Bros Before Betrayal
Dawson
I’d rather wrestle a half-ton Hereford bull into a trailer than sit through another one of Damon’s monthly meetings but unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.
The cavernous, high-ceilinged conference room at the heart of Lockhart Ranch’s admin building was designed to awe, not foster intimacy.
I suspected that was Damon’s point of using it, he was a man who believed in the power of spectacle, in the ritual of gathering the troops under a single roof and making even the most trivial of operational updates feel like an event.
From where I sat at the U-shaped mahogany table, every wall of the room was hung with a hundred years’ worth of Lockhart family memorabilia—sepia-hued photos of ancestors in Civil War-era garb, black-and-white images of the ranch’s earliest days, a collection of rusted branding irons arranged in a monogrammed shadow box.
A few of the newer frames featured Damon himself, his square jaw locked in a smile that looked genuine only if you didn’t know him, flanked by some up-and-coming state senator or local news anchor.
My left leg bounced with a restless energy that threatened to set the entire table vibrating while Damon droned on about quarterly projections for the vineyard expansion and the spa’s record-breaking bookings.
I never envied Damon’s job, and I sure as hell couldn’t fathom why he seemed to enjoy it.
Maybe it was because he’d always been more of a people person, or because he genuinely believed in the transformative power of spreadsheets and mission statements.
Me? I would have rather spent the morning shoveling hay or fixing tractor engines, anything that involved animals or moving parts with a clear end result.
The only “moving parts” in this room were the sycophantic heads nodding in time with Damon’s cadence, a peculiar ballet of deference that left me feeling like the walls were closing in.
Every so often, Damon would pause and look directly at me, as if daring me to contradict his claim that “consolidation of departmental reporting will streamline efficiency.” I never rose to the bait, mostly because I didn’t care, but also because I’d long ago learned that my opinions on process improvement were unwelcome unless they involved animal welfare or fire mitigation.
The only redeeming feature of these meetings was the presence of my mother, a diminutive force of nature whose appearance belied the fact that she could outwork any man on the crew.
She sat two seats away from me, her posture prim as a schoolmistress.
She held Minnie on her lap, scribbling on a color-coded legal pad while sipping black coffee from a chipped mug.
During one particularly dull lull, she leaned over and whispered, “You look constipated. Are you going to survive this?” I snorted, and Damon glared at us both, but Mom just grinned, unrepentant.
We were half an hour into Damon’s color-coded PowerPoint when the boardroom door creaked open, and Dylan wandered in, looking every bit the prodigal son.
My youngest brother had perfected the art of the unapologetic late entrance.
Today he wore dusty Timberlands, a faded Seahawks tee, and a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, the brim still bent from his high school baseball days.
He carried with him a palpable sense of mayhem, like a tornado disguised as a human, and as he slid into the empty chair beside me, he offered a sideways grin.
“Sorry, got hung up with the fence crew,” he lied. We all knew he’d probably slept through his alarm, but nobody called him on it. Not even Damon, who ignored his entrance entirely and moved on.
Dylan pulled a can of energy drink from his back pocket, cracked it open with a daring fizz-pop, and whispered to me, “I’ll give you fifty bucks if you fake a seizure and get us out of here.”
“You still owe me two hundred from the Pereira fight,” I reminded him.
“I told you I’m good for it.”
“Yeah, you did, six months ago.”
I knew I was never going to see that money.
If I kept a spreadsheet of all the money Dylan owed me from betting, borrowing, and bankrolling he’d be in debt to me in the tens of thousands.
Luckily for him, Buddy taught me never to give anyone money you expected back, especially family.
Which is why, while I gave Dylan shit, in reality, he owed me nothing.
Dylan shrugged, unbothered, and settled in for what he clearly expected to be a nap with his eyes open.
It amazed me how little the passage of time had changed him, how he retained the same anti-authoritarian streak that landed him in the principal’s office at least once a week, back in the day.
And yet, for all his bluster, Dylan had been the first to sign enlistment papers after graduation, and the first to come home after serving his country, a little less reckless and a lot more careful about how he spent his anger.
It was easy to forget, sometimes, that Dylan had seen things that none of us would ever understand in war zones.
He hid it well, beneath layers of bravado and sarcasm, but every so often I caught him staring off into the distance, as if daring the world to throw something at him he hadn’t already survived.
As Damon pressed on about expanding guest capacity and the need for standardized checklists, my attention drifted to some of the other department heads ringing the table like suspects in a murder mystery.
There was Noah Carter, the guest relations manager, a former cruise ship director who wore pastel suits and talked with his hands so much I always half-expected him to levitate.
Walt Walker, ranch manager, an old-timer who looked like he’d been carved from a single block of sun-dried beef jerky, contributed only grunts and the occasional “yep” when prompted.
Charlotte Winslow, the tasting room manager was a recent hire—a woman from one of the pinot-centric wineries up north—who had already instituted a dizzying array of “sensory flight” options that I found pretentious, but was clearly not the intended audience.
The spa director of operations, a stone-faced woman named Brenda Sterling, listened with the serene patience of a Buddhist monk.
Still, I’d once heard her reduce a vendor to tears over an unsatisfactory shipment of Himalayan salt.
Catering manager, Ricky Alvarez, was in a constant state of panic, as evidenced by the tremor in his pencil and the flop sweat darkening his collar.
Wes Bennett, maintenance supervisor, a curly-haired guy who dressed in a rotation of salmon-colored polos, spent the meeting tapping out texts with the speed of a court stenographer.
I’d been to enough of these meetings to know that the real decisions happened outside this room, usually after hours in the kitchen or during impromptu gatherings at the back fence line.
Still, Damon believed in the theater of consensus, and so there we were, all fifteen heads of the respective sub-kingdoms in the Lockhart Ranch land, plus me, whose title was technically CEO but who’d rather be hip-deep in manure than neck-deep in bureaucracy.
Actually, I’d rather be at the hospital with Buddy and Sadie.
It struck me as almost funny, in a sick twist of fate, that after years spent drowning myself in Lockhart Ranch work to avoid the Shepards, now all I wanted was to drop everything and go be with them.
I pictured him in a hospital bed, still managing to look bigger than the furniture built to contain him, every inch the stubborn old bastard he’d always been.
But his stubbornness wouldn’t mean shit this time.
That stroke, heart attack, and subsequent bronchial infection were game-changers, and even with the best prognosis, he’d be out of commission for the entire season. Maybe longer.
I reached for my coffee and realized I was squeezing the cup so hard I was crushing it.
I forced my grip to relax and took in the scene around me.
Damon was laying out the expansion timeline with a laser pointer in hand, aiming it like a sniper at a floor plan projected on the wall.
The other department heads all scribbled in their notebooks or clicked away on tablets, but no one looked up, this was just another round of the same old song and dance.
My brothers both sat on the opposite side of the table, Dean hunched over his iPad, and Dylan—having downed his energy drink—was now constructing an elaborate tower out of Styrofoam cups. If Damon noticed, he didn’t let on.
I was only half listening when I heard, Lydia, our events manager—the one person on the ranch who never, ever took days off—announce she was taking early maternity leave.
She’d been with us for five years, and I’m pretty sure she’d attended every wedding, anniversary, birthday, and corporate retreat held at the ranch since she was hired.
Now she was about to disappear for up to a year, and the mere mention of this caused a wave of mild panic to ripple around the table.
Damon tried to sound upbeat about it stating—“We’ll hire someone and until then, we’ll beef up the admin team, we’re a family and we’ll pull together”—but I knew from experience that any work not directly assigned to someone got lost in the black hole of competing priorities.
There wasn’t a person alive who could keep up with Lydia’s all-hours, all-emergencies approach.
Her shoes would not be filled, at least not in any way that didn’t involve duct tape and prayer.