“I never thought of it that way.” Some of the leather looked like beef jerky. Lily wondered whether her father’s neighbor was kicking up his heels somewhere beyond the big sky. “The exhibit has been growing ever since I can remember. Supposedly the man who lived here started it when he got stuck up to his boot tops during a gully washer and he hung them up there thinking the rain would clean them off.”
“Did it?”
“I don’t even know whether the story’s true.” Lily glanced over at her daughter, hiking her eyebrows. “Could be a rural legend. Think Snopes dot com would have something to say about that?”
“I think it’s called ‘Lies My Mother Told Me.’”
“Oh, come on. Lighten up.”
“You kids with your boots on the ground,” Iris mocked in a crackly voice. “We had to leave ours on the fence post so we didn’t lose them in the mud. We walked to school.” She wagged her forefinger at the windshield. “Twenty miles each way. Barefoot.”
“Only when it rained,” Lily said with a smile.
“Carrying your Roy Rogers lunch boxes, which are now worth more than— Don’t tell me this is it,” Iris said, as Lily flicked the turn signal. The last fence post boot was a speck in the rearview mirror. A break in the four-wire fence was marked by a sparsely graveled approach, a new cattle guard and an old sign. “Mom, there’s nothing here. Just … Omigod, you weren’t kidding. The Rocking R Ranch. Really.”
“Really.”
It was hard to keep a straight face, but Lily had to put forth the effort. Otherwise she wasn’t sure whether her mouth would turn up or down. She hadn’t seen much of her father since she’d left the ranch over thirteen years ago. She’d seen him twice, to be exact, and both times he’d been the one to initiate the contact, and pay his only child and grandchild a visit in Minneapolis. It had been four years since the last visit. She’d told herself she was going to make this trip with Iris one of these days, just as soon as the right day came along. It never had.
Lily wasn’t kidding herself thinking this was the elusive right day. On the right day she would have been at the top of her game, returning on terms of her choosing. If she’d made the time when times were good, this trip might not be so difficult. But she hadn’t. Once she’d lost her job, times had gone from tight to tough to agonizingly tense, but she wouldn’t call for help from her father until she had no other choice. And no home plus no money equaled no other choice.
So here they were, and here, at the very least, was a place to be. The house hadn’t changed—a box with a top—but it promised a roof over their heads, over doors that opened and closed, over quiet rooms with safe beds. It wasn’t home anymore, not since she had walked away carrying Iris inside her. But it was a place to be. Nothing quite like an eviction notice to put a necessity once taken for granted into perspective. All they had now was each other, and Iris would never have less. She would never be alone, certainly not by Lily’s choice. Pride didn’t go down easily, but it did go quietly. For Iris’s sake.
“Does the Rocking R Ranch have wi-fi?” Iris’s voice had lost all its edge, all its humor. Could this be the sound of a thirteen-year-old’s reality setting in?
“I don’t know.” It wasn’t a lie. She didn’t know for sure, and what were the words I doubt it really worth?
“It didn’t occur to me to ask,” Iris said. “Until now. Not that it would have mattered.”
Lily stared straight ahead. They were nearing the place she’d last seen in the rearview mirror of a friend’s pickup. Not a boyfriend’s pickup. The driver hadn’t been the father of her unborn child. Molly Taylor had driven her to Glendive, where she’d boarded a Greyhound bus and headed for Minneapolis, which hadn’t been exactly what Mom had it cracked up to be. Nothing ever was. But it was a place to be until Lily took matters into her own hands and made it more than that. She’d worked her butt off to get her degree and her own place and her teaching position, and she’d almost gotten tenure. Almost. But then she’d lost her job, and she hadn’t been optimistic about the prospect of getting on at another school. You pay your dues so you don’t have to take any more chances. She’d had her standards, her requirements—damn it, she’d earned the right to hold out for more. At the very least for nothing less. Security, maybe?
Okay, subsistence.
How about survival?
She had fought it, cursed it, and finally she’d made her peace with reality. But she wasn’t ready to force the whole reality enchilada on a thirteen-year-old. There had to be some scrap of fantasy left for Iris. Lily couldn’t provide internet, but surely she could come up with something wonderful and wireless.
She pulled the car around back of the house, and there was her something.
“Horses, Iris.” The old barn’s new metal roof glinted in the sun. Two sorrels stood in the small pasture outside the corral, where a man was working a beautiful black-and-white paint on a lunge line. “You’ve always wanted to ride,” Lily said. “Now’s your chance.”
“Oh.” Iris released the buckle on her seat belt as she leaned closer to the windshield. “Hey. That’s not Grandpa.” Closer still. Lily wondered whether it was time for an eye exam. “Mom, who’s the cowboy?”
“No idea.”
“Really? Good.”
Iris got out of the car, shut the door a little harder than necessary and met her mother on the other side. Lily was pretty sure she’d made the entire move without taking her eyes off the corral, not even for the motley-colored dog that darted out from behind the barn growling and then, at a glance from the cowboy, quickly retreated to the fence and sat. Lily glanced back at the cowboy, whose connection with the dog was clearly below the radar.
“Okay, this place is suddenly looking a lot better.” The comment was sotto voce, not that the cowboy seemed to be paying them any mind. “His pants are kinda tight and geeky, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
“They fit.” Lily gave her daughter a who-are-you? look. “Not that it matters.”
Iris squinted, gave a tight smile. “I saw him first.”
“Iris, really.”
“You keep telling me to look on the bright side. I finally found one.” She turned back to the corral. The man was concentrating on his horse. “We should go introduce ourselves.”
“We should go present ourselves to your grandfather. He knows we’re coming, but …” Lily put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders and urged herself by urging Iris toward the back door of the house. “I wasn’t sure exactly when.”
After several knocks the door still stood closed.
“Is it locked?” Iris wanted to know.
“We’ll wait for him to let us in.” Lily could feel the doubt, the disbelief, the adolescent impatience growing on her left flank. Or was it really her own uncertain center, the feel of her tail stuck between her legs? Her head was telling her to get on with it—the first few moments would be the hardest—but the strings to her limbs were tied somehow to the knot in her stomach. She glanced at Iris, who questioned her with a puckered brow.
“You can try it if you want.” With a gesture toward the doorknob, Lily took a step back.
Seriously? the voice in her head scolded.
“He’s your father.” Iris’s frown deepened. “He’s expecting us, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but … I should have called him before we left. Or when we stopped in Fargo, maybe.” Lily gave her head a quick shake. She was making a complete fool of herself. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Trying to time it just right, I guess. After chores, before bed. You don’t want