Homecoming Ranch (2 page)

“She is,” Jackson said, and I think he was probably pretty pissed off at this point. He likes Libby. Hell, everyone likes Libby. Most everyone. I hear Ryan doesn’t like her much these days, but that’s another story for another day.

I digress.

Grant was annoyed that Libby was trying to be a good daughter. “Jesus H, can’t a man just die in peace?”

“I think she’d like to offer you some comfort in that regard,” Jackson said, and I can just picture his jaw clenched tight as his fist. “And it’s not like you’re going to die any minute.”

“You don’t know that,” Grant snapped. “Tell her to come back later. I got my comfort right here,” he said, and with some effort, fished a bottle of Jim Beam from beneath his pillow. He laughed at Jackson Crane’s expression, but his laugh quickly dissolved into a painful cough.

Yeah, the end came pretty hard at Grant Tyler.

I know it did, because I know everyone in town. My name is Leo Kendrick. Don’t let my good looks and charming personality blind you.

Orlando, Florida

Unreal
.

It was the only word that came to mind, popping into her head in neon colors. A girl should never hear of her father’s death quite like she did, Madeline Pruett would tell her best friend Trudi a few hours after the fact. Especially when she didn’t even know she had a father. And what made it spectacularly unreal was that there were strings attached to her father’s death. Big strings. Enormous, bungee-cord-jump-off-a-bridge strings.

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone as Trudi took this news in. Madeline could hear Trudi’s two-year-old daughter in the background banging cups on the tile floor. Then Trudi said, “Are you going to soccer practice?”

It wasn’t exactly what Madeline would call “practice.” She volunteered with Camp Haven, an organization that mentored at-risk youth. Camp Haven sponsored afterschool soccer camps, and Madeline coached little five-year-old girls. Not that Madeline was an outstanding soccer player—she was mediocre. But the coaching challenge was getting the girls to run in the right direction. The payoff was spending time with them. “Yes, I’m on my way,” she said to Trudi.

“Okay, so here’s what you do. When practice is over, I’ll meet you at Paco’s Cantina. Order two gold margaritas. I’m calling Rick right now.”

Thank God for Trudi Feinstein, because Madeline really needed to repeat back the things the man had said about her father, to hear it out loud again, to make sense of it. She needed some moral support, someone to gasp and exclaim that it was all so unreal right along with her.

Madeline had tried to find that moral support from her mother when she’d called her just a couple of hours earlier, but Clarissa Pruett had cheerfully announced that she and some guy named John were about to go and “party” and to make it quick.

“Okay. My father died,” Madeline said.

“Huh? What do you mean your
father
died? Who are you talking about?”

In her mother’s defense, it was a legitimate question in a family of exactly two. Not that Madeline had lacked for dads—in her life, she’d been subjected to four that her mother had said she should call “Dad,” and that didn’t even count a few men in between. And quite obviously, Madeline had been produced with the help of an actual father. Turns out the one who had died was the absent sperm donor, the deadbeat the state could never track down to collect child support. Madeline had only one memory of him: a stack of gold chains around a thick neck, the reek of cigars, and a beefy hand with an endless supply of candy he dispensed like a broken gum machine. There was only one fuzzy picture of her parents—her mother with long hair, big floppy hat, a cigarette, and cocktail, and a man, whose face was partially obscured by her mother’s hat.

“My real dad, Mom,” Madeline said. “My sperm donor. He died.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” her mother said. Madeline heard the pop of a beer can over the cooking show blaring in the background from the enormous flat screen TV some man had bought her mother. Clarissa Pruett never actually cooked anything that Madeline could remember, but she watched that channel religiously.

“So how’d he die?” her mother asked before slurping from the can of beer.

The bigger question to Madeline was how did he
live
? Where had he been? It had not occurred to Madeline, in the shock of hearing about him at all, to ask how he’d met his demise. “I don’t know.”

“They didn’t say?”

“It wasn’t a they. It was one guy. Jackson Crane.”

Jackson Crane had shown up late to the realty offices where Madeline worked. She was the fairly new agent who always took the people who came in after the other agents had left for happy hour. It was a trick that had landed her a few good listings, including her prize, the DiNapoli house.

“Now who is Jackson Crane?” her mother asked. Madeline heard the sound of a lighter, the quick inhale of breath as her mother lit a cigarette.

“My father’s business agent or something like that,” Madeline said, and told her mother how the handsome, tanned man wearing a tailored suit coat and crisp white shirt open at the neck had walked into her office. He’d reminded her of one of those sitcoms where four guys live together in a loft and have hilarious girl troubles, and she’d even assumed he was looking for a new bachelor pad somewhere in Orlando. She told her mother how he’d shaken her hand vigorously, thanked her for seeing him, and then said,
“I flew in from Colorado and came straight here,”
and proceeded to announce that he had some unpleasant news about her father.

He’d said it with dimples and white teeth, as if his unpleasant news could be softened by a Crest toothpaste smile. Madeline had been suspicious of him—she was generally suspicious of all men—and had feared his was one of those awkward smiles people get when they hear bad news and they don’t know how to take it in. He clearly thought she would be very upset with hearing her father had died.

“I told him I didn’t have a dad.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Maddie,” her mother said disapprovingly. “You make it sound like I was sleeping around. You obviously had a father.”

Madeline chose to skirt around the glaring truth that her mother had spent most of her life hopping from one bed to another. “Not everyone has a father, Mom. Some people only have a sperm donor.”

The absence of a father was the singular crack in Madeline’s life, the chasm she could never seem to avoid. It wasn’t that she dwelled on it, quite the opposite—she had made herself forget it a very long time ago. But inevitably, when she met new people, they would ask about her family, and she would end up explaining that she never knew her father, and, no, she never saw him but one time, never heard from him (never mattered to him, did not exist for him)—and she would have to relive the whole no-dad thing again. She much preferred not thinking about him at all.

“Why’d this guy come all the way to tell you?” Mom asked. “Why didn’t he send a letter or something?”

“Because my father left me something, Mom. He left me a ranch.”

“A
what?
What do you mean a ranch? A
real
ranch?”

“A real ranch,” Madeline confirmed. Just saying it out loud made her feel strangely annoyed. She ought to be, as Jackson Crane had pointed out, excited by the prospect. But she wasn’t.

“What about me?” her mother asked.

“What do you mean?” Madeline asked, confused.

“I
mean,
did he leave
me
anything?”

Madeline didn’t even know what to say to that. Why would she think he had? “I don’t—”

“What about all the child support he should have paid me? I ought to go after that.”

Madeline was not surprised that her mother would turn news like this around to herself. “Mom… no offense, but you probably should have gone after that when you actually supported me. I’m almost thirty. I’ve been on my own since I was seventeen.”

“Well,” her mother said with a sniff, “when you go, ask about that. I feel like he should have left me something.”

Go? Go where? A big, heavy wrench had just been tossed into the middle of Madeline’s neatly ordered life. She had the DiNapoli listing, a fifteen-thousand-square-foot monstrosity of Greek revival meets Jersey Shore. It was a huge challenge to sell, but one that would pay off in a major way when it did. Eight months ago, Madeline’s fellow realtors had told her not to take it, that the sellers were unreasonable,
that they wouldn’t come down off the asking price. But Madeline was determined. She’d spent a lot of time and money to market that property—a
lot
—and she wasn’t going to leave that hanging. Plus, she’d committed to another eight weeks of soccer, and neither was she going to leave those little girls without a coach. Camp Haven had saved Madeline from a bad situation one summer by daily removing her from her mother’s dysfunctional orbit. She was indebted to them. Coaching made her feel useful. She didn’t have time for a father she never knew popping up, uninvited, unwanted, into her life.

“Honestly, I never thought he was a ranch kind of guy,” her mother said, and at the same time, Madeline heard the faint, but unmistakable tone of a male voice in the background. “Well, listen, kiddo, I’ve got to get going—”

“Wait, Mom! There’s more,” Madeline said quickly. “That’s not all he left me.”

“Oh yeah? What else?”

“Two sisters.”

Her mother took a long drag off her smoke and blew it into the receiver. “I guess that doesn’t come as a big surprise. Look on the bright side—you’ve always wanted siblings.”

It was true that Madeline had always wanted siblings. Brothers, sisters, she didn’t care, just someone to be there when she came home from school. Someone who would make Pop-Tarts and watch TV with her until Mom dragged in from wherever she’d been that day. To think that all this time, Madeline had had not one, but
two
sisters was a lot to absorb. She imagined an entire life of barbeques and ski trips and father-daughter dances that had not included her.

“
I’ll be just a minute
!” her mother suddenly shouted, startling Madeline, and then said, “You look like him, you know it?”

“Who?”

“Your father! Those blue eyes and that dark brown hair. Let me tell you, thirty years ago, Grant Tyler was one good-looking bastard. We sure sowed some wild oats.” She laughed, but it dissolved into a phlegm-filled cough. “We discovered our sexuality together.”

“Mom!” Madeline exclaimed. “Don’t even. It’s not like you guys were hanging out at Woodstock.”

“You think Woodstock was the only sexual revolution in this country?”

“I am
so
not having this conversation with you.”

“You know what your problem is?” Mom continued, ignoring her. “You’re too uptight. You like things to fit in neat little boxes and go certain ways and they never do.”

“Oh, I know, Mom. You taught me that things weren’t going to go my way,” Madeline said with a twinge of bitterness.

“Don’t start with me, Madeline. I did the best I could. Now when are you going to go and check out this ranch?”

“I’m not.”

That gave her mother a slight bit of pause. “What do you mean, you’re
not
?”

“I don’t want to go. I don’t want anything from him. I don’t want a ranch and two sisters I never knew I had until today, and the only reason I know about them at all is because he must have felt guilty on his deathbed. I have way too much going on right now. I just listed the DiNapoli house. I’m coaching a new team. I’m really busy.”

“John, goddammit, I am on the
phone
with my
daughter!
I said I’d be there in a minute!” her mother shouted. “I swear, the things I have to put up with. I have to go, Madeline. We’ll talk later. But you think about what you just said. Because I think you want to understand more about the man who gave you life. And you need to go see what we got.”

Madeline had wanted to understand more about her father a very long time ago. And when the answers didn’t come, she’d stopped caring. How could her mother not realize that? “No, Mom. I don’t care who he was, and I don’t want anything of his.” There was, Madeline had realized with surprise, so much resentment in her voice.
So much.

She’d expected her mother to argue, but in a rare moment of maternal instinct, Clarissa Pruett sighed. “He cared about you, Maddie. He
loved
you. But he was a weak man. Now I really have to go. I need some help with my car payment this month and it’s best to keep Big John happy.” She hung up.

“I’m not going,” Madeline said into the dead line. And she meant it.

She had no intention of uprooting her carefully constructed life, of dropping everything to fly out to Colorado.

Trudi was not satisfied with Madeline’s response either. “Don’t be stupid,” she said when they met up.

Madeline had known Trudi since the first grade. They’d met in Mrs. Bever’s class—Madeline, the skinny, dark-haired, dirty kid who was always late because her mother couldn’t wake up after a night of partying. And Trudi, the overweight, red-cheeked redhead with sparkling green eyes. They were outsiders, the kids on the fringe. But as they grew older, Trudi’s personality far outshone her weight, and she became friend to all and enemy to none. She’d still experienced crushing moments—mean boys, meaner girls—but Madeline was always there, on her side.