“I thought this morning I would make your favorite breakfast. You still like huevos, bacon and pancakes, mija?”

CHAPTER 9

It was the end of the day for Jessie; though it was hours after the horses were untacked, brushed and fed, she continued on her rounds. It had been an especially difficult evening because one of the guests (“stupid dude,” a newly-hired-and-subsequently-fired-wrangler had said) had come in from the last ride with a broken arm. While Jessie tried to get a straight story from someone, she took care of the woman, called the medical clinic in town to arrange for them to send the bill to the ranch, soothed the woman’s husband and then fired the big-mouthed wrangler.

Though it was a time when she would normally be finished with dinner and thinking about going to bed, she found herself staring out the kitchen window into the darkness, drinking a cup of coffee and thinking about something her father said to her before he died. “Don’t ever stay here because you have to, Jessie. I don’t want that for you…” she had interrupted him, protesting before he could finish his sentences, which took a long, wheezy time those days. “Listen to me,” he insisted. “It isn’t any good you being here if you don’t call this home. I know why you came back, and I am glad of it. But don’t think that you have to stay here for me or your mother or even your grandfather. If you aren’t here because you belong, this is going to be a jail cell, not a life.”

After days like these, she was tempted to feel caught, trapped by everything that needed her. But then she would remember her time in Denver, idly strolling through worn out and useless memories. After comparing that life to this one, it was easier to chalk her feelings up to needing a hot bath, a hot cup of coffee and a long night in a soft bed.

That was her way of coping for many months after she watched her father die. “He’s comfortable,” the hospice nurses told her, which looked comatose to Jessie. While he laid gasping for breath and then taking longer and longer to inhale again, she started repeating the phrase in her head, a mantra fueled by her grief and fear. “He’s comfortable.”

After the doctor had breezed through in the morning to pronounce Jed King dead, he tried to make arrangements for the body to be taken to the nearest funeral home, which was over an hour away. Jessie told him, her arms hugging herself and her blue eyes giving him a look her father would have recognized, that she would make the arrangements, and thank you for coming by. When he tried to convince her otherwise, he found himself being escorted out by the elbow by a woman half his size and was repeating the same words, as if he were a child being corrected. The screen door slammed behind him, and he wandered off the porch, into his car and drove away. Jessie buried her father in a remote corner of the ranch, where they would ride together to watch the wild ones graze in the evening light.