Jed was especially good with the horses. When they had first moved to the ranch from town (his father renamed it the Lazy K as a joke, because neighbors gossiped that he had gotten the ranch through sheer laziness), there had been an old man there, weathered, wrinkled and spare of talk. Except when he talked about horses. Jed drank everything he said in. He watched as this crumpled, faded man took horses bucking to turn themselves inside out and calmed them merely with his presence. He watched as these same horses came to look for the man, and would nicker when they saw him approach. He watched as their eyes went from glassy and white-rimmed to soft as the sky after a summer rain. He never thought taming a creature so prone to flight could be as much a work of art as the paintings he saw in the many museums he had visited. Without realizing it, he knew he wanted to be an artist like this old man someday.

So while he raised cattle for money, he had horses for pleasure. That didn’t mean that they didn’t work, too, but Jed knew that there was something more than just getting them ready to work cattle that he enjoyed. He was after that summer sky look in their eyes, the way they would approach him even in endless acres of pasture. He liked to think that his art was made of manes, tails and soft nickers.

Jed and Gloria would often ride out on their ranch, sometimes taking Jessie, sometimes going out on their own. Jessie would smile to herself as she saw her father reach for her mother, and they would hold hands while riding their horses side by side. This was Jed and Gloria’s way of taking a vacation, the only vacation either of them wanted. It stayed that way until Jessie was fifteen, and her mother became too ill to ride. It had happened quickly, her mother fading like a photograph until one day she didn’t wake up in the morning. Jessie and her father, already close, grew closer. She stubbornly insisted on doing the same chores that the hired help did—struggling to push a wheelbarrow through mud, straining against bales of hay that weighed more than she did and fixing fence when she was allowed to ride out.

So it wasn’t her mother who tracked her down and called and gave her the news of her father’s diagnosis and his insistence on ignoring it. It was Mrs. Rodriquez, a middle-aged widow who had come to them after Gloria King had died to help out with keeping the house in order. This feisty, quick-witted woman had grown into part of their family. Jessie had come to rely on her solid figure and her even more solid, wise ways. Mrs. Rodriquez was not a woman to waste much, and words were no exception.

“Jessie, it is time for you to come home now,” she had said as soon as Jessie answered the phone. “Your father has a cancer. If you do not stop being foolish, he will be gone and you will regret being mad for so long. Come home, and stay awhile mijita. We have missed you here.”