Chapter 2
Sarah
“I’ll do breakfast, go back to bed,” I told my mother. “You never get to sleep in.”
“No, I’ve got it. Don’t worry, Sarah; I’m used to this.”
“I won’t have it. You get back to bed, or read a book, or whatever else you’d like to do. But you’re not making breakfast today.”
It was true, as long as I had known my mother, she was always up before me and everyone else on the ranch. She made it her job to feed the lot of us and always wanted us to have our meals before we got to work. My father tried to tell her that she could make breakfast later in the morning and everyone could come back in to eat, but she refused and told him it was not a very efficient use of time.
One of the things I had learned from my mother over the years was a detailed use of my time. I could fit more into one day than most people did in three. It was probably one of the biggest reasons I had been so successful at such a young age. But there was more to balancing life than fitting as much in as possible. Unfortunately, it had taken me losing my job before I really figured that out.
“There’s a new guy, his name is Garrett. He’s missed breakfast all week; save a little food for him. He’s struggling with the schedule.”
“You’re too nice to these guys, mom. If you didn’t save him food, he’d learn his lesson faster and get his ass out of bed on time.”
“Oh, Sarah, this isn’t your big, New York company. Here, I like to treat everyone kindly. Can you please save him some food? I know you’re a fan of tough love, but I never used it with you and you turned out just fine. Just give it a try and be nice to him for me. I’d really appreciate it.”
“Sure, mother, but I’m not saving it for long. As soon as breakfast is cleaned up, his food is going to the dogs.”
My mother just shook her head at me as she made her way back up the stairs to go to bed. She was tired; I could see it in her body as she climbed the stairs. I was happy to be home to help her and father out, even if the circumstances that had brought me home weren’t all that great. They were managing just fine in getting the day to day tasks done around the ranch, but there was so much more to actually bringing in money.
My parents had worked hard all their lives for the ranch. I had only decided to enter the corporate world so I could make enough money to help them out at the ranch. I knew they didn’t have retirement accounts or any means to ever actually stop working. I had hoped I would be able to buy the ranch from them and take it over someday, but my dreams of financial freedom hadn’t turned out quiet how I had hoped.
Living in New York was extremely expensive and maintaining the lifestyle I had to have as the Vice President of Marketing for Anderson Telecommunications had used up most of the money I earned each year. Sure, I had some in a savings account and I had the severance package that they had given me when they decided my position was no longer needed. But I had totally failed in my goal of earning enough money to actually be of help to my family.
It was difficult to come home and feel like I had failed my family. When I looked back, I wasn’t even sure I knew where all my money had gone. Making $250,000 a year certainly seemed like a lot of money, but apparently, it hadn’t been enough.
Working in marketing wasn’t my idea; I had an MBA from Harvard and had hoped to move up in the organization. But marketing and sales were what they needed most, so I learned the position and did the best I could to bring in new clients. It worked, and I had more than $3 million in new revenue my first year. My new sales couldn’t make up for poor management though, and the organization was soon seeing red and looking for the easiest executive to cut.
I was that person. To the other executives, they figured lower level sales people could make up for my job and they didn’t need a head of the department. My gut told me they were wrong and I’d soon be hearing about Anderson Telecommunications going broke.
“Good morning,” I said, as the first few men trickled into the gathering area. “Pancakes and bacon today; I hope you enjoy.”
“Thank you,” they said as they quickly grabbed up platefuls and sat down at one of bench tables.
Despite what my mother thought, I was actually very kind to the men who worked on our ranch. They worked long and hard hours for my parents and I wasn’t about to do anything to jeopardize that for them. My parents needed all the help they could get. Sure, it was necessary to cut down on the number of ranch hands we had over the years, but we still had to keep enough to keep the ranch running properly.
We typically had anywhere between ten and fifty men working for us. It depended on the time of year and what was going on. In the summer time, we were the busiest, so we typically had the most employees. But on this morning, I had only counted twenty-two men. I instantly knew my father’s financial issues had led to him not hiring as many ranch hands as he normally did. It was a tough decision though. With less workers, it meant the men we had were working much harder and that meant we would probably lose those men to new jobs sooner than normal.
Working as a ranch hand really wasn’t a great job; I knew it, my father knew it, and I suspected even the ranch hands knew it. But many of the men we hired were drifters. They were in the process of moving from one place to the next and needed a few weeks of pay to make that happen. Some would stay on for the whole summer, and even fewer would stay on throughout the winter. We paid well; it wasn’t as if we were taking advantage of them. But the work was hard. It was labor intensive and exhausting and I could see it on the men’s faces that morning.
For me, there was a sense of calm that came when I was on the ranch though. Working outside and with the animals was an entirely different world than the corporate one I came from. Even the long days seemed to fly by because I was out and moving around. The sun was on my face, the wind in my hair; nothing seemed all that bad when you had nature on your side.
While I worked in the corporate world, I had days when I felt energized and excited, but I had many more days where I felt totally drained and unable to move forward. The long hours in an office worked my body both physically and mentally. Working that much made it difficult to find friends outside of the office and I certainly didn’t have time to pursue hobbies or relationships much.
The corporate job was what I thought I wanted and needed though. How was I ever going to help my parents financially if I didn’t make a ton of money? Soon the vicious cycle of working long hours and spending my money to keep up appearances started though. Once I started to become concerned about the luxury handbag I was carrying to my meetings, that was when I stopped working my corporate job to help my family. By the time I was carrying an Hermes Birkin into my meetings on Mondays, I had long fallen down the hole that I wanted to avoid so desperately.
After cleaning up breakfast, I made my way out to the horse barn to take care of them. The horses were my pride and joy; they calmed me, and just being near them always made me feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be in this life. When I was younger, I had begged my father to let me take riding lessons and he refused to allow it. He promised to teach me everything he knew about horses and then I could be in charge of them. But I wasn’t willing to wait and I started saddling the horses up myself and sneaking them out for ride.
Wild horses were my favorite though. They were like children exploring their boundaries and sometimes they would wander near our ranch. In the beginning, my father ignored the wild horses who would come to our property, but soon we had one that just wouldn’t leave. The horse wanted to be part of our group so we kept her and I worked with my father to break her in.
The idea of breaking in a horse seemed like torture to me when my father first explained things. We had to walk her on a lead rope at all times. I couldn’t spend a lot of time petting her or grooming her until she learned how to behave. It didn’t seem fair. But soon my father explained that the reason she had been sticking around the ranch was likely because the other horses had ostracized her. They didn’t want her with them, so it was our job to give her a home; that made so much sense to me.
“This is Buckjoy,” my father said as he held the rope of a wild horse.
“Dad, you can’t keep bringing home wild things and thinking they are going to like you saddling them up.”
“I think Bambi would disagree with you.”
“She was special. We just have a bond, but I was here to train her and show her she was safe. I don’t think it’s going to work like that for all wild horses.”
After my father struggled with training Bambi, I stepped up and offered to give it a try. I was only a teenager, but I felt like the horse liked me and would listen to me. Sure enough, Bambi ended up liking me very much and wanting to be good so she would get praise. That was what I found as a key to bonding with the horses: I had to find a reason for the animal to like me.
Sometimes animals weren’t all that easy to convince that they liked you. Bambi hadn’t really fallen in love with me until I started sneaking her apples before my father would get up. Then she spent the rest of the morning being nice to me in hopes that she would get another apple. I finally started incorporating feeding the horses apples as a way of building up trust with them and it really started to work well.
“Well, you are home again, so try and tame Buckjoy. I need a new horse for myself and I’d like a nice, strong one like him. I’ve been riding out to the river and it’s exhausting the horses we have. I need a wild one that can handle that kind of range.”
“Why are you going to the river?” I asked.
Although, the river was certainly one of the most beautiful aspects of our land. It was nearly ten miles north of the house and not accessible by car unless we used the off-road vehicle. My father had brought me out to the river area several times over the years and the trek up and over the mountains used to scare me to death. But as I got older, I realized that by just slowing down and keeping in control of the horse, I could make it up and over the mountain with relatively no issues.
“I’m thinking of selling the land north of the river. I’ve been going out there to put some fencing up and take photos for a listing. Although my photos have turned out horrible.”
“What? Dad, no. You can’t sell off part of the ranch. I’m here now. I’m going to help make things work. Why would you even consider this?”
“Honey, it’s not just about taking care of the animals anymore. We really don’t have the money to keep this whole place up and running. I think it’s fine to sell off that piece; we hardly use it, only for some occasional cattle running. It will bring in some good money and help keep the rest of the ranch afloat.”
“How about I take a look at the books and see if there are any other options?” I offered. “That land is worth more and more money every year you hold onto it. Perhaps you’d be best to wait a few more years.”
I did have my MBA from Harvard, the least I could do was look at the financials of the ranch and see if there was anything we could be doing better. Running a ranch was a huge undertaking. I didn’t even have to look at the books to know that my father probably hadn’t been keeping track of things as closely as he needed to be.
In order to run a successful business of any kind, there had to be very close monitoring of the financials. Even the smallest of mistakes could cost a business their profits. I hadn’t gotten my chance to fully run the financials for a business yet, but I had run them for the marketing division of my company. Not only did I cut back in unneeded expenses, but my department made twice as much as we had been predicted to do.
The problem with running a very efficient group of people was that my organization started to think they didn’t need me anymore. They believed the high functioning staff that worked for me could handle all the jobs that I had done. I wasn’t sure they would be as good as me.
But I wasn’t sure I had the energy to train Buckjoy. He was a big horse and full of energy and I was emotionally exhausted from just losing my job. I didn’t have that passion for the horses yet, but I did have a passion for my father. I would do anything for him, and if that meant training a wild horse, I’d give it my best shot and I knew that was exactly what my father wanted me to do.
“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “But you also need to train Buckjoy for me.”
“Deal.”
I was surprised he had agreed to let me look at the books. I had offered once before while I was in college and my father had vehemently denied my offer. My father was a proud man and I’m sure he didn’t want to admit defeat when it came to his ranch. I knew that by agreeing to allow me to look at his books, my father was agreeing that his ranch wasn’t doing well at all. It took a lot of insight for my father to finally be at a place where he truly understood the financial peril the ranch was in.
Operating a ranch had been a very lucrative endeavor as I was growing up, or so it seemed from where I was looking in on things. We always had a bustling group of ranch hands and even two or three men who had stayed on for many years. In his prime, my father had managed the men himself, but in recent years, he had the man with the most seniority in charge of the other men.
Currently we only had one supervisor over the ranch hands, Walter, and one assistant to him, Forest. Walter was getting ready to leave and I didn’t know much about Forest at all. He was relatively new to me. I had heard of him, but he hadn’t been at the ranch when I came home over Christmas. But that was how things were going lately: the good guys ended up leaving and moving on to larger ranches that were operated by big conglomerates. The larger ranches typically had better hours for about the same pay, so I couldn’t blame them for wanting to move on.
I grabbed the reins of Buckjoy and the horse instantly started to buck with irritation. I could see how he had gotten his name. The horse didn’t scare me though; I saw the fear in his eyes and I knew I just had to step a few steps backward and away from him to get him to calm a little. As I moved toward the door of the barn, I saw the horse start to calm.
“He’s not used to having a woman around,” said a man from the other side of the barn.
“Ah, Garrett, this is my daughter, Sarah,” my Dad said as he motioned for Garrett to come join us.
Suddenly I remembered that I was supposed to have saved some food from breakfast for Garrett. But then again, he hadn’t shown up by the time I cleaned up, so he was out of luck. Any man who couldn’t be bothered to get up at breakfast time wasn’t going to last long around the ranch anyways.
The men that my father kept around on the ranch were hard workers. They weren’t the kind of men who let others do work for them while they sat and watched. Usually when a guy arrived on the ranch, he had already worked at several other places and knew what it was going to be like. They knew how to wake themselves up in the morning, and most of all, they knew that if you didn’t eat breakfast, it was going to make for a really exhausting day. Obviously, this Garrett guy had a few lessons he needed to learn still.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Garrett said as he reached his hand out to shake mine. “Do you mind?” He asked and then grabbed the reins from me, without waiting for me to answer.
“I guess not,” I muttered.
“Garrett has been working with the horses for the last couple of weeks. He’s new at it though, so he’ll need your guidance. But Buckjoy seems to like him. It’s a good sign, I think.”
It was true; I watched as Garrett gently moved his hand down the main of Buckjoy and the horse instantly calmed. I tried not to take it personally, but a little piece of me was pissed off that the horse favored this stranger. Well, he was a stranger to me at least and as I stood there watching Garrett and my father interact, I realized my father really did like the guy.
My father always tended to like the strangest ranch hands. Sometimes he would even favor guys who looked like they had just gotten off a bus directly from New York City without a single shred of experience on a ranch.
Once, I had confronted my father on his favoritism. There had been a man who came to us in the middle of the night and literally didn’t even know what a pair of cowboy boots were. He was an arrogant asshole and refused to work at all. My father let him stay with us in the house for a whole week before the man finally moved on. When I confronted him about it, my father had told me that everyone needed a helping hand at some point in their life. It baffled me and angered me, but mostly because I felt like there was much more to the story than he was letting on.
“You’re not experienced with horses?” I questioned. He certainly seemed to know what he was doing as he had Buckjoy practically purring like a kitten in front of him.
“Never even seen a horse until I got here a couple of weeks ago.”
“Beginner’s luck,” I said softly under my breath.
“Sarah, he’s a hard worker. Be nice to him and teach him what he needs to know about the horses, please.”
My father didn’t look impressed with my snarky attitude toward the stranger and I instantly changed it. I knew better than to make my father angry. There was one thing in the world that I always knew for a fact: my father knew a good man from a bad one. Over the years, my father had worked with thousands of men, and even a few women, at the ranch; he had always been able to tell the hard workers from the wannabes. Even when he said a man was a good man and let him stay for a week without working, I knew deep down that my father had to have some sort of reasoning for this.
“What have you learned so far?” I asked Garrett.
“Oh, pretty much just how to shovel shit,” he laughed.
Both my father and I laughed with him. It was true, the first few weeks a ranch hand was at our place, my father typically had them shoveling poop. It was a great way to test the character of a man. Some of the men would refuse out of pride or whatever else was going on and that just baffled me. Cleaning up after the animals was just as important as any other job on the ranch. The men who understood this did much better and lasted much longer on the ranch.
I get it, shoveling shit isn’t the most glamorous of jobs. But if horses walked around in their own shit all the time, they were more likely to get infections and become ill. That cost the ranch money, not to mention it was gross. Being a rancher wasn’t just about playing with piglets and selling cattle. It was about caring for the animals in every aspect.
“And sleeping in?” I joked.
“God, I don’t know how they do it. Everyone insists I’ll be able to adjust and get up when everyone else does, but apparently, I just haven’t learned yet. I think there’s some sort of trick to it that no one is telling me. But I’m up for a little hazing if that’s what’s going on.”
Garrett smiled and seemed very easy going. I couldn’t help but like him a little bit more than I had when he had taken Buckjoy from me. His bright, blue eyes were mesmerizing as he looked at me and I felt like a bit of a schoolgirl with a crush. Of course, I wasn’t about to admit that to anyone. I didn’t have time for men in my life. I needed to make some big career and life decisions and having a man around was just going to fuzzy up the process.
“I’m sorry, I forgot to save some breakfast for you this morning; I’ll remember for tomorrow.”
“You’re making breakfast tomorrow? Maybe that’s the motivation I need to get my ass up in the morning,” Garrett said as he winked at me.
“I’ll leave you two to work. See you at dinner, dear,” my father said with a quick peck to my cheek. “Garrett, remember that fox I killed last week that was running around the hen house?”
“Yes, sir,” Garrett laughed.
“I bet you can imagine what I’d do if there was a fox around my daughter,” my father laughed as he slapped Garrett on the back and walked away.
“Oh, Dad, don’t be so dramatic.”
Garrett was laughing, but I could tell he was leery about even being near me after what my father had said. He and my father seemed to get along well though and that was a huge plus for Garrett. My father didn’t take many people under his wing like he was doing with Garrett, so if he already liked the man, I knew he was just being a jokester about Garrett hanging around me.
“I better get back to shoveling,” Garrett said and handed me the reins.
“You know he was kidding, right?”
“Oh, yeah, but I do have lots to do still.”
Garrett made his way back to the first stall in the barn and I watched him every step of the way. He was much more handsome than the ranch hands we normally had. His tall, muscular frame should make the work easier on him, but even a man who thought he was in great shape was typically surprised by the amount of work that ranch hands actually put in each day.
Garrett looked more like a preppy businessman who was pretending to be a ranch hand, but sometimes that happened around our ranch, too. Young men would get sick and tired of the life they were leading and up and decide they wanted to be free as they took off on a trip around the country. Sooner or later, they would run out of their money and have to find work in order to sustain their new roadie lifestyle, and that’s when they would come to us.
I wasn’t sure that was what was going on with Garrett though. He really seemed to be new to everything farm-related and didn’t even look like he was comfortable wearing his cowboy boots and jeans. I would have to make an effort to get to know him a little and see what had brought him to our ranch.
I watched as his blond hair bobbed up and down in the horse stall while he shoveled it clean. His hair was shaggy and looked like it had been professionally cut recently, which surprised me because most the men who showed up to work on the ranch had been drifting around for a while before they landed with us. They certainly weren’t paying money to get their hair cut.
“Do you have gloves?” I asked, as I put Buckjoy in his spot and walked over to Garrett.
“Who needs gloves?” Garrett joked as he held up his hands that were full of blisters. “These are the hands of a highly skilled shit shoveler.”
“Oh, God. Have you never worked at all? Those are horrible,” I laughed, but then felt bad. His hands were indeed in very bad shape.
“I’m more of a supervisor than a worker bee normally, but I’ll manage.”
“Here, let me get you some gloves. Those need to be drained and cleaned, too. Come see me at lunchtime and I’ll fix you up,” I said.
Garrett flashed a smile at me and my knees went weak; it caught me off guard and I grabbed onto the side of the barn to stabilize myself. I certainly wasn’t used to a good-looking ranch hand being around me and was even less comfortable with him flirting with me. If that was what he was doing? I hadn’t been flirted with in a long time, so I wasn’t even sure I knew it when a man was doing it.
Quickly I turned toward the cabinets on the other end of the building and grabbed him a pair of leather gloves. They were my father’s, but it was clear that Garrett needed them more than anyone.
“Put these on,” I ordered.
“Yes, ma’am,” Garrett said as he snatched them from the air when I threw them. “Do you always give the order around here?”
His voice was light-hearted and his smile brilliantly white. I knew he was teasing me, but I wasn’t sure I was able to handle it. My life was in ruins and I had only come home to gather the pieces; I really didn’t have time for flirting; even if he was one of the most delicious men I had ever laid eyes on.
“I do have to give orders from time to time,” I said as I grinned back at him. “I’ll see you at lunch.”
I didn’t wait for his response and quickly left the building. My heart pounded with excitement at the interaction I had just had. There was something about Garrett that drew me to him. Maybe it was his smile, or his handsome good looks; or maybe it was just that my father seemed to like him. I wasn’t exactly sure, but I knew I was going to enjoy having him around this summer.