The Wrangler

Gus reached out and patted her hand. “Honey, I know how much I was asking of you when I made that phone call to you in Bahrain. I knew you hated Buck and hated this house.”

Val slipped her hands around the mug of hot coffee. Warmth against the iciness inhabiting her knotted gut. “Like I said, I’m here because of you, Gus. If you hadn’t broken your hip, I couldn’t have gotten out of the Air Force. Because of the situation, I was able to get what they call a hardship discharge.”

“I’m so glad you’re here. An elder like me with a cranky hip can’t run this place alone.”

“Gus, why save the Bar H at all?” Val drilled a look into her grandmother’s wrinkled, darkly tanned features.

“Why not?” The elder perked up, feisty now. “This is your home, Val. It doesn’t have to always be the terrible place it was for you as a child. You can create happy memories here, too. I had to sell our ranch in Cheyenne and it was the last thing I wanted to do. Pete’s family started that ranch a hundred and twenty years ago. It broke my heart to have to leave it in order to come back here. But I did it. Sometimes, life puts huge demands on us we don’t want to face. But we must sacrifice for a greater good.”

Guiltily, Val said, “You gave up so much. I knew you were grieving for Grandpa Pete’s passing. And I know you two spent your sixty years together building that spread into a profitable ranch. You walked away from all of it for us, Gus. Even at sixteen I realized the terrible sacrifice you made for us.”

“I did it,” Gus said, her voice firm, “because you two were far more important than our ranch. Family comes first. Always. You’re my granddaughter and all I ever wanted for you was happiness.”

“That didn’t happen,” Val said in a rasp, fighting back rising emotions. She held her grandmother’s teary blue gaze.

“I just wanted to put this whole damn thing behind me, Gus. I never wanted to be here again.”

“Then,” Gus said gently, “maybe it’s time to start healing up from it? Everyone deserves to have a home. A place where they came from. A place where they can come back to and call their own. Us Westerners believe in family, home and loyalty. Maybe between you and me some healing and good might come from this.”

“You’re such an optimist, Gus.”

Perking up, she grinned. “Yes, I hold out hope for hopeless, that’s for sure. Pete always called me a cockeyed idealist,” and she chuckled.

Laughing a little with her grandmother, Val took a sip of the hearty coffee. She thought back on her life since she’d left this ranch. She’d gone to college at eighteen. From there, she went into the Air Force. She was twenty-eight now. She’d only spent six years in the military and had been counting on making it to twenty years so she’d have a pension. “This ranch’s back is broken, Gus. The corrals are in terrible shape. The barn needs a new roof. I don’t see any cattle. I see a few horses out in one pasture. This place is not a moneymaker, it’s nothing but a money pit.”

Nodding, Gus said, “After Buck died of a heart attack, your mother made a lot of poor choices insofar as hiring good wranglers. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know how to budget because Buck kept her out of the money and finances. He refused to let her know anything about the running of the ranch, and he took all his knowledge of keeping this ranch solvent to the grave with him. I tried to pick up the slack, figure out the accounting books, but there was only so much I could do.”

Val recalled that time. “I celebrated when Mom told me Buck had died.”

“No one can blame you, honey. But without Buck, this ranch went to hell in a handbasket. Your mom was depressed. No matter what kind of medication the doctors put her on, she spiraled deeper and deeper into a very dark place. I couldn’t talk or reason with her. She just locked herself away in her room.”

Val’s heart wrung with pain over her mother’s decline. She hadn’t been there to help her. She’d run as far away as she could.

“When it came to finding the accounting books,” Gus continued, “and then discovering all the places Buck squirreled money away, it took me a year to figure it all out. And your mother, by that time, had been diagnosed with the most virulent form of breast cancer and she died six months afterward.”

Val recalled the phone calls, the fact her mother was drifting away from her. Val had felt abandoned and adrift. “I remember the funeral.”

“Yes, and I remember telling you not to worry, that I could handle the Bar H. I felt at the time, I could bring it back bit by bit. But your mom chose wranglers like she chose Buck. They were young men who talked the talk but couldn’t walk the walk. That series of wranglers did nothing but allow the ranch to slide further into destruction. Good wranglers are worth their weight in gold.”

“And then, you fell and broke your hip,” Val said. She saw what the Bar H meant to her grandmother because of the fierce look that sparked in her watery blue eyes. Her jaw was set. Val knew the bulldog feistiness she’d always possessed was there even at eighty-four. “But even if that hadn’t happened, no one person could ever run this two-hundred-acre ranch by themselves.”

“No, I couldn’t. And then the hip replacement went wrong, and I’m stuck with this damned cane for the rest of my life. I can’t ride a horse or go out and mend the fences. So much was taken away from me when I broke my hip, Val. I grieved over this situation a long time before calling and asking you to come home. I don’t want to see this ranch sold, too. It broke my heart to sell ours. I cried for weeks over that decision. I was hurting so badly from Pete suddenly being torn away from me, too. We were a good team. The best of friends. And then, suddenly, in one moment, he was gone….”

Val reached out and gripped her grandmother’s hand, its knuckles slightly enlarged with arthritis. “You’ve had to go through so much, Gus. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, honey, I know you are. We’ve all gone through our share, it seems. When Cheryl would bring you to visit our ranch in Cheyenne, I couldn’t understand why you were such a shy shadow that hid from all of us. And every time Pete came near you, you were like a wild horse running in the other direction. Lord, how I wish I had picked up on your reactions properly. After the fact, I talked to a therapist about abused children. It was then I realized you were terribly wounded and wouldn’t trust any man. Not even my Pete. And he was one of the most gentle, loving men you could ever meet.”

Dragging in a huge breath of air, Val felt as if the weight of the world was bearing down on her shoulders. “Gus, you can’t blame yourself for not knowing what was going on. I myself wish I’d done something. If only I’d called the sheriff. Or talked to one of my teachers.”

“Don’t go there,” Gus warned her. “You were innocent in all of his, Val. You were a trusting, vulnerable child.”

Hot tears wedged into Val’s eyes. With an angry swipe, she wiped them away. “I just couldn’t ever understand why my Mom lied to the doctors when she was taken to the hospital. She had a broken arm and collar bone, eyes blackened and both cheeks fractured. And she lied to them! She told them she’d been bucked off a horse, hit the pipe corral fence and then fell to the ground.” Gulping, Val stared helplessly at Gus. “They believed her! When you came here and told me that, I just felt like I was going to implode with rage.”

“You were raised in a toxic environment, so you thought love was being beat. You never knew any different as a child. How could you?”

“I’ve tried so hard to forget my past!” Val choked, the tears flowing down her taut cheeks. “When you asked me to come here, I threw up. I couldn’t hold back the fear, the memories avalanching me again.”

Gus scraped the chair back, picked up her cane and hobbled around the table. Leaning down, she slipped one arm around Val’s shoulders and kissed her red hair. “You’ve had nothing but pain from the time you were born,” Gus agreed. “But you listen to me. You’re a Hunter. You have the blood of my family running strong through you, Val. I know this is the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but really, it isn’t.”

Val lifted her head, the tears blurring her grandmother’s deeply wrinkled face inches away from hers. “W-what do you mean?”

“Honey,” Gus said in a whisper, placing a kiss on her wrinkled brow, “the worst was living in this house when Buck was alive. He’s dead and gone now. I know you have the past to work through, but he ain’t here any longer. That makes this easier than the first eighteen years of your life, doesn’t it?” She gently held Val’s tearful blue gaze.

“I—I don’t know.”

“I do. Besides,” Gus said, gently wiping the tears from Val’s pale cheeks, “you have me. Together, you and I are a force to behold. We can bring this ranch back to life, and make it even better than before. We can make it beautiful, successful and you’ll have the money you need for when you want to retire.” Giving her a soft smile, Gus added, “Family should be a team, Val. Oh, it’s true, there’s always a rotten apple in every family barrel, but don’t walk away from it all just because of one person. Your ma put her heart and soul into the Bar H. Now, we’ll do the same. Together…”

CHAPTER TWO

THE SWEET SMELL of alfalfa hay entered Griff McPherson’s nostrils. He walked into the large, airy barn, carrying a huge baling hook in each of his hands. A ranch customer had backed his Chevy truck up against the lip of the wooden platform and was waiting for twenty bales to be placed onto its bed. Sweat trickled down the sides of Griff’s temples as he approached the first bale and quickly sank the long, sharp hooks into it. With a grunt, he hefted the eighty-pound bale out of the building and dropped it into the truck. He reveled in his strength, feeling close to the earth and to all life of late. Working at Andy’s Horse Emporium, a central place in the valley for ranchers to buy hay, feed and other supplies gave him deep and growing satisfaction.

Just having a job in this sputtering economy made Griff feel grateful as he walked quickly back into the barn. His well-worn boots thunked hollowly against the graying oak plank floor. Andy had taken pity on him when Griff’s brother Slade had kicked him out of the family ranch house. Mouth tightening as he leaned down and hooked a second bale, Griff turned and walked it out to the truck.

There was another full-time young man working at the Emporium with him, and between the two of them, they were kept busy all day long. It was hard, physical work and Griff absorbed it with quiet joy. It was a far cry from his days as a banker on Wall Street. As he hefted another bale and carried it out of the barn, he glanced up at the blue morning sky. How could he ever have left Jackson Hole, the place he was born and raised? The Tetons Ranch had been in his family for a hundred years. His soul was here. How could he have not come home as soon as he’d turned eighteen?

The third bale was dropped into the pickup. Griff leaped down into the bed of the Chevy and expertly arranged the bales so he could make a solid foundation for the rest to come. Inhaling deeply, his white cowboy shirt clinging to his body, Griff smiled to himself. In one easy, fluid leap he was back on the platform. Grabbing the hooks with his sweat-stained leather gloves, he moved into the shade of the barn. His mind lingered on his past life, working in derivatives at his uncle’s Wall Street firm. When the crash hit, he’d been out of a job. Coming home had been a rough landing.

The air was full of fine dust and bits of the alfalfa that had been trucked in for ranchers in need for their horses or cattle. The growing season in this part of Wyoming was only seventy days and not long enough to grow a crop of either alfalfa or grass hay. It all had to be brought in from nearby Idaho or from other surrounding states. And it made the price higher than usual.

Griff’s nostrils flared as he sank the hooks into the next bale. In about twenty minutes, he’d have the order filled, the bales neatly stacked upon one another, tied in place with the rancher’s stout nylon straps so they wouldn’t fall off during transit. The work satisfied him. It was far better than sitting in a chair staring at a computer and translating graphs and analysis. He was born into a Wyoming ranch family. And God, it was good to be back home even if it meant living hand to mouth. If not for Andy hiring him to work five days a week, Griff knew he’d have to leave Jackson Hole for a soup kitchen in a major city.

“Hey,” Andy hollered to him from the office across the way, “when you get done, I need you in here, Griff. There’s a lady in here lookin’ to hire a full-time wrangler.”

Straightening, Griff pushed the tan Stetson cowboy hat off his brow. “Fifteen minutes,” he called back. He saw Andy nod, raise his hand in acknowledgment and disappear back inside the main store. Lifting the hat off his head, Griff quickly wiped his brow. He could smell his sweat. It came from good, hard work. He now realized he’d been wasting away in New York City. Out west, he was once again hard-muscled, physically fit and ready to take on his newly evolving world.

* * *

VAL WATCHED ANDY return to the front desk where she stood waiting. She had received a warm welcome from him when she’d first walked in the door. He’d recognized her right away. “Griff will be in here in about fifteen minutes,” he told her.

Val felt leery. “Are you sure he’s a good wrangler, Andy?”

“Yep, I am,” the man said, ringing up her items at a cash register.

“But, you said he’s only been here a couple of months.”

“I know you’ve been gone a long time, Miss Val, but surely you know Slade McPherson? Owner of the Tetons Ranch?”

“Yes, of course. Everyone thinks well of him.”