Grandma Helen hadn’t let me into the corral until my fourth year on the ranch. By then, I was seventeen and strong enough to handle myself, but I never did find her level of comfort around the birds. I was forever flinching at their pecks and ducking out of their way.
Inside the corral, I fed the flock even though it was early yet for their dinner. As they gathered around the trough, I squeezed through them to survey the nests and saw a collection of empty pockmarks in the sand. I watched the birds as they fed. I just didn’t understand it. They didn’t appear sick. Aside from their soaked feathers, which drooped against their cheeks, they were the picture of health.
One of the hens, making her slow way to the feed trough, pecked at the shiny yellow vinyl of my raincoat. Her broad beak curled down slightly at the edges, giving her a disgruntled look that was emphasized by the sag of her wet feathers. I pulled down her beak to inspect for any signs of respiratory trouble, but her nostrils were clear and her eyes showed no signs of swelling. She blinked.
“What the hell?” I said, releasing her. She meandered away from me with a lazy gait, shoving herself into a spot between the other birds at the trough.
One hundred forty-two ostriches and not a single egg. It didn’t make any sense. Those exact birds had been laying eggs consistently for years. Biologically speaking, they should have another three decades or so of good egg-laying left in them.
Of course, when Joe took over, they would all be slaughtered. Maybe not immediately—he would need to wait until a batch of eggs hatched and a new crop of birds grew into the supply chain—but within a year or two, every bird standing there in the corral would be gone. A wave of nostalgia washed over me. Life was shifting. After nearly fifty years, our family would no longer center around Wishbone Ranch.
The oldest of my cousins might remember the family business, but the youngest was only six. At best, the ranch would be a foggy dream to her. She wouldn’t remember coming out for weekly family dinners or holding out grain through the fence for the birds to pluck from her hands while she squealed at the thrill of interacting with an animal so much bigger than herself.
I shook my head to clear it. My presence was overdue in the house. I had promised Aunt Christine I would stick with her plan for the day, so I needed to get myself inside.
FOUR
In the mudroom of the main house, Uncle Scott hunched over a wooden crate containing twenty-eight custom license plates. He jumped when I burst in out of the downpour but recovered quickly. I hung my dripping raincoat on a hook near the door and joined him, suppressing the urge to reach out for a hug. That wasn’t something we did anymore. Instead, I shifted my attention to the collection of license plates stacked front to back, paint chipping and rust taking hold in the cracks. It was my mother’s inheritance. I had retrieved it from the barn the day before in anticipation of her arrival, a move that seemed naïve now that she was a no-show.
Uncle Scott’s hair was tucked behind his ears. Up close, I could see more clearly the signs of health I had glimpsed at the church. His eyes were relaxed, if glum, and his skin was clear. I felt a familiar flicker of hope that he hadn’t been lying about being sober. His father’s gold watch peeked out from under his shirtsleeve, the sum total of what Grandma Helen had left him. It wasn’t much, but it held a lot of sentimental value.
“No word from your mom?” he asked. He was wearing sneakers, and the cuffs of his slacks were wet. Marlboro smoke hung on his clothes. He had probably been outside smoking while I was in the corral.
“No.” The wet ends of my hair stuck to my face, and I could feel raindrops on my cheeks like cold freckles. The stuffy house made me want to go right back outside until everyone left.
“Live and let live, right?”
It was one of his NA catchphrases, I knew, but it didn’t seem to fit the situation. “Right.”
I was glad he had come. If he’d been on a bender, we likely wouldn’t have been able to track him down. He might have gone months not knowing about his mother’s death.
I ran my hand over the license plates and let my fingers walk their blunt metal edges. Flipping through the collection was like time-traveling on the highway: the way the colors shifted from authoritative blue to reflective white, the lettering of “California” at the top evolving from the utilitarian imprint of the seventies to the overly ornate art deco of the eighties to the painted-on red cursive that had been the norm since the nineties.
Uncle Scott pulled one from the middle of the stack. It was blue, with tall, yellow letters reading USDFORC. On the back, Grandma Helen had written Honda CVCC—followed from Sombra to Baker 1982. “I remember this one,” he said.
He would have been a kid then. I could imagine him sitting next to her on the bench seat of the truck as she followed that car, patiently waiting until the driver left it unattended long enough for her to swipe the plate. She had never been a particular fan of Star Wars. She must have nabbed that one just for him.
“Joe Jared made an offer?” Uncle Scott asked, surprising me. The manila envelope was still folded into the pocket of the raincoat. It felt like a dirty secret. But Uncle Scott knew that Joe Jared had wanted to buy the ranch for years. There was no reason to lie.
“Yeah.”
He was studying the blue license plate with more attention than was really warranted. I worried. The ranch had been his childhood home. But Uncle Scott’s life had been divided by meth. There was before and there was after. I didn’t know what, if anything, the ranch meant to my uncle anymore.
“Fuck that guy,” he said. “Today of all days.” His voice was scratchy.
“Does Aunt Christine know you’re here?” I peered past him, through the open doorway to the living room, where Aunt Christine stood making conversation. She pressed her thumbs into the small of her back and shifted her swollen body from one foot to the other. Devon had retreated to the corner of the room, where a few older men sipped beers and talked in hushed voices. Dim light gave the place a somber glow. The drumming of the rain slipped beneath the hum of subdued chatter and I could smell coffee.
“She agreed I could come if I brought Matt to babysit.”
Matt, with his stupid topknot, existed apart from the other guests. He had a narrow face and square brows. The tattoos on his arms rolled down past the cuffs of his sleeves, and I knew he wore a leather band around his wrist with the word “freedom” carved into it. In his hand was a napkin stacked with grapes and cheese.
He popped a cube of cheddar into his mouth and glanced around the room. He was wildly out of place among my aunt’s church friends, with their threadbare blouses and perfectly pinned hair. But he held himself as comfortably as a crow on a crowded tree branch, surprisingly at ease for someone with such a sordid history. The stories of Matt’s teenage fuckups were fairly legendary in Sombra, but he had been sober for fifteen years and living in Victorville for almost twenty. He didn’t come around Sombra all that often. I had only ever known him as my uncle’s best friend, the guy who had pulled him up out of the muck of addiction time and time again. Even so, I didn’t like him. He thought he was better than everyone around him because he was sober, like getting through the day without getting fucked up was some major accomplishment. He turned toward me and I looked away.
“Uncle Scott,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, “I’m selling the ranch.” I was glad to be removed from the other guests. I wasn’t ready to share the news with the whole town. “It’s not official yet, but that’s why Joe Jared was here. I asked him to come.”
He stared at me, his expression shifting from confusion to anger.