Chapter 3
“I’m going on vacation in Cambodia for a week,” Chris declared after roundup the next morning. “I trust you guys to take care of the cows. I’ll leave you the keys to the barn and the office, Carlos. I know you guys know what to do, so I trust y’all with everything. You’ve been a great crew, and I trust you guys.” He handed a huge set of keys to his lead hand, Carlos, a stocky Hispanic guy with a healthy mustache and eyes always full of laughter.
“Cambodia?” all the guys seems puzzled. “Hell, have you even been out of Texas? You never even leave the ranch, man.”
Chris grinned sheepishly. It was true, he almost never left. This was the first time that he was leaving the ranch in Carlos’s hands for vacation; normally, he was tethered to the ranch, leaving only for a few hours at a time at most. “I’ve been out of Texas. A few times I went down to Laredo with my brother and friends to get wasted when we were younger.”
“Ah.” Carlos waved Chris away with his massive paw. “Laredo might as well be Texas.”
“I don’t know. There are some pretty wild bars down there. My brother used to get into all sorts of trouble.”
“And you didn’t? You aren’t always such a good boy,” Carlos grinned, showing his gold tooth that he got after a vicious cow kick during round-up the year before. “There’s some lovely ladies down that way.”
“And they’re all after your money if you’re not careful,” said John, a lanky hand who lived in a small cabin near the main ranch house. John had been orphaned and had ran away from foster care. Chris took him in and let him live on the ranch as soon as he had turned eighteen. “I spent eight hundred one night at a strip club down there.”
“You don’t go to strip clubs in Laredo, you fool!” Carlos chided him.
“What are you doing in Cambodia?” a scrawny kid named Derek asked. Sometimes they called him Elvis because of the way he wore his hair.
Chris grinned secretively, revealing his brilliant blue eyes and his perfect white teeth. “Let’s just say I met a girl.”
The other men began to hoot and slap their thighs. Chris just shook his head. He knew that he had this teasing coming. While many people avoided him now, these three ranch hands had stayed by his side over the years. He could trust them with everything, from friendship to managing the ranch properly.
“You know those types of girls just want money,” Carlos cautioned. “They want green cards. Then they’ll move their families over and leave you when they get their feet on the ground.”
“This one is different. She is really something. And she has no family left.” Chris pulled up a picture of her on his phone and all the guys hooted in admiration.
Then they started teasing him about how he was in love and that he was utterly useless now. “Might as well sell the ranch now,” John and Carlos joked.
“Are you going to bring her back?” Derek asked.
“Eventually, if it all works out.”
“So I see how it is. You’re getting a week of sex while we get to keep working,” Carlos joked.
Chris waved him away. “Don’t talk about Chanda like that. I actually like this girl.”
Again, they begin teasing him. But it was clear that their teasing was good-natured. They were all genuinely happy for Chris, who had been lonely for years.
Chris said bye to the hands after a few more minutes of teasing and went up to his room to start packing his things. He ran his hands through his blond hair as he surveyed his clothes. What should he wear? How could he look handsome, rich, and professional, but also fun and caring? Between his Western clothes for horseback riding and his business suits, he really didn’t have anything casual. There were the sweats he wore around the house, but he couldn’t imagine wearing those to see Chanda.
He finally packed some suits and found an old poncho. The website said to pack lots of insect spray, so he made a note to pick some up on his way to the airport in Houston. There was also the matter of finding Chanda a gift. Chanda was so polite and modest that she wouldn’t tell him what she wanted. He wondered if flowers would make for a good gift. Honestly, he knew nothing about Asian girls, or girls in general really.
The idea of traveling to Cambodia petrified him. He had not been lying when he said that the only place outside of Texas that he had ever gone was Laredo. He used to go a lot with his older brother, Jake, before Jake passed. For a few minutes, he took out a photo of Jake. Jake would have been happy for him, especially since Jake had always had a thing for shy, pretty Asian girls. He also loved adventures and went for a motorcycle trip through Central America. What a crazy guy he was, always cracking jokes, always inciting laughter and hilarity. The parties he used to throw would gather the whole town. He was friends with everybody.
Choked up with grief, Chris placed the photo back in its place, face-down in his closet. Then he gingerly closed the door. It had been years since he had let himself think about Jake, and let himself cry. Sometimes, though, his heart ached and he wanted nothing more than to see his brother again. If only Jake was still here, able to see Chris into potential bliss with the beautiful Chanda. Everything in Chris’s life would be OK if Jake was still here.
The familiar ting ting of a Skype call interrupted his sad reverie. “Chanda,” he said excitedly when her face filled his phone screen. Like that, his grief was replaced with happiness.
Chanda beamed. “Are you ready to come, love?” she asked in her thick, sweet accent.
“I am packing as we speak.” He turned the camera around so she could see the clothes neatly folded and stacked next to his open suitcase. “I’m all ticketed and booked. I leave to Houston at four tomorrow.”
“So I better not keep you up all night, then,” Chanda giggled.
“I don’t mind. I prefer talking to you instead of sleeping.”
She smiled and looked just like an angel. “You are so wonderful.”
“I can’t wait to see you.”
“I can’t wait, either. I hope you like it here.”
“I’m a little scared. I heard it’s very different there.” Chris ran his fingers through his hair, a gesture that Chanda would soon come to find comforting and familiar.
“You will do fine. We are like Texas,” she assured him. “Very hot.”
He chuckled. “But it’s not jungle here.”
“Please show me Texas again,” she pleaded.
Chris carried the phone downstairs, to the lovely covered patio in the back of his house. He held the phone in the air and showed her the view he had of the sweeping hills and distant mountains. She gasped. “So bare,” she commented.
“You always say that,” he said. “Is it too bare for you here?”
“No, no, it is pretty.” She took her phone outside and showed him the dirty, sprawling city around her apartment. The bamboo beside her balcony was dripping with fresh rain. There were the distant sounds of traffic and people yelling in the market nearby.
“It is another world entirely,” Chris said. “But I can’t wait to explore it with you.”
She pursed her lips and blew him a kiss.