Ellie

Thanksgiving Day

So that’s how things pretty much went after as I liked to call it, The Great Fight of October. We kept talking. My belly got bigger. We definitely kept boinking. All without any ramifications on the baby. Turned out the baby liked to move in the morning regardless if we had sex or not. After two weeks Jake could finally feel what I was feeling, and it was pretty awesome.

Suddenly we weren’t us any longer. The baby—we still decided not to learn the sex early, not because I was weird about it, but because we did want to be surprised—was now a member of #TeamJakeandEllie. We talked to it, we messed with it. Jake read something that said we could shine a flashlight over my belly and it would turn toward the light.

Totally worked.

It was still months away from the main event, but we felt like three people now instead of two. A family, instead of a couple.

To celebrate my new attitude, we had decided to have a bunch of people over for Thanksgiving diner. This would be my first official time hosting the holiday.

Our closest neighbors, the Pettys, of course. Thankfully Mrs. Petty was offering to bring most of the side dishes. All I would be responsible for was basically the bird, the stuffing, and the mashed potatoes. No small task, but still manageable I thought.

We invited Cody and Rich, Howard and Mirry. Bella from the Hair Stop and Frank and Bernie, who only closed the diner two days a year, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Chrissy was doing a fifth year of college abroad. Mostly, I think because Chrissy really liked college and was doing everything she could to prolong it. Denny was traveling with a new boyfriend, who apparently was not just a cowboy, but a rich hawt cowboy, according to Denny. And MaryAnne had taken a job on the east coast and couldn’t make it back. Still, it would be a lot of friends and family, which was important when making a big announcement.

That’s right. I was ready to tell everyone I was pregnant.

Given that it currently looked like I was wearing a bowling bowl under every shirt I owned, Jake found this comical. Still it was a big step for me to make it official.

After weeks of planning, the day was finally here.

Jake found me putting the turkey back in the oven after I had basted it and nearly lost his shit.

“Ellie! I told you. Nothing that heavy!”

“It’s only eighteen pounds,” I said even as he took the pan from me. “Shit, do you think that’s enough? I went with the whole one and half pounds per person, but you’ve seen how Mr. Petty can put away turkey.”

Jake grunted as he pushed the pan into the oven. “I’m serious. You go to baste this thing again and you call me.”

“Yes, sir,” I grumbled.

“Where is Cody? I thought he was coming over early to help with setup.”

“He was here earlier setting up the buffet tables, but I sent him to into town to pick up some more wine.”

“We have a case,” Jake argued.

“You’ve seen Mr. Petty drink wine after you’ve seen him eat turkey. I’m not taking any chances.”

“He should have sent Rich into town for that,” Jake grumbled.

“Rich is sick,” I said carefully. Not sure why I was being so careful. This was Jake after all. He wasn’t stupid. “That’s what Cody told me. He’s fighting a bad cold and he wasn’t sure he was going to feel up for dinner.”

“That’s what Cody said?”

I nodded.

“Shit.”

He was cursing because he suspected what I did. That Rich’s cold was more than likely a story to cover up the fact that he was drinking. I wasn’t sure when it happened exactly. When we started seeing less of him and more of Cody. The less we saw of Rich, the more excuses Cody seemed to have for him. It could be as innocent as a cold or it could be something else.

Rich had always been a heavy drinker, but it had never seemed to impact his work. So it was never something we felt comfortable discussing with him. Rich was an employee, not family. In fact in the short amount of time he’d been here, Jake and I both felt closer to Cody than we ever had to Rich.

If Rich’s drinking was going to start interfering in his ability to work, then ignoring it or pretending it wasn’t a problem wasn’t a solution any longer. I knew that.

“Jake, not today,” I said with my hand on his arm. “We need to confront this. I get that. If for no other reason than Cody can’t keep covering for him. It’s too much work. But it’s Thanksgiving and a big day for us. Let’s hold off until after the holiday. Okay?”

He huffed, but he knew I was right. “Okay. But eventually I’m having a talk with Rich.”

“Understood. Now help me start putting all the silverware out, and then all we have to do is wait for the guests to arrive.” I clapped excitedly because suddenly the idea of having all my friends gathered around a turkey I cooked made me ridiculously happy.

I rested my hand on the bump and thought about how this was what we had wanted. When Jake and I decided to go down the scary path of parenthood. A family. If everything went according to plan, this time next year there would be a baby shoving turkey into his or her mouth.

It was almost surreal and yet it wasn’t. It was like I could almost see it.

* * *

Cody

Thanksgiving Day

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” I stared at the broken-down car about five hundred feet up the side of the road and thought I had absolutely no time for this. I was late getting back to the ranch as it was.

People were probably already there—heck, they might have started eating without me. Not that I cared about that, but I needed to make sure Rich didn’t decide to put in an appearance and jack everything up. Which would ruin Ellie’s day. Because if he did put in an appearance, I knew he would be plastered.

Plastered, drunk, buzzed, hung over. It’s all he ever was these days. Sobriety was a rarity. But nothing I said to him about it mattered. He was a grown man. That’s all he ever said about his drinking. He was a grown man and would do what he wanted to do.

Except what he wanted to do was starting to incapacitate him like it never had before. Because he wasn’t young anymore.

Plus, I could see it was starting to not work. The lying. I could see the way Jake and Ellie glanced at each other any time I had to do it. Which was a fucking lot.

Damn the old bastard. Me being here was supposed to help him. He had reached out to me, but it had been a mutual thing. I needed to take a break from the rodeo circuit. My body needed a break too. The fall that had broken Snickers’s leg had broken both of mine as well when she rolled over on me.

They put two casts on me.

They shot her in the head.

I couldn’t think about that. All I knew was that once I was back on my feet I needed work and a place to land. He said he’d been given the go-ahead to hire more permanent help to keep up with what was a growing cattle ranch. Might as well be me.

Rich and I weren’t exactly close. For one, I never called him Dad. I never got the sense he liked it. But we were cool. I didn’t see any problem working with him and without the money from the rodeo, I needed the work.

Instead, me being here, it had become an excuse for him to relax. Except when Rich said relax, he meant drink. If we weren’t careful, between his drinking and my lying about it, we were both going to get shit-canned.

That couldn’t happen. I needed this job. Rich needed this job even more, given he was looking at sixty in a few years. It wasn’t like there was a lot of work that paid as well in Montana. Not to mention the fact that it covered room and board.

Which meant I needed to be back at the ranch, making sure he kept his drunk ass in the bunk house and didn’t do anything stupid like show up wasted at Ellie’s Thanksgiving.

What I didn’t need was an obstacle to that. Except the broken-down car was exactly that.

I could have driven by I suppose, but it just wasn’t done in these parts. These roads were all but abandoned on a normal day. On a holiday, forget it. It was unlikely there would be anyone else passing this way today, which meant I was the only hope around for miles.

I pulled the truck in behind the car. I could see it was an old model Nissan. And based on the shape of it, it looked like it had seen some road. The hood was up, steam was pouring out. I hopped out of my truck and stopped.

I hadn’t seen her before. She must have been the driver, because she came around the hood of the car and when she saw me, she held her hands up as if to stop me in my tracks. She was young, maybe a few years younger than me. Long bleach-blond hair that fell around her face.

Wearing skin-tight jeans and a coat that wouldn’t keep her warm in Montana in spring, let alone winter.

I glanced at her license plate. Washington State. Something told me she wasn’t from a rural part of that state either. Her pale skin, dyed hair, and clothes screamed city girl. Which meant she was hell and gone from there, being in Riverbend, Montana.

Shit. I thought again. Except she needed help and I was the only one to do it.

Something about her shivering in that coat too. I didn’t like it.

“I’m fine. I don’t need any help,” she said as soon as I got close enough to hear her.

“It doesn’t look that way from here,” I said, raising my chin in the direction of her car.

“It’s just a little overheated. Once it cools down it will be fine.”

A little overheated. The steam was coming off the engine in plumes of smoke.

“Miss, if you would like me to take a look, I can.”

I could see she was torn. I suppose I understood. An attractive (okay, she was smoking hot, but I wasn’t about to let myself even think that) young woman alone on the side of the road, confronting a strange man. Sometimes I wondered when we all got so damn paranoid in the country. Used to be expected that folks would look out for each other, help each other when needed.

I was offering to check out her car, and she was debating what level on the serial killer spectrum I ranked.

I held up my hands. “I swear I only want to check out the car. I’m late as it is, so if you could figure out whether or not you’re going to trust me to do this, I would much appreciate it.”

She stepped back and I took that as my sign to move forward. It was like she felt safe with the five feet between us when it wouldn’t take any time at all for me to close that distance.

Still, I had no interest in frightening some skittish city girl.

I rounded the hood of the car and waited for the steam to abate. I checked under the car and could see the drip of blue coolant.

“Looks like you’ve got a leak in your radiator.”

“I’ve been filling it with water when the engine light went on. That seemed to be working,” she said. “Except I drank the last of the water.”

I tried not to do the man thing. The one where I rolled my eyes and asked her how she thought pouring water into a leaking radiator was going to solve anything. And what was she thinking, driving through a state like Montana where a person could go hours without seeing another vehicle on the road without having enough water?

“Where are you headed?” I asked.

Shit. Because I was going to have to take her there. Because anything leaking that bad, it didn’t matter how much water I could give her, the car wasn’t going to go but another ten miles. Maybe twenty.

There was just more of a whole lot of nothing ten to twenty miles from here.

“Long Valley Ranch,” she said.

That surprised me. “You know Jake and Ellie?”

Maybe one of Ellie’s old college friends? She looked about the same age. Maybe a year or two younger.

“Uh, sort of.”

Sort of. “They know you’re coming? On Thanksgiving of all days?”

That’s when her mouth turned. Into this hard line, as if I had raised every one of her defenses. “Who are you? Some kind of cop or something? It’s none of your fucking business.”

Seriously. Could this day get any worse? Between my drunk father, lying to Ellie again, trying to get all his shit done so I could get my shit done. Now I was missing turkey and stuffing and some of the red wine I had in the truck, to help this girl who clearly didn’t want anyone’s help.

If I were an asshole, I would have told her good luck and happy Thanksgiving, gotten back in my truck and drove away.

I wasn’t an asshole. On most days anyway.

“Your car is fried. It’s not going to make it to where you want to go, but I’m heading there now. I’ll take you.”

Again she stepped back, away from me. Back on serial killer alert.

It was enough to piss me off. Here I was not being an asshole, and still getting lumped in with all the bad guys on the planet.

“You know what? Fuck it. You’re too afraid to be alone with me, fine. I really don’t care. Sit your ass on the side of the road and I’ll let Jake and Ellie know they’ve got company they sort of know coming. I’ll send someone back with Ellie, even though that will probably ruin her Thanksgiving. Satisfied?”

I started to make my way back to my truck when I heard her run after me.

“Okay. I’m sorry. I’m just… please don’t leave me out here. It’s so freaking scary.”

Scary? There was nothing but road and grass as far as the eye could see.

“There is nothing out here,” I pointed out.

“Exactly. There is nothing out here. It’s creeping me out.”

One hundred percent city girl. Just like I figured.

“Get in then.”

She opened the back door of her car and pulled out a suitcase. It was cheap and it bumped along the road as if one of the wheels on the back was sticking and not rolling. I went to grab it and when I felt how heavy it was, I was surprised again. This wasn’t some light packing. The case was stuffed.

It raised more questions, but I wasn’t about to ask them and get more attitude fired back at me.

I got behind the wheel and watched as she moved the case of wine into the space at her feet and then buckled her seat belt. She was still shivering, so I cranked the heat a little higher than I liked.

That’s when I saw it—the faint bruising underneath her eye. She was trying to cover it with makeup, and it worked, because at first glance when I saw her I didn’t notice it.

Now with the hair pushed back over her shoulder and her chin a little jutted out, her teeth chattering, it was easy to see.

This girl had been hit in the face.

It was strange. I had never known anyone who had been hit before. I mean, I heard those things happened. Knew, from the news, women got abused all over this country. Hell, even my father was a sonofabitch drunk, but he’d certainly never laid a hand on my mom. My mom would have kicked his ass if he’d ever tried.

“What are you staring at?” she snapped without turning to face me. This close up, she had to know the bruise would probably be more obvious.

By asking the question, it was like she was daring me to state the obvious.

I’m staring at your black eye and wondering how it happened.

She would lie about it. That’s what most women did, didn’t they? Because they were ashamed. Or she could tell me it was none of my fucking business again. Which I supposed it wasn’t.

Still, I had this need to say I’m sorry. To apologize for men everywhere and say we weren’t all jerks who delivered pain. That she was safe with me. That I would never hurt her.

Instead I said, “Nothing.”

I started the truck pulled out onto the empty road and took this girl with the full suitcase, fried car and bruised face to Long Valley Ranch.

* * *

Jake

I leaned against the doorway of our living room, all of our friends gathered there now instead of throughout the house. As Ellie had called everyone into the room for her big announcement. Some still had plates of food on their laps. Second helpings. Some had thirds.

Everything had been laid out buffet style, so people were still scavenging, which made Ellie beam with pride. Her goal had been to fill bellies to make them look as big as hers.

Which I didn’t imagine was physically possible with a single meal, as hers was pretty big.

She clinked on her champagne glass filled with sparkling water to get everyone’s attention. Conversations hushed to whispers until finally everyone was quiet.

“Hey everybody, okay here is deal. I didn’t just ask you all here for Thanksgiving dinner, although given the look of that turkey carcass I would say it was a success. Actually Jake and I wanted to take this occasion to tell you all… well… we’re having a baby!”

She patted her six-month baby bump… which really looked more like a basketball at this point.

A few people laughed. I heard Howard say it was about time. And Mrs. Petty got up and walked over to her, patting her on the arm, saying, “Yes, dear we all knew. Late January?”

“Early February,” Ellie told her.

“That’s lovely. Now should we see about putting out the pies?”

Ellie nodded and then the conversation started up again.

It was, in a word, anti-climatic.

Mrs. Petty declared the pies would be served in the kitchen and a few people got up to follow her, most likely fearing there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Although if you asked me we had all the pies in all the land and would never run out.

The men rolling by either gave me a chin up or a pat on the shoulder in silent congratulations. All of the women strolling by told me to take care of their girl. That was without question.

Finally, Ellie came over to me, with her lips in a pout. Which always made me think of blow jobs, which was not a good thing to be thinking of on Thanksgiving with a house full of people, so I opened my arms and brought her in close so she could rest her chin on my shoulder.

“Everyone knew, didn’t they?”

“Yep. You’ve got the equivalent of a beach ball under your shirt. It’s pretty obvious.”

“I look like an ass don’t I?”

“A little bit.” I huffed out a laugh. “But you know folks. They’ll come to understand this was your way of coping. Everyone is happy for you. You know that too, don’t you?”

She nodded against me. “I’m pregnant,” she said again.

“Yep.”

“We’re having a baby.”

A baby. Not the b word.

“Yep,” I said even as hugged her tighter.

“We should think about names. I think… if it’s a boy… I want to name him Jackson Talley Jr. after the greatest man I know.”

I swallowed a lump in my throat. She was talking names. She was thinking about the sex. In that moment, I knew it. The fear, while maybe not gone, had lost the battle over her.

Once again Ellie had triumphed. I should have known that eventually she would. Because she was strongest woman I had ever known.

“And if it’s a girl we could name her Petunia Jr.”

I snorted. “You are not naming our daughter after your horse.”

She lifted her head and smiled at me. “I think this is a ten day,” she said quietly.

Yeah, this was definitely a ten day.

I heard something behind me and realized it was the front door opening. I would have thought everyone we knew was in the house already, but then I remembered both Cody and Rich and had been MIA. Rich because he was supposedly sick, and Cody because he’d gone to fetch more wine. A task that shouldn’t have taken as long as it had.

So it was at first with a sense of relief that I saw Cody open the door, until I saw the girl behind him. I didn’t recognize her and it seemed strange to me that Cody would bring a date to dinner without having mentioned it first.

Not that I cared, but I wasn’t certain how it was possible he even found time to date given his work week schedule. I sized up the girl behind him. It was funny, she didn’t look like she was from around here, but there was something oddly familiar about her.

“Oh Cody, you made it!” Ellie called out, peeking around my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I left some turkey and stuffing for you… oh. And I hope enough for your friend too.”

He looked confused. Then he glanced over his shoulder. “She’s not my friend. She said she knew you guys. Her car broke down along Old Oak Road and I gave her a lift.”

I couldn’t speak for Ellie, but I had never met this girl in my life. I glanced at Ellie and she shook her head.

“How do we know you exactly?” I asked her.

She seemed to shrink a bit behind Cody, but then he seemed to glare at her as if upset he’d been caught up in whatever game she was playing.

“Okay, you don’t know me exactly,” she admitted. Then she pulled something out of the beat-up leather purse she was clutching to her chest, and I could hear Ellie gasp.

“Oh Jake,” she whispered, clearly recognizing her handwriting on the front of the letter. “I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, as the pieces weren’t quite lining up. Finally I spit it out.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Ruby Smithson. Adele Smithson…uh, Adele Talley is my mom. Which makes you my half brother.”

Her half brother. My half sister. None of that was processing, because I was focused on the anger that erupted from hearing that woman’s name. A name I never wanted to hear again.

“She’s gone,” Ruby continued. “Left me a year back to head to Mexico with her new boyfriend. My dad left her years before that. No clue where he is. I don’t have a job or any money left, and then your letter came and I thought…”

“God, Jake,” Ellie said again. “This is my fault.”

I ignored that and tried to focus on what this girl was saying. This girl who I now understood why she looked vaguely familiar. Because she looked a little bit like a feminine version of me.

“You thought what?”

She shrugged. And something about the gesture caught my attention. It didn’t say, I don’t know. Or, you tell me.

It said, I don’t care.

This girl, who looked to be in her early twenties, shouldn’t not care like that.

“We can figure this out later, I think,” Ellie said, stepping around me. “Ruby, right?”

The girl nodded.

“It’s late, your car is broken down so you’re not going anywhere tonight. You can stay in our guest room. Are you hungry?”

She hesitated as if she couldn’t believe someone was being so nice to her. She was tall, not as tall as Ellie, but rail thin. Like she hadn’t had a decent meal in years.

Finally, she nodded.

“Okay. Let’s get you fed. Cody, didn’t she have a suitcase or something?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said tightly. Not happy that he’d been the person who delivered her to our doorstep.

“I’ll get it,” Ruby said, then rushed out of the house as if she was afraid of anyone touching her stuff.

“I’m sorry about this, Jake…” Cody began.

“Stop. You had no idea. Go get something to eat.”

He looked back at the open door and seemed reluctant to leave us with her. As if he’d handed over something to us that turned out to be dangerous. Something that looked like a helpless puppy, but was really a wolf in disguise.

Ellie put her arm around my waist to offer support, but I couldn’t put a name to how I was feeling right now.

“Well, I screwed up pretty bad,” she said, leaning against me. “But being who we are, it really doesn’t matter who she is, does it? You see that bruise under her eye she’s trying to hide with makeup?”

I did. I saw the bruise.

“She’s in trouble,” Ellie concluded. “We’re going to need to help her.”

Help her. This girl who said she was my half sister. The daughter of a woman I loathed.

Then Ellie patted me on the shoulder. “Look at it this way, Jake. At least this time you don’t have to marry anyone.”