From the Hat Down, page 6
Meg read the last paragraph three times. She hadn’t told Gina about how things completely unraveled with Kate last November. When was the last time she’d emailed her? Christmas. Five months ago. She hadn’t wanted to burden her with that. It wasn’t like they talked much, anyway. She re-read the paragraph about Gina wanting to apply for a position stateside. She’d been seeing Sharon for a couple of years, and Meg wondered how either of them managed a relationship as traveling journalists. At Christmas, Gina had sent a holiday email that mentioned Sharon was getting assigned stateside after the first of the year.
That explained why Gina wanted to come back to the States. She refolded Gina’s letter and slid it back into the card. Why the hell did her heart speed up when Gina said she thought about her and wanted to see her? It had been eight years since the breakup. Five since she last saw her. She sat staring at the envelope, at Gina’s handwriting, and she pulled the card out of the envelope again to re-read the bit about Gina wanting Meg to say hi to her dad. She frowned. This wasn’t like Gina. She had hardly ever mentioned the past since they broke up except in vague reference to people or events. Never anything deeper than that.
Meg sat thinking for a bit. Something didn’t feel right about Gina’s letter but at the same time, something felt extremely right. Sean’s story about her dad and stepmom popped into her head. Dammit. Nothing like false hope to kick you in the teeth. And what exactly was she hoping for, anyway? Gina had moved on with her life and found someone else, someone who had a lot more in common with her. Sure, what Meg had experienced with Gina was an intense, immediate connection, but it was just a summer affair that maybe went a little longer than it should have.
She told herself that again.
And failed to convince herself.
Well, fine. So they’d been together and now they weren’t. It wasn’t like Gina was the only lesbian in the world.
There were eight years and eight thousand different things between them now. She was just a cowboy vet, and Gina was a world traveler and a talented journalist, rubbing shoulders with world leaders and the stuff legends are made of. Not goddamn country doctors. Meg stood suddenly, knocking the table and sending a stream of wax down the candle’s side where it pooled on the small plate she had placed underneath it. She glared at it, irritated at this burst of self-doubt, before she blew it out then stalked down the hall to the bedroom to change into sweats and a tee. She had to be at the clinic the next morning.
Chapter 4
Meg finished up at work around noon on Saturday, which was when Roy came in to round out the afternoon. He, Meg, and Mark rotated weekends. He exuded old-school Wyoming, thin and wiry, with lean, sharp features as if the wind had carved him from a bigger man. Deliberate and quiet, Roy used little breath on unnecessary talk. For the first couple of weeks Meg had been at the clinic, she wondered if he might be gay because he approached his work with an almost feminine energy unusual among many men in her profession. But then he brought his wife Cynthia by the clinic a month after Meg started working there and the way they looked at each other pretty much dispelled that idea.
She looked up from her computer when he appeared in her office doorway, holding his lab coat.
“Did Flora Jenks come in?” he asked as he put the coat on.
“Yeah. She picked up the Dasuquin for Frisky’s arthritis and made an appointment for next week.”
“With you or me?” He rolled his sleeves up.
“You, of course. You’re way better-looking than I am.” Meg flashed him a grin.
He snorted.
“It’s your baby blues, Roy. Does Cynthia know about all the competition she’s got?”
“She’s got nothing to worry about. Not even Flora Jenks can turn my head.” He smiled before he left and Meg looked back at the monitor and the paper she was working on for a conference in the fall. She put in another hour then saved the document onto a flash drive before she shut her computer down. A few minutes later she locked up and headed to the reception area.
“Hey, Ginny. Hey, Anna. I’m outta here. Have a good weekend.”
“Going to the ranch?” Ginny looked up from the files she had spread out in her work area and regarded Meg over her reading glasses.
“Yep. Call me on my cell if anything comes up. If that doesn’t work, call the ranch’s main line. Brady’s around this weekend, too. He’s on call.”
“Sounds good. See you Monday.”
Meg waved at her and Anna, who was on the phone, and left through the back door.
Once at home she put a pair of underwear, a T-shirt, and a pair of socks into a backpack along with a small toiletry kit. She kept some clothing at the ranch, including some old jeans, so she never packed much when she went. On her way through the living room, she hesitated and stared at Gina’s card where she had left it, lying next to the candle on her coffee table. She shook her head once—still puzzled—like a horse might, and continued to the front door, where she took her black Resistol off the coat rack and put it on before she flipped the front porch light on and locked up.
She tossed her backpack onto the front passenger seat of her truck and put her sunglasses on before she slid behind the wheel and starting the engine. Meg had the same country station on her radio dial that Roy kept in the clinic’s house-call truck. While Pam Tillis belted “Maybe It was Memphis,” she headed west on Grand and hung a right on Third, which became Highway 287. From here she turned left onto Snowy Range Road, which became Highway 130 and part of the scenic byway through the Medicine Bow Mountains. The road had opened a few days ago in preparation for Memorial Day because the route was extremely popular with tourists. It was closed through the winter and generally remained impassable with snow until this time of year. Though sometimes slow going, it shaved at least forty miles off the longer way to the ranch.
Meg settled into the drive as Laramie dissipated in her rearview mirror and she began the gentle climb into the Medicine Bow National Forest. Snowy Range Pass sat in a notch between looming peaks reminiscent of the Swiss Alps. They hunkered above the road, white-capped granite giants reflected in glacier-fed ponds. She loved the mountains and this was her favorite road in southern Wyoming. The contrast between the alpine meadows and jagged peaks with the rolling grasslands of Laramie always took her breath away.
She shifted into a more appropriate gear for the gain in altitude. The plows had indeed been through here. They’d cut the road free from the snow, packing it tightly on the shoulders so it was like driving in a maze, frozen white curbs on either side. She slowed down and admired the peaks, loving how they rose above her and how the thin air blew tendrils of snow from their crests.
The road curved then straightened again and Meg pressed “play” for the CD. Sarah McLachlan crooned “Good Enough” through the cab, and she sang softly along, thinking about Gina, who was always singing during their time together. She smiled, remembering the times that Gina would just burst into song, sometimes making up lyrics and melodies on the fly. She had a great voice, husky and edged with smoky Southern blues, full of unspoken promises. She wondered where such a California girl could have gotten a voice like that but when she met Gina’s family, she understood. They all sang. Constantly, whether in Italian or English, and they all had nice voices, though Meg thought Gina and her grandfather had the best of the bunch.
She downshifted and eased off the accelerator at another curve. Once, she’d gotten caught in a snowstorm up here just before the road was closed for the winter and it was the one time in her life, through her years of driving in terrible western weather, that she honestly believed the highway patrol might be hauling her frozen body and her truck back onto the road after the spring thaw.
“That’s a pleasant thought,” she muttered. “Not.”
She mulled Gina’s letter instead. With all the unrest in the world and the kind of work that she did, was she worried about her safety? Was she reaching out to all her friends, letting them know that she was thinking about them in case something happened to her? Meg tightened her grip on the steering wheel and her knuckles whitened.
Fuck it. She’d email her. Just to check in, make sure she was all right. Nothing weird about that, since they’d emailed each other over the years. She relaxed her grip and the road descended into the North Platte River valley, a strip of green that sliced across Wyoming’s sage-ridden southern high plains. She turned south on Highway 130 and then right onto the county road that would take her to the Diamond Rock Ranch. Her father had already gotten the road graded for the summer, so ten minutes later she crested a rise and descended into the shallow bowl that enclosed the many structures that made up the DR. Meadows stretched all around the main buildings, fed by a meandering creek. Medicine Bow National forest bordered the ranch to the west and east, ensuring a dearth of neighbors and development, and an array of stunning mountain views.
A sense of peace engulfed her as she pulled in behind the main structure, the building her great-grandfather Joseph from North Carolina built in 1895. Meg’s paternal grandfather Thomas had added a second story, which was basically an apartment that Meg lived in during her years at the ranch and later between semesters at Colorado State. A wooden staircase on the backside of the building provided the only way up, ensuring a certain degree of privacy. She took her pack upstairs and walked along the covered veranda to the heavy wooden door that would take her to the bedroom she still used when she stayed here.
She dropped her backpack off and clunked down the stairs to the back entrance into the kitchen, which Stan had upgraded twice. Once a decade ago and again three years ago. Meg smelled the warm, earthy odor of potatoes before she opened the door and went in. The DR kitchen could rival a major urban restaurant with its sleek steel countertops, appliances, and implements.
“Hey, Meg.” Tammy, one of the two prep cooks who worked under Alice, appeared from a walk-in cooler. She set a bin of lettuce on a nearby counter.
“Hi. Where is everybody?”
“Alice went to town to drop off some mail. She’ll be back any minute. Bud’s in the office ordering supplies. I think your dad might’ve gone to town, too.”
“Okay. You need anything?”
“Nope. See you at dinner.”
Meg nodded and pushed through the swinging door into the dim dining room. Stan had to expand this room three years ago, as well, to accommodate an ever-increasing stream of guests. Three long tables stood parallel to each other in the center of the room, each capable of holding twenty people. An additional sun room on the eastern side of the building harbored six more smaller rectangular tables. Red-and-white checked tablecloths covered all the tables and fresh flowers filled small vases on each one.
“Well, hello stranger,” Alice said as she came in through the front. “It’s been almost a month since we last saw you. Your dad was just lamenting that he doesn’t see you enough.”
Meg laughed and gave her a hug. Alice always reminded her of a glamorous forties movie star, her physical beauty a contrast to her grounded personality. She still turned men’s heads, even now in her mid-fifties. And usually, younger guys developed crushes on her, which amused Alice to no end. She enjoyed teasing them, but it was always gentle.
“He seems to get by all right without my supervision. He’s got you, after all, to order him around,” Meg said.
“He’d probably agree with that. How are you?”
“Fine. Busy.”
Alice gave her a look.
“Really. I’m fine.”
“Mmm hmm.” Alice raised an eyebrow in skepticism. “Feel like talking?”
Meg sighed. She did, and Alice could read it on her face, like she’d read Meg since the first year she started cooking at the ranch. “After dinner?”
She smiled and pecked Meg on the cheek. “With bells on. Now go. Get a ride in.” She walked toward the kitchen and Meg watched her, thinking that Alice had been more of a parent to her than Irene ever had, since she’d arrived at the ranch nearly twenty years ago. She smiled and left the dining room through the front entrance. Directly across from her stood “the motel,” a two-story Northwoods lodge-like structure that housed guests. Eight cars were parked in front and Meg saw a few people standing out on the second-story veranda, leaning on the rail. She waved and they waved back.
Five years ago Stan had added more room there too, expanding it from its original twenty rooms to thirty. To Meg’s right sat his office, a smaller Northwoods-style building. He lived in an apartment off the back. Past that stood three bunkhouses for the hands and a smaller place for Alice. Stan had decided it would save Alice some driving if she didn’t have to go back and forth to Saratoga all the time, so he remodeled one of the older structures for her. She’d moved in soon after Meg’s graduation, and become part of the “wagon circle,” as Meg called it. All of the buildings surrounded a hard-packed parking and common area.
Moonshine, the oldest cattle dog, limped over to her, whining in greeting. She bent and scratched him behind his ears. “Your arthritis bugging you, huh?”
He gave her a canine kiss on her cheek.
“Thanks, buddy. I needed that.” She’d check with Stan about Moonshine’s pain medicine, but she had a feeling she’d be taking him with her to Laramie. “Getting old sucks, doesn’t it?” she said against the top of his head. Booger, Moonshine’s sister, didn’t seem to have the problems that her sibling did. She came trotting over and rubbed her face on her jeans, and Meg petted her as well.
The newest members of the pack appeared from near the horse paddock. Border collies Nutter and Jim were the best herd dogs on staff. Bastard and Hellfire were the youngest, but Bastard promised to be a better herder than her predecessor, Dammit, had been. They converged on Meg, wiggling and whining their own greetings.
“Hey, guys.” She petted each in turn, and grinned as Bastard rolled over to present her stomach for extra love. Gina had asked a couple days after she and Meg met how the hell the dogs at the DR got their names and Meg told her that usually, the guests named them, either intentionally or not. Some guests came every summer to the DR and they kept the tradition of dogs with cuss words for names, which was fine by Stan. “More PR for the DR,” he’d say. “It cuts us from the herd.”
“Hi, gal,” came Jackson’s clear tenor behind her.
Meg stood, brushing her hands on her thighs. She smiled up at him. “Hey. How are things?”
He nodded and hooked his thumbs on his belt. Jackson Treadwell stood six-two without his hat, which he always wore except at meals. Angular and work-hardened, he still hadn’t put weight on in the twelve years he’d been at the ranch. He was pretty much Stan’s right-hand man these days, for which Meg was glad. His unflappable demeanor proved an all-around anchor for the DR, no matter the season. He had a rep as one of the best horsemen in Carbon County but Meg knew Jackson’s skills were better than many of the guys on the rodeo circuit way beyond Carbon.
“Your dad’s in town. He’ll be back for supper. How’s the clinic?”
“Things are great there, actually.” Meg pushed the brim of her hat back. “I wish I could be closer, though.”
A slow smile raised his mustache. “That’s the damn thing about this life. Gets under your skin and in your blood. Too long away and it pains you.”
Meg shrugged. “Might be genetic, too, in my case.”
He clapped her on the shoulder. “True. It’d be good to have you around more, though. You’re always a hit with the guests and I know your dad misses you.” He put his hands on his hips and gave her a knowing look. “You gonna ride?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said emphatically. “I need to check my email, though. Vet stuff.”
“I’ll get Destry ready. She’s in the paddock.”
Meg grinned. “Thanks.”
He winked as he brushed past her and headed for the barn. Meg went to her father’s office. She pushed the door open and glanced around. Stan had left the radio on—the classic country station on AM that he liked—and comfortable clutter nestled in various piles on his desk, though he had organized it somewhat since the last time she was here. A stack of Western Horseman magazines sat on one corner. Papers related to reservations occupied another and catalogs for farm and ranch supplies sat in the center, one open to a page advertising bridles.
She settled into her father’s battered leather chair and swiveled it to the right to face the monitor. A small cartoon horse galloped across, the same screensaver she used. She jiggled the mouse and clicked onto the web so she could access her email account. Though she’d already cleared it out at the office, a couple of stray messages had wandered in from her equine and rural vet email lists.
A colleague in South Dakota had dropped her a line about a conference in Rapid City in November. She emailed him back and said she’d check to see if she could go, but she wasn’t sure. Then she clicked on the “compose” command and typed in Gina’s email address. She sat back and studied the blank message screen. Her heartbeat sped up a little. She leaned forward and began writing:
Hey—
Got your card yesterday. Thanks. I always enjoy hearing from you. Thanks for the update on the family.
She paused. Too formal, maybe. She deleted it and tried again.
Got your card yesterday. Thanks! I love—
Oops. Better not use that word. She deleted that as well and tried again. Fifteen minutes later, she sat back to read through her message:
Hey—
Got your card yesterday. Thanks! It’s great hearing from you. Weird, but I’ve been thinking about you, too. More than usual, actually. I guess I might be a little worried about you. What’s up? Are you okay? I hope so. Wow--so you’re thinking about coming back. That’d make it a hell of a lot easier for me to visit you, for sure. Not that I wouldn’t love to see the places you’ve been. I’ll bet those villagers in Turkey could teach me a thing or two about horses. I’m interested to read your piece on how a lack of veterinary care either helps or doesn’t help them. I did check out Veterinarians Without Borders a couple months ago and it’s something that’s in the back of my mind, but I’ve got some other stuff I’m working on. I’m thinking about buying my own practice in Saratoga. The problem is funding it. I’m going to talk to my dad about it, see what he thinks. You know how good he is with business. It’ll be a few years down the line, but I’d like to get started with the idea.
