The Meier family burial plot occupied the highest elevation for a hundred miles. Before the coastal plains sank toward the Gulf, before the granite and limestone of the Texas Hill Country rose in earnest to the west, before more adventurous terrain mitigated strong, jet-stream winds that gathered out of the northern plains, there was this strip of Texas hilltop beauty. Clem used to say that God created Texas so people would be able to recognize heaven when the time came then turned up the heat to remind them there was an alternative—Oklahoma. Of course, the man who nearly stole Clem’s beloved out from under him while he fought the good fight in Europe had been a Sooner.

Nat sat beneath the hilltop’s best feature—a cedar elm ninety feet tall, its spread nearly as wide—on a bench crafted from stones rumored to have been the first cleared from the land. The breeze stirred the canopy overhead into a song as familiar to him as Clem’s favorite Jerry Jeff Walker song. The only time this place was more breathtaking was during bluebonnet season when the hill became an island in an ocean of wildflowers. Three generations of Meiers stretched out before him, men and women who sacrificed everything in their lives so that he, and those who came after, could have so much more than a square of dirt to call home.

Difference was, they had each other. Nat had never felt so alone.

Willie had sent him up here when Nat nearly lost his shit in the tack room. Thought it might help him clear his head. Really, it served as a reminder that his family intended to stay here forever and that if he lost the ranch, his dearly departed loved ones would be eternal squatters on someone else’s land. And he wouldn’t even be a pin on a map.

Certainly not January’s map.

Waking in the cabin hadn’t been his finest moment. But watching her gather her belongings without confronting what had happened between them, leaving him twisting in the wind of uncertainty about her plans and any possible future, felt like an electric cattle prod to an old wound—all high voltage and low current. His every intent to steer clear of January Rose had gone south. Argentina south. Now he had to push her out of his head enough to keep this square of dirt for another year.

“Two days, Grandad. Then we’ll know for sure.”

Nat leaned forward, elbows on knees, toward a headstone whose ending date felt like a kick to the nuts most days.

“I expanded this year, like you did all those years back. Mason Dekker passed away last summer. Too many years of whiskey and Virginia leaf with you.” Nat smiled, remembering the two friends on the porch most nights, old stories and the sweet burn of honey-infused tobacco drifting straight through his window. “His kids didn’t want the ranch anymore. Seemed like the right time. East perimeter was a little short-sided, and I wanted to make you proud. Thing is, I think I made a mistake. And I’m really scared that I lost everything that you spent a lifetime building. I could really use your help.”

“You got it, brother.”

Nat’s heart slipped off-beat. The voice—that voice…

He shot to his feet and turned.

Wes stood in his sand-colored fatigues, sleeves rolled, hair sparse on his head—no beard, no hair—the way Wes hated it. The way Nat hated it, too. That close crop of jet-black hair straight from their mom’s gene pool signaled the Marines had a stronger hold over Wes than his family. Still, Nat had never been prouder to be a Meier than when he saw the name tape on his brother’s uniform.

Nat’s gut shot to his throat. “Hey, man.” He didn’t try to hide the tears in his voice, already riding high from begging the dead for assistance.

Wes closed in, always the first of the two to charge forward. Nat supposed that came from his combat training. The hero part. Nat just told cattle where to eat and crap.

They embraced, a bit longer than usual, as if Wes was afraid that Nat might detonate if he let go. Must have seen some bad shit this tour. Nat gave himself to the hold for as long as his brother needed him. Even gave him a few rough smacks on the back, a covert reminder of his sibling seniority. When they split apart, Wes’s grin was the best thing Nat had seen all day.

Well…

“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming back? I’d have met you in Houston.”

“Busy time, little brother. You don’t need to spend it at an airport.”

“I would have come. No hesitation.”

“I know. But it’s all good,” Wes said. “Willie told me I’d find you up here. Didn’t say I’d find you crying to Grandad like a pussy.”

Nat gave one appreciative bark of laughter then raised three tight fingers and peeled the outer two. “Corn stalk, man.”

When Nat was twelve, the Meier brothers perfected the art of saying fuck you to each other in as many pre-adolescent boy variations as there were blades of grass on the ranch. Chance was the most creative—musical instruments, elaborate mime routines that ended in a grandiose display of the forbidden middle finger. Wes, named after their father’s historic collection of Smith & Wesson firearms, favored the gun varieties of flipping off his brothers. Usually double-action with a ton of kickback.

“Always were Grandad’s favorite, weren’t you?” said Wes.

“After you gave his favorite steer a heart attack with those black cat fireworks.”

Wes tossed his head back and laughed. “Hoss jumped like a jackrabbit.”

Nat joined in the laughter. After that July Fourth, they had renamed the cow St. Elmo, after the weather phenomenon that turns the tips of a steer’s horns to fire, and he spent the rest of his days coddled by their grandmother.

Not unlike January and MooDonna.

Nat sobered.

“What are you doing up here, man?” said Wes. “Such a sad place.”

“It’s peaceful. Good spot to think.”

“You’ve always done your fair share of that.”

Nat sat on the bench. Wes filled the space beside him. His brother sat straighter, taller, his nose to the breeze. Shoulder to shoulder with Wes, alive, fucking alive, felt good, lifted a cloud. Like maybe Nat could do this ranching thing, after all.

“How long are you here for?” asked Nat.

“Long enough to help you sell some hide.”

“I appreciate it, man. But I’m sure you have things you’d rather do now that you’re home.”

Wes shook his head. “It’s funny. Growing up here, all I could think about was doing something else, you know? God, I hated mucking stalls. I never took to this place the way you did. But over there? Some days…some days were so fucking dark, I’d have traded a limb to be back here, working the land beside you.” His bottom lip quivered on a sigh.

Nat looped his arm around Wes’s shoulders and tugged him close. “Missed you, brother.”

Wes blinked toward the breeze, sniffed.

“Now who’s the pussy?” said Nat.

To which Wes promptly hiked his pantleg up from his boot with a strategic middle finger.

“Saw January up at the house.”

Her name, the mention of it, was a sucker punch.

“Did you?” Part of Nat wanted her gone. The other part wanted her at the house, doodling cartoon additions to the kitchen wallpaper until their grandbabies walked underfoot.

“She get tired of the world yet?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well? What are you going to do about it?”

Nat shrugged. He didn’t want to get into it.

“Did you know Mona sends me a care package every month? Usual stuff—hand wipes, pistachios, glittery notes from the church youth group. Her chocolate pecan bark. Countries could win wars with troops eating that. Know what else she sends? Every one of those girly columns of yours where you preach about missed opportunities and living with intent. They were kind of a thing in our unit. We’d pass them around. Read them to stay awake on duty. Use them for toilet paper.”

Nat shook his head and smiled. Always from the moment he returned stateside, the brotherly ambush.

“Nah, they’re good, man. Aside from the guys calling my brother Aunt Anus.”

“Your point?”

“It’s time to take your own advice.”

Wes cupped Nat on the neck, shook him a bit as he stood, and started back down the hill. “I’m fixin’ to crash, man. I’ll be up to help with evening chores.”

He hadn’t made it ten yards before Nat stopped him. “Wes?”

“Yeah?”

“Welcome home.”

Wes gave him a half-assed salute and cleared the shade of the elm. For Nat, quite possibly, the best view of all.

* * *

With Wes home, Nat’s workload was cut in half. His brother had showered and crawled back into bed to sleep off his jetlag. The house was quiet. Nat found himself in his stable office hours earlier than his usual midnight, not a thing left on his to do list but anguish over the sale.

He pulled the five journal sheets he had written on the cabin roof from the desk drawer. His handwriting was crazed. The words belonged to him, but he didn’t remember writing them. All he remembered was the transformative nature of January’s head in his lap, her lids closed, the even cadence of her breath the only inspiration he needed.

Nat studied the room. Claim the space and you claim the dream. January’s words sounded like more advanced bullshit, but no more so than the advice he dished out with every column. What kind of hypocrite tells people to live with intent and doesn’t do the same? He reached for the spur, turned the rowel, touched the things that belonged to Clem. Then he packed it all away. Everything but the spur and the honey-soaked Virginia leaves in a corner tin.

Slate clean, he opened his laptop and finished his novel.

* * *

January had poked her finger with a needle no less than four times. The gauzy material in her hands was perfect for curtains, not so ideal for someone with two left thumbs and no thimbles. She found the domesticity of sewing oddly therapeutic, however. Or maybe it was simply her plan for Nat’s gift coming together in the way she hoped.

Twenty-four hours ago, they drove back to the main house in silence, Mack behind the wheel, Willie in the passenger seat, trying to make small talk and failing. When the terrain swelled and caused Nat’s knee to bump hers, he shifted away. Hours earlier, their bodies had been playgrounds; after their dust-up, incidental touch made him recoil.

She had known it would happen. To the deepest cell in her body, she knew he would hurt. Nat lived life like he was a china cabinet: hardwood and sturdy on the outside; inside, filled with the fragile things in life—porcelain hearts and feelings—taken out on special occasions and polished but rarely ever enjoyed. What January hadn’t counted on was feeling like a broken dish herself.

“J-Rose? You in there?” her mother called from outside the trailer.

January untangled herself from the material, grabbed her iced tea, and went to the door. Her mother exited one of the ranch’s old trucks. A bright overnight delivery envelope in her grip stood out in stark contrast to her dusty gray mechanic hands.

“Driver delivered this to the house. Thought it might be important. Last time one of those trucks drove all the way out here, the boys’ mother had signed away ownership of the ranch.”

“Who’s it from?”

A silly question. The agency sent trackable paperwork filled with legalese contracts that released them from all liability should you, say, fall in a river in Kenya and get eaten by crocodiles. The delivery was an assignment. Quite possibly the assignment. The timing was right, the season a prime window to get her into elevated terrain before winter.

Mona met her on the trailer steps, offered her the delivery.

An odd flutter—not entirely unpleasant but decidedly foreign—meandered through January’s belly. Her stomach hardened, like an overturned mason jar that had trapped a moth, oblivious to losses greater than freedom. She set her tea on the step.

“Well? Aren’t you going to open it?” Her mother, used to prodding livestock, had no issue prodding her daughter past this pivotal moment.

January’s gaze drifted to the return address. Sure enough, the agency.

“It’s my next assignment.”

“Oh. Well, let’s hear it.”

To say notes of disappointment tripped through her mother’s twang was an understatement. January recognized it because she felt it, too: late nights when Mona worked on some machine part at the table while January told her everything she could remember about the places she’d been; their mutual obsession for ice cream that had them meeting at the fridge at three in the morning; and last night, when January’s tears over Nat flowed faster than her mother’s special-reserve peach bourbon.

Mona crawled up on the trailer steps. January sank beside her and opened the envelope.

Double-indented on the cover page, in bold type, the words: Tsum Valley, Gorkha, Nepal.

Beside her, Mona allowed several heartbeats to pass before she celebrated with a subdued hoot and a maudlin holler. “Can’t say as I know where the hell that is, but I know it’s what you wanted.”

Wanted.

Want? Well, that was an entirely different matter.

Her gaze tracked lower on the page. The reporting date was in red. “Four days.”

“Don’t give you much time, do they?” said Mona.

“Letter is dated last week.”

A million details flooded her brain. She had to call the agency travel rep to get a flight booked and email her updated immunization record and file her work plan and the name of her contact with the nearest embassy and pack—God, it would be winter, and her boots weren’t warm enough—when all she really wanted to do was crawl back into the trailer and finish the curtains for Nat’s surprise.

What the hell was wrong with her? She should want to run through her mother’s guinea fowls, scattering them with all her dancing and carrying on. At the very least, she should want to move. Work travelers sat on waiting lists for years to draw dream places like Nepal. She wanted peace and Zen-like serenity and prayer flags and rickshaws and all the things that promised complete detachment and a life-altering adventure. But she also wanted Nat, and the two were mutually exclusive. As much as he said he would give it all up, that would be like asking the sun not to rise. His light was here.

January remembered what Nat had told her: Agnes is more your mother than me. She had never confided in her mother before, but if Mona gave advice like the kind January read in the column, January had waited twenty-eight years too long to ask.

“What made dad want to leave? I mean, why weren’t we enough?”

Mona inhaled deeply and looked out over the pasture. “When we first met, he was like a cool drink of water on a hot day, better than any high found in hand-rolled paper or at the bottom of a bottle. He had this restless curiosity that was always there, at the edges of everything we did together…” She gave a gentle shoulder bump to January. “Even parenting. Being out of his element was his element. It was a part of him I accepted in exchange for the most exhilarating love I had ever known.”

“I’m afraid that’s who I am for Nat.”

Mona’s expression squeezed into a maternal, poor-dear smile. January wasn’t sure if it was a poor-dear-you’re-just-like-him smile or a poor-dear-you’re-deluded smile.

“Your father ran from a childhood of pain. His father—your grandfather—abused every substance he could get his hands on and ran into trouble with the law, which is why you probably don’t have many memories of him. To deal with that, your grandmother began another life, had more children, pretended her first life—and son—didn’t exist.”

January tucked her hair behind her ear and watched sweat trickle down her glass. Her father’s past had always been weak tea to her—diluted, mostly sweet, because who wants to tell a little girl her grandparents were messed up?

“J-Rose, your father told lies to himself, created stories about how he wanted to remember his past, not how it had been. And he believed them. After a while, I couldn’t believe in him anymore. His wanderlust came from pain. But yours? Well, I’d like to think you got the best of him.”

January’s awareness split, like the part of her who had always believed her father, who still wanted to believe, scooted beside her, and the truth left her behind inside a cavernous shell.

Her mother took her hand and squeezed.

“This world needs fearless people,” said Mona. “People who take a hard look at their own biases and limitations and have the courage to move past them. Just be careful that you don’t get to the end of your life, alone, and have to create stories about how it had been.”

January’s throat tightened. She squeezed Mona’s hand back. A million things filled her brain, but all January wanted was to pass time with the woman beside her. A woman she never really took the time to know, distracted as she was by the noise and the fanfare of her father.

“I should clean up for my date tonight with Harlan. Man’s been asking me out for five years. Then you come in, wanting some fix-it man favors, and I’m stuck in my heels and Sunday best going for ribeye over in Hickory, trying not to notice his teeth slipping in and out when he chews.”

January giggled. “Nat’s worth it. Have you seen it, yet? It’s almost finished.”

“I’ll get over there after the sale.”

After January was on a plane to Bangkok, her second of three flights. The thought turned the tea in her stomach sour.

“I’m sure it’s special. Everything you touch seems to head that direction.” Mona’s direction sounded more like die-rection.

“Thanks, Mom.” January clenched her into a side-embrace.

“You’re welcome.” Mona’s cheekbones lifted on a grin. After one of those great Southern hugs that zinged all the way to the toes, her mother stood and made her way into the trailer. Her voice drifted back to January as she pulled a swig of drink past her lips.

“But if you tell me you need plumbing for something, you’re out of luck. Oswald Graf squeezes a quarter so tight the eagle screams, and his ears look like the open doors to a Buick.”

Tea sprayed all over Mona’s geraniums.

* * *

Nat whipped into a choice parking spot in front of What the Hay feed store, the only name Close Call’s city council would approve after the Marin Missionary Baptist Church came to blows with the store owner—once an opening comedy act for Lyle Lovett—who had originally named it Roll in the Hay. Locals took to the old name. Even came up in a Google search that way. After a while, the preacher moved his righteous crusade on to the Lord of the Wings chicken place over on Birch Street.

The feed store was also the most reliable place to ship packages.

His gaze fell to the passenger riding shotgun: a fat, manila envelope addressed to his college professor. The first hundred pages of his manuscript. Sure, finishing the damned thing last night was a high in itself. But a crazy-impulsive rush came as he typed out a cover letter and sealed it up, not unlike those moments on the cabin roof. He felt the inertia of his life shifting, like a train switching tracks. If the rest of his existence made no room for spontaneity, his writing could be the place that provided that rush.

He grabbed the envelope and went into the store.

Lon Smith broke his conversation with Close Call’s resident gossip queen and buckle-chaser, Miss Bess Scandy, to greet Nat, shake his hand.

“Hey there, Nat. What can I get for you?”

“Need some dog food. Fifty-pound bag, Active Wilderness brand.”

“Sure thing, sure thing,” said Lon.

Lon sent his son to the back room to haul out the requested bag while he rang up the purchase.

“Hear you got some help out there for the sale,” said Lon. “We’re real blessed to have such a hometown hero.”

Inwardly, Nat cringed. Wes always wanted to go stealth for a few days before word got out that he was home. People meant well, Nat knew. But too many questions, mostly ignorant ones, while Wes was just starting to remember what it’s like to piss in a toilet instead of a tube set Nat’s teeth to gnashing.

As if Lon could read Nat’s mind, he added, “Mack was in earlier for some last-minute stuff before you head out tomorrow.”

Right. Nat made a mental note to talk to Mack about the Meier brother code.

“Nice to see you, Nat.” Miss Bess toyed with items in the “gauntlet of riff-raff,” as Clem called it when Nat was little and begged for something stupid like a plastic top. Wire baskets lined the register with everything a body didn’t need and nothing it did—in Clem’s mind, the typical cowboy vices—booze, bullets, and ’baccy, as well as toys. Miss Bess, known to most as the horniest divorcee in town, took special interest in a kids’ Tarzan drink cup with a phallic straw. “You tell your brother I said hello.”

Nat’s attention was slow to pull away from her testing the ease with which Tarzan’s straw slipped through the lid. The suggestive sight made him want to ask Lon to add bleach to his purchase. Give his eyes a good wash. Miss Bess may have been stacked, but she was twice Wes’s age, nearly his weight, and ten times the drama of any other woman in town. He knew for a fact that Wes would rather jack Tarzan.

“Will do, Miss Bess.”

“I hear someone else is heading outta town tomorrow. Way outta town.” Bored with Tarzan, Miss Bess had moved on to lip balm wrapped in a Holstein pattern. “Senegal, Resistol, something dirty like that…”

Nepal.

Fuck.

“Shame the girl couldn’t stay longer, but that one’s always been hard to catch. Guess you’d know a little something about that, huh?”

Nat’s lungs felt like a water balloon hit with an arrow, tip pierced, a split second before it burst. This was news to him. Why hadn’t Mona told him?

Lon gave him a sympathetic look and said, “Forty-eight seventy.”

Might as well have been the shrapnel count of Nat’s heart for all the number meant.

Lon pointed. “You want to mail that, too? Pick up don’t come for another hour.”

Nat remembered the envelope in his hand.

His breath came on quick. The room slipped a little. Miss Bess looked at him with shiny gizzard lips, still rubbing them together from sampling the lip gloss.

“You all right, son?” Lon had known Nat since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. Son wasn’t a loose term, it was an endearment born of concern. “You want to mail that?”

“No,” said Nat, too fast, too fucking sharp.

Lon blinked and finished the transaction. “I’ll have my boy load your dog food into your truck.”

“Thanks,” Nat might have said. He wasn’t sure.

“See you tomorrow night, Nat,” said Lon.

Nat nodded.

Miss Bess said something snarky about January by way of goodbye. Something about her waiting another ten years to come back to Close Call. The thought made him damned near lose Mack’s leftover chili he’d had for lunch all over some Texas-sized cleavage, but punishing the messenger would only feel good for as long as she startled. Nat had a problem. A five-foot-six, energetic, magnificently sculpted and joy-filled fireball of a world-traveler kind of problem.

On the way out to his truck, he shoved the envelope in the trash can. That’s what came from being spontaneous.

Heartbreak. Pure and simple.