. Why? To keep it nice, Dalton had said.
“Nice for who?” I asked.
“For us,” he said. “We deserve nice things.”
The house had fancy blinds over the many windows; they could go halfway up or halfway down, depending on the sunlight and how much we wanted of it.
The house had wooden floors, thick doors, and cool metal doorknobs, which Dalton said would cut down on the transfer of germs. He was a whirlwind as we painted: pale violet in one bedroom, pale blue in the other.
A yellow kitchen, a sage green living room, all the colors like petals of a flower opening to bloom.
Then, somehow, Dalton had arranged for an old-fashioned barn raising, a project I had thought would wait until spring, when Dalton and I could hire a few folks to help us out.
No, he planned something bigger, where all the occupants of Snow Creek Ranch were invited, as well as a chunk of the people in town.
Dalton had seen something about barn raising on YouTube, he’d said, and so instead of sweating my ass off, doing it by hand, we had a team moving like ants over the foundation and then the framing, and the whole thing went up in a matter of days.
There was room for a tractor, ready for when we’d get one, box stalls for horses, a loft for hay—it was like he’d pulled the hoped-for barn out of my head and made a boyhood wish come true.
It had been late when we’d moved in, and cold; the chill air of October at midnight sank into my bones so hard, all I wanted to do was hunker down in the bunkhouse at the ranch, and never mind that I had my whole life opening up for me.
A new husband, a plot of land to call my own, and a brand spanking new house waiting to be filled with life and love.
It was Dalton who kept me going, steadfast and unshakable, holding my hand as I made this huge change.
I’d told myself that as long as I had Dalton with me, I could withstand any change, so as we got out of Daybreak, and the setting sun cast odd shadows along that hillside, looking so unfamiliar in twilight, it was Dalton who went up the steps to the front porch, and it was Dalton who opened the door, and it was Dalton who held out his hand for me to take, so he could lead me inside and we could start our new lives together.
“The furnace will kick in,” he said. He went over to the thermostat and pressed it, and I heard the swoosh of air as the heat came up through the vents in the floor, and was stunned with the thought: I own a furnace. That is, we owned a furnace.
Maybe to some, that fact might not seem so remarkable, but to me, it was. Still is. Will always be. If I had known this day would come, really known it, not just dreamed it, then I would have been braver when I’d been shuttled from foster family to foster family.
We didn’t have much in the way of furniture when we moved in, just a card table to sit at and two chairs from the thrift store. It was nothing much, but it was ours.
That night we slept on an old bedstead that had been brought down from somebody’s attic.
The mattress and box spring on the bed were new, and I suspected Jesse and Lucas had something to do with that.
Someone in town gave us an old quilt and a set of sheets that were still in their original case. The pillows came from the bunkhouse.
The generosity bordered on charity, and bothered me some, that is, until Dalton pointed out that we ourselves could share what we had and donate to people who needed it.
And though we were twenty minutes from them, we had neighbors and friends in Chance and at Snow Creek Ranch, and someday we could step up for them, just as they had stepped up for us.
I had passed out like a light, but found myself waking at midnight, imagining there was some undone task, or a question to ask, or a deed that had gone unpunished. Surely something bad would happen, right?
The space beside me in the bed was empty, but I sensed Dalton in the house, which, after the bunkhouse, seemed enormous. I got up, threw on a flannel shirt to keep off the chill, and went through the house to the front porch.
The door was open. Dalton sat on the top step with the porch light off.
In the distance, over the slope of the land, the moon was coming up from the horizon like a half-circle of pale yellow cheese.
It was too late for crickets and cicadas, but I could hear the low whisper of the grasses rustling against each other and imagined, somehow, that I could hear cottonwood branches squeaking together in the nighttime breeze.
“Everything okay?” I asked as I sat down next to him. The chill of the top step in October bit into my bare legs and made me wish I’d grabbed the blanket from the bed.
“Yes.” Dalton laid his head on my shoulder and sighed. “You know that property out by Scottsbluff?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Got an email.” He reached out to grab a bit of my flannel shirt and worried it between his fingers. “It’s not worth as much as I thought, those water rights.”
“How much?” I asked. I was still uncomfortable talking about money, seeing as how most of it was his: the two-hundred thousand in his 401K, for one thing.
“It’s only going to be twenty-four thousand for the annual water rights,” he said. “For the land itself, I could charge around four-thousand.”
“That’s twenty-eight thousand a year,” I said. “Nothing to sneeze at.”
“And nothing to make my brothers jealous, to make them want a piece of it.” After a pause, he added, “There’s a guy who wants to lease it.
Wants to homestead it with his wife and new baby.
He says he wants to go totally organic, and he wants to build a set of greenhouses that would be heated by underground pipes. Totally experimental.”
“I’d say yes,” I said. “Is that what you’re asking? For me to agree or not agree?” I was still working out the way two people might communicate when they intended on building a forever home, a forever life.
“I had dreams,” Dalton said. “That there’d be more money in the property. There would be if I’d inherited land near Grand Island or somewhere.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said.
Dalton’s head dipped down. “I hate talking about money.”
He was fully grown, but I pulled him onto my lap.
He came willingly, and I wrapped my arms around him.
Breathed into the skin of his neck; let his warmth soak into me.
His arm came around my neck, and for a long moment we breathed together, our bodies connected and, as the stillness settled around us, our souls twined together.
“We’ll raise cattle and alfalfa,” I said with a kiss to his neck. “That’ll take a while to be profitable—”
“How long?”
“A year or two,” I said. “Now, let me finish. You can do accounting. Work from home like the modern man that you are. I’ll work at Snow Creek to earn cash so you don’t have to dip into that account of yours. In the spring, we can have a little garden and put food by.”
“We’ll be poor,” he said, and I could hear the pout in his voice.
“Not when we have this.” I waved at the darkness, at the unseen grasses and the long hillside. At the moon, which was clear in the night sky.
Mentally, in that wave, I included the just-planted cottonwoods, and the idea of the rich green scent of just-mown alfalfa.
And the idea that if there was no moon, we would see stars flung from horizon to horizon, as thick as white flour on a cutting board.
That the air would always be fresh, the sky above us would always be wide, and yes, when the blizzards came, which they would, we’d have four stout walls to protect us and a roof to shelter us.
We’d work hard and the land itself would provide.
The future before us was uncertain; our lives were full of unknown changes. And in the meantime, we’d have each other to love, all the live-long days. My pipe dream had come true. My someday sigh was real. The only difference was I had Dalton to share it with. And that was the best part.
The End