Luke felt a surprising swell of nostalgia when he turned into the ranch’s entrance. He and little brother Leo, separated by three years, had spent their childhood in a patch of heaven. In the winter, they would ski and snowboard, or, if necessary, use trash-can lids to careen down the grassy slope behind the house. Their summers consisted of hiking, fishing, building forts, and bear tracking, the latter much to their mother’s chagrin.
When they were older, they’d joined their father in working cattle. It’s what the Kendricks did—they were, and had long been, high altitude cattle ranchers.
But the rhythm of their lives had revolved around Luke’s mother. She’d been there to feed them home-cooked meals after a hard day of play or work, to remind them to bathe when they had more important things on their mind, and to soothe the injuries, both emotional and physical, two boys tended to suffer. She kept the books for the ranch, sang in the church choir, and never missed a school event.
Dad didn’t miss one, either. Mom had been their anchor, but Dad had taught them how to be men. He taught them how to cast a fly-fishing line, how to saddle a horse, and chop wood. To build things, to breed cows, to respect women.
Maybe Luke had taken all that for granted. Maybe he’d thought that even after Mom died, when the ranch had started to look and feel different from the one of his youth, it would always be there for him. He never saw this coming, never dreamed it would all slip from their grasp. He’d always believed that one day, when Dad was gone, he’d be here, carrying on the tradition.
He’d not realized how much it would hurt to lose the ranch. It felt as if the blocks of his life were being kicked out from beneath him, one at a time.
It still looked the same as the magical place of his childhood—with the exception of the Port-A-Johns, and Luke was sure he didn’t want to know what that was about. He stopped just inside the gate, got out of his jeep, and walked across the meadow to the hillside. He studied the trees a moment, then walked straight for a Ponderosa pine. He pulled away the vines that had grown up onto the rocks beneath the pine, and smiled when he saw it—the fort he and Leo had built with river rocks, its entrance carefully concealed for spying. Luke had learned about the importance of proper engineering in building that fort. It had taken several tries and consultations with Dad before they got it right, but there it stood, maybe three feet by three feet, the best fort in America.
He and Leo would hide here, watching cows meander by, watching Dad and Ernest work. They brought pellet guns and shot at grouse and pheasant… until Mom found out what they were doing and took their guns away that summer. One Christmas, they’d made Dad a toolbox, and they’d hid it in here so he wouldn’t find it.
Luke re-covered the entrance with the vines. He’d always assumed that he would bring his son to this fort. Then again, he assumed his mother would be here and Leo would be healthy and Julie would be his wife.…
“Anh,” he muttered, silently chastising himself. There was no point in reliving that heartache again.
He drove on to the house, bouncing over the little bridge Dad and Ernest had built over the mountain stream that ran through their property. The stream eventually widened and met up with Pine River, where they used to shoot the rapids.
As he pulled into the drive, Luke noticed things were looking a little worn, a little weathered. Repairs to the place had begun to suffer when his mother had gotten sick, but what he saw was nothing that he couldn’t fix up in a couple of weeks. He would do that, Luke thought. He would fix things for Dad. He would make some wheelchair-accessible entries—there was only one at present, in the back of the house—maybe modify one of the rooms downstairs for his little brother so he wasn’t living twenty-four-seven in the den. On the weekends, he could come up here and turn this into a home again.
Luke was used to seeing Dad’s old pickup and Mom’s Pontiac in the drive and was not used to seeing strange cars parked there. Mom’s Pontiac was a beast of a car that could have ascended Pikes Peak. It still ran. It was in the garage, gathering a new layer of dust. The cars in the drive were the cars of strangers, of people who had slipped in and stolen his childhood right out from under him.
That little car with the donut spare in particular made him irrationally crazy. It was front and center, the car of the woman with long dark hair and blue eyes and a yellow highlighter. A woman who wore Dr. Scholl’s inserts and suite to the mountains. She was definitely cute. And definitely quirky. And she was now, officially, on his shit list.
Luke pulled around, sliding into a spot beneath a canopy beside the garage. By the time he’d gotten out of his Bronco and returned to the drive, Libby Tyler had walked out onto the porch as if she owned the place.