Chapter Four
He wasn’t sure why he felt compelled to include her.
He’d always wanted the luxury to gatekeep who he was around.
That didn’t happen when you were in care. Didn’t really happen when you were traveling around for fights either.
He was used to chaos. And he didn’t mind it. He thought, though, that coming out here, having more time to think, a little bit more in the way of isolation would be good. It was.
But after a year of this life, he was…bored.
She wasn’t boring.
“You can just leave your car here if you like. I’ll bring you back when we’re finished.”
“Oh. All right. I won’t lie. It will be nice to have something other than the MREs.”
“I can’t believe that you were ready to stay out there in a little tent eating dehydrated food.”
She shrugged. “They aren’t bad.”
She followed him to the truck. She opened up the door and climbed inside, and he watched with some amusement.
He doubted very many people would call her perky.
She didn’t have the demeanor of someone on the pep squad, but there was an enthusiasm to her.
Something sort of bright-eyed. She was keen.
It was the kind of personality you didn’t see a lot going with kids who ended up in the foster care system.
Enthusiasm, excitement, all those things got bled out of you pretty early. It didn’t mean that those feelings didn’t exist somewhere deep inside of you, but as a survival tactic, he and everyone he knew had learned to tamp down those feelings. To hide them deeply.
Dakota and his art, for example. That was something he just hid away. He didn’t let people know that he wanted to do that because it was the kind of thing that would get the shit kicked out of you. Emotionally, if not physically.
Jax had it easy by comparison. Getting into MMA fighting, into martial arts, that was stuff people didn’t make fun of you for. Though he had a feeling that if they knew the level to which he was into it, they would be scathing. He didn’t just prize the physical part of martial arts.
The spiritual aspect of it mattered to him.
The fact that it centered you. The fact that learning how to fight made it so you didn’t have to fight as often. That it brought you greater control. Meditation, the flow of energy, those were all things that he had learned from his first sensei. The only real father figure in his life.
Yeah, he kept that stuff to himself. All people really wanted to know was how high he could kick. And if he could kick the shit out of them.
Ernestine didn’t possess any of that veneer. There was no wall up. She was just…her. That was another thing kids like him got good at. Reading people. Checking for a lack of authenticity. She was frighteningly authentic. That had been visible to him immediately.
He sort of wanted to cover her up with a blanket so people couldn’t see it. Felt protective of her, which was strange, all things considered. He didn’t know her.
He got into the truck, and started the engine. “It’s about a half-hour drive to town.”
“I know. I’ve been to town. I’ve actually been here for a week or so. I stayed in the motel initially. And then I showed up at the dig site, and Haley was there.”
“Explain that to me.”
“She stole my research. I’ve been painstakingly documenting migratory patterns of animals based on what we know about the era, and the flora and fauna and weather at the time.
Coming up with theories as to where I think there was the most activity.
Of course, none of that will be confirmed until I actually find fossils and tracks.
But I formed such a great theory on where to dig. However, I did leave some of it out.”
“You left some of it out?”
“Yes. I built a map, and I intentionally left some of the information off of it. I’ve suspected for a while that someone was passing information to Haley.
Because it seemed like whatever I was researching, she was always a step or so behind me, and she’s very adept at making it look like she might actually be a little ahead of me.
But that’s because what she’s very good at is networking.
She’s extremely conventionally attractive. ”
He nodded, keeping his eyes on the road.
He didn’t know if he should say that Ernestine was also attractive.
Except, while she was, he couldn’t say that it was conventional.
She wasn’t stylish, she wasn’t made up, her glasses were large to the point of being comical.
There was something unique about her features.
Compelling, but she wasn’t someone you’d see working as a ring girl at a fight.
And so in that sense, he understood what she was saying.
He just didn’t know if it would hurt her feelings if he didn’t jump in on that.
But by the time he’d finished with that mental loop, she’d already moved on.
“I think—and I know that this is not feminist to consider—that she might be getting information because she has used physical incentives with one of the men at the museum.”
“Are you suggesting that she’s trading blow jobs for fossil information?”
“Oh. Well. I…” He looked at her, and she had a distinctly strange expression on her face. “I had not thought exactly what the specific physical favors might be. Though it does stand to reason oral sex might be involved.”
He smiled. “There’s a bone joke in there somewhere.”
She frowned. “Is there?”
“Never mind. So you think that this woman got your information, and that’s why she was able to write a grant essentially when you did, and get it. And this is all public land, so she was able to set up her own dig site ahead of you.”
“Yes. And honestly? I can go in there and start digging over the top of her, but there’s no benefit to that.
I don’t want to be walking in her discoveries.
But I knew that digging on your land would be a little bit trickier because it is private.
I knew that it would cost me a bunch of my grant.
Still, there’s a reason I held it in reserve. I think this might actually be better.”
He frowned. “So, I don’t know you very well, Dr. Martin, but I suspect that if you thought this was better the whole time you were going to end up here anyway.”
“Not wrong. My curiosity would’ve gotten the better of me. That’s one of my more regrettable and useful features. I’m curious. About everything. It’s what’s got me as far as I’ve gotten.”
“I read your bio.”
She looked at him, and he didn’t take his eyes off the road, but he could feel her stare. “You did?”
“I had to make sure that you weren’t a grifter.”
She laughed. “I would be terrible at grifting. I’ve been told that I’m toxically honest.”
“What does that mean exactly? How can a person be too honest?”
She sounded very grave then. “Oh, they can be. Trust me. And it’s taken me a very long time to figure out that when people say they want you to be honest, they don’t mean it.
Because what they actually want is to hear their own opinion said back to them with some level of earnestness, but honesty is not actually ever what they’re looking for.
And there absolutely is such a thing as being too honest, when you don’t cover it in social niceties so that it’s easier for someone to digest, then they find it abrasive.
Even if you are just trying to help. I’ve always had that problem.
Well, it’s not helped by the fact that I’m generally the youngest person in the room. ”
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-eight. But almost everyone in the position I’m in in this field is closer to forty. Maybe thirty-five. Haley is around thirty-five, which is one reason I find her behavior alarming. It feels very high school to me. In theory. I didn’t actually attend high school in a traditional sense.”
“You went to college early.”
“Yes. That is in my bio. I ended up going when I was fifteen, I got through the first program really quickly, and accelerated my way through my PhD. My biggest problems have been interpersonal. It’s never…
Fossils are great. They tell a story. And they do it with objectivity.
Human beings aren’t like that. Plus, you can offend them. I’ve yet to offend any skeletons.”
“Well, I feel that if you’re offensive then people need to toughen up a little bit.”
“I would agree with that. But a lot of people lack resilience. If you want to hone resilience, try going to college when you’re fifteen.”
He laughed. “Foster care will do it too.”
“You were in foster care?” And right then, he felt that curiosity. The intensity of it. Felt it zero in right on him. She was like a laser.
“Yeah,” he said. “For a lot of my life. I was in a group home later on. Because I caused quite a bit of trouble, that’s where I met Dakota and Rowdy.”
“Ah. I see. That’s why the ranch is called Three Brothers.”
“Yeah. It is. And you thought that we were trouble.”
“Well,” she said. “It’s only that I guess I assumed the name might be preexisting.”
“A fair enough assumption,” he said.
“I thought so.”
“This was always our plan. To start a ranch up here. Well, not here specifically. Rowdy led that. But it was a dream we had when we were younger. Home. A place for all of us.”
“That’s really wonderful. I love that you managed to do that. I find that so many people have dreams, but they don’t have any follow-through.”
“That is true. Sometimes it’s sad. But sometimes people don’t have the resources. When I tell you, getting the resources together has been the hardest part. Though all of us have been very successful in our own fields. We’ve also dumped absolutely everything we have into this place.”
“Well, it works for me, because it gave you an incentive to take some of my grant money.”
Her directness on that was funny. He could see how people might not always be able to deal with her brand of honesty.
He liked it, though. It was interesting.
Truth be told, he wasn’t a big fan of fake social niceties either.
Mainly because he’d spent his whole life surrounded by people who often seemed nice, but didn’t have good intentions.
He would rather deal with somebody who spoke plainly.
“I suppose it did.”
“What made you decide to make it a guest ranch?”
“Well. None of us is from a ranching background. Rowdy a little bit. Though he only remembers bits and pieces of it.”
“Why did Rowdy end up in foster care?”
“His folks died.”
“Oh. And nobody took him in?”
“No. I guess there was a rift in his family and…nobody had the means to care for him. His family were ranchers, but…they made meth. It was actually an overdose.”
“Oh. Well, that’s terrible.”
“It’s pretty terrible. Terrible is kind of our big common bond.”
“What happened to your parents?”
Wow. He wasn’t used to getting this deep with somebody this quick. But then, this was all public information. Somebody could look his name up and they would see the article about his mother. None of this was difficult to get to the bottom of; he just wasn’t used to people wading right in.
“My dad killed her.”
“Oh. That…that’s awful. The domestic violence statistics are so terrible. Was she trying to leave him?”
“Yes,” he said. “She was.” He had to admire the fact that she didn’t shrink away from it.
Didn’t flinch when he told her the truth.
A lot of people would’ve felt awkward. But this was just part of his life.
It had been twenty-five years since his mother’s death.
It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t a fresh wound either.
“Your dad is in prison?”
“Yes, he is. May he rot there. A little aperitif before hell.”
“I never thought of prison as hell’s aperitif. But I sort of like the concept.”
“I’m a big believer that a person should suffer as much as they can in both lives. If they deserve it. And I think he does.”
“I would say.”
“So how old were you?”
“Ten.”
“Had your life been pretty stable before then? I would imagine not since your father was violent.”
She just asked questions, rapid fire. She knew she was at least. She hadn’t been exaggerating when she said that she was curious.
“I’m sorry that I said that. About going to college at fifteen being the thing that toughens you up. I’m sure that seems silly to you.”
He shook his head. “People have different experiences. That’s okay.”
“Oh. A lot of times I say things like that without thinking. I think a lot of people do. But for some reason people get madder at me when I do it.”
Probably because she was so forthright. She’d already given him a lot of information about her with the few things she’d said about her communication style and the way people responded to her.
She was direct. She wasn’t being hyperbolic about that.
There was no cushion around her words. But again. He didn’t mind that.
“Well, I’m kind of hard to offend. Again, I think it’s probably because of my life experiences. When the stakes are low you can afford to get your feathers ruffled about everything, I guess. My dad killed my mom. That’s my baseline for getting my feathers ruffled.”
“I see. Well, the stakes are impossibly low in my field. That leads to a lot of skirmishes that need not exist in my opinion. I mean, the stakes feel high to us, because we’ve made our study our entire lives.
But it’s information that the world will keep on spinning without, and I’m quite aware of that.
It’s satiating curiosity for the sake of it, which satisfies me on a very deep level.
The fact that I get paid to do that is incredible.
But I’m not solving crises that impact the world at present. ”
“I don’t know. Wouldn’t you say that we have things to learn from the past?”
“Oh, I definitely would. In fact, I could give you a dissertation right now on why I think everyone would be better for understanding the migration patterns of long-extinct mammals. It’s just that it’s not a mainstream school of thought, and I understand that generally speaking I’m a little bit esoteric for the general populace. ”
He didn’t look at her when she said that, but for some reason, in his mind’s eye, he suddenly interpreted all of her features in a different way now. And he had to retract his thought about her beauty. He didn’t think he’d ever quite met someone like her.
He knew what esoteric meant. At least vaguely, because he heard it used in context, but hearing her say it like that… Well. There was just something about it.
Get ahold of yourself. Your problem is you haven’t had sex in three months. Don’t make that her problem.
“Well,” he said, as they rolled down the sun-faded road and into the very small town of Clear Lake, “here it is.”