“Thanks.”
He moves the bacon around the cast iron pan with a fork. “I don’t have a lot to make a mess with,” he says without turning around.
“But what you have seems to count.”
Now he looks, quick and over his shoulder—no more than a glance into my eyes. “Suppose that’s how it should be, right?”
“I suppose.”
Moseying over to his bookshelves, I pore over the mostly paperback titles. The classics are widely represented: a couple of Hemingways—The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises; Steinbeck’s East of Eden, The Pearl, Of Mice and Men; a very old leather covered copy of a St. James Bible; a thick, multiple dog-eared paperback copy of Lonesome Dove (my favorite mini-series ever, which Jake knows); and…a few business books? Louis L’Amour I’d expect, sure, but business books?
“I’m taking a few classes at the local community college.” His head peeks around the corner before disappearing again.
Does he ever miss a beat? “Oh, really?”
“Just things to help the ranch run more efficiently.”
I round the corner, closing the space between us, padding barefoot back into the small kitchen.
“That’s awesome, Jake.”
“No big deal.”
I hold up the book in my hand. “No, it’s a really big deal. You’ve invested so much of your time helping Dad and Anna and…the ranch.” And me. “I appreciate it, Jake. We all do.” I’m glad he’s facing the stove. Glad he can’t see the honesty, the naked truth of this confession, cross my face. “You have no idea how much.”
He glances over his shoulder, and there goes my attempt to appear casual. I suppose it’s too late for that anyway. I’m walking around his cabin in his plaid shirt and my underwear.
He cooks the way he drives, the way he rides, the way he listens, the way he sets up a mountain camp: mindful of every detail, his brain two steps ahead of his body. In a flash, two white plates are filled with crispy bacon, eggs over easy, and whole-wheat toast topped with melty pats of butter.
This is easy, Jake and me. I could see us doing this every day. Every morning. Every evening. I could see us doing this forever.
“Do you think I should stay?” I ask him.
“Instead of going to college?”
“Yeah.”
He shakes his head. “You have an amazing chance, here. I would’ve killed to go away to school. The only college we have is a two-bit community college with mostly older ladies. That’s not for you. You need to get on out of here and do your thing.”
“I—I thought you’d be happy. Especially after last night.”
He squats in front of me and sets his palms on my thighs. “I’m happy you want to stay. You know I like you a helluva lot, but I’ll be damned if me or your daddy will stand by and let you not get your education.”
“Oh.”
He stands and plops a plate of food in front of me. “Go on now, eat up. You want some jam? I have some of Anna’s good stuff, the canned strawberry.” He flips open the refrigerator door. The appliance is red and stocky, a foot shorter than him, and usually I’d laugh at how ridiculous he looks rooting around inside.
But I’m not laughing, and I sure as hell don’t want to eat anymore.
Jake doesn’t want me to stay, and he doesn’t even know about Ty yet.
Chapter Sixty-One
Jake and I have barely finished our eggs when he mentions the offer to buy Scout.
I set my fork down. “Wait, what?”
“He approached Anna and Gus after your performance and offered two hundred grand cash for her last night.”
“Who?”
“The guy who wants to invest in the ranch.”
“That greasy developer approached you, and you didn’t tell me last night?”
“He approached Anna, and she told me while you were showering to go out.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He leans back in his chair and laces his hands behind his head. “I knew you’d be upset and I didn’t want to ruin your night.”
“At least you’re honest,” I say unhappily. “But you should’ve told me. Is that what last night was all about, Jake? Kissing me and tucking me in and making me breakfast and being so…” I growl at the frustrating blanks. “Were you trying to butter me up so I’ll agree to sell her?”
This was worse than him not wanting me to stay on the ranch. This was betrayal.
“Of course not. You’re misinterpreting what I’m trying to do again. I wouldn’t do that. I’m telling you now because, A. you’re sober, and B. it’s something we need to discuss before we give Anna and Gus our answer.”
“Our answer?”
“You broke her in. We consider Scout to be yours, too.”
I folded my arms. “A. I didn’t break her in. She agreed to let me ride her, and B. good, I’m glad you consider her to be mine, because the answer is a resounding no. No way in hell to be exact.”
“No?”
“No. I’m not selling Scout—especially to that assclown.”
“I’m not saying you should.” He sits back up and holds out his palm calmly. I sort of want to stab it with the runny-egg fork. “I’m just saying the money…Paige, it’s enough to save the ranch.”
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck.
The eggs churn in my stomach. “So I risk everything to train her, enter her in the rodeo, wear that stupid outfit, and not only do I not win, but I lose—twice?”
His mouth opens, but I talk over his almost-words.
“If I don’t lose her, I lose the ranch. It’s a lose-lose.”
“But if you lose—sell—her, you get to keep the ranch, Paige. Keep it. Forever.”
“But what about Scout? This is her home.”
He takes a deep, deliberate breath. “She’s just a horse.”
“She’s not just a horse and you know that.”
The tears I’ve been fighting brim over my eyes. I swipe them off my face as I see her up running in the moonlight with her herd of wild mustangs. The family she lost and only recently found again. It’s not fair. “If this was going to be her fate, I should’ve just left her on the mountain in peace.”
“I’m not saying you have to sell her.”
“But just like me leaving for college, you’re saying it’s the best thing to do.”
“For the whole of life? Yes, I do.”
I get up and walk over to the fireplace so he can’t see me cry. The framed pictures are mostly of Jake in various rodeo-themed shots: young Jake tying up his first calf at rodeo, Jake riding a bucking horse, Jake bull riding…and then one that surprises me—a couple of kids, a floppy haired boy and a blonde girl in pigtails, fishing over a stream.
“That’s us,” I say.
“Yes.”
“How long have you had that?”
He shrugs.
“A long time, or since I’ve come this summer?”
“I found it when I was going through your dad’s pictures. That’s the girl I remember. Fearless. A girl who would untie a calf’s legs because she was scared it was hurt—not caring what people thought about you—like you were last night.”
I can’t stop the tears this time. “He won’t treat her well.”
Jake’s hands smooth over my shoulders. “He will. He’s gentle with his animals. I’ve seen him. And he has a rider who is great. Accomplished. A nice girl who will treat her right. Scout’ll get to tour rodeos. Now that she’s got a taste of this, she’ll want to keep it up. It’s in her blood. You’ll be off to college, not touring the U.S. doing rodeo.”
“But…I could.”
He sighs. “Yes, you could. But is that what you want from your life?”
“But I love her, Jake. I love that beautiful, stubborn horse. I—I-don’t want to lose her.”
“I know,” he says. He pulls me in close, our hearts beating as one as his fingers run through my long, tangled hair, my wet cheek rubbing against the soft fl
annel of his broad shoulder. “I love her, too.”
We talk for a while longer. I’m not happy, but I’m not as angry and hurt as I was at first, either. I even consider that it might be smart, if it means saving the ranch. I agree to meet the girl who would ride her and show her in the rodeo circuit. Then, together, we decide to go talk to Dad and Anna. As soon as we walk through the door, hand in hand, I know something’s wrong.
There’s no breakfast smells coming from the kitchen, no quiet chatter as Anna talks to Dad about the day or rehashes the daily newspaper’s current events, no country music from her CD player as she sings along in her perfect pitch.
“Jake,” I grip his hand hard and stop short in the doorway.
He senses it, too.
He moves past where I’m frozen in the doorway. “Stay here.”
I’m sick. I fear the worst. Or course I fear the worst.
Last night’s events, this morning’s, flood my mind, turning love and light into guilt. I should’ve come home and I didn’t come home.
Jake re-enters the room, waving a piece of Anna’s notepaper. “They’re at the hospital, come on.”
“The hospital?”
Grabbing his hat off the hook—his keys are already out—he dashes out the door and I chase after him. He flings open the passenger door of his truck for me before running around the other side and starting the ignition. I hop in, slamming the door behind me. I’ve never seen him this rattled. Something is really wrong.
“What happened?” I ask in a shaky voice.
He hands me the hastily scribbled note written on Anna’s personalized strawberry design stationary.
Meet us at the hospital ASAP.
Hospital.
The breath I’ve been holding slowly leaks out. At least he’s alive. At least he’s still alive.
“Why didn’t they call us?”
I see the two of us last night, drinking and dancing in the loud bar, kissing under the stars, this morning waking up in his bed, breakfasts and bookshelves and…
“That may have been the call in the truck outside the bar. I couldn’t hear her. Damn. Dammit.” He slams his fist into the steering wheel.
I pull my phone out of my back pocket. The screen is black. It won’t turn on to retrieve messages. “My cell is dead. I didn’t even think to charge it at your place.”
“Why didn’t she—” His mouth snaps shut. I follow his eyes to his cell phone, which is lying on the floor beneath my feet, a flashing light indicating missed calls or messages or both. He slams his fist into the steering wheel again.
“Here I was worried about college, worried about Scout when Dad could’ve…” I choke back sobs. Jake drives so fast down the long dirt drive that gravel and swirls of dirt twist into the air behind us. He doesn’t turn on the radio. I cross my legs. My foot twitches in a nervous rhythm for the whole of the ride. Hurry. Hurry.
At the hospital, he pulls into the first open spot he sees and grabs my hand as we race through the automatic doors. “Gus Mason?” I ask an older volunteer in a pink uniform at the information desk. In a slow voice, she points us to the elevators, third floor, ICU.
“ICU. Shit.”
Her eyes widen.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s my dad.”
“I hope he’ll be okay, dear,” she says and her kindness is worse than if she was judging me.
Silently, we watch the floor numbers go up. At three, we jump out, walking fast down the waxed patchwork floor through a sterile hall. At the nurse’s station I ask again for my dad, and we’re pointed to a room, 113 bed B.
We screech to a halt at his door.
There’s a man in the first bed, Bed A. An oxygen mask fits over his nose and mouth, tubes flow from his arms, and his stomach rises and falls. The slit in his light blue and white floral gown is open, exposing boxer shorts and more tubes snaking from his inner thigh.
A thick, mustard-yellow curtain separates us from my dad. Two pairs of medical personnel clogs, one black and one brown, are visible in the exposed inches between the curtains bottom and the hospital flooring. Doctors.
“Come on.” I grab Jake’s arm and quietly walk through Bed A’s area, careful not to disturb the sleeping (unconscious?) patient. I peek through the curtain, my ear grazing the cool, white wall. Anna waves us in. I can tell right away from her face, red and puffy, her watery eyes, that something is really, really wrong.
“I’m so sorry we weren’t there,” I spit out. “We couldn’t hear what you were saying over the phone. We were in Jake’s truck and we couldn’t hear you.” None of this even matters but I keep going on about it.
“What happened?” Jake asks, cutting me off.
“He c-choked on dinner and aspirated. I couldn’t clear it.”
“Oh my God.” My worst nightmare happened and I wasn’t even there to help.
Jake’s looking at her funny, which is…odd. Why doesn’t he look as horrified as I feel?
“Jake, I…called 9-1-1. The ambulance got him here just in time.”
Jake looks at the wires, the mask, the IV with a strange look on his face. “He’s on life support,” he notes.
Something that looks a lot like guilt rolls across her features. A foreign mask on Anna’s confident face.
I’m genuinely perplexed and kind of annoyed at Jake for reacting like this instead of being apologetic. “Anna, it’s okay. He’s alive! You saved him!”
She touches my dad’s hand, then like the cords are live wires, recoils. “You don’t understand, Jake. In the moment, I just couldn’t…”
Jake doesn’t say anything.
Why are they acting so weird? Maybe she’s just in shock. I rush over to her. “You saved him, Anna. I’m so sorry we weren’t there to help you.”
I see Jake and me dancing and laughing again. The bar. Drinking. The truck. Oh God, and the cabin and breakfast this morning. Arguing over the horse. Guilt is cancer spreading through my cells. How could we be so selfish? We never even thought to call Anna back.
Maybe he felt bad about being with me? Taking me back to his cabin instead of back home? “We…I…got a little tipsy. And Jake let me spend the night. Don’t worry, nothing happened, but we didn’t think to call you.”
I meet Jake’s eyes, pleading with him to finish the confession, and when he does, his voice is clear and guiltless. “She stayed with me at the cabin. I’m sorry, we should’ve let you know.”
She shakes her head. “I figured as much. It’s not your fault, kids.”
She’s Anna. She doesn’t care where I was. She accepted that I wasn’t there and she’s already over it. Moving on to the here and now and what’s important to her.
“But your dad may have a different opinion when…if…he wakes up. You’re his little girl after all.”
Tears pool in my eyes. I’d give anything for him to sit up and yell at me for staying out too late, for drinking, for spending the night with a boy—but he’s lying there with tubes and an oxygen mask and he has no idea what I’ve done. He has no idea we’re even here.
Anna bites her lip and looks much younger when she says, “If you’d been there, Jake, things might’ve ended differently. And I can’t say I’m unhappy about that.”
Avoiding my questioning eyes, Jake nods. He looks at the wires. The IV.
“What do you mean if Jake was there, things would’ve ended differently?”
Neither of them looks at me. It’s like with the story of Scout. It’s like the story with the bankruptcy of the ranch. There’s something else they aren’t telling me. And by the look of their exchanged glances, this one is bigger than the others.
“He’s alive. Obviously Anna did the right thing.” I try to make them look at me. “What is it you’re not telling me?”
Anna sighs, her eyes filled with tears. “Your daddy has a DNR, Paige. You know what that means.”
“Do Not Resuscitate. Of course. But that doesn’t mean that’s what we’re going to do. I’m his daughter, and I’m not g
oing to let him die just because of what some stupid card says.”
Now she’s sobbing. Tough as chain-link Anna is sobbing, and I’m scared—really scared—because this is foreign, her vulnerability, and this whole situation is so screwed up.
“I went against his explicit request, Paige. I thought I could do it. I told him I could, but in the moment, when it was actually happening, him gasping for breath and looking at me with these scared eyes…I couldn’t sit there and watch him die. No matter what he said, no matter what he told me before, over and over, that he wanted… In the moment, I just couldn’t.”
She collapses into an orange vinyl chair in the corner, and in an instant, I’m back in that sterile counselor’s office sitting around the round table with Ty and the other kids, talking about all the people we couldn’t save. The peers I couldn’t help. The peers I didn’t help, and the stepbrother I pushed too far. I learned my lesson with Ty. I wasn’t going to let that happen again. I had to do everything in my power to save my dad.
Kneeling beside her, I hold her hand. “You did the right thing, Anna. You love him. You can’t just let someone you love die. You have to do everything you can to help them, everything you can think of to save them.”
I wasn’t just talking about Dad anymore.
She shakes her head, pushing away my words. “He’s going to be so angry at me.”
“For saving his life? That’s ridiculous. He loves you. He’ll understand. You can’t just…he can’t expect you to make that kind of choice. He can’t expect you to play God.”
“I’m not sure it’s that dramatic.”
“Life and death? If that’s not dramatic, I don’t know what is!”
Images from California funerals flash through my mind, lives that might’ve been saved if only we’d have known what to do to save them. Dad has another chance. Maybe he’ll wake up. Maybe he’ll sit in the kitchen with us again and I’ll hold his hand and read to him and we’ll email/talk together and make jokes.
“I would’ve done the same thing if I were there,” I say. “No question.”
She looks at me sadly and pats my hand. “That’s why you aren’t his caretaker, honey. The hospice nurses warned us about this. When a caregiver is also a loved one, they don’t always carry through with the patient’s wishes. I thought I was strong enough. That I respected Gus enough to see his wishes through, but in the end it’s not about respect, it’s about love. It all comes down to love, and I couldn’t let him die.”
Paint My Body Red Page 25