14.
Ollie
I’d had a dream that didn’t involve prison.
For the first time in a long time, I woke up and didn’t feel like my heart was in my throat, didn’t feel like I was about to jump out of my own skin. The dream was still perfectly clear in my mind, as though it were really an episode of a TV show, playing again on repeat. It had been a perfectly realistic dream, a slice of life that could actually happen.
I was somewhere near the ocean.
Which meant I was somewhere far from where I was now. I’d never seen the ocean before, had never smelled the salt air or heard the seagulls calling from overhead. Even so, I could remember all that from my dream, plus the way the warm sand felt between my toes, the sound of the waves as they rolled up the beach, then back again.
I was on a beach somewhere, in a town where no one knew me.
And because I was there and no one knew who I was, there was no guilt, no pitying or angry looks, no one who had any clue about what I’d done or where I’d been.
It was a good feeling.
In fact, it was a feeling that stayed with me throughout the day, as I tacked up Bebop, when I rode him out to wrangle the other horses into the corral for their morning feed, when I sat in the quiet of the barn later, cleaning the saddles and bridles, when I left the ranch to stop by Paula’s.
“Well now, there you are,” Paula said. She was sitting on the front porch in one of the rocking chairs, sipping on a glass of lemonade. “I was thinking you’d forgotten about me. Wouldn’t have blamed you if you did. Guess Wren gave you the message.”
“She did,” I said. “And I didn’t forget about you. I’ve just been busy. Been meaning to get over here, though. How have you been?”
She clinked the ice around in her glass. “Same as always. You know, you don’t have to keep coming out here like this. You really don’t.”
But I did. “I promised Jackson I would.”
“How’s he going to know if you stop?”
“Do you not want me to?” Even if she didn’t, I’d still stop by every once in a while. He’d have a way of knowing. And I had given him my word.
She shrugged. “I suppose
it’s nice to have the company. Even though you’re not here because you actually
want to be. That’s the thing that’s kind of bugging me—you’re not out here
because you want to be. You’re out
here because you made a promise to my husband and if you stop, you’re afraid
something bad’s going to happen.” She snorted. “It won’t, you know. I’m not
sure who you think he is, but he’s not a gang member or anything. He doesn’t
have all these dangerous connections or nothing.”
“I don’t think he does,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. In prison,
Jackson was one of those men everyone respected. Not just because he was big
and strong, but because that’s just how it was. I’d never questioned it, and
had assumed it was, in part, because he had connections.
“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t actually much feel like talking right now. So, I’m sorry if you feel like you made a trip out here for no reason. If you want to come back some other time, you can, but don’t feel like you have to.”
“I really don’t mind,” I said. “Have you seen Jackson?”
“Not lately. I’ll probably be taking a trip up there in the next couple weeks. Maybe you should come with me.”
“I don’t know if I want to go back there.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
I stayed and sat with Paula for a while longer, most of our time spent not even talking. I didn’t mind it though, I really didn’t. When I got up to leave, she smiled, and I could tell that she felt better that I’d stopped by, and I told her I’d come back again soon.
When I got back to the ranch, Keith was there, talking with Ryan. I parked the truck and headed down to the barn, but then I heard someone calling my name. I stopped and turned.
“Hey, Keith,” I said, waiting for him to catch up. He was red in the face and breathing hard.
“You give any more thought to what my father talked to us all about?” he asked.
“I’ve been thinking about it a little bit,” I said. “It’s a pretty big decision to make.”
“It is.” He squinted at me. “But I figure it’s probably a pretty easy one to come to. Why the hell wouldn’t someone like you take it? It’s practically a gift from god. You get out of prison, and get a job offer just like that. Not even a job offer, but the opportunity to take over the whole damn place, if you so choose. Almost kind of suspicious, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” I said. “I had no idea your father was going to be there to pick me up. And I certainly didn’t have a clue that he was going to offer taking over the ranch. You think I had something to do with it?”
Keith shrugged. “Any reasonable person would. Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And I really didn’t. I tried to consider it from his point of view. Thing was, he’d never shown any interest in the ranch whatsoever. I knew for a fact if he had, Garrett would have included him in his offer.
“You don’t know,” Keith repeated. “Well, since you don’t know, let me make it to clear to you. Most everyone around here thinks you’re a piece of shit for what you did, and the only reason word hasn’t spread even further about you is because I don’t want to hurt my father’s business. But trust me when I say you’re nothing more than a waste of space, and my brother and I are going to do what we can to convince our father to change his mind about this whole ridiculous idea of you ever having control of this ranch. Which has been in my family for generations. My family, not yours, regardless of what you think.”
He didn’t wait for me to respond, he just walked off, though I didn’t know what the hell someone was supposed to say to something like that.
What I did know was that I shouldn’t let his words get to me, but they did. I’d planned to work with Ditto some more before I went to go meet up with Wren, but it would be a bad idea to work with a horse like that when I was feeling like this. Maybe in the back of my mind, I’d thought that Keith was right, that the people who knew tolerated me but that was about it.