When It's Right(11)
“I killed my father, my own flesh and blood. I understand if you don’t want me here.”
He took a step toward the edge of the porch and called out to stop her from walking back to her truck and leaving. “I just wanted to know. I needed to hear the truth from you. Your mother, Erin . . .”
He hadn’t said her name in years. The pain of all he’d lost, the regrets he carried like a stone in his gut, the dreams he’d had for his little girl that had left him brokenhearted when she’d thrown her life away on drugs washed through him.
“Erin had a wild streak no one could tame. She harbored unrealistic dreams of leaving this place and living a glamorous life. In high school, when her mother was ill and fighting the cancer, Erin found trouble around every turn with drinking and drugs and messing with boys. She barely managed to graduate. When she turned eighteen, it didn’t take much coaxing from Ron for her to run off to the bright L.A. city lights. She left as fast as she could and never looked back. She didn’t want any part of this ranch or me. She couldn’t stand to watch her mother wither away and die. She wasn’t strong enough to stay for her mother.
“I heard from her a handful of times that first year. Then, nothing. Ron controlled her. He didn’t want me to find them and made sure I didn’t the few times I tried to track them down. I didn’t know about you until you were three. I tried to get in touch with you after your mother died, but Ron had already taken you away again. I didn’t know your situation,” he said miserably.
“How could you? My father was a master at working people and the system. He hated Montana. He always said that living on a ranch was too much work. That man did as little as possible as often as he could. He spent his life for the last twenty years tending bar in seedy dives and selling drugs. Within a month of them arriving in L.A., she was pregnant with me. They worked their way up the state and landed in the Bay Area. We moved around San Francisco and the surrounding areas. She was a drunk, a drug addict, and sometimes a whore. He didn’t seem to mind any of those things so long as he got his cut. If he didn’t, he made sure she didn’t forget to pay up.” She shrugged. What more was there to say?
Her grandfather’s eyes filled with sorrow. Numb to her own feelings about her parents, she forgot that her grandfather remembered her mother as someone different. Maybe a happier, friendlier, the-world-is-full-of-possibilities-for-her kind of person. The someone she must have been at one time for him to show such grief.
“You must have had so many hopes and dreams for her.” The way she did for Justin’s future. “I’m sorry to be so callous. I never meant to . . .”
“You spoke your mind and the truth of your life and hers.”
Gillian let the dead rest and started to tell him about herself. “I spent a lot of time at school and in the library.” Better to come home late, lessen the opportunity for someone to notice you. A better chance they’d be passed out drunk and stoned. She kept that to herself. Better to stick to herself than her parents’ fucked-up lives. “I made good grades and graduated top of my class in high school. I’ve worked all kinds of jobs. I’m good with my hands. I learn things quickly. If you show me what you want me to do around here, I’ll work hard and earn my keep.”
“Will you stay? Please.”
“That depends. Are you responsible for that animal?” She cocked her head toward the sick and hurt horse in the nearest corral and tried to fight the clench in her heart every time she looked at him.
“He’s mine,” Bud answered.
Gillian cast them both a disgusted look and turned her back on them, but hesitated to walk back to her truck and leave. If her grandfather had hurt that horse, she needed a plan to get the hell out of here, now, but she didn’t have anywhere else to go. With little more than eighty dollars, she’d never make it more than a few days. She’d never even get out of the state. Too damn cold to sleep in the truck again. She’d need to find a shelter.
Blake caught her hesitation and indecision and knew exactly where this conversation derailed. “He didn’t hurt that horse. He saved him from the son of a bitch who neglected and hurt him. Bud wouldn’t hurt a horse. No one on this ranch would hurt them. I’m trying to nurse him back to health.”
He spoke to her back, but she listened, even if her gaze remained on Boots. Blake knew how she felt. Seeing that poor thing broke his heart, too. He imagined she saw herself in the horse.
“She thinks I hurt that horse,” Bud whispered, disbelief in his words.