Putting on family spreads on Sunday mornings, Wednesday evenings, and holidays was about as close to celebrity cooking as either of them could manage.
While they did their graceful cooking ballet, Logan wended a path around them to the coffee—laying a kiss on his sister’s cheek, and one on Gabe’s, and a kiss to little Matthew’s satiny baby head. He was three months old, and Gabe seemed to wear him on her chest all day long.
Logan had been there when little Matthew Edgar Cahill had made his impatient and dramatic entrance into the world. He hadn’t meant to be there, but Gabe had unexpectedly popped the boy out in the middle of her and Heath’s bed, and Logan had heard all the screaming and run in to find out what was wrong, and found himself face to … very much not Gabe’s face while Heath frantically helped her birth their kid.
That had been a hell of a thing, seeing that, the screaming and the mess, and then bearing witness to Heath and Gabe and their son in that first moment of bonding. There’d been a twitch in Logan’s mind, or heart, somewhere inside, and the tormenting memory of holding Heath back while Ruthie died screaming for her daddy to save her had twined tight into the beautiful sight of his little brother bringing his next child into the world. There was a kind of circle there, a frayed thread finding its place in the weave.
God, Logan loved this baby boy.
Right now, he was fussing quietly, kicking his cute little feet into his mother’s belly, trying to decide if he wanted to really work up a good fit. Gabe cooed at him while she tried to work around him to twist hunks of dough into knots.
Ah man, he loved those knot things. They had this savory-sweet flavor going on that made his mouth water in anticipation.
He took a big slug of his coffee and set the cup down in a tiny free space on the butcher-block island top. “Hey, I’ll take him.”
Gabe smiled but shook her head. “He’s gonna want to nurse any minute. That’s what his grump’s about.”
“There a bottle in the fridge?”
Her pretty mouth twisted up; she didn’t like her son to have a bottle when she was right there with the source.
Logan nudged her. “C’mon, little mama. Let Uncle Logan have a turn.”
The twist eased into a smile. “Okay. I could use the break, actually.”
“Excellent. The B team is ready to get on the field.” He found a bottle of breast milk—he’d been an uncle, living shoulder to shoulder with his whole family, long enough not to be freaked out about breast milk—in the fridge. By the time he had it warmed to the perfect temperature, Matthew had made his decision about working up an honest fit and had come down firmly on yes. Gabe extricated the bellowing, writhing bundle from the sling on her chest, and Logan got good hold of him.
Surprised by his sudden change of location, Matthew paused in his protests and scowled up at his uncle.
“Listen up, cowpoke,” Logan murmured as his nephew settled into his arm and took the bottle eagerly. “You gotta treat your mama good. Every day you’ve got her, you make sure she knows how much you love her.”
He stood on the sideline of the busy kitchen and watched Matthew feed. As little dark brown eyes rolled up with pleasure, Logan grinned. Yeah, this was everything he wanted or needed, already here, in his home. Where he belonged.
The room had gone quiet, and Logan glanced up. Emma and Gabe stood at the island, frozen in the midst of their work. They stared at him. Anya, standing on a chair between them, was the only one who hadn’t given him her full attention. She was pouring far too much batter on the pancake griddle.
Emma had a strangely bittersweet look on her face. Unable to understand what that was about, he nodded toward Anya, directing his sister. “Watch out.”
She turned to her daughter and caught the batter spill before it became an environmental disaster. But Gabe still stared at him, watching him feed her child.
“What?”
“You should do that someday.”
“What?” he asked again, feeling like he was getting only half the pages of this story.
“Be a father.”
He laughed—hard enough that Matthew flinched and lost the nipple. Logan plugged him up again before he could register a complaint. “No, little mama. I’ll leave that to the nesters in the family. I’m too old and ornery.”
“You’re neither of those things. And you’d be good at it.”
It was hardly the first time someone had said he should be a father, or asked when he planned to settle down, or some variation on that theme. It had been his father’s favorite song all through Logan’s thirties. The old hypocrite.
Logan had always brushed off such questions like a bit of dust on his boots. He loved kids and was good with them, but he didn’t want the kind of life kids fit into.
Today, however, with the shadow of his misspent night with Honor Babinot trying to climb onto his back, he felt a little raw at the thought of a different kind of life.
“Oh, don’t bother,” Emma breezed. “Logan’s a lost cause. He likes his ‘freedom’ too much.” She’d made dramatic quotes around the word freedom, with her fingers and her voice both, and punctuated it further with a roll of her eyes.
Now, Logan was pissed. Real, vivid, fierce anger lit his head on fire. It shocked the hell out of him and took all his will to hold it in, to keep it deep, away from any visible part of him. He stood where he was, silently, looking down at Matthew, taking calm from the sight of the contented child, and hid his anger from his family, until that anger was mastered.
Logan did not do rage. Heath did rage. Logan did nonchalance.
So he stood there until he could lift his head and grin at his sisters. “Yep. A pirate’s life is the life for me. I’m gonna take this little rapscallion off to the men, where he belongs, before all this female work confuses him.”
Gabe laughed and stuck her tongue out at him. “Caveman.” Her tone was playful and full of love.
He smiled and kissed her cheek again. “Pirate, you mean. Get it right.”
Chapter Eight
Logan leaned on the pommel of his saddle and gave Ranger, his buckskin gelding, an affectionate pat on the withers. The horse bobbed his head and stamped his foot lightly. Knowing what he wanted, Logan loosened the reins and let him snack on the lush grass beneath them.
This spring had been unusually cool and wet, but it was working its way to summer, and all that rain had turned the world at the foot of the Sawtooth range into an emerald fairyland. Cahill Creek had overtaken its banks a few times during the season, and here at the beginning of June, it still rushed like a river. Snow lingered above, frosting the teeth of the mountains; skiing around Sun Valley, nestled in the Sawtooth Range, had been spectacular well into the spring.
The Twisted C herd had been especially fecund as well; they had more new calves than they’d had in years. Logan sat astride his horse on a rise overlooking their biggest, best pasture and watched the mamas and babies wander below. This was his favorite time of year on the ranch—green and quiet. Peaceful. Later in the summer, there’d be the weaning, and as the cold approached, it’d be time to roundup for market. There was a lot more work to be done in those months, and, though he enjoyed the work itself, it wasn’t peaceful.
The Twisted C herd was free-range and grass-fed. Their cows had good lives, natural lives, largely free from stress, though roundups couldn’t help but be stressful, nor could market time.
Free-range had always been the Cahill way, but his father had reversed his own father’s decision and taken the herd off corn, long before grocers had started charging premium prices for grass-fed beef, like it was some kind of delicacy. But, as his father insisted, free-range grazing was the way things had been done in the beginning, and the way things should be done. Grain feed had taken hold in American cattle farming on a large scale around the middle of the twentieth century—the same time that corporations had turned their attention to agriculture—and the primary reason was profit.
The Twisted C was a bus
iness, of course, with an eye toward profit, too. But the family had become wealthy when the natural way was the only way, Morgan Cahill had argued. They weren’t a corporation, they had only their own purse to mind, so they could decide when enough wealth was enough.
Then, of course, grass-fed had become ‘trendy,’ and their beef sold at a premium, so the profit margin grew anyway.
For going on three decades, Logan had been paying attention to the way his father did business. For the whole last of those decades, he’d been empowered to influence that business. What he’d learned was that he wanted to be a rancher, and a businessman, in his father’s model. There was little he’d change about the way the Twisted C ran. His father was suspicious of technology and slow to adopt it or adapt to it, and Logan pushed him to accept innovations that would make things easier to track without changing actual operations. But the operation itself—it ran right. The old ways had been good to them, and to their herd.
And a life on a cattle ranch where the cattle lived well was a quiet, peaceful life. A good life.
“What’re you thinkin’, son?” Logan’s father, at his side astride Hollywood, his big palomino, asked.
“Just that I love this life.”
His father made a hoarse, lazy chuckle. “Yeah. There’s little in the world better than this—a bright day, a good herd, summer on the wind. It’s days like this when I can see what my life’s been and know I did okay, on balance.”
“Better than okay, Dad.”
“Maybe so. But that’s not for me to judge. It’s what I leave behind that’ll matter in the long run. If the ground I tilled is fertile enough to keep this family strong as it grows.”
Logan smiled at the farming metaphor that didn’t quite work for a rancher. He turned and studied his old man’s rugged profile. Eighty-five years old and still mounting his sixteen-hand horse. His hair and beard were prodigious and nearly white, his faded-denim eyes buried in heavily lined lids and shadowed under bushy white brows. Astride his horse, under his Stetson, with the Twisted C all around him, Morgan Cahill was a study in the history of the American West. A thick branch of a family tree that had rooted in land that had been wild and unmarked.
Logan would be no more than a dwindling twig shooting off that branch, going nowhere, bearing no fruit. He would run the ranch until he died, but when he was gone, it would be Heath’s children, or Emma’s, carrying on. His blood, but not his legacy. Himself, he’d fade out of memory until there was nothing left of him at all.
Ripping his hat off his head, he gave himself a hard shake and dragged his hand through his hair. Was this a midlife crisis he was having? At forty-one? That shit had to stop, and right the hell now. He did not want children, or wife, or any of it. He wanted the life he had, the way he had it. Emma might roll her eyes at the thought that he wanted his freedom, but that was exactly what he wanted: to live his life his way. No compromises. No entanglements but those he’d been born with. Nothing to draw him away from what he loved, who he was.
What the hell did it matter if he left a legacy of his own? The Cahill family would be strong without him. He’d left the creation and raising of the next generation to his brother and sister, who had the temperament for it.
“Loge?” He could feel that his father’s intense regard had turned to him.
“I’m okay. Rabbit ran over my grave, I guess.” He tried out a chuckle and thought it turned out pretty normal.
His father didn’t respond, but Logan could still feel his eyes on him. He turned and met that squinty, weathered face.
“I’m okay.”
“You been quiet of late, son. Since you last came back from Boise. There anything you need to get off your chest? That friend of yours okay?”
“Friend?”
“The friend in the wreck. Why you didn’t stay at the mayor’s banquet.”
Damn, he forgotten he’d used that lame excuse. Well, if his father had ever believed there had been a friend in a wreck, he didn’t now. But Logan continued the lie. “Yeah, he’s okay.”
His father grunted and turned to survey the herd again. Logan turned as well and watched a couple of calves leave their mothers’ sides to cavort together like the energetic youngsters they were. When they strayed too far, both cows lowed, almost in unison, and called their babies back to safety.
“For a long time, I thought I didn’t want a family of my own. I let your grandfather worry the name was gonna die out with me. I never found a woman I could imagine living every day with, and I hated the way everybody thought I should find a woman out of duty to the family. I hope you don’t think I pressure you, son.”
“You don’t, Dad. Heath’s got the family name covered, anyway.”
He grinned. “Indeed he does. But I’m worried about you, Logan. Pretty soon, you’re gonna be rattling around alone in that big old house.”
“Dad, what the hell does that mean? You’re not dying.”
“No, I’m strong enough. But I’m old, and I’m startin’ to feel it. I’m not gonna live forever.”
Logan did not want to have this conversation, so he did what he always did when things got too intense, and deflected to sarcasm. “Do you have a point besides my living accommodations? Because if that’s all you’re worried about, after you croak, if it’ll make you happy, I’ll switch up with Heath and Gabe and move into the bunkhouse or something. Problem solved.”
“Logan. Live your life the way you want to live your life. But somethin’s eating at you, and it has been for a couple weeks now, since you came back from Boise. You and I both know you don’t have a college friend in town, wreck or not. Not one you’d shirk a family duty for. Not a ‘he,’ at any account. If there’s a woman’s got you somber like this, then I say think hard about what that means. When I met your mama, I was so old, and she was so young, I thought I was crazy for feeling the way I did, especially after all those years of not wanting what I all of a sudden wanted with her. Took me some time to get it right in my head, but my heart was dragging me to her from the first time I saw her.”
Logan was surprised at the depth of the insight, but his father was wrong. What had him distracted was a woman, maybe, but not in the same way his father spoke of his mother. Morgan Cahill had been forty-two years old when he’d married nineteen-year-old Serena. He’d married her and carried her to the ranch, and she’d grown into the role of ranch wife and mother at the same time she’d grown into her life as a woman. Though her home had been the Sawtooth Jasper Reservation, and she’d always maintained the ties to her family and her heritage, she had become a Cahill, unreservedly.
Emma and Heath had married people whose lives had been similarly unencumbered. Neither Wes nor Gabe had had strong family connections or fully developed lives before they’d met their Cahill mates. They hadn’t changed the Twisted C or the Cahill way of life; they had become part of it.
Logan’s current existential crisis—and yeah, midlife or not, that was what he was going through, his renegade mind scurrying around, digging up old memories and second-guessing every damn thing about himself and his life—wasn’t really that what he wanted in his life had changed. That was true, but it wasn’t a crisis. It was that what he wanted would change everything about his life. That was a crisis.
The only woman who had ever made him think of any kind of future was Honor Babinot. And, by her very existence, she made him see and feel every way he was unworthy. Moreover, she would never fit into this life. She was a high-powered urban attorney, not a country wife.
They did not mesh. At all.
The problem was not that he didn’t want what his father had found, what his brother and sister had. The problem was that he had discovered that he did want it, but only with one woman--and he could never make that woman happy and be happy himself.
“There’s no woman, Dad,” he insisted, and wasn’t sure whether it was a lie or not.
With another disbelieving grunt, his father let the matter drop.
Logan’s t
reacherous brain, however, kept digging.
*****
“Hey, pass the sprouts, will ya?”
Heath shoveled his forkful of meatloaf into his mouth, set his fork on his plate, and handed over the big casserole dish of roasted Brussels sprouts. Logan grabbed it with a nod of thanks.
Anya, who’d been discoursing at length about the unfairness of her new Brownie Girl Scouts troop leader, glared at her uncles for the interruption. Logan shrugged. “Sorry, honeybee. The sprouts were getting cold. Go on with your story.”
“She says we all have to pick a robot badge to work on, but I don’t want a robot badge. Robots are for boys.”
Logan looked down the table at his sister, who said nothing. The female point of view was sorely lacking at this meal. Gabe was missing the Wednesday family dinner; she was taking a course at Boise Community College that met for four hours on Wednesday nights. She’d taken online courses in the spring, in the last weeks of her pregnancy and first weeks of Matthew’s life, and she meant to take as many courses online as she could, but this wasn’t one of them, apparently.
Anya and her mother were the only females at the table, and Emma wasn’t one who’d argue with the idea that robots were for boys.
Gabe would’ve leapt all over it, and they probably would have had a lively discussion. Logan glanced at Wes, Anya’s father, who had a mouthful of dinner roll. Heath was focused on his meatloaf and his son, asleep at his side in his rocker-cradle doohickey. Logan didn’t think any of them had really been listening to the girl’s diatribe. Neither had he, in point of fact. She’d been going on for a while, and she rarely stopped for breath.
Somebody had to say something to her, so Logan swallowed a sprout and jumped in. “I think robots are for boys and girls both, Annie. Remember that story we saw on the news awhile back, the girls who made a farming robot. They won a big contest.”
Someday (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 2) Page 10