Rancher Daddy: A Single Dad & Nanny Romance

by Lexi Whitlow

  “She didn’t deal with the pregnancy well. The bigger she got, the more miserable she became, and she wouldn’t quit drinking. She slowed down a little, but she wouldn’t stop. That pissed me off. I dealt with it by clearing all the alcohol out of the house. She dealt with that by driving to the liquor store or the bar. I took her keys away. After that, it was game on, and we fought constantly.

  “Then Emma was born. I think we had about ten happy minutes after she arrived, before everything went wrong. Almost as soon as they cut the umbilical cord, she started to turn blue. Her blood pressure went sky high, and the doctors and nurses scrambled. It all happened so fast, I barely remember the details. I just know that one minute I had a beautiful baby daughter, wailing a mighty hello to the world, and the next she was the color of stone and listless with a crowd of doctors rushing her away.

  “Most new parents don’t get much sleep, but I lived at the hospital those first few weeks in an exhausted blur. Then, when they determined that a stent wasn’t going to be sufficient to open the blockage in her aorta, they said she would have to have open heart surgery. The hospital in Missoula wasn’t equipped to deal with it, so we flew with Emma to Las Vegas.

  “You’d think having your sick newborn in the cardiac critical care unit at a children’s hospital would be the thing to slow you down, make you take stock, and get your priorities in order. Not Beverly. We were in Vegas, so she was determined to do Vegas. The third night after Emma’s first open heart surgery—she was just four weeks old—Bev left me at the hospital while she went to the strip for drinking, gambling, and who knows what else. She stayed out all night without a word of explanation. By then I was so exhausted and so over it all, I didn’t even care anymore.

  “The surgery went well enough, but Emma developed pneumonia in the hospital a few days afterwards. She was so sick the doctors and nurses weren’t willing to say that she would be okay. They told me they would pray for her.

  “Emma pulled through, but it was touch and go for weeks.

  “We brought Emma home after five weeks in Las Vegas. Tyler ran the ranch while I was away. If I hadn’t had him to cover my back, the whole thing would have gone belly-up.

  “After we got home, things continued to go downhill with Bev. Emma caught every bug that came around. She was always sick, tiny, and fragile, and when she cried her blood pressure would go way up. She’d get listless, her breathing getting real shallow. She scared me to death on a couple of occasions. She’d cry because she was wet or hungry, and then she’d just zonk out. I’d watch her for hours sometimes, just to make sure she was still breathing.

  “Meanwhile Bev was out drinking with friends, or home drinking by herself in front of the television.

  “After a few weeks like that it occurred to me that I couldn’t trust Bev alone with Emma while I was working, so I hired a babysitter to come in weekdays, eight ‘til four. She was a sweet girl who worked a few summers here at the ranch years before all this, when she was in high school. She mostly bathed and groomed the horses, fed and watered them, but she also did general errands for both my mom and the ranch, so we all knew her well. Mom heard she was looking for a job, so she called her, and that was that.

  “Except Beverly took the hiring of the babysitter as the last straw. She said I didn’t trust her, and she was right. Instead of straightening up and giving me a reason to trust her, she just decided to take the babysitter’s presence as an opportunity to ignore Emma, and to come and go as she pleased. She slept here most nights, but not all. She treated our home like it was a hotel. She did her laundry here, but that was about the extent of her domestic presence.

  “She spent a lot of time at the bar, coming home late, night after night. That went on for months. When I complained, she threatened to leave and take Emma with her. She said she’d move to Arizona and live with her parents, and I’d never see Emma again.

  “I’m smart enough to know that she couldn’t prevent me from seeing my daughter if we split up, but I’m also well-aware that the courts favor the mother, and I sure as shit didn’t want my daughter growing up under Craig Beaufort’s roof, so I sucked it up. I even bank-rolled her bar tab.

  “One night, when Emma was about ten months old, she was sick again and her fever was spiking. The babysitter, April, stayed late to help me. I tried to find Bev but she wouldn’t answer her phone. I called the local bar and they said she wasn’t there. Emma’s fever kept going up and she was acting weird, not crying, more like just trembling all over. I called Emma’s cardiologist in Missoula on his emergency number and he said to get her to the ER there as soon as we could. My mom and I drove Emma to the hospital as fast as we dared.

  “Along with having a terrible ear infection, when they did an ultrasound of her heart they found an aneurism at the suture line where the arterial graft was done months earlier in Las Vegas. Under guidance from Emma’s cardiologist at the children’s hospital, they did an emergency surgery in Missoula to tie it off and clip it.

  “All that happened in less than fifteen hours. Bev didn’t even know her daughter was sick, much less having surgery. She didn’t come home until the next morning. When I wasn’t there, she called me. I told her what happened and all she could say was that she didn’t know.

  “A few days after that, April sent me a text while I was still in Missoula at the hospital with Emma. It had a photo attached. The photograph was of Beverly arm-in-arm with a guy I vaguely recognized from some of the Competitions around the state. I couldn’t call his name, but I knew his face. According to April’s text, it was taken at the Silver Dollar in St. Ignatius, sent to her by a friend.

  “I called my lawyer next. He recommended getting a private investigator to obtain proof that Bev was cheating. I let him handle it. I deleted the text from my phone after asking April to do the same.”

  I look up from my meandering story to see Grace still hanging on my every word.

  “I need a drink,” I say. “I’m not done with the story yet. You want one? I’m gonna go get a bottle.”

  She nods.

  When I return I pour Grace a glass of what I’m drinking, the good Scotch. I figure I’ve earned the right to sample the best stuff in the house after finally taking on this monster of a confession. I take a long swig, feeling it burn straight down to my gut before settling low, boiling me warm from the inside out.

  “Anyway,” I start again. “Emma gets better and we come home. Things go right back to the way they were with Bev spending all her time either drinking at home, being belligerent to me and neglectful of Emma, or her just being gone. I take Emma to all her docs appointments. Her baby sitter feeds her, plays with her, cuddles with her until I get home, then I take that over.

  “Months pass like that. Meanwhile, the P.I. is piling up loads of incriminating video and photographic evidence of the fact that Bev gets around, and that she drives drunk, and does drugs, and goes home. Sometimes with guys she’s met in random bars.

  “The only thing I’m waiting for that this point is for Emma to get to twenty months-old. Her cardiologist said she needed a final procedure to elongate the aorta to accommodate the rapid growth a toddler undergoes. They had to wait until she was big enough to harvest a piece of artery from her upper arm to graft to the aorta, and they don’t do that until the child is older, healthier, and showing no indication of cardiac stress.

  “My plan was to get Emma through the surgery, get her home and recovered, then tell Bev I’m filing for divorce and sole custody; t not how things worked out.

  “April was great with Emma. But she got way too invested in the drama between me and Beverly. I guess she felt sorry for me. I also know that because we spent so much time together, she started to feel more than she should have. She started telling me how I deserved better, and what a good dad I was to Em. She said things I wanted to hear. I was worn down, exhausted. I was lonely, and April was always there.

  “One night she stayed late because Emma was sick again. She wouldn’t settle
down. She was just crying with a cold and wanted to be held. April and I took turns until late. Finally, Emma wore herself out and I laid her down in her crib and watched her fall into the deepest, sweetest sleep. I sat there watching her a long time by myself.

  “I went downstairs to tell April that Emma was down, and she could go home. Instead of leaving, she poured us both a drink. Then another one. Then, another one.

  “What I remember about that night is blurry in places and razor sharp in others. I remember April kissing me. I don’t remember exactly how it came about; whether it was me who started it or her. It doesn’t matter, because it didn’t end with a kiss. My sharpest recollection of what happened is that April and I were in the kitchen in a pretty good lather. She was mostly undressed, and I was working on getting there myself, when I hear Bev’s voice behind my back. ‘You son of a bitch,’ she told me. ‘I’ve got you cold. Doing the freaking baby sitter.’ She had her phone up, taking pictures of us.

  “She started laughing when we started scrambling. She said, ‘Shit, don’t mind me. Don’t let me interrupt. I got everything I need. The judge will love this. I’m thinking a little over three grand a month in alimony and child support ‘til Emma is at least twenty-one, plus a college fund, and a new car every couple years, and a nice three-bedroom house in Missoula in a good neighborhood. Somewhere that doesn’t smell like mud and horseshit.’

  “She was just inebriated enough to be talkative, but not drunk enough to really be impaired. She was happy to catch me trying to fuck the babysitter. It’s what she wanted to have happen. What she didn’t expect was that I’d anticipated her.

  “I told her about the P.I and the hours of video surveillance I had on her and her various hook-ups, drug deals, and nights stumbling drunk out of bars. I told her about the stack of photos that had been taken of her. I told her she could show the photo she just snapped of me all she wanted, but after testimony from everyone who had witnessed her cheating on me, whoring herself to whatever limp dick was buying drinks, putting coke up her nose, no judge in the state would find my minor indiscretion in my own kitchen, where I’d come after rocking my sick daughter to sleep, even a reasonable comparison to her years of infidelity and bad behavior.

  “She cursed me and called me a liar. I laughed at her. Then, I told her to get out. I told her to leave and never come back. I told her she’d be better off driving off a bridge and drowning, then staying alive and fucking up my daughter’s life with her self-absorbed drama. I handed her the three-quarters full whiskey bottle and told her to make a night of it, and I’d see her in court if she had guts enough to show up and let the world see what a shitty mother and unchecked slut she really was.

  “She took that bottle from my hand without a word. Usually Beverly fought back, screamed at me. But she just took the bottle and walked out the front door. After that, I opened another bottle and poured myself a drink. Then I told April to go home.

  “I sat up all night, watching Emma. I fell asleep in the chair beside her crib, and only woke up when April returned the next morning. I didn’t give Bev another thought except that I was glad it had all come to a head and the nightmare between us was over. I went to work.

  “The first I knew that anything was wrong was when the Sherriff drove up about a quarter ‘till noon that day. He got out of his car, put his hat on without looking at me, and asked to come in the house. I thought something had happened to Momma. I never imagined…”

  I sighed.

  “The rest of it, well… the Coroner ruled it suicide based on the fact that there were no skid marks on the road, and that she texted a couple people before she did it. She sent the pic she took of me and April to her family and a few friends with a cryptic note to the effect of she’d had enough of my shit.

  “I let her parents handle all the funeral arrangements, while I paid for them. They flew her remains down to Arizona, burying her a thousand miles from where she was born in raised, under a hot desert sun without a real mountain within view for a hundred miles. Bev and I didn’t agree on much, but she loved the mountains and the seasons. She would have hated Arizona.”

  I pour another shot, downing it fast, then pour another.

  “So that’s the whole story. Nothing held back,” I say. “Aside from my lawyer, you, Tyler, and my mom, no one else knows the whole thing. A lot of people have different pieces of it, but not many have it all.”

  I swallow a small sip, waiting for Grace to respond or react in some way, or maybe ask a question.

  She does none of the above. She just sits, thinking. After a long while she finally says, “Thanks for telling me everything. All the loose ends I’ve picked up make sense now.”

  Is that it? Is that all she’s going to say?

  I need to give her everything. Hell, I’ve come this far, I may as well go for broke.

  “For a year or so around town, I was pretty much toxic waste. It took a while for the people who knew Bev and everything she was into, to start speaking up, admitting it wasn’t all my fault. Getting help with Emma was a loaded equation. Everybody who wanted the job figured it was a sure-fire shot at tangling me up in a marriage plot, since I had a thing for the babysitter.

  “That’s why I put the ad out, looking for someone who didn’t know me or the story. Someone who would come in here without all the judgement and pre-conceived notions. I just wanted to find someone who was good for Emma. I didn’t expect… I didn’t expect… what’s happened between us.”

  I swallow hard.

  “I didn’t expect to fall in love with you.”

  Chapter 17

  Grace

  He didn’t expect to fall in love?

  What am I supposed to do with that? After everything he said?

  I know this story, or at least a version of it. I watched my own parents play it out. The big difference with my family is that before they had the terminally sick child, they had me. When Jon came along, all their energy, angst, guilt, and anger had to focus on him. I was just along for the ride.

  My mother was a crippled basket case while Jon lived, watching him suffer procedure after futile procedure in the pediatric cardiac care unit in Raleigh. My father, on the other hand, was our tower of strength. He was there. He was our pillar, focused on getting the best care for Jon that could be had, while taking care of every other detail of our lives from paying the mortgage to making dinner.

  While my mom indulged herself in paralyzing guilt and raging blame, my dad just put his head down and got things done, and he made sure I did the same. He showed me how to be strong, and how to be useful. He taught me to put my own needs aside when there were more pressing concerns—like my brother’s well-being. He assured me that in the long run, it would all be worthwhile.

  He said that when Jon got better, mom would get better too.

  But then Jon died.

  I wonder what would have become of Camden if Emma hadn’t been as fortunate or as healthy? Would he have just checked out of his life, forgetting all his other commitments? Would he have left his family, his business, his friends? Would he have gone to some dark corner to investigate the fallacy of his self-inflicted delusions of duty, drinking himself to death in the process?

  I don’t know the answer to the question, and it bothers me.

  I want to talk to Kara. Maybe she’ll have some wisdom on these new revelations. I fire my computer up, going to my text messenger app, but she’s not online. It’s Friday night in New York City. Is this any wonder?

  I switch over to email, looking for anything to distract me. I’m floored by a new note I see sitting in my inbox.

  It’s from Mark Edmunds; subject line, ‘Time to catch up?’

  I open the note. It reads,

  Hi Grace,

  I know it’s been a long time. To be precise, it’s six months and three days since we last spoke, and not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about you and wished you were here. Mountain View is everything it’s cracked up to be. I work with p
eople from all over the world. Everything moves fast. Everyone is striving for the next greatest thing. I’m making my way. My first product release debuted in February and we got a huge write-up in Fast Company. It’s competitive and hard and I don’t get a lot of sleep. What’s missing is someone to share all the good times with.

  I talk to Kara occasionally. She updates me on what’s going on with you. I also found your blog. Your search engine optimization skills are too good to keep it hidden. A few carefully selected keywords and I was there. I’d know your photos and your voice anywhere. Your style is too distinctive to miss.

  The kid you’re taking care of looks like a sweetheart. The guy you’re working for… not so much. I don’t know what you’re up to out there in the sticks, but I know you, and I know it’ll only keep your curious mind occupied for so long.

  We should talk. I have almost a week off for Easter. I want to see you. I miss you, Grace. No one in the whole world knows you better than I do, and vice versa. I want to have a look at this place that has you so captivated. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you’re happy being nanny for some redneck guy’s kid. I won’t believe it until I see it.

  I’ll see you in a week.

  Love you with all my heart.

  -- Mark

  * * *

  Wow. Six months and three days. Who would have ever imagined he would keep track to the day? I suspect he had to do some math to get there, but then I’m cynical.

  Mark has landed in a big world where he’s a small fish, and he hasn’t gotten laid in eight months and however many days since the last time I sympathy-fucked him before putting him on a plane to California. That’s how I read his note.