Chapter Thirty
Brady took Jake on an unofficial tour of the ranch land as they looked for Tanner.
They drove down access roads leading to the main pastures, over to the edge of several fields of corn and soybeans, up to an open pasture near a tree-covered rise in the land that Brady referred to as Sandstone Ridge.
Jake took it all in as they bounced past, wondering where his brother would have gone, wondering if it was futile to search for him in the thousands of acres of the ranch, if they should just wait it out. It seemed like needle-in-haystack odds of finding a man on a horse in all this open land.
When they were headed up the road toward the east pasture where they’d found the cattle thieves, both of them silently scanned the area. They hadn’t found a trace of Tanner or spotted him in any of the expected places. Jake could sense Brady was becoming agitated.
“Where the fuck are you, Tan?” Brady muttered as he slowed the truck down to ease over the uneven potholes in the gravel road, his eyes roving over the area ahead of them.
Jake was getting an inkling that Tanner didn’t want to be found.
“Would he have gone up to the family cemetery?” he asked, suddenly thinking of Brady’s offer to take him.
He had no idea if his brother would be that kind of man, to wallow in a place like a graveyard when he was at rock bottom.
Jake knew himself, and he would do just that, likely with a bottle of scotch to keep him company, similar to when he’d lost his restaurant.
So, given they seemed to think the same way sometimes, it was worth a shot to at least check.
Brady stopped the truck and looked over at Jake. “I hadn’t thought of it. Worth a look.”
Brady turned the truck around and they bounced back over the potholes toward the main road a little faster, Jake holding on to the handle on the door to keep in his seat. Brady didn’t seem to notice how rough it was, but Jake’s teeth rattled until they reached the smooth asphalt of the main road.
The truck creaked as they swung onto the main road, and Jake relaxed the death grip he’d had on the handle.
That road should be regraveled. They all should.
Driving through ruts and potholes the size of a small pond couldn’t be good for the trucks, and he found himself wondering how much it would cost to bring in a dump truck of gravel to fill them, what roads were the most important to do first, and if they had one of those tractors that smoothed out dirt with a big blade.
He was about to ask Brady about it when it struck him that there was no reason on earth he needed to worry about that, since this wasn’t his ranch and he’d be gone soon. What did he care about potholes?
But a voice inside him said he did, and it was important, and like he’d been doing since he got here, he added it to the giant bag of issues he’d unpack when he was back in New York and he didn’t need to worry about anyone other than himself.
Which was a world away from where he was right now, staring at fields his family owned, looking for his brother and a horse, and falling in love with a woman who would never follow him home.
He’d gotten in deep, and he didn’t know how to climb out.
“It’s just up here,” Brady said, and turned down another gravel road, this one a little smoother, with grass growing between the wheel ruts. An iron gate with the word west arched over it stood a little way up a hill, and Jake’s chest prickled, his heart kicking at his rib cage.
His family was buried here. His father, his grandfather, aunts, uncles . . . an entire side of his family. A legacy he had squarely sitting on his shoulders to make whatever his father had done right again.
Brady stopped the truck at the end of the lane and they looked up. Chip was quietly grazing around an old headstone just inside the gate, his mane and tail wafting in the breeze, a picture of peace.
“Son of a bitch. Looks like you have some sense,” Brady muttered, flicking a glance at Jake. “He’s here all right. He hasn’t visited once since Dad, I mean Brett—”
“He’s still your father,” Jake interrupted. “He raised you. He’s more your father than he could ever be mine.”
Brady hmphed at that and stepped out of the truck, the squeak of the hinges loud compared to the quiet where they were.
Jake did the same, apprehensive to walk under the metal bars with his name on it.
But if Tanner was here, it was more important to suck it up and make sure his brother was okay.
He could deal with his own emotions later.
As Brady had indicated without saying, this was not normal grumpy-asshole Tanner behavior.
They climbed the slight rise to the middle of the small cemetery.
Jake noticed faded names on the headstones, most of them West, but some names he didn’t recognize.
Right in the middle was a large, black marble obelisk-shaped monument, with west across the top tier of the base.
Underneath that were names, his father’s most recently chiseled into the polished rock.
“Dad—he was cremated. He and his family are buried around the base of this one.” Brady murmured, gesturing at it. “There’s a spot for Tan and me, too, apparently. I’ve never looked.”
Jake nodded, reading the name over again, tracing the curve of the B with his eyes, seeing the dates, the rock uncovered by the chisel still milky white, waiting for rain and winter to weather it to the darker patina the others already had.
He glanced over the other names, and there was Veronica beside it, her birth and death dates.
Underneath that was Tanner and Brady, their birth dates but no death date.
Peony was not, which irked him a bit. She had as much right to be buried as a West as anyone.
As Jake scanned the rest of the granite, over to the other side, in not quite as fresh but nonetheless newly chiseled letters, was his name, the same way.
“Fuck,” he whispered, and pointed. “He put me on here too.”
Brady crouched and ran fingers over the lettering, then looked back at Jake with raised eyebrows. “Well, look at that. We never noticed at the interment. Dirt was heaped up, maybe it was hidden by some of the flowers.”
It hit Jake squarely in the chest as he stood there, and he couldn’t breathe, narrowing in on his own name, the hair on the back of his neck rising as his unease took hold.
His dad was in the ground in front of him, and someday he would be too. He’d never dealt with death like this before, at least not so directly and visibly. It was fucking scary to contemplate, and he hadn’t even known the man. He had actively hated him for most of his life.
Did he still hate him? It was a huge question, and it added pressure to the weight sitting on his chest as he stood there.
He let out another big breath, looking away, the tension cording across his shoulders.
They were here for Tanner, not this, and he forced himself look for him instead of focusing on the mild panic creeping across his body.
They heard a cough, and Jake stepped around the monument to find Tanner sprawled out, his back propped against the stone, the bottle of Crown Royal in his hand almost empty.
The view of the Rockies from this side was spectacular, and obviously why this hill had been sectioned off.
Jake looked at the hazy peaks in the distance before squatting beside his brother.
Brady had done the same on the other side, a hand already on his shoulder, which Tanner shook off.
Bloodshot eyes turned Jake’s way, then back to the horizon.
Tanner had been crying, or he was already completely drunk, Jake wasn’t sure.
Brady hung his head but Jake caught the look on his youngest brother’s face that said he was in uncharted territory, just as much as Jake was.
Jake immediately steeled himself like he did when he had to talk his mother into a cab or help her in the door of his apartment.
He stuffed all the worry and unanswered questions deep down inside and went calm.
“Come to rub some salt in?” Tanner rasped, and took a long pull from the bottle.
The liquid sloshing against the glass was such a familiar sound, Jake swore he’d been transported to a back kitchen somewhere in the city. A gentle breeze and the smell of fresh-cut hay were the only reminders that it was a different time, a different family member.
He reached out and took the bottle from Tanner, who let it go without a fight, fingers slack, hand falling to his lap. Jake gave him a gentle nudge.
“Move over.”
Tanner shuffled sideways, and Jake lowered himself down beside his brother.
Brady sat down cross-legged where he was, and the three of them went silent, looking across the fields toward the mountains.
The breeze lifted Jake’s hair off his forehead, and he took in yet another deep, cleansing breath, filling his lungs.
From this vantage point, he allowed himself to find calmness in the fresh vibrancy around him. There was no dirty concrete, no skyscrapers blotting out the sun, no smog that could make you choke, no sirens that made your ears bleed.
Right now, there was only peaceful, centering, open space.
“You know, Dad used to tell me One day this will all be yours, son.” Tanner’s voice was slurred, and he flailed his hand out in front of him. “Bullshit, all of it.”
“Not bullshit. It is yours,” Jake replied, catching Brady’s eye.
Brady nodded but thinned his lips, squinting back out at the mountains in the distance.
“It is bullshit. He never told us ’bout you, or that my own brother isn’t—”
Tanner hiccupped and stopped talking, squeezing his eyes shut. He was beyond drunk, but not to the point where he was going to toss his cookies back up. At least Jake hoped not. The truck ride home would suck if Tanner did.