Chapter 13
HOLLY
The van that picked us up in Bozeman, Montana negotiates the unpaved road toward the Big Sky Dude Ranch, jostling me against the side window. Anna bumps into my shoulder when we hit another pothole and quickly pulls away, grabbing onto the seatback in front for stability.
The dude ranch is only ninety minutes from the airport, but this drive has made today feel like the longest day of my life. I’d forgotten about this stretch of the road—if it can be called a road—and we still have another thirty minutes to go.
“I will never complain again about the cars Zoe rents for us,” I whisper to Anna, who nods in agreement. The overloaded compact we drove to Napa seems heavenly compared to this.
The van hits a particularly deep pothole that launches us a few inches off our seats. We come down hard on the unforgiving pleather-covered seat coils. Behind us a kid squeals in delight.
“Ow,” Anna whines.
I shift to get comfortable. My insides are not enjoying this either. I have to pee again.
The family seated in the row ahead of us, a mom with two teenage daughters, sway side to side as the van swerves to avoid another divot.
In the passenger seat beside our driver, Wade, who’s pretty much a kid himself in a plaid shirt, dusty jeans, and dirt-caked boots, is the girls’ dad.
The parents have barely acknowledged each other, and their daughters have been slumped in their seats, eyes glued to their phones, doomscrolling TikTok since we left the airport.
I stopped counting how many times the mom has told them to put away their phones and enjoy the scenery.
Beyond the smudged glass window, the sky feels too big and too blue, the mountains in the background impossibly huge.
It was Zoe’s excitement and awe at the majesty of the mountains that had eased my anxiety that first time.
I’d never been somewhere that could make me feel both insignificant and claustrophobic by its sheer size.
Behind us is a rambunctious family of five, two dads with three kids under the age of ten.
The noise is primarily coming from the toddler who has two levels of volume: ear-piercing and shrill.
They’d first entered the van in a heap of commotion with Dad #1 instructing them to “use your inside voices and be respectful,” while Dad #2 handed out snacks. Sugary snacks. Rile-up-the-kid snacks.
Two kids in front of me, three kids behind me.
There was never a question that I would go into a career that involved kids.
I was forever getting distracted by babies, much to Anna’s frustration and Zoe’s amusement.
I push the swell of emotion building in the back of my throat down.
This is not the time. Not with Anna next to me waiting to grab at any hint of a personal connection.
The van takes a sharp right onto yet another dirt road and I cross my legs, saying a silent prayer that we’re on the final stretch. I don’t remember this drive from our first trip. I don’t remember the van being this awful either.
“Deer!” The toddler shrieks so loudly that my shoulders lift to my ears. If only he listened as well as he screamed. “Deer, deer, deer,” he babbles behind us as one of the dads shushes him to no avail.
“Oh, my god,” Anna complains under her breath, and for once I have to agree with her. “Luxe Vacations Travel Tip: Pack earplugs.”
I cough-laugh and turn to see if she’s actually pulling earplugs from her bag. She isn’t. She shrugs instead.
Suddenly, Wade swerves the van to the roadside and stops with a lurch that gives me whiplash and launches the phone out of the hands of one of the teens. Anna and I both reach for the bag on the seat between us, protecting Zoe from the same fate as the iPhone in the pink bedazzled case.
“Look on the left.” Wade points out his window. Like synchronized puppets, we all look.
A herd of elk graze on shrubs and tall grasses along the roadside. The bull casually scans the van until he stops to stare at me.
Sweat beads in my cleavage. “Why’s he looking at me?” I whisper to Anna.
“He’s not looking at you,” Anna dismisses. She reaches into her bag and retrieves her phone, then tightens the shot on the bull. “Oh, wait, he is.”
Zoe was the one who put “Dude Ranch” into the vacation decision hat.
Cabo had also been her choice. Napa had been Anna’s.
I was oh-for-three. Once the trip had been booked, Zoe unfurled a list of “must dos and sees.” At the top of her list was seeing an elk in real life.
It took three full days into our seven-day trip before she spotted one during a trail ride.
After that, they seemed to be everywhere, as though the elk spigot had been turned on.
Zoe’s enthusiasm for each sighting didn’t dim, to the point that Anna suggested we turn it into a drinking game.
I nixed that idea before it could get any traction. But it didn’t stop us from loud-whispering “Drink!” every time one of us shouted “Elk.”
“They’re beautiful,” announces the mom from the row ahead of us.
“It’s creepy how that one is staring at us,” says one of the teens before returning her focus to yet another TikTok video.
Anna leans across me, elbowing me in the stomach, and snaps a picture. I glare at her. She leans away, tucking her phone into her lap like a busted kid. I immediately feel bad.
I snap some of my own pictures, then bump her shoulder and whisper, “Elk.”
Anna’s face breaks into the widest smile I’ve seen since we started this seven-stop excursion. “Drink,” she whispers, and I grin, which irons a wrinkle from the tension between us. I take it one step further by leaning back so she can get a better view out the window.
“Thanks.” She takes a few more photos.
The bull shakes his head, his giant antlers slicing through the air. “Wow,” we say as one.
I blanch at the thought of the damage those antlers could do.
“Don’t worry,” Anna leans into me. “I’ll distract him for you to get away if needed.”
“Thanks.” I have a vision of Anna in those red cowgirl boots and wonder if elk also see red as a neon charge sign. God, I hope she doesn’t have those boots anymore.
Anna takes a few more pictures, including a selfie with the elk behind her. I lean as far back as I can to stay out of the shot.
I’ll distract him for you to get away.
She’s teasing, but I know from experience she has a big heart to back it up.
It had always been easy to overlook Anna’s selflessness and keen intuition.
To the uninitiated, she was a bubbly party girl, obsessed with fashion and the latest “it” spot to be seen.
I’d been the recipient of that big heart on many occasions.
Like when Eddie, a boy in our dorm I was crushing on before I met Jack, stood me up on my birthday—granted he didn’t know it was my birthday, but still—and Anna whipped Zoe into gear and made reservations at the swankiest restaurant I’d ever been to.
If it came down to it, Anna would distract that elk so I could get away.
“They really are impressive,” says one of the dads from behind us.
“The dude ranch hires them to stand there until the van drives by. It’s part of their VIP package,” jokes the husband from the front seat, and both his teen daughters sink lower in their seats, mortified.
“Do we get to ride one?” one of the kids behind us asks.
“No, Dek. We don’t ride elk. They’re wild. We stay away from wild animals,” explains a dad in a patronizing voice that makes me wince.
“We have over fifty horses on the ranch,” Wade explains, maneuvering the van back onto the road. “We match every guest with a horse for the time you’re with us. We have daily trail rides for riders of every level. You’ll love it.”
The girl right in front of me throws accusing eyes at her mother. “I am not riding a smelly horse. You didn’t say anything about having to ride.”
“We’re going to a dude ranch, CeCe. Of course, you’re going to ride,” her dad adds, clearly missing his wife’s wide-eyed glare to zip it.
“I thought you loved horses, darling.”
“That’s DeeDee. God, Mom, really.”
Anna snorts, barely covering her nose in time to muffle the sound. I hide a laugh and whisper, “If they had another child, would they have named her BeBe?”
Anna giggles in her cupped palm. “EeEe.”
I fake a cough, allowing the bottled-up laugh to escape.
Anna leans back and pats the bag with Zoe’s urn, her mouth moving in silent words.
I wonder what she’s saying to Zoe, catching myself watching her as I have several times lately when she’s otherwise distracted.
She’s so familiar and yet so different. Or maybe I’m the one who’s different.
Every so often, like now, I see the Anna who was my best friend.
Then memories of Greece and the five years we haven’t spoken blur the woman I knew into the entitled monster I saw that last day in Greece.
Jack had suggested that I misread the situation.
Zoe had insisted that I misread the situation.
But hurt and betrayal and anger, mixed with guilt and a killer hangover, are not conducive to reading between the lines.
I’d seen it. Everyone had seen it. And I had to live with the fallout. All three of us had.
I close my eyes, feeling Zoe’s arms around me the first time I saw her after that fateful trip. “I don’t want to lose my best friends,” she’d said. “I can’t lose my best friends.”
If we’d made up back then, would she have confided in us sooner?
The mom in the front row of the van sighs in defeat. “You don’t have to ride. There are plenty of other things to do.”
Anna leans forward, placing a still perfectly manicured hand on the seatback.
“That’s what this one said the first time we came.
She swore up and down and sideways that she would never get anywhere near a horse.
” Anna hitches a thumb in my direction. The grumpy teen is more impressed by Anna’s ombré nail art than my lack of enthusiasm for equestrian sports.
“You’re one to talk,” I say. “Anna, here, was so grossed out by the smell of the horses that she went through an entire bottle of perfume the first day.”
“It was a five-hundred-dollar bottle of Guerlain from Paris,” Anna says as though that helps clarify what happened.
“It smelled better on you than on the horse.” I’d been too terrified by the size of the beast they paired me with to be overly concerned with Anna dousing her mount in expensive French perfume.
After thirty minutes of walking in circles in the arena, I decided that maybe Squirt wasn’t that bad after all.
That’s when I got the first whiff of Anna and Peanut.
While the perfume may have camouflaged a bit of Peanut’s smell, it also attracted more flies, which made the mare extra cranky.
CeCe wrinkles her nose and twists to get a better look at Anna. “You sprayed perfume on a horse?”
Anna shrugs. “She was smelly.”
“Why would you come to a dude ranch if you’re afraid of horses?” DeeDee narrows her eyes at me.
Indeed. It had taken some top negotiation skills on Zoe’s part to convince me and, I’m not too proud to admit, the promise that I could pick our next destination without having to rely on the luck of the draw. “It was on our best friend’s bucket list,” I answer.
Anna rests her hand on the urn wedged between us.
CeCe notices. “What’s that?”
“Our friend Zoe.” Anna smiles sadly.
DeeDee turns around to look at what we’re talking about, her eyes widening at the sight of the urn. “You brought a dead person with you?”
Anna’s mouth falls open.
“DeeDee,” the mom snaps.
“What? I think that’s cool.”
“It was her final wish that we scatter her ashes in the places we visited together,” I feel the need to explain then promptly wish I’d kept my mouth shut when one of the dads from the row behind us squeezes my shoulder.
Anna is the oversharer. Zoe was everyone’s welcomer. I was the can-we-please-not-er.
The mom’s eyes soften. “That’s lovely.” Then to her girls, “Turn around.”
CeCe turns around and lifts her phone, looking for a signal. “When are we going to get there? There’s no cell service.”
DeeDee takes another look at the urn, and I can tell she wants to ask more questions, but her mom taps her shoulder for her to face forward.
“We’re almost there,” Wade says.
I pull the sides of Anna’s bag over the urn. Anna catches my gaze, her eyes misty. “It’ll be okay,” I say, fighting a wave of nausea. I’d like to blame the rough, twisty drive but that’s not the culprit. Tomorrow we’ll have to say another goodbye.