Dry Creek Daddy

“Well, there’s too much bouncing on the passenger side,” her father said as he turned to face her. “A man needs to take good care of his pickup. Mark should know that.”

Hannah turned to look at her father. “It doesn’t matter. He’s doing us a favor.”

Mr. Stelling turned back to stare out the front window.

In all that time, Hannah hadn’t spared Mark a glance.

“Your father just likes to keep me away from you,” Mark said, hoping he’d get a chuckle from at least one of them.

Hannah didn’t turn his way and Mr. Stelling didn’t answer. The other man had a white bandage wrapped around his head, and he was sitting straight in the seat just like the nurse had asked him to.

“Not that I blame him for that,” Mark added.

That didn’t gain him any further response, so Mark kept silent as he made the turn from the parking lot to the main street leading to the freeway.

“I don’t like hospitals,” Mr. Stelling finally said. “They make me cranky.”

Mark figured that was as close to an apology as he’d get from the older man.

“None of us like them,” Mark agreed. They were crowded together in the cab, but at least now it didn’t feel quite as awkward.

Within a few minutes, they were on the freeway and headed back to Dry Creek. There was little traffic. Large empty fields lined both sides of the freeway. Mark refrained from mentioning that all those other ranchers had managed to get their wheat harvested. A herd of deer stood in the distance, grazing. The clouds on the horizon looked darker than they had been. Mark only hoped the rain would hold off long enough to get Mr. Stelling’s harvest done.

“I shouldn’t have made that remark about your head being damaged,” Mr. Stelling offered when they’d driven a few miles. He was silent for a while and then asked, “Did it hurt much all those years you were out of it?”

“You mean during the coma?” Mark turned slightly. It was not surprising the older man would ask about that time. Everyone seemed curious. “No, it didn’t hurt. At least, I don’t think so. I don’t remember much.”

Mr. Stelling nodded. “My wife, she was in a coma a few days before she died.”

“Ah.” Mark understood now. He’d forgotten that fact. “Don’t worry. She wasn’t in any pain.”

A few more miles passed. Mark wondered if he’d always be known as the man who’d been in a coma. People used to say he’d do great things in his life—that he’d be a hero. No one said that any longer. He even had some sensational grocery store newspaper call and offer him a “significant amount of money” to interview him for a story. The thought made him cringe. He didn’t want to be known as the man who had been stuck in a coma for four years. A man needed some dignity.

Mark thought a moment. “I still don’t remember everything about that night when I got shot.”

Mark didn’t want his life laid out to satisfy the curiosity of strangers, but he did want to tell Hannah how sorry he was about what happened back then, and this might be his only chance to do so.

“I’d called and asked you to come over and talk to me,” Hannah said. Her voice was low, but she had turned so he could see her. He wasn’t sure of her emotions from her eyes, but he thought he saw some hurt in their depths. He wanted to soothe it away.

“I remember that clearly,” Mark said. “Your dad was at some church meeting, but I still parked my pickup out by the driveway into the ranch and you walked out to meet me. Some of your mother’s flowers were blooming.”

“The wild roses.” Hannah smiled then. “You could smell them all along the fence. It was a moonlit night.”

“They were a deep pink,” Mark offered. “Beautiful.”

Mr. Stelling grunted. “I would have grounded her for a month if I’d known she was seeing you behind my back. You never were any good for her.”

“He was my friend,” Hannah protested even though she didn’t look over at him. “There was a bully at school and he always protected me.”

“I still am your friend,” Mark said. “I hope you know that even though there probably aren’t any bullies now.”

Except for your father, Mark added to himself silently. He figured Hannah wouldn’t want him to say that, though. She didn’t answer, and memories flooded Mark. He’d thought she had circles under her red-rimmed eyes that night because she was coming down with a cold. He hadn’t realized until later that she had been scared and had likely been crying.

“I should have told you straight out that I was pregnant,” Hannah said quietly. She did glance up at him then. “Instead, all I could do was pick a fight. I wanted to argue. I thought there would be time to tell you about the baby when you came back.”

Mark shook his head. “It was my fault.”

Her father grunted this time. “I’ll say.”

“Do you mind?” Mark asked the man. “We’re trying to have a conversation here.”

“You can’t order people around,” Mr. Stelling said. Then he crossed his arms over his stomach. “Who do you think you are, anyway?”

“I don’t know any longer,” Mark snapped back without thinking. On the day he and Hannah were trying to discuss, he’d known exactly who he was. He’d just been awarded a full scholarship to the college in Missoula. Everyone said he’d win at least two events in the local teen rodeo like he had for the past three years. He craved prizes like that. Somehow it was proof that he was somebody—a hero of sorts. He didn’t think he’d see any more of those wins again in life. No one gave out brass-plated belt buckles to someone for learning to tie their shoes.

He glanced over at Hannah. He had defended her from everything once. Now he wasn’t sure if he could protect her from anything.

“I’m sorry,” he said. The least he could do was get on that combine and harvest her father’s wheat. He didn’t want her to have to do that. She looked tired to him.

“That night was my fault,” Hannah said again, her voice firm. “I shouldn’t have gone on like I did. You were excited about that scholarship and all I could see was that it was pulling you away from me.”

“No,” Mark protested. There was that flash of hurt in her eyes again. “I always saw that scholarship as being for us. For a chance to live a good life for us—you, me and—well, I wasn’t thinking of children then, but it would have been all of us.”

He’d never thought he’d be content to be a rancher. He had wanted to win all the prizes the world had. He pictured Hannah on his arm, looking proud. A big house. An important job. Lots of money. Truthfully, he didn’t ever remember asking himself if that was the kind of life that Hannah would want, though.

“Well, if I hadn’t been so upset, you wouldn’t have gone off like you did,” she insisted. “I knew that scholarship was important to you.”

Mark shook his head. He wasn’t willing to let himself off the hook that easily. “It wasn’t about the scholarship. No one forced me to go out drinking with Clay. He didn’t even want to go driving around. Besides, my mother had always told me never to start drinking. She knew my father had a terrible time with it and she worried I’d inherit that from him.”

No one needed to say anything more. Mark had let alcohol overtake him that night. He became so confused he came up with the crazy idea of taking the hunting rifle from the rack in his pickup and going in to rob that gas station. He couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking. But he still clearly saw the slice of time when he’d turned that gun on the male clerk inside the station and demanded money. Events had happened fast then. The clerk turned out to be an ex-marine and skilled enough in combat to disarm Mark. In the scuffle, the gun had discharged and the bullet slammed into Mark’s head.

He sat there a minute, just driving as he watched the farmland go by. He was more content than he thought he’d be with his future on the family ranch. He turned toward Hannah. “Don’t let Jeremy ever drink.”

Until this moment, Mark hadn’t realized that the Nelson curse of alcoholism could touch his precious son.

Hannah grinned and glanced at him over her father’s head. “So far Jeremy hasn’t asked for anything stronger than grape juice. That’s his favorite. He tends to spill so he takes it in a sippy cup, but he’s almost ready for a regular big boy cup.”

Mark basked in the moment. This was the kind of conversation parents would have.

“The boy should be drinking milk, not juice,” Mr. Stelling announced.

Mark saw Hannah bite back a response. He was glad they were making the turn off the gravel road. There was a lot of irritation in his pickup and only some of it belonged to him. Still, he was pleased to be escorting Hannah home.

* * *

Hannah felt her stomach muscles clench as the pickup turned into the drive leading to her father’s house. The sky had grown lighter although it remained gray. The conversation had bumped along all the way back from Miles City, and she saw the scowl on her father’s face deepen as he looked at his place. She figured he regretted the deal with Mark. But it was too late; Mark was already parking the pickup, and someone needed to run the combine.

“At least the rain is holding off,” she said, hoping to ease the tension. Every rancher she knew liked to talk about the weather. The clouds were gray, but there had been no droplets on the windshield of the pickup.