Luke talked to Jackson, and Jackson told him there wasn’t much he could do, but he was meeting with the heirs this afternoon, and maybe Luke could come out and make nice, that sort of thing. He also gave Luke the name of a lawyer, and he said, You’re going to need one if you can’t work this out with the ladies.
I have faith that Luke can work it out with the ladies. He said he was going out to the ranch to scope things out, get a feel for them. I said, “Are you going to tell them their dad stole the ranch from our dad?”
He looked at me like that was a dumb question and said, “Well yeah, Leo. That’s the whole point.”
Boy, I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that one. Women are superhot when they’re mad.
But then I got to thinking about it, because that’s what I do, I think, and I said, “You know, you ought to invite them to dinner.”
Luke said, “Now I know you’re crazy. I don’t even know them. I’m not bringing them here,” he said, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if it was because of the house or because he didn’t know them.
I said, “No, think about it, Luke. They have no reason to make a deal with you. They don’t know you, they don’t care what Dad did, right? But maybe if they see that we are living in reduced circumstances,” and I sort of gestured to my chair, but I can’t really gesture anymore, so I had to knock my hand against it, “they might be more sympathetic.” If you think that’s a totally sick idea and a gross manipulation of emotions, you are right. I think someone should pay me for my great ideas.
But Luke, he just shook his head and said, “Sometimes, I really worry about you, Leo.”
He doesn’t need to worry about me. I know where I am and where I’m going. He needs to worry about himself because his path isn’t so clear. That’s why he needs a certified genius in his corner.
EIGHT
With a carefully highlighted map, Madeline started for the ranch later that afternoon, driving cautiously on a narrow two-lane road. It wended up through a forest so thick with pines, spruce, and cottonwoods that the trees were forced to bend over the road, creating a canopy. Roads seemed treacherous enough, but they were made worse by the ground squirrels that sailed out of the underbrush and onto the road before her car, crisscrossing in crazy patterns and narrowly avoiding death beneath her wheels.
She finally reached a plateau where the road ran alongside a meadow bursting with daisies and sunflowers. A handful of horses grazed, their tails swishing away flies. It seemed to Madeline she’d driven miles and miles, when in fact, according to her speedometer, it had been only seven. She found the turn she was to take at mile marker 243, just as Jackson’s map said (kudos to him for accuracy) and turned onto a gravel road. The grade was steeper here, the curves around the mountainside longer. She drove through towering spruce trees until the road began to straighten out as it crossed another meadow. This meadow was much larger than the one she’d passed, and ahead, she could see the entrance to the ranch. It couldn’t be missed—two thick wooden posts held up a sign, faded by weather, that said HOMECOMING RANCH.
Madeline coasted to a stop. Jackson had said the gate would be unlocked, but it was closed. She stepped out of her car, landing awkwardly in her pumps on the uneven road. The gate, all iron, came only to her waist; she gave it a healthy shove, and it swung back, clanging against the stretch of iron fencing that marked the entrance.
So this is where her father had lived? Madeline turned to look back down the road she’d driven. The forest, the mountains and meadow, all so breathtakingly beautiful. And so vast. Too vast. In Florida, one could hardly drive ten minutes without encountering another community. Madeline could get lost very easily out here without markers, without signs, without something to say where she was. Was that what her father had done? Put himself so far off the map that she couldn’t possibly find him and the family he’d had that didn’t include her?
Speaking of family, if only loosely, made the knot in Madeline’s gut tighten. She’d come this far, she told herself. There was no room for nerves now.
She got back into the car and drove up a lane lined with cottonwoods and spruce trees, all of which seemed to grow out of a carpet of black-eyed Susans and daylilies. Through the trees, Madeline could see another meadow fenced in by split rails. It was coffee-table book perfect, save one jarring sight—in that lush meadow, a line of portable toilets that had been set up next to a split rail fence. She could not imagine what purpose those toilets served in a place where there were no people, besides marring an otherwise perfect mountain vista.