Ranger
THE TRUCE WAS about to break. It had lasted less than seventy-two hours.
“You’re not serious.” We sat in her truck this time in front of a place called ‘Calla’s Pottery’ Inside there were about a dozen women all sitting at easels with what looked like champagne in their hands painting something that looked nothing like the sample at the back of the class.
There wasn’t a lick of testosterone in a mile’s range.
“What?” She shrugged and pretended to touch up her lipstick in the pull-down mirror. I knew she was pretending because her lipstick, when she chose to wear it, was always perfect. How could it not be? It was sitting on two curves of actual perfection.
I thought about giving her grief for bringing me here, but she had a way of knowing just how to tick me off. and I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.
“How did you know this is my favorite thing to do?”
She froze in place. She expected frustration or maybe whining. Old Ranger would’ve done just that. He was a kid. I was far from that kid anymore.
I could take a little paint and brushes just to prove her wrong.
“Come on. Let’s go. I think I’d like to do the cat one.”
It was all I could do not to smile. I would not be painting the cat one.
By the time I got around to her door, she had gotten over it and was now smiling from ear to ear. This was her thing. She was darn good at running the farm and the horses would always make her heart beat, but deep down, she was a little bit artsy and flowery.
I loved that about her.
Loved.
I shouldn’t even be saying that. Maybe it’s true that you never quite fall out of love with your first love.
I was sure that wherever that artsy part of Hero was, there was a part of me that would never quite get over her.
We got inside and after listening to the instructions, picked out our example. Hero chose a sunset scene, and I chose the manliest one – a cross against a blue and brown background.
When she wasn’t looking, I painted her arm blue around her elbow.
“You like to paint. How come you don’t do it more?”
She shrugged. “Time. Money. Same reasons as everyone else when they don’t get to do what they want to do.”
“I guess you’re about to have the money you need. Maybe you can hire some hands to help out. Give you the time.”
“And you?” She put her brush in the water and swirled it around a bit. She’d pulled her hair into a ponytail again.
“Me what?”
“What’s the thing you want to do that you don’t have money or time for?”
I shrugged, but I knew.
“Tell me.” She put her hand on my arm. It was warm like I remembered. She was always warm like that favorite blanket you curled up with on a cold night. “We used to tell each other everything – everything.”
“I’d like to own a ranch again, or at least work on one. I didn’t even know I missed it until I saw your farm again. I miss all of it, the horses, the freedom, the hard work, the early mornings.”
“What about the boot camp thing? Isn’t that where you’re headed? That sounds like a good opportunity.” She looked away when she said the last sentence. She always looked away when she was lying.
Come to think of it, she hadn’t looked away from me since I’d been back in town. Hero always looked at me directly in the eye.
“It’s a good opportunity, but it sounds like work to me. It’s work I don’t want to do anymore. Yes, it will pay the bills. Yes, it will keep me busy. But it’s not how I see myself living the rest of my life. I know people don’t always get what they want but a guy can hope.”
Hero leaned in closer. She had a dot of purple on her nose, but I kind of liked it there. It gave her a little imperfection. Made her real again. I had been imagining her for way too long.
When I was in Afghanistan, I held onto her picture until the edges were shredded and the lower left corner was torn from taking it out and putting it back into my pocket time after time.
After a while, I cut the edges and kept it in one of the small pockets of my pack. I also kept all of her letters in that same pocket.
One day I took the letters out and her picture wasn’t there anymore. I looked for it everywhere. Even the boys helped me look.
It was gone.
I blamed it all on fate. After all, I’d gotten her letters out of my pack to burn them. They were all lies anyway. She loved me. She wanted me to come home. She couldn’t wait to see me again.
She was with my brother.
She was a lying cheat.
She broke all of her promises.
No, those were Jacob’s words.
Or they were mine.
It was all mixed up in my head.
The letters took the place of her picture and so I let them live there, untouched.
When I came home, I requested to go to Nashville instead.
Instead of my family and my girl waiting for me at the airport, I grabbed my backpack off of the belt and walked away from it all.
“Ranger? I said how do you see yourself spending the rest of your life? Where’d you go? I’d lost you for a minute.”
She’d lost me for more than a minute.
I’d once asked her the same question. She told me she wanted to spend it with me. If I took away everything in between…if I stripped our lives down to nothing but me and her, that would be my answer too.
She was so close I could see the one speck of gold in her right eye. One of her earrings was coming out of the pierced hole. Her heartbeat in the form of her pulse on her neck. It was racing like mine was for this beautiful woman in front of me.
That was the problem with all of this.
There was too much in between.
Too much filler.
Too much gunk choking the life out of what we had.
I winked at her and held up my paint brush. “Duh. Painting.”