Chapter Five #3
“Again, same goes. Leveling out the ground, building things, that’s only part of the work. We had to conceptualize a business. Put it all together. There’s a lot of dreaming and scheming and hoping behind the scenes.”
“Interesting.” He wasn’t argumentative, but he did seem determined to introduce a new perspective to her, and usually that was her function in a conversation.
He was more original than he was giving himself credit for.
She was about to tell him so, but then the farmhouse came into view, and she noticed that there was an extra car. “Oh, I hope we have enough pizza.”
“I’m sure we do. That’s Jessica. She’s Rowdy’s best friend. Well, one of them. Obviously there’s us. But the two of them met in the rodeo, and they’re thick as thieves.”
“How interesting. How does a rodeo work exactly?”
“I only know a little bit. You’ll have to ask Rowdy and Jess.
” He parked the truck in front of the house, and got out to grab the pizzas, and Ernestine followed behind.
They walked up the front steps and into the house, and Rowdy, Dakota and a woman she knew was Jessica, thanks to context clues, were all sitting there laughing. Chatting.
She looked at Jessica, and she felt a strange tightening in her stomach.
She’d experienced that a few times before.
Envy. She didn’t like it. She didn’t feel it when she dealt with Dr. Haley Boesch, who only knew how to steal things from her.
Who was close enough to her, while being far away, that Ernestine could logically evaluate that she didn’t want to be anything like her.
But Jessica had an easy beauty to her. A little bit of makeup, a wide smile, her hair falling prettily around her shoulders. She was athletic, and her body seemed relaxed. There was something effortless about her, and Ernestine had never known a moment of effortlessness in situations like these.
She had gotten more and more comfortable with herself, with the reality that she was always going to be an outlier, regardless of how much she wished that weren’t true.
And she had grown to have a sort of acceptance with that, but that only gave her a reprieve from her feelings of awkwardness via acceptance. It didn’t make it not there.
“We brought pizza,” Jax said.
“You’re a godsend, Noble,” Jessica said, standing up from the table.
Oh. She was very pretty. And that envious feeling grew.
“Yeah. Of course. This is Ernestine. Dr. Martin.”
Jessica turned to Ernestine and smiled, her expression showing genuine interest. “A doctor? What kind?”
“PhD. Not MD. I’m a paleontologist.”
“Oh,” Jessica said, her eyebrows shooting up. “And how do you know Jax?”
“I was going to tell you,” Rowdy said. “That we had her staying here and digging.”
“Well, way to bury the lead, Rowdy. That’s about the most interesting thing to happen around here in years.”
“This is a very fossil-rich location,” Ernestine said. Her words sounded hollow and a little bit disconnected to her own ears. She wasn’t a fan.
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
Jessica went to the fridge and opened it. “Beer?”
“Yes,” everyone said. Ernestine needed to get back to the car to get her groceries that needed to be refrigerated. And she needed to get her lemonade.
“I’m just going to go grab my—”
“No. Sit down. I’ve got it.” Jax offered easily, leaving the room, and leaving her standing there with those three relative strangers that she didn’t feel as comfortable with. She swallowed hard. “So. I heard that Rowdy and Jessica were in the rodeo together?”
“Oh yeah,” Rowdy said. “She was a barrel racer.”
“Not anymore?”
“No,” Jessica said, shaking her head. “I got injured a couple of years ago. Got my leg pinned between the wall and the fence, and my horse kept running, not pretty.”
That challenged Ernestine’s initial perception of her. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I came back here to work on my dad’s ranch. I can still do some things.”
“How extensive was your injury? Why does it keep you from riding?” She was doing it again. Asking too many questions. But she really did want to know.
“It was my knee. Which obviously causes a lot of pain. I can still ride, I just can’t do it on the level I need to to really compete. And there’s no point doing it if I can’t win.”
“Really? Not even for fun?”
“Would you dig up dinosaur bones for fun?”
“Yes,” said Ernestine. “Though usually it’s fossils. And my focus is mammals.”
“Oh,” Jessica said.
And Ernestine wondered if she had gotten too weird again.
“So…are you still in the rodeo?” She directed that question to Rowdy. She was trying to minimize any awkward silence.
“No. I gave it up so that I could come here and do this. Which has had its moments. I’ve questioned myself more than once.”
“What about you, Dakota?” she asked. “What did you do before you came here?”
“Oh, I still do it. I’m a sculptor.”
“Oh. Well, that’s really interesting. What’s your medium?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but then Jax came back into the room. “Are you interrogating them?”
“Sort of,” Dakota said.
Ernestine felt her face get hot. “I’m sorry. I do that sometimes. But I’m just very interested in things. All kinds of things.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Dakota said gently. “I get it. Being an artist, you have to be interested in things. The way people see them, the way a certain scene makes them feel. It pays to be curious.”
“It doesn’t pay for me to be curious, but I do think that science is all about building a story.
And if you’re going to build the story you have to ask why.
At every stage. It’s one of the most important questions you can ask.
And so many people don’t like to ask it because they don’t like to seem ignorant.
But honestly, pretending that you understand something when you don’t leads to actual moments of ignorance.
I would much rather be perceived as dumb than actually be dumb. ”
Jax looked at her. “Somehow, I imagine that no one has ever accused you of being dumb.”
“Well. No.” She frowned, feeling her whole brow lower. “Many other things. But not dumb.”
“Did you ask Jax what he did before he got here?”
“No,” she said. She realized that they had gotten trapped in the story of his youth. Because of that, they hadn’t had an actual discussion about him.
“It’s not a big deal,” Jax grumbled.