Christmas at Cade Ranch

by Karen Rock

  “The police returned this to us a couple years ago, but I didn’t... I couldn’t bring myself to look through it. Not until recently. Then I saw this.”

  She flipped the phone around to show a picture of Sofia in a hospital bed, a newborn Javi in her arms. Jesse grinned as he crouched beside them. The name Cade was scrawled in big letters on the empty baby pen nearby.

  “That’s me!” Javi exclaimed.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “Mama said I cried a lot. Is that why Daddy left?”

  “Honey!” Sofia exclaimed. Out of the mouths of babes. Javi had been a colicky baby. True, she had worried at one point that taking care of a demanding baby had driven Jesse back to drugs, but she knew that was not the case at all.

  “Mama said he got sick.”

  Joy nodded. “Yes. She has the right of it.” She cleared her throat. “Javi, would you find me some holly berries?” She pointed to a patch of bushes beyond the pine bunch. “Celtics believed they were good luck.”

  “Like basketball?”

  “No, honey. Ancient people. They’re all gone now.”

  “Like Atlantis? Mummies?”

  “Something like that...”

  “Got it!” Javi leaped off the bench and raced away, eager as always to help. He lived to save the day like his beloved superheroes.

  “Don’t eat them, now!” Joy called.

  The bushes were in their line of vision but out of earshot. Sofia admired the woman’s deft handling of this tricky moment. She pressed clammy palms on her jeans and perched on the edge of the bench. Her insides felt frozen, her heart beating in a block of ice.

  “So Javi doesn’t know about Jesse’s addiction.”

  “No,” Sofia said swiftly. “I don’t want him knowing about any of that.”

  Joy studied her for a long moment, then nodded. “He won’t hear of it from me.”

  Sofia released a breath. “Thank you.”

  “I’ve been searching for you ever since I found this.” Joy tucked the phone in her purse. “I figured out who you were by searching his contacts, but your number no longer worked.”

  “I’ve moved around a lot.”

  And Sofia couldn’t afford a phone, or this conversation. It brought up too much of her past. She needed to leave. Now.

  Joy’s eyes glistened as she studied Javi scuttling across the whitened ground on his hands and knees. The sky spit a few snow flurries. A first volley of more to come, Sofia worried. A low howl rose in her ears.

  “I—I—” Sofia was struggling to think of a graceful way to extricate herself when Joy buried her face in her hands and her shoulders shook. Overhead, a pair of cooing mourning doves alighted on a branch. “I’m sorry I upset you.”

  “No!” Joy lifted a tearstained face and a left-sided dimple appeared. “This is wonderful. It’s just hitting me that this is real.” She released a shaky breath. “Javi’s my first grandchild. Knowing there’s a part of my Jesse still here on this earth, well, it’s the first thing that’s made me feel alive in a long, long time.”

  Sofia’s heart felt like it might explode. “I wish we could stay longer and visit, but our bus leaves soon. May I call you when Javi and I are settled?”

  “I’d appreciate that. Will I see you again?” Joy rose.

  “I’m not sure,” Sofia temporized. She reached for her wallet and came up empty.

  Had she left it by the grave? Her eyes flew to the area and landed on Javi’s backpack. Perhaps she’d stowed it in there. The events of this anxious morning blurred. Her panicked thoughts knocked against each other, and her temple throbbed. When was the last time she’d had it?

  “Javi, have you seen my wallet?” she asked, hustling to the backpack.

  “Uh-uh.”

  She scrounged through Javi’s backpack and her purse. Nothing.

  “Our bus tickets were in there. Money. Identification...”

  “Let’s retrace your steps. If we can’t find it, you’ll stay at the ranch until everything’s sorted,” Joy declared in a tone that brooked no argument.

  “Wooo-hooo!” Javi shouted. “I want to see Daddy’s ranch! Can we, Mama? Can we?”

  She stared into two pairs of hopeful eyes. Her throat constricted as though someone slipped a noose around it and tugged. If she didn’t find her wallet, they’d be out of options, and this small town didn’t look like it had a shelter.

  Where would she and Javi sleep during the blizzard?

  It’s only one night, a voice whispered. A chance for Javi to see what a real family looks like and meet his aunt and uncles.

  Fine.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “MOVE IT! MOVE IT!” James Cade hollered as he thundered at breakneck speed alongside a stampeding herd of longhorns. His siblings’ bloodthirsty howls filled the broad valley. Pelting snow obscured his vision and froze his throat. He yanked up his bandanna to cover his nose and mouth, leaned low over his palomino’s neck and galloped flat out to redirect the rampaging group before they plunged off the bluff ahead. His heart drummed. Stinging sweat dripped in his eyes.

  “Hee-yah!” pealed his younger brother Jared, his lusty shout ringing above the bellowing cattle’s din.

  Their trampling hooves slapped the hard, rocky earth in a heart-pounding rhythm. At James’s finger point, Jared swerved away in the white murk and chased after a breakout group of cows and heifers, his face animated, eyes intent, back straight. He looked as unruffled as he had when they’d begun searching for the runaways who’d broken from their winter pasture hours ago. Of course, it’d take a lot more than a hundred out-of-control livestock to rattle golden-child Jared’s bone-deep confidence.

  As for him? Chaos got under James’s skin, made it itch. And whenever chaos hit, James’s restless thoughts didn’t quit until everything on the family ranch he managed was in its proper, predetermined place. The rules he’d instituted after his youngest brother Jesse died and older brother, Jack, left to seek justice were needed to protect his family and their way of life. Otherwise, their carefully pieced-back world risked falling apart again.

  “Yip! Yip! Yip!” hooted his sister, Jewel. She barreled at lightning speed along the right side of the cattle atop her large bay. Her dark eyes flashed, and her mouth curled slightly at the edges in a fearless smirk. She’d lost her black Stetson, he noticed, and snowflakes clung to her dark, braided hair. Red filled in the pale skin between her freckles. If she was tired after their grueling day, she wasn’t showing it. Not that she ever would.

  In fact, since Jesse’s death, she’d thrown herself into ranching as if possessed. As though she could somehow make up for the shattering loss.

  At James’s signal, Jewel nodded then fell back slightly. The maneuver allowed him to begin arcing the cattle her way into an open, snowy space, turning the stampede in on itself so they’d mill instead of run.

  More important, it’d stop them from mingling with the Brahman herd owned by their archenemies and neighbors, the Lovelands. Their bitter family feud went back over a hundred years, beginning with a tale of deception, theft and murder, the rivalry still fresh as it played out in water access disputes and missing cattle.

  James pursed his lips and whistled long and high, urging on the Border collies. They lunged at the longhorns’ ankles, dodging horns, driving the livestock to the right. With the bluff drawing alarmingly close, they needed to make the turn in the next thirty seconds or it’d be too late. Devastating tragedy. Not on his watch.

  He squeezed Trigger’s heaving sides and rode harder still, James’s body steaming and slick beneath his plaid shirt and flannel-lined jean jacket. He ignored the deep ache in his shoulders and the way his teeth ground with each jarring stride. All around him rose the thick, musky scent of animals. Their eyes rolled and they bleated loudly, showing no signs of sl
owing.

  Out of the worsening blizzard, his youngest sibling Justin emerged, a lone, dark figure between the herd and the bluff’s edge.

  “Get out of there!” James bellowed.

  He ripped off his bandanna and waved at his reckless brother. Immediately, the wild swirl of icy wind and blowing snow snatched away his breath. Anger and concern roared in his bloodstream. Cool, unaffected Justin, however, didn’t budge. He sat slim and ramrod straight in the saddle and stared down the charging herd as if he dared them to mow him over. The fool. Their departed father taught them better when they’d begun working the family’s ten-thousand-acre ranch as kids.

  Some said Justin had a death wish. Given his reckless antics since losing his twin, Jesse, James agreed. But he wouldn’t let anything happen to his little brother, to any of them, ever again. However, when he got Justin to safety, he’d kill him.

  James kicked Trigger with his heels, dragging forth the blowing horse’s last bit of steam. At his command, Trigger neighed, then veered directly at the lead cow, obeying without hesitation. Make-or-break time. James flashed his red bandanna at the cattle, flaunting the “fish” to make them more afraid of him than whatever had spooked them.

  The livestock balked, then broke to the right. The rest of the herd dashed pell-mell after their leaders, turning back. Confused and confronted by themselves, they slowed, raising the snow, tearing the naked brush, letting out hoarse bawls as they began to mill and spread farther down the white valley, no longer in danger. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Justin chasing off any stragglers who approached the bluff. James released a long breath.

  Jared flashed by, effortlessly driving the group he’d wrangled back into the now-organized mob. Jewel pulled her mount around in a neat circle, scooped up her trampled hat, then trotted up beside James. After rounding up the last of the strays, the Cades corralled the bawling, red-and-white-spotted herd and guided them back on the long trail home.

  Silence reigned as the herd’s lowing dropped down to its usual buzz. The Cades settled into their saddles and thoughts. Thick snow poured from the sky and clung to their hat brims, their noses and shoulders. They followed a meandering, beaten trail down the mountain slope.

  The pungent scent of spruce filled the air and seeped into James’s nose, making his shoulders drop, his rigid spine bend and flex. He felt pummeled, his muscles tender and worn out the way he liked best. This was the right kind of tired, the type that followed a long, honest day’s work. It sometimes let him escape his worries about the ranch, his siblings and his grieving mother by falling into oblivious sleep.

  The world dimmed further as the sun, buried underneath heavy-bellied clouds, slipped behind Mount Sopris’s craggy top. The valley floor billowed away, raw and untamed, growing gray in the dawning dusk. Walls of ice on stone, gleaming with the last of the light, enclosed the valley, stretching away toward the long, low Elk Mountain range.

  The place was wild, beautiful and open with something nameless that made the highland spaces different from any other country to James. That made it home. The isolation, the vast, untouched stretches of valley and bluffs, soothed his restless spirit, lowered his guard and gave him peace.

  He felt a bone-deep kinship with the land. It configured his DNA. His ancestors had labored, sacrificed and fought to protect it, to claim it as their own. It was his responsibility to maintain that legacy and pass it on to the next generation. No threats would cross its border again, not so long as he drew breath, he vowed, his own personal cowboy’s prayer.

  The horses nickered as they clomped past barren aspen clumps, tails swishing. “That was fun,” Jewel drawled. She swayed in perfect rhythm with her enormous steed. It was the ranch’s largest mount, which, of course, made it the only one the petite roughrider would mount.

  “Then you don’t get out much,” Jared said, then flinched to avoid Jewel’s trademark shoulder jab.

  “Just wait till we get home. We’ll see how tough you are,” Jewel huffed. She rammed her misshapen hat on her head and pulled the brim low over her braids.

  “I’m a lover, not a fighter,” Jared protested, riding with the easy grace born of years in the saddle. His perfect white teeth flashed in his lady-killer grin.

  The family’s Romeo had left a swath of broken hearts across the valley. Jared’s ease at meeting women, at achieving anything in life, was downright irritating. Opportunities like college football scholarships and a starting NFL position seemed to fall into the small-town hero’s lap.

  “That’s your excuse? Pathetic.” Jewel rolled her eyes and brushed snow from her horse’s forelock. “Don’t know why girls throw themselves at you.”

  “Must be desperate,” Justin said through a yawn, looking ready to fall asleep despite today’s excitement. A thick belt of snow encircled his hat brim.

  “Who is it this time?” teased Jewel, wagging a finger. “Mandy? Mindy? Mona?”

  “It’s Melanie,” Jared clarified. He rubbed the back of his neck, then gave a rueful laugh. “Nope. It’s Melody.”

  “See.” Jewel snapped her fingers. “They’re all starting to blur together. Even for you.”

  She burst out laughing and Justin joined her. “Seriously, dude. Pick a girl. Any girl.”

  “They pick me, bro.”

  A wild howl pealed down the slope and Trigger’s ears shot up. It was loud and harsh, then softened to a mourn, lonely and haunting. The hair on the back of James’s neck rose. Wolf.

  A pack of coyotes barked in answer, a sharp, staccato yelping chorus, the piercing notes biting on the chilly early-evening air. Trigger sidestepped, nickering, and James swiftly brought him under control on the slippery terrain.

  “You’re so full of yourself,” scoffed Jewel once they’d settled their jittery horses. Their hooves clattered against the frigid slope.

  “And you’re so full of—”

  “Knock it off.” James’s fingers tightened around the leather straps in his left hand. “We’ve got more important things to worry about than Jared’s love life.”

  Had his mother gotten out of bed this morning? Eaten? Dressed?

  “At least I’ve got one, big bro.”

  James opened his mouth but the denial dissolved, bitter on his tongue. Jared was right. Since Jesse’s murder, he’d worked nonstop to shore up the ranch and didn’t have time for anything, or anyone, else. He loved his family. That was enough.

  So why did he sometimes wish for a confidante? A hand in his? A person to hold...someone to share a bag of peanuts with at a football game. The pelting snow slackened.

  “Let’s pick up the pace or Ma’s meat loaf will be cold,” he said, needing to deflect, hoping that by saying those words they might be true and she’d had a good day.

  “If Ma’s cooking... Didn’t see her up this morning.” A line appeared, bisecting Justin’s brow.

  “Yesterday wasn’t one of her good days.” Jewel patted her horse’s sweat-streaked neck. “She was going through Jesse’s phone again. She still thinks those pictures are his son.”

  James shook his head. “If that was true, Jesse would have told us.” Jesse had messed up a lot, but James didn’t believe his brother capable of turning his back on his own child. Besides, Jesse loved kids, all living things, in fact... Jesse keeping his child a secret made no sense. There had to be another explanation for the photo.

  “I don’t like Ma getting her hopes up,” Jewel fretted.

  “Obsessing is more like it,” James worried out loud. “Like when Jesse was alive.”

  A collective moan rose from his siblings. Their mother’s fixation on healing their brother had taken a horrible toll on her physical and emotional health.

  James’s hands tightened on the reins. He’d convince her to put away the phone and stop torturing herself. With the holidays approaching, this false hope ca
me at an already painful time.

  Jared deftly guided his horse away from a depression in the snowy field. “Should we get Ma help?”

  “No. She’s getting stronger,” James insisted. They didn’t need outsiders poking through their business. Once they got through Christmas, Ma would improve. He’d make sure of it. “She’s been mostly keeping up with routines.”

  “And that’s all that counts, right?” Justin asked out of the side of his mouth. “That she follows your schedules?”

  “They keep things running smoothly,” James protested. A night wind hummed softly through the gnarled, stunted cedars they passed.

  Yes. He was a micromanager. No denying it. But if he’d been more vigilant, he would have spotted the threats to Jesse, like his connections to the Denver-based drug group who’d tracked him to Carbondale, then killed for unpaid debt.

  And then there was his own, more direct role in the tragedy—a failure he’d never forget—or forgive. “I’m protecting us. Plus, the schedules help Ma.”

  He closed his eyes against the sudden vision of Jesse, pale and still in his coffin. They’d all struggled to make it through that day and every day since, especially around the holidays when he’d passed away.

  Giving his mother direction, a routine, gave her a purpose, something positive to focus on. Seeing her wander the house, or worse, staying in bed, with that empty look in her eye as if her heart had been scraped right out, broke him in two.

  “Meat loaf,” Justin said solemnly. “Yeah. That right there is a real lifesaver.”

  James nudged Trigger and trotted ahead, leaving his siblings behind in the gathering darkness. They meant well, and he wouldn’t trade them for anything. But they didn’t understand the need to keep a tight rein on the ranch, the family and especially Ma. He didn’t give two hoots if they ate meat loaf. They’d lost too many Cades already. With his mother lumbering through life like a zombie, he feared they’d lose her, too, if he wasn’t extra careful. Better to worry too much than not enough, he’d learned in the hardest way possible.