Cowboy Christmas Redemption

by Maisey Yates

  It wasn’t.

  It was Hank.

  “What’s up, Dad?”

  “This is a nice place,” Hank said, pressing one weathered hand against the old, gnarled post by the door. “You must be proud.”

  “Yeah,” Caleb said.

  You must be proud.

  He noticed that that was very explicitly not an admission that his father was proud.

  “You seem happy,” Hank said finally. “You seem happy here, doing this.”

  “I am. I chose it. I went out of my way to choose it, actually, so that should tell you that it’s something I wanted.”

  “I could never believe it,” Hank said.

  “What?”

  “That you boys really wanted this life. I could never believe you wanted it. I just thought you didn’t want to do the kind of hard work that required you to sit your asses in a chair and think. I thought you were rebelling against me.”

  “Pretty damn big commitment for us to do all of this just to rebel against you.”

  “Well,” Hank said. “Gabe basically did.”

  “Gabe was pretty pissed at you,” Caleb reminded his dad.

  Gabe had basically gone into the rodeo to prove to his dad that he couldn’t control his life. When Gabe had begun slacking at school, Hank had sold Gabe’s horses. And there had been nothing his brother loved more than his horses. And so Gabe had gone straight out and made horses, and falling off them, his career. Because that was who the Daltons were.

  They didn’t do things by half. They did them in a whole, with their middle fingers held high in the air at the person who had dared challenge them.

  “Yeah,” Hank said. “He was. I figured you and Jacob probably were, too.”

  “I don’t think Jacob is pissed at anybody. No one but himself.”

  “Maybe not anymore. Maybe it’s the same with you. Maybe this is the thing you need to be happy.”

  “Maybe,” Caleb said. “Which you would have known if you would have listened, even once.”

  “I just wanted you to try.” Hank shook his head.

  “Like Clint?”

  He shouldn’t have said that. But he had. So there it was. He might as well have cut his own chest open and shown his dad everything.

  “Clint didn’t come from anything. He didn’t have any parents pressuring him, nothing. His grades...”

  “Yeah,” Caleb said, gritting his teeth. Because there was Clint, from the grave and in the middle of his conversation. And that wasn’t fair. Because it wasn’t Clint’s fault, and it never had been. That he was good, that he attracted people to him like a tractor beam. That he was smart, and that he was smart in a way that impressed Caleb’s father more than anything his three sons had ever done.

  “I know that Clint’s grades were amazing. And I know that mine weren’t. And that’s why you didn’t even offer to pay for me to go to school.”

  “I figured it would get your ass in gear,” Hank said, his tone incredulous. “College tuition ain’t shit money to me. I could have paid for you, for him, for some of the neighborhood kids. But I wanted you to want it, and somehow, sometimes competing with him seems to make you do something.”

  “I’m dyslexic,” Caleb said.

  He hadn’t meant to tell his father that. But really it was a secret there was no longer any point to keeping. Tied up with those secret lessons with Ellie.

  Clint was gone. He and Ellie were sleeping together.

  Why not throw this on out there?

  Hank drew up and back. “What?”

  “Do you even know what that is, Dad?”

  “I know what it is. You see letters backward and things.”

  “Yeah,” Caleb said. “But for me they moved, too. And it makes my head hurt to look at a page for too long. And to go along with that, I’m dyscalculic, and there’s something called a sequencing disorder, too. That means numbers are backward, too, and I have a tough time putting things in order on the page. Do you know what that means? It means school is impossible. It means it’s harder for me. And I’m not saying that to get out of anything. Hell, there’s nothing for me to get out of. But I didn’t know that about myself until I was about twenty-seven years old. Because Ellie saw me try to fill something out, and she recognized it. But there was no teacher that thought maybe... And you sure as hell didn’t think maybe I needed help. You thought I was lazy. Even Mom thought I was lazy.”

  “Caleb, I didn’t have a damn clue.”

  “No,” Caleb said, “you didn’t. Because you’re married to your vision of what you want our lives to be, and you never stopped to ask what we wanted. Or maybe why we wanted it. The idea of going to college was torture for me. But watching you offer something to Clint that you wouldn’t give me, when I knew that it was about who you thought was better, that was worse. I would rather have turned you down.”

  “I didn’t want you to turn me down. I wanted you to ask me for help.”

  “Why?” Caleb said, throwing his hands wide. “Why the hell would I ever ask you for help, Hank Dalton? You didn’t want to think I needed it. You wanted to tell me to use elbow grease and knuckle down. And you wanted us to do it in an arena you knew nothing about. You didn’t go to college. You didn’t even graduate high school.”

  “Yeah, because I was too busy staying home and making sure my rat bastard sperm donor didn’t kill my mother and siblings.” Hank shook his head. “You want to share secrets, Caleb. I have secrets. Things I didn’t want to burden you boys with but I’ve been confronted with nothing but my failures over the past year. The ways that I messed you all up, so maybe it’s time you knew.”

  Hank’s words sent a shock wave through the empty barn. Sent a shock wave through Caleb.

  “Do you think it’s an accident you’ve never even heard me talk about your grandparents? We’re not just nothing,” Hank said. “We’re the bottom of the barrel. My old man was scum. He used his fists, his boots, on my mother. He did it on my brothers and sisters. He damn near killed my mother more times than I can count. I didn’t have the opportunity to go anywhere. Not until he got himself stabbed and killed in a bar fight. God bless the man that drove that knife through his rib cage. That’s when I got to leave. And I’ve... I’ve hurt people. Because I’ve got... I don’t know.”

  “PTSD?” Caleb asked.

  Hank waved his hand. “Hell no, boy. I didn’t go to war.”

  Hank all up. No excuses for bad behavior, just plenty of bad behavior.

  “Sounds like you lived in the war zone.”

  “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I thought that money would keep us safe. Because all that stuff... The way that my father was. He would always blame it on being poor. On the money. Throwing beer bottles at my mother’s head because he was stressed about the phone bill. About where the space rent for the trailer was going to come next. We were a damned cliché. And I didn’t want that for you. I didn’t want that for us.”

  He could see his parents clearly now. All the fights they’d had, and the way that Hank had always just smiled and let Tammy rail at him. Tammy, for her part, had never hit Hank. But she had lit his clothes on fire, hit his truck with a baseball bat.

  And Hank had never done a damn thing. Except cheat. Constantly.

  And suddenly, he saw his dad in a strange new light. As somebody who might be as twisted and damaged by his past as Caleb was. If not more so. Hell, it had to be more so. Because his parents might not have been perfect, but they were never in danger.

  Hank was right. They had been insulated by the money they’d had, never worried about being thrown out onto the streets.

  But more than that, neither Hank nor Tammy had ever put them in physical danger, and never would.

  Their fights might have been over-the-top, but they’d never gotten violent with each other.

  And he could see now
that his father’s overly laid-back attitude was likely covering something inside him he was afraid might be dark. And Caleb was well familiar with being a little bit afraid of your own darkness.

  A darkness that had come out when he had framed Clint for stealing those weapons. It wasn’t the act itself so much as the spiderweb of implications that touched so many things. He’d known Clint had it hard, and he hadn’t been able to muster up the strength to care. He’d been consumed by his own dark feelings.

  That seemed to keep coming out with Ellie, with the intensity between them.

  “I wanted you to be as far away from what I was as you could possibly be,” Hank said. “I knew that I was something in the middle. Something better than what I left, but definitely not the best.”

  “Is that why you cheated on Mom?”

  Hank paused for a long moment. “I’ve said it before, and it’s true. It was always easy for me to go away and forget about home. To block everything off and remember the moment I was in, and nothing past that. To do what felt good, not what was right. That was how I spent my childhood surviving home. When I left that trailer, it wasn’t there. And when I was home I was in the thick of it. So it was years of practicing that. But more than that I think... I could never accept the kind of love that your mom tried to give me. I wanted to. I wanted to be the man that she seemed to think I was. But I just... That meant seeing something other than that boy whose dad hated him, and whose mama wouldn’t leave, not even for the sake of her own children, and I had a very hard time doing that for a long time. I finally worked through some of it. We went to counseling, you know. I went to counseling.”

  “I know,” Caleb said. “Marriage counseling.”

  “Oh, more than that. I went to therapy. Because that was a lot of years... A lot of patterns of behavior that I had to figure out the cause of. But I never did make myself perfect, and I made a hell of a lot of mistakes both in my marriage and with you. And it’s hard for me still to admit it. Because I’m just still not perfect, dammit.”

  Caleb gritted his teeth. “No one needed you to be perfect, Dad. Just a little bit less of an inflexible bastard.”

  “Here I am at the end of my life...”

  “That’s dramatic, Hank. I don’t think you’re at the end of your life.”

  “In comparison to where you’re at, I am. So here I am, standing at the end of everything, and I’m damned lucky to have a wife that stuck with me, to have kids that still speak to me, hell, and surprise kids that come and speak to me. Probably some of that because of the money. But I don’t even care. Because I made so many mistakes I should be standing here alone in a big-ass house with money and no one around me. But I’m not. Because of your mother.”

  Caleb paused and then looked his father square in the eye. “But you’re mad at her about hiding West’s identity.”

  “That’s complicated, too.” He cleared his throat. “I always thought your mother was perfect.”

  Again, Caleb thought of his mother lighting things on fire and hitting trucks with baseball bats. “Perfect?”

  “She had a temper. Still does. But she forgave me every single time. She was my touchstone. Patient with me until I got my stuff together. A great mother to you boys. And finding out that even she wasn’t immune to...”

  “The same kind of petty behavior that you engaged in?”

  “Yes,” Hank said.

  “Well, that’s not really fair. Mom doesn’t exist to be your angel, Dad. She’s just a woman. And that makes the fact she forgave you all those times even more remarkable.”

  “I expect that’s so,” Hank said, letting out a long, slow breath. “I didn’t mean to make you boys feel stuck. I meant to give you freedom. But I pushed you toward what felt like freedom to me. And I’m sorry.”

  Caleb took a breath. And he realized it was a decent time to tell his dad about Clint and the guns. To confess his own darkness, and his own part he played in that, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He couldn’t bring himself to speak it out loud.

  It wasn’t like even though it had been such a big deal all those years ago, that Ellie would never forgive him, or that Hank would disown him. But the fact was, it exposed the truth about himself that he didn’t necessarily want to reveal.

  He was comfortable saying he wasn’t Clint, that he couldn’t live up to it, and it was true.

  But he wasn’t comfortable with the details.

  “It’s a good ranch,” Hank said finally. “It’s a good life. God knows we had a good one. It would have been better if I could have just...”

  “Been perfect?” Caleb asked.

  “Yeah,” Hank responded.

  “Sure. But you weren’t.”

  He didn’t say it as an accusation, just with acceptance, and Hank seemed to understand that.

  “I better bring the ax back out.”

  “Sure,” Hank said. “Let’s go chop down some more of your trees.”

  And Caleb could only marvel for a moment that just five minutes ago he’d thought his life was in a pretty optimal spot. But suddenly, he understood his dad a little bit better, and his dad seemed to understand him.

  In this moment... Well, this moment somehow managed to make things even better.

  And he was going to cling to that for as long as he could.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE FIRST WEEKEND of the Christmas tree lot was set to coincide with the Gold Valley Christmas parade. The parade was a big event, bringing people in from many surrounding areas. Gold Valley made sure their time complemented the parade that would be happening over at Copper Ridge, along with the events, so that tourists could feasibly pass between both, sampling candied nuts, coffee, cheeses and any number of other local delicacies while also enjoying the picturesque main streets of both towns.

  Caleb, for his part, couldn’t remember the last time he had come into town for the Christmas parade. Though, technically, he supposed he wasn’t here for the parade. He was here to sell trees. But still.

  From his position at the corner lot, they had an ideal view of the parade, and as much as Marco and Aiden, his first shift workers, were pretending that they didn’t care about it, he could tell that they were mildly interested.

  It was tough to be a teenage boy. He remembered that well. Because you were still very much a boy, desperate to prove that you might be a man, with a whole lot of the desires that men had swirling around inside you. But sometimes that hollow, deep longing existed inside a boy, to run wildly and not care what anyone thought, to enjoy the parade, to not be cynical about Christmas.

  He could see that war playing out over them now.

  Just a damn sucky part of growing up, really.

  But then...he looked over at Ellie, who was setting up some little chairs at the edge of the lot so that Amelia could get a good view of the parade. Yeah, sometimes being a grown-up wasn’t so bad. Because he could act on his feelings. The kind of feelings that a man had.

  Most important, he knew what to do with a woman.

  Yeah, sometimes his knees hurt after a day of hard labor, and his muscles had been pretty sore after all the tree chopping. But he would take that any day over being a fumbling teenage boy who didn’t know how to take off a bra.

  He was a man who knew what to do with his hands and knew what to do with Ellie’s body. And he was pretty damned glad of that.

  Amelia got out of her chair and wandered over to where Marco and Aiden were. She looked up at them, an earnest expression on her face.

  Caleb shot Ellie a look, asking nonverbally if he should intervene. Ellie shook her head.

  “Are you going to watch the parade?” Amelia asked.

  “We’re working,” Marco said gravely.

  Amelia wrinkled her nose. “You should watch some of the parade. There are a lot of horses.”

  “Horses are cool,” Aiden
said, nodding, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  Caleb bit back a grin. Yeah, it didn’t matter how tough you thought you were; if a little girl wanted to talk to you about horses, you had to talk to her about horses. And right then, Caleb felt for sure that Marco and Aiden were going to be all right.

  “Yeah,” Marco agreed. “Cool.”

  “I brought my favorite one,” Amelia said, lifting a small plastic horse with disheveled pink hair and waving it in front of them. “She’s going to say hi to the big horses.”

  “Very cool,” Aiden said.

  “Yeah. Very cool.”

  Clearly, neither boy had any idea how to talk to a child, but they were sure trying.

  Caleb looked back over at Ellie, who was doing her best to bite back a very wide smile.

  “Bye,” Amelia said. “I’m going to watch the parade.”

  And then she turned away from Marco and Aiden, clearly done with that discussion. She paused in front of Caleb and reached out, wrapping her hand around three of his fingers. “Are you going to come sit with us, Caleb?”

  Something tugged in his heart. “In a minute, squirt. I’ll sit for a while. But we’re working. We’re selling the trees.”

  “No one is going to buy trees during the parade,” Amelia said, clearly not understanding why anybody would ever do something when the parade was going on.

  “Well, if you’re right, I’ll come sit.”

  She let go of his hand and bounced back to where Ellie was sitting, all energy and cheer with her pale blond hair, striped leggings, boots and bedraggled fairy skirt.

  He would say he didn’t think about kids much at all, that he didn’t even particularly like them. That little girl, though... He’d die for that little girl. He’d kill for her.

  He hadn’t ever really wanted to be a father. Mostly because his relationship with his own dad was so messed up.

  But then, the only time he’d ever really had feelings for a woman, it had been Ellie. And that had been impossible. So he had stuck to his whole plan of never getting married.

  Looking at Amelia and Ellie sitting together, their matching blond hair bright in the gray light filtering through the cloud cover, it was so easy to pretend that they were both his.