Oklahoma City—late January
Like every second Sunday evening for the past fourteen years, Gil drove into the plushest section of Oklahoma City and parked in front of Krista’s house, delivering Quint back to his mother. He didn’t care what anybody said about modern architecture, he still thought the place looked like a two-million-dollar dentist’s office. An opinion he probably should have kept to himself, but it had gotten a rise out of Krista, which Gil enjoyed far too much.
Then he’d gone home and made his house a place for running and wrestling, scattering Legos, and scribbling on walls. God knew that and getting caked with grease and ranch dirt were the only things Gil could give the kid that Krista didn’t.
The door swung open, and Krista Barron-Tate stood framed in the entrance, a splash of bright poppy in her silky pantsuit and excruciatingly pointy shoes. A pantsuit, for God’s sake. The renegade who’d blown Gil’s college-boy mind would’ve sneered at the picture she made now, with her blond hair set in sleek, bulletproof waves. Maybe that was why Gil could never resist agitating her until the shell cracked and he caught a glimpse of the girl who’d run wild on the rodeo circuit with him for most of his rookie year.
Now she waved a perfectly manicured hand at him. “Come on in, Gil!” she called. “We need to talk.”
Not good. Since the day she’d told him she was pregnant and God no, she wouldn’t marry him, those words from Krista had never boded well.
What did she want this time? Spring break in Tuscany? A two-month summer music program in New York City? Then Gil would have to argue that the horizon in the Texas Panhandle was wide enough for any kid, and the boy could get plenty of culture from his grandmother, the same way she’d tried to ingrain some sense of their Navajo heritage into her sons.
Efforts Gil had resisted with every fiber of his being, starting with screaming at the top of his three-month-old lungs through the entire length of a ceremony intended to celebrate his first laugh.
Gil thumped the steering wheel once, muttered a curse, then climbed out of his midnight-blue Charger and followed Quint up the walk. Krista stood aside to let them in. “Quint, go change out of your good clothes while I talk to your father.”
Quint regarded the pair of them with the Are you sure you can handle this? pucker between his brows that had been making Gil feel inadequate since—equal parts awed and terrified—he’d stared into a hospital bassinet at what was unmistakably his child.
He’d been playing catch-up for most of the fourteen years since.
With one last doubtful glance, Quint disappeared into the sterile depths of the house. Gil tucked his hands in his pockets and strolled past Krista into what they called a living room—as if anyone could survive in there for more than an hour. He declined a seat on a couch that appeared to be made of upholstered concrete slabs and said no thanks to the glass of sweet tea sweating politely onto a stone coaster, choosing to lean against a mantel made of gray slate. The obligatory family photos were so flawless they looked like they’d come with the frames, except that unlike his two younger sisters, dark-haired, dark-skinned Quint was obviously not the child of Krista’s pale, sandy-haired husband. And speaking of Douglas…
Gil glanced toward the nearest archway. “Are you sure you don’t want to have your attorney present?”
Of course she’d married a lawyer. A Harvard graduate. The son of a family whose social and business dealings were so interconnected with her father’s that their union was borderline incestuous. And to top it off, he was a decent human being who adored Krista and Quint and showed Gil nothing but respect…the son of a bitch.
Krista sank onto a chair that matched the concrete couch. The cushions didn’t give under her weight. “Can we just have a civil conversation?”
“Depends on what you want to talk about.” Gil held up a hand. “No, wait. Let me guess—you want to take the kids to South Korea while Douglas helps negotiate some new trade agreement?”
Krista took a sip of her tea, then set it down with a sharp click. “Close. He has been offered a position as a commercial attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Namibia.”
“That’s an actual country?”
She smiled faintly. “It’s in the southwest part of Africa. Douglas has always been interested in foreign service, and this is an excellent opportunity to get his foot in the door.”
“Wait a minute.” The gist of what she was saying slapped Gil in the face. “You’re talking about a job.”
Krista ran her fingers down her thigh, pleating the thin fabric of her pantsuit. “The posting could be up to five years.”
Five. Years. Gil bunched his fists, panic coiling in his chest as he scrambled for some angle of attack. There must be a clause in their custody agreement that barred her from taking his son to the opposite side of the planet. “No goddamn way.”
“That’s also what Quint said…minus the obscenity.”
Cold sweat sprang up between Gil’s shoulder blades. “You can’t make him go.”
“I don’t intend to try.” Krista continued to worry the fabric of her pantsuit. “The girls are young enough to adapt, but Quint starts high school this fall, and he’s not willing to give up football and basketball.”
“But if you’re going with Douglas—” Oh shit. Her father and stepmother. She was gonna leave Quint with the man who’d thrown all his money and influence at erasing Gil from Quint’s life.
A corner of her mouth quirked. “Give me some credit. I am painfully aware that if you and Daddy had to deal with each other, someone would end up in a shallow grave.”
And Gil had proven to be remarkably hard to kill. Otherwise high speed, a motorcycle, and a sharp curve would have done the job shortly after Krista had gutted him on her way out of Texas. Instead, he’d destroyed the rodeo career he’d loved even more than the woman who was still not looking him in the eye.
“If you’re not staying and he’s not going…”
Her gaze lifted, and behind the shadows in her eyes he saw a glint of mockery as she repeated almost the same words she’d said to him once before. “Congratulations, Gil. You’re gonna be a full-time daddy.”
He…what?
For the first time in all the times he’d been in her house, he had to sit down.
* * *
It was after nine when Gil got home, still in shock from Krista’s bombshell. He parked in the driveway of his house, conveniently located only steps from the back door of the Sanchez Trucking shop, slammed the car door, and headed for the shop. Even at this time on a Sunday one of the drivers must have a problem that would give him an excuse to yell at someone.
But when he stomped into his office, Analise, the night dispatcher, shooed him out again. “Everything’s under control. Go annoy someone else.”
Who? His brother was in Houston for most of the week, and their dad was off on one of his monthly fishing trips. Hank would be cuddled up with Grace. All the Jacobs crew were on the road with their bucking bulls and horses, so he couldn’t drop by Miz Iris’s kitchen tomorrow morning to let her promise him that yes, he could handle living with his own child.
Geezus. He had to go meet with the school principal this week about getting Quint enrolled for spring term, like a real fucking parent.
He couldn’t even text Carma because it was her turn. And yes, that was as juvenile as it sounded, but those were the rules that kept him from sending every meme and GIF that made him think of her—which would be at least once a day.
He paced through the reception area and into the manager’s office to snatch up a pile of envelopes from the desk his dad and Delon shared. Their latest receptionist showed no sign of grasping the software program that integrated every facet of the business, but he’d figured she could at least sort the damn mail.
Gil did it now, dropping payments into his stack to be reviewed, signed, then taken to the accounting firm downtown that did their bookkeeping. He wished yet again that they could outsource the receptionist, too. The position had turned into an ongoing headache since their old battle-ax, Mrs. Nordquist, had had the nerve to retire. And the company might have doubled in size over the last eight years, but the office had not. The fewer bodies that occupied the cramped space the better, especially when one of them was Gil’s.
He tried to warn the new hires, but they never seemed to grasp that keeping fifty drivers both busy and on schedule was the equivalent of having a dozen balls in the air at all times, any one of which was likely to burst into flames without warning—and Gil with it.
He tossed a fistful of junk mail into the trash and set a stack of others aside. His dad could deal with whatever the Chamber of Commerce wanted now, and the Rotary Club, and the Booster Club. Catalogs and sales flyers for tools and parts went into the in-box marked Shop for the foreman, Max. Gil started to flip a brochure that direction, then paused when he saw it was addressed to Delon. Six years after his brother had moved out of the apartment above the office, his personal mail still showed up here.
Gil’s hands went still when he turned it over and saw the bareback rider on the front, chaps flying as he spurred a horse that all but leapt off the page. The old longing crashed through him, as powerful as ever. Three years after the surgery that had finally set his hip right, his body felt as good as he had at twenty-one. Better, since he wasn’t fighting a hangover more often than not.
He ran his thumb over the bold, black font on the brochure. Diamond Cowboy Classic! Find your nearest qualifying event!
Always a glutton for punishment, Gil broke the seal and spread the flyer on the desk. Delon didn’t need it. As the reigning world champion, he was one of the five who’d gotten an engraved invitation directly into the Classic.
But it was the open-to-the-world qualifying events that made the Diamond Cowboy a huge draw for spectators and cowboys alike. Old and young, wannabes and current contenders—all they had to do was pony up a five-hundred-dollar entry fee for their shot at glory. The top four contestants from each of the regional elimination-style competitions would all meet in Amarillo for the nationally televised showdown.
David versus Goliath, rodeo-style.
When the dust settled, only one challenger and one headliner would remain. Two competitors. One ride. Winner takes home fifty grand and a diamond-studded horseshoe ring.
Who wasn’t a sucker for an underdog story? A chance to cheer on a steer-wrestling insurance agent from Oregon or a barrel-racing teenager from North Carolina?
But not this trucker from good old Earnest, Texas. Gil’s fingers creased the edges of the brochure as he fought off a stab of longing. Nowadays, he could slap the entry money down without blinking an eye. What he couldn’t afford was to screw up the near-miraculous work of an entire team of surgeons, or risk a return of the grinding pain that had kick-started his opioid addiction. The doctors might let him run and jump and bang around in the occasional pickup basketball game with his kid, but no one knew exactly how much abuse his reconstructed hip could take.
He could still play pretend, though.
He stuffed the brochure into his back pocket and strode back through the reception area and down a hall that led past a restroom and break room, into what had once constituted the entire shop area. The space was barely big enough to accommodate one semi tractor, minus a trailer. After they’d built on the first full-length truck bay, Gil and Delon had stripped out everything except the workbench along one wall, installed a kick-ass stereo system, and converted this to their gym.
Gil locked the door and set his phone on the narrow metal stairs that led up to an apartment that had been his father’s bachelor pad, Gil’s jumping-off spot for three breakneck years after high school, then Delon’s home for over a decade until he’d taken up residence at Tori’s place in Dumas.
In four years, Quint would be old enough to have his own place. Geezus.
Gil rubbed at another heart spasm as he walked over to push Play on the ancient boom box and cranked up one of Delon’s heavy-metal mix CDs. The cardboard box he pulled from under the workbench had once held fuel filters but was now the final resting place of rodeo gear that had reached the end of its competitive life. Gil grabbed a rigging whose stiff rawhide handle had been mashed by a horse that had reared up and crushed it against the back of the steel chute. The bronc would have done the same to Delon if a buddy hadn’t yanked him out of harm’s way. Gil had pounded it back into good enough shape for his purposes. He cinched it onto the spur board—an ugly plywood contraption built to mimic the shape of a horse’s back and shoulders—all too aware of the irony of now being the brother on the receiving end of hand-me-downs.
As Gil pulled on one of the old gloves from the box, he glanced in the direction of the office. Normally he wouldn’t do this when there was anyone around to pity the poor has-been reliving his glory days, but Analise was busy, and the thumping of his feet would blend into the music.
He fetched an MP3 player from a drawer and plugged in the earbuds. When he’d worked his hand into the rigging, he cued up an audio clip he’d recorded from a televised rodeo performance. The announcers’ voices filled his head as they launched into the play-by-play for a section of bareback riding from last year’s Fiesta de los Vaqueros pro rodeo in Tucson.
As they rambled on about the first cowboy and the horse he was about to ride, Gil tucked his chin, lifted his free arm, and rocked onto his hip pockets to tuck his knees against the imaginary horse’s shoulders. The fluorescent lights faded and he was in Tucson again, his nostrils filled with the smell of horse, dust, and rosin, and his heart with fire. At the shouts that signaled the gate had opened, his heels snapped into the neck of the spur board, then rolled up, his knees jerking wide as his boots clicked the front edge of the rigging.
Again, and again, and again, his feet lashed out and dragged back, and he could practically feel the horse exploding beneath him, yanking on his arm and slamming his shoulders into its rump. Then the recorded eight-second whistle blew, the crowd roared, and Gil let his feet fall, breathing hard as he spiraled back to reality.
It was a pathetic substitute. A fantasy that inflicted as much pain as pleasure. But unlike so many of the things he’d had to give up, indulging in a taste of this one wouldn’t kill him.
It just felt like it sometimes.