The Cowboy

by Molly O'Keefe

  “You never have to pay me back, son. You just have to let me in.”

  “Where?” I whispered. “To what? I’m living in my Gran’s house. Working construction and killing myself trying to get a forty-five percent bend back in my knee. What part of that do you want?”

  “All of it.”

  “Charlie.” I laughed. “You’ve got a gazillion-dollar oil company to run.”

  “It runs itself. I’m sorry your momma taught you that you weren’t interesting unless you were in the spotlight.”

  “Don’t,” I whispered because I couldn’t take it anymore. I really couldn’t.

  “But me and Bonnie deserve better than what you’ve given us. And you know it. Because me and that horse gave you everything we had.”

  Oh, God, it was so fucking true. I turned away because my face was hot and my chest was so tight I couldn’t take a full breath without it shaking my whole body. “I feel like I failed you,” I finally said. “And I know I failed Bonnie. She did everything I asked of her and she nearly died, and I don’t know how to make that better.”

  “First thing you do is go walk into that stall. Let her get a good nose full of you. You’ll see she carries no grudges. And neither do I, son.”

  Charlie half-led, half-pushed me around the corner to the stall. I kept my eyes on my boots because I was putting off looking at her for as long as I could. There was a rhythmic pounding up ahead. The sound of a horse beating its chest against a stable door. A couple of the hands came trotting past me towards the horse in distress. I heard her, that deep whinny, and out of instinct I looked up to see it was her pounding herself against that stall.

  And those big brown eyes looked right at me. I stopped, the two of us staring at each other, and then she was tossing that head and lifting her front legs, beating at the at door like she was going to knock it down. Her whinny got higher and more distressed and I couldn’t stand it.

  I ran the last few feet and got my hands on her neck and she put her nose right in my chest, breathing me in with big pulls of her magnificent lungs.

  “Hey there,” I whispered and her ears flicked. “Hey, sweetheart.” I kept talking nonsense to her, telling her how amazing she was. How strong. How brave.

  She put her nose against my chest and then my face, her lips nuzzling the collar of my shirt, and I stroked the soft white-and-brown-spotted neck and I didn’t realize I was crying until I tasted the salt of my tears on my lips.

  And all that praise I whispered to her turned into, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” in her ear on steady repeat. I was vaguely aware of Charlie talking to the doctor, signing some paperwork, and I was happy to let him handle it because Bonnie needed to be told she was such a good horse, such a good girl, and that I wouldn’t leave her alone like that again. Ever again.

  I ran my hands over her sides, happy to see that if she’d lost weight after the accident she’d gained it back. She looked healthy and felt strong.

  My horse. My beautiful horse.

  “She’s a wonderful animal,” the doctor finally said, interrupting our reunion.

  “Yes, she is,” I said.

  “And Oscar out at The King’s Land will take great care of her.”

  Oh. Right. Shit. Another situation I needed to make right.

  The doctor left and it was just me, Charlie, and Bonnie, and a tabby cat in the corner watching us through half-closed eyes.

  “Thank you, Charlie,” I said, because it was the only thing to say.

  Charlie nodded and I saw his own eyes were damp. And man, I didn’t know a lot about friendship. About what happened when one person was in pain and the other one just had to stand there and watch it all go down. But it couldn’t be easy. “I’m sorry I put you through all this.”

  He took a deep breath, the pearl snaps of the shirt beneath that sport coat of his earning their money trying to keep his chest inside the fabric. “Buy me a beer and we’ll call it even.”

  “Sure thing,” I said with a laugh. “But I gotta get Bonnie out to The King’s Land.”

  “I brought my trailer. We can hook it up to your truck.”

  “Like the old days,” I said. Remembering when he first sponsored me in the shit circuit in Oklahoma. I was sleeping in my truck, borrowing money from Gran to pay my entrance fees. He came up to me after a big all-around win and told me he couldn’t stand to see a man live like this. Sponsored me for five thousand dollars.

  It was more money than I’d ever had in my life.

  And for the cost of five grand some days he’d ride with me in my truck, from arena to arena across the Panhandle. The two of us decimating a bag of sunflower seeds and talking shit.

  How could I have forgotten those days? How could I have treated this man so poorly?

  “Charlie,” I whispered and shook my head, the words to big to make their way out of my chest.

  “It’s all right, son. Let’s take care of Bonnie and you can get me that beer,” Charlie said, clapping me on the back.

  This time the son felt good.

  It felt right.

  20

  BEA

  The dogs and I were driving out to The King’s Land.

  It was part of an elaborate plan to make sure I didn’t think about Cody. So far, in order to not think of Cody, I’d cleaned my house. Painted my toes. Made some calls to Austin and Houston about poaching some kitchen staff, got a bead on a young man I liked to be our chef.

  And I came to grips with the fact that I needed to move. For real. It was criminal keeping those dogs in a one-room apartment. We needed a yard. Fenced in with a tree for shade. And I didn’t care what came with it. A house. Apartment. I’d take a camper if I had to. But these poor dogs needed a place to roam. A tree to lie under.

  “I’m sorry guys,” I yelled over the radio and they both jumped up to lick my face. Absolving me because that was what pets did. Bonnie, for all Cody’s imagined crimes, probably did the horse equivalent of this. Lapped at his shirt, butted her head into his chest. Searched for contact. Offered up the same.

  I sighed, feeling grief in my belly for a man I didn’t want to feel a damn thing for.

  I grabbed my phone and had my thumb over Ronnie’s number to see if she knew any real estate agents or, really, to see if she had any ideas where I should live and I stopped. Because that instinct was another thing that had to end. She couldn’t solve my problems for me.

  I wasn’t going to call Sabrina, either.

  Instead I pulled over on Old Flagg Road and searched local real estate agents, found a woman whose face I liked and who had pretty good Google reviews, and I called her and made an appointment with her for Monday.

  Because I was an adult goddammit.

  And it was time for me to act like one.

  I pulled in under the gates at The King’s Land only to find the parking area fuller than usual. Some giant Denali and a horse trailer. The bottom of my stomach got cold with a sense of foreboding. Shit.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  Cody was here. He was dropping off Bonnie. I could feel it across my skin and the pit of my belly. For a moment I considered turning around and heading back into town. But I wasn’t going to have Cody push me away from my own damn house.

  I stopped on the far side of the parking area and Thelma jumped and Louise whined until I got her down.

  Something smelled good from inside the house so the dogs took off that way.

  I walked inside the house I hated without really looking around. But it was hard not to notice what was being done. Maria was boxing shit up. It was, in fact…almost all gone. My step-mother’s modern glass collection that looked like a thousand variations of a dick, my father’s old trophy heads and dusty old furs were off the walls and shelves. She was painting all the walls a bright, clean white.

  Without all that crap, the living room—with a wall full of windows—was actually really pretty. It kind of glowed. In the kitchen, Maria was trimming fat from a pork roast and feeding it to the dogs. />
  The kitchen always looked good. It was all brick and copper pots and a big gas stove where Maria worked her magic.

  “You’ll spoil them,” I said and walked over to kiss her.

  “Right. Because you’re so strict.” She leaned her cheek into my kiss. She smelled like cumin and roses. “Why are you here?”

  “Giving them a chance to run. What’s going on outside?” I asked. The window over the breakfast table looked out at the barn. There was a pretty strawberry roan out there, trotting around one of the corrals, shaking her mane like she was putting on a show for the cowboys standing around the fence line.

  Cody was there. His sweat-stained hat pushed back on his blond head.

  It was ridiculous to think I could have loved him. Even while I was lying to him. Tricking him. But the thought was there, as hard and real as truth.

  I could have loved him. And maybe it was delusional, but I think he could have loved me, too.

  “That new horse is moving in. Oscar and I are leaving tonight,” Maria said. “Dwayne and the boys will see her settled.”

  “Headed to Galveston?” I asked.

  “Yep. Leaving at five. Shoo, pups, I got nothing else for you,” she said and then came to look out the window with me. “Pretty horse.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Pretty cowboy.” Maria caught my eye and wiggled her eyebrows.

  “Dirty bird,” I said and bumped her hip with mine. “Hey,” I said. “I like what you’re doing with the place.”

  “Those old things should have been gotten rid of years ago,” Maria said. “And it will be easier to sell the place with all that clutter gone.”

  “When is it going on the market?”

  “No idea. Ronnie just asked me to clear out the junk.”

  “Have you done the upstairs?” I asked.

  “No,” she grinned at me. “I was waiting for you girls to come home and clear out your own rooms. You could do that right now.”

  “Maria,” I sighed, but she was jostling me around the shoulders. It was nice. Like something Ronnie would do.

  “No, you girls have been putting it off all year. Go clean out your stuff. Throw it all away. Keep it. Whatever you want, just…go look. Nothing is as bad as you think it is.”

  Oh, God, wasn’t that a lie. Particularly here. Everything on The King’s Land was just as bad as I thought it was.

  Even that cowboy out there.

  Especially him.

  “Okay,” I agreed. Because I imagined there wouldn’t be anything I wanted to keep. No mementos from my rather tumultuous childhood. Binky, my stuffed elephant, already sat on my bedside table. And I had my sisters. The rest was just…junk.

  “We have to go,” Maria said, looking at her watch. “I’m gonna have to drag that man away from the corral. If you want to spend the night,” she said. “There are clean sheets in the master.”

  “Sleep in my dad’s old bed?” I asked.

  “Hardly looks like what it used to,” Maria said. “We got rid of all that old furniture—you won’t even recognize it.” She kissed me on one cheek and patted me on the other and then was gone. Taking the roast wrapped up in the tinfoil with her. The dogs whined at the door she went out of.

  I propped open the back door, which opened up onto the screened-in porch where my mom used to spend her evenings with Ronnie and me when we were kids. Ronnie loved it out there, but it made me uncomfortable in the way the whole house did.

  Like all my happy and unhappy ghosts were watching me.

  Usually I raced through this room, but I didn’t today. I stood still and let the ghosts rub up against me until I felt sick from it. Or maybe it was Cody’s presence making me feel sick.

  Hard to say.

  I pushed out the screen door, onto the small stone deck, and sat down in the lawn chair, watching Maria and Oscar climb into their brand-new camper. Maria, who was driving, honked the horn as they pulled away under the gate.

  The two men still down at the corral—Cody and another man—were looking at me.

  And I was torn, right down the middle, between wanting him to come up here and wanting him to leave.

  Come.

  Leave.

  Something.

  But don’t hurt me anymore.

  And that’s when I realized it was me. Me that kept putting myself in harm’s way. Me that had the power to stop being hurt. Fuck this.

  And fuck him.

  I got up and headed back inside.

  21

  CODY

  “Something up there caught your eye?” Charlie asked when I turned to look up at that house for the hundredth time. She was a magnet in that green dress. I couldn’t not look. “That is one purely pissed-off woman.”

  I resettled against the fence, watching Bonnie toss her mane around and show off for me.

  “Fuck you, Charlie.”

  “What did you do to piss that woman off?”

  “Bea fucking King. I should have known better.” I kicked at the dirt and resettled my hat on my head. In the process I looked over my shoulder and caught her crossing her legs, the hem of that dress fluttering around her knee. “It was all just a…game to her.”

  “Well, her father was known for that kind of shit.”

  God bless Charlie. Always a sympathetic ear. I told him the whole story. The Morning Girl and Bea and how she played me all along. Pretending to be one thing while being something else entirely.

  “The fucking kick in the gut was…I liked her. I mean, really liked her,” I said.

  “So, that’s it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You really like her and she made a mistake and so…that’s it?”

  “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. I’d already decided I needed to apologize for that shit I said to her, but past that, what future did Bea King and I have?

  “You can take her in,” Charlie said to the hand who was walking Bonnie, and she trotted over to us as if to say good-night. I stroked my hands over her neck, felt the familiar warmth of her twitching skin.

  And then she was gone.

  “I better go make sure they’re not giving Bonnie—”

  “You stay right there, boy,” Charlie said, and his tone made me stand up straight. We faced each other next to the fence, the wind whistling through the stable doors. “A woman doesn’t go to all that trouble for a trick. You’re not that much of a prize, my friend.”

  “What the hell?”

  “It’s obvious you cared for her. And it’s real obvious she cared for you, too, and you’re not an easy man to care for,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to call bullshit, but I knew it was true. I’d made it impossible for her to be my friend.

  “You’ve tried to buck me off so many times I’ve lost count, and before you get that back up, you know it’s true.”

  I glanced up at the house and she was still there, radiating in that green. “And, yeah, she lied. A lot. But it sounds like she was just trying to hold on to you any way she could. Same as your gran used to. Same as that friend of yours, Jack, used to. Same as me.”

  “You never lied to me,” I said.

  “Nope,” he nodded. “And that’s a really shitty thing to do to a person. And I wouldn’t blame you if you couldn’t get over that. But…sometimes the why matters more than we want it to.”

  I already knew why she lied. She told me. It was the only way she could keep me in her life. Because I kept pushing her away.

  This time when I glanced back at the house Bea was gone. Her chair empty.

  Shit.

  Oh. Shit.

  The panic I felt was pure adrenaline and I turned away from Charlie and all his very true words and started up the small grassy hill toward the house.

  And the girl I had hurt more than I’d realized.

  “Meet me at home,” I yelled over my shoulder at him. “Key’s under the mat.”

  “Bring back some beer and BBQ. Or breakfast—whenever you get home,” he sa
id and then ambled off. The neck of his jacket had a sweat ring around it.

  “Don’t have a heart attack in my grandma’s house,” I said and he flipped me the bird over his shoulder.

  Once he was safely in his truck, no doubt with that AC cranked to 11, I turned back to that house. And Bea.

  The patio door led into a dark screened-in porch that didn’t seem to match the rest of the house. And from the porch I walked into a big kitchen. At the sound of me coming in, the two dogs I’d been seeing eating their breakfast every morning rushed out to greet me.

  Close up they were even uglier. And the Chihuahua was growling at me.

  “Hey,” I said and held out my hand for them to sniff. “I’m a friend.” The giant slobbering mastiff came over but the Chihuahua wasn’t having it. She started to bark, and when I attempted to get around her she growled low in her throat.

  Jesus, I thought, taken aback by the ferocity of this thing. The mastiff came over and sat on my boot and licked my palm as if to tell me, Don’t worry—she’s like this with everyone.

  I got past the guard dog by finding an old rope chew toy and tossing it into the porch. I held open the door and both dogs ran past me. I locked the door behind them.

  “Bea?” I called out. There was no answer but I knew she was in the house. I could smell her in the air. And her Jeep was still out front.

  “Bea?” The rest of the house was huge but pretty nondescript. A big blank canvas. She wasn’t in the living room or office so I headed up the big sweeping staircase to the second floor. One of the doors was open and I eased it open a little further to find Bea sitting on the carpet. Her green dress a puddle around her.

  The walls were white and turquoise. The bed looked like a giant flower. There were trophies on the wall. From math competitions.

  “Is this…your room?”

  It didn’t feel like her room.

  “My sister’s. What are you doing here?” she asked, pulling things out of a dresser and throwing them into a garbage bag. Her fury put me off my stride.