Return to Homecoming Ranch (Pine River) (8 page)

His adamancy was surprising. “I didn’t say I was getting back with him! And anyway, how do
you
know?” she demanded.

“Because I know,” he snapped. He leaned forward, bracing himself against her car with one arm, locking her in between him, the vehicle, and his rebuke. “He let you go. Dumb as that is, he did. He’s moved on. He’s moved on so much that he got a
restraining order
against you.”

“Because he was mad—”

“Because he is
done
,” Sam angrily interrupted her. “Don’t create some fantasy in your head. Leave him alone. Don’t make me have to arrest you.”

She didn’t like what he was implying. Ryan had apologized—it wasn’t as if she was fantasizing about it. She was almost certain she wasn’t. “He just said it this morning!” she insisted. “You
heard
him. He said he wished things hadn’t happened like they did, and that he was sorry, and to let the dust settle. What does that mean? It means he is sorry!”

“Jesus
Christ
,” Sam muttered incredulously.

Libby dipped under his arm and put some distance between herself and those piercing hazel eyes. “Don’t come and check on me. I don’t need you to hold my hand and tell me what to do. I
know
what I’m doing.”

Okay, maybe she didn’t know exactly, but this was her problem. Not his.

Sam pressed his lips together, as if he was working hard to bite back a few choice words. “Okay,” he said tersely, and abruptly turned around and walked back to his truck.

Libby watched him get in, back up, and drive on. She watched his truck disappear around the corner.

Her breath was still coming in angry gulps.

Sam was wrong. He had to be wrong. Because it wasn’t impossible that Libby and Ryan could patch things up, at least enough that she might see Alice and Max. And besides, it wasn’t Sam’s business. This was her life, not his. Sam didn’t know what had gone on between Libby and Ryan. No one knew but her and Ryan. And Libby knew Ryan well enough to know that it took a lot for him to say that he wished things hadn’t ended.

She would be the first to admit that she couldn’t be sure what had been real between her and Ryan after all that had happened. But what she did know was that it couldn’t
all
have been a lie.
I’m crazy about you, baby, crazy in love. I can’t live without you and I never will.

That’s what Ryan had said the night he asked her to move in with him and the kids.

How did love like that suddenly disappear?

It didn’t.

People made mistakes. Ryan had admitted as much to her twice this week. Alice was calling her every afternoon. It wasn’t ridiculous to imagine some level of reconciliation could happen, if only for the sake of Alice and Max. Because no matter what had happened between her and Ryan, her relationship and her love for those two kids was as real and as deep as anything she had ever felt in her life. She wasn’t going to walk away from that. Alice and Max meant more to her than anything else in the world.

Sam may not get that, but he didn’t have to get it. This was Libby’s life.

She got into her car and drove to town, pulling into a spot on Main Street, just outside Tag’s Outfitters. She was still brooding over Sam’s anger, and as she looked up at the door of Tag’s, she was suddenly reminded of a sunny afternoon in early May. It was the first time she’d come to town since Ryan had sat her down at the kitchen bar, had even filled her wineglass for her, and had told her that she had to leave. That he was through, that he didn’t love her anymore and hadn’t for a long time.

“Through?” Libby had said. “How can you be through? What are you talking about?” She’d been so confused. Of course she knew that things were a little strained between them, but she never would have guessed that he was thinking to end it, that she was headed out the door.

“Afraid so,” he’d said. “It’s just not working for me. I think it’s best if you leave.”

“
Leave
?
” she’d all but shouted. “There’s no discussion? No talking? You just announce you’re done and I have to leave? Just when did you think I was going to do that?”

She would never forget the look he’d given her. It was indifferent, uncaring. “Well . . . now,” he’d said with a shrug.

Everything had blurred after that. Wine had spilled along with her tears. There had been a lot of shouting, a lot of accusations, but Ryan had insisted there was no one else, there was nothing but Libby and a love he didn’t possess anymore.

And then Alice and Max had come home.

Libby closed her eyes, unwilling to think of the moment Alice and Max had understood what Ryan had done.

Libby shoved angrily against her car door to open it, and stepped onto the sidewalk.

She remembered something more, as she hitched her purse over her shoulder. Libby had nowhere to go and had moved in with her mother. After two weeks of stumbling around blindly, painfully, her mother had insisted she get out and get on with her life. As if Libby hadn’t spent the last four years creating a family that was now gone. As if Libby were wasting time. Libby had tried to move on.

She remembered walking down this street, on her way to yoga. Yoga would center her, yoga would ease her, she’d reasoned. It was right here that she’d run into Sam. Literally. She’d been darting around tourists and had even clipped a mailbox in her haste, her mind racing, her thoughts in another place altogether. She’d had her yoga mat strung across her back.

She didn’t notice Sam until he spoke to her. “Libby, hello,” he’d said, and he had smiled so warmly that she’d had to fight the urge to burst into a sudden torrent of tears. That happened quite a lot to her in the beginning.

“Oh, hey Sam.” She’d slowed down, even taking a step backward to keep from passing him. She’d smiled, too, or at least she thought she had. But Sam had instantly dipped down to have a closer look at her with those knowing eyes.

“Are you okay?”

“Me? Sure!” she’d said. Because after a couple of weeks back home, Libby had learned to say everything was okay so her mother would not hover and harp. “How about you? I heard about you rescuing that couple on the Divisidaro Trail last week. Dani Boxer is singing your praises. She said they were scared to death. They were staying at the Lodge and told her all about it.”

Sam had chuckled, and Libby had realized then that, judging by his casual manner, he hadn’t heard about her. He was just being nice when he’d asked how she was. “Dani is quick to sing praises,” he’d said. “They weren’t very lost. They hadn’t strayed from the trail nearly as far as they thought they had. But then again, they had a special glow about them from all the weed they’d been smoking.”

“Aha,” Libby said with a grin. “The rolling papers should come with instructions, shouldn’t they? Please do not hike while stoned.”

Sam grinned. “Going to yoga?”

“Yes. Are you coming?” she’d asked and, grateful for the few normal moments, had playfully poked him in the shoulder. “The offer still stands, you know. You never took me up on it. Where is that yoga mat, anyway?”

“In my office. Right between my desk and the wall. I’m still mulling it over.”

“Liar,” she’d said. “You told me that last time I saw you. It’s been over a year now.”

“I like to mull things to death.”

She’d actually laughed a little, because so did she. “So how is that back of yours, anyway?”

“Stiff as a board,” he’d admitted.

“
Knew
it,” she’d said. “I better get going or I’ll be late. Have a good day, Sam.” She’d moved to pass him, and had accidently brushed against him when she did. Sam had surprised her by impulsively catching her hand in his, and she remembered thinking her hand felt so small in his. As small as she felt inside.

“Hey . . . are you sure you’re okay?” he’d asked, peering closely at her.

Libby could remember the swell of gratitude that he cared enough to ask, to even notice. In those weeks after Ryan told her he didn’t love her anymore, she had needed that reassurance. “I’m sure,” she’d said. She wasn’t too convincing, because he’d arched a dubious brow. Libby had sighed. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind. My dad is really ill, and . . . and . . . you know, that puts a strain on things at home.” It wasn’t a lie. She’d even asked Ryan if her preoccupation with her father’s slow death had caused him to change his mind about her. Ryan had said no, but as nothing else made sense, Libby wasn’t sure she believed him. But to Sam, she’d shrugged helplessly and said, “It’s no big deal. Just life beating down the door, as my grandmother used to say.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sam said, and he had looked sincere. “I hope everything works out.”

“Oh, it will,” Libby had said, because that’s what she did best, she assured everyone that everything was okay. “It’s just a bump in the road.” That bump had suddenly felt insurmountable. Libby had pulled her hand free of Sam’s and had started to walk, but had paused and looked over her shoulder.

He’d been watching her, and Libby had felt a rivulet of something sweet run through her. “Sure you don’t want to come and do some down dogs with me?”

“I’m sure,” he’d said with a wink.

“Suit yourself, Stiffneck.” She’d moved on, falling back into melancholy.

Turns out, she didn’t go to yoga that day, either. She just kept walking, past the studio, down to the park, where she had sat on a bench and cried some more.

No more of that. She hadn’t cried over Ryan Spangler for a very long time now.

EIGHT

Sam was up before dawn and stumbled into his kitchen, grimaced at the dishes still in the sink from last night’s attempt at chili, and dragged his fingers through his hair. He grabbed a cup from the shelf and stuck it under his new single-cup coffeemaker. Coffee was the one vice Sam allowed himself, and he had fallen in love with this machine. It was probably the most expensive thing he’d bought for himself in a year.

Hell, it was probably the
only
thing he’d bought for himself in a year.

He turned it on, scratched his chin, felt the stubble of a beard there. He’d been off-duty yesterday, and when one lived alone, one tended not to groom one’s face quite as often as one ought. He picked out a coffee—wild mountain blueberry—and jammed it into the cup holder. As the coffee brewed, he padded back across his little house, into his bedroom.

Admittedly, he wasn’t the neatest guy in the world. He had clothes strewn around, draped over the back of a worn-out armchair he’d rescued from an eviction a few years ago. He sorted through that stack of clothing, found some jeans, and pulled them on. He stuffed his feet into his house shoes, pulled on a jacket with sheepskin lining, and retraced his steps. With his morning cup of joe liberally doctored with cream and sugar, Sam stepped outside onto the deck in the back of his house. He paused like he did most mornings, standing as still as he could to breathe in the quiet, crisp, cold mountain air.

His place was set back in the woods, a little two-bedroom log house with a big open kitchen and living space, a huge expanse of deck under the firs out back, a garden, and the work shed he’d built from logs and stones at one end of the deck.

A mountain stream cut across the back of his property, home to a family of river trout that had been there about as long as he had. He had a fenced meadow beside the house that was full of late summer wildflowers, and a small barn for the horses he kept for those rare occasions he had to go deep into the mountains to rescue a stranded hiker.

As a rural area deputy, Sam was assigned to the backwater, remote parts of Pinero County that could not be easily reached by main street emergency responders. When Mr. Gomez had had a heart attack two years ago, it had taken an ambulance forty-five minutes to reach him. Mr. Gomez didn’t make it. Now, Sam had a defibrillator in his truck. He was a one-man show, the first line of defense. The man with the star who showed up to keep a lid on things until the cavalry could arrive.

He had an office and a small holding cell rented from the Pine River police department, which he used only rarely. Most of his work involved crimes like cattle rustling, poaching, and the occasional lost hiker. His workload was pretty simple now, very different than it had been back in the days he was patrolling the more populated part of the county. People who lived this far out tended to be pretty self-sufficient, taking care of trouble on their own.

The job suited the man Sam believed he’d become. He wasn’t especially close to his family. His mother, in Dallas, had remarried after the bitter divorce from his father. His sister, Jan, was a financial advisor in Pittsburgh with a family. Sam heard from his father occasionally, but his dad had married a woman from Mexico and spent most of his time there.

For Sam, this little house in the mountains of Colorado near Pine River was as good a place as any to be.

It was certainly the easiest place to be.

Sam walked to the work shed and stepped inside. He flipped a switch and light erupted from a pair of single bulbs swinging overhead. He sipped from his coffee and looked around at the birdhouses stacked on the shelves. There were dozens of them, in various colors, shapes, and sizes. This was his hobby, the thing that kept him busy and his mind occupied on long winter nights. His birdhouses were elaborate, too: castles, multi-level houses with pitched roofs and steeples, condominiums. He made them in shapes of recreational vehicles, boats, airplanes, and spaceships. He’d made one that looked like a hamburger, only because it amused him.

He was pretty good at making birdhouses, but most of his creations stayed here. He had no desire to sell them. He just kept making them, kept stacking them around his work shed and hanging them in the trees around his house.

Once, his pal Dirk had said, “People would pay good money for these,” as he’d admired one that was fashioned after a vintage Cadillac. “Especially rich people in Aspen.”

Maybe Dirk was right, but to Sam, it felt almost like an invasion of his privacy and his solitude to let anyone know that his birdhouses existed, much less
sell
them. He’d given a couple away. One to Millie, hoping that would soften her up. It hadn’t. One to Leo Kendrick, who spent a lot of time looking out windows. But other than that, this was something he preferred to keep to himself. It was his thing, his quiet pastime, his testament to his life up on the mountain: simple and solitary.
Safe
.

Sam put aside his coffee and selected a piece of tin to fashion into a birdhouse roof. He glanced at the little building plan he’d made and tacked to the wall, and began to hammer the tin into shape.

But the tin didn’t have the same appeal to him as it normally did. His mind was elsewhere, his thoughts jumbled. He hadn’t been able to erase the image of Libby’s hopeful face as she’d stood outside his truck. He could even hear her voice.

It may be possible that Ryan and I will agree to some happy medium.

That statement had made Sam profoundly and irrationally angry.

That he cared enough for it to make him angry made him angrier still. He didn’t care what Libby Tyler did with her life. It was not up to him to set her on the right course. Then why the hell didn’t he just let it go? Let her do whatever she wanted, let the chips fall where they may! What difference could it possibly make to him?

There it was again, that feeling of something old and battered trying to dig out from underneath his rubble. He didn’t like the feeling at all, and suddenly lost interest in the birdhouses. He put down his hammer, swiped up his coffee cup, and stalked out of his work shed.

The sun was coming up, and with it rose the chatter of the magpies and blue jays greeting their day. Sam stood very still, his eyes closed, taking in the morning.

Sometimes, when there was something going on up at Homecoming Ranch, and the mornings were this still, he could hear a little bit of laughter or voices drifting down to him. He was always glad to hear it, too—the place had been so silent and forlorn after Mrs. Kendrick had died from cancer. Sam had been sorry when Mr. Kendrick and Leo abandoned the ranch for Pine River and sold the place to Grant Tyler.

He worried about Homecoming Ranch. Libby’s intentions were good, but her ideas were such a gamble. Sam’s thinking had been confirmed one day when he’d run into Jackson Crane, who had been Grant Tyler’s financial guy. Jackson mentioned that the sisters would have to book a wedding every weekend to make it a go, and Sam was pretty sure that wasn’t anywhere close to happening.

Still, Libby was pretty goddamn tenacious, and had as good a shot as anyone at turning the ranch around. She’d always been a go-getter, the first one in line to volunteer for whatever needed doing. A few years ago when the wildfires had come close to Pine River, he remembered Libby with a stain of ash on her face, tirelessly working to bundle up food, shoes, and water for evacuees. She was at the annual road race for bikers at the start of the summer, manning the rest stops. She’d been active in her church, had worked with the Chamber of Commerce, and had lobbied the city council for funding for pedestrian-friendly walkways and had won.

She was tenacious all right, so much so that he was pissed off all over again.

He opened his eyes and gazed out at the valley.
Forget it. She’s not your problem.

He lifted his coffee cup to his lips—and sloshed it down his bare chest when the ring of the telephone jarred him. Cursing under his breath and wiping away the spill, he walked inside, picked up his phone and looked at the display.

Terri. His ex-wife. Sam put the phone down and walked away from it. The last time she’d called, she’d been looking for money. He’d told her not to call him again. He couldn’t bear the idea of her piercing the armor he’d erected around his heart and his memories again.

The phone stopped ringing, and a moment later, it started again. Terri again.

Sam turned off his ringer. He felt a swell of bitterness rise up in him, the sort he used to tamp down with drink. Four years ago, he would have opened a bottle. Today, he would take a shower and hope to God it erased the tension he felt.

He’d met Terri in a college government class all those years ago. She’d been the girl with straight red hair and dancing blue eyes. She was full of purpose and the desire to make a difference in the world. Sam had been caught up in the swirl of her energy, had fallen madly in love with her.
Let’s join the peace corps,
she’d said.
Let’s go
help
people.

He had never wanted to help people so much in his life.

But even then, as young and idealistic as they were, there had been warning signs. Terri loved to party, for one, and Sam had been easy to pull along. She also had a volatile temper that was made worse with a couple of drinks.

Whether Sam had been too naïve to understand what was happening to her and to him, or too blinded by love, he didn’t know. But he’d ignored those signs, every last one.

Sam and Terri married in a little church in Taos, New Mexico, the summer after he graduated. Terri, a year behind him, dropped out of school.
They’re part of the establishment. They don’t get it,
she’d said. That was the reason, she claimed, that her grades were falling.
Them, they,
the unseen faces of injustice that seemed to shadow her everywhere she went.

Sam and Terri moved around for a couple of years. They lived in Santa Monica in a rent house with a bunch of hippies who talked a lot about bringing peace to the world but did little more than surf. They made their way to Portland when Terri had the idea to own a coffee shop.
We’ll have poetry readings,
she’d said brightly. They’d lasted three months.

Eventually, the need for money had driven them to Colorado Springs. Terri had big plans to take a job with the Forest Department, but took a job working for an insurance agent—still helping people, as she saw it. Sam joined the police force. After a couple of years, the opportunity to work for the Pinero County Sheriff’s Office had cropped up. It had been a good couple of years for Sam—he’d done well, rising quickly through the ranks. The sheriff had liked him, and had taken Sam under his wing. Sam was the guy everyone assumed would run for office when the sheriff retired.

Many times, Sam had tried to pinpoint when it had all begun to get out of hand. When it was, exactly, that Terri had gone from a vivacious college girl to a woman who got into verbal altercations with people around town about ridiculous things and drank straight from a vodka bottle. When it was that everything had unraveled into frayed ends, when the shadows had begun to close in around Terri, when he found the answer to all his troubles in the same vodka bottle Terri favored. When had they become this couple?

It bothered Sam when he saw shadows around Libby, too. Libby’s shadows were vastly different than Terri’s had been, but still. He didn’t think Libby was crazy, like he heard Mrs. Miller say at the Grizzly Café one morning. Or that she had some heretofore undiagnosed mental health issue that had suddenly manifested itself. He thought it was probably true what she’d said—she’d had a breakdown. He didn’t believe she was gripped by anything more than a need to belong—to someone, to something. And in rapid succession, she had lost all her places to belong, and all the people who had mattered to her. That was enough to send anyone down the path Libby had traveled.

He knew what that felt like, that wanting to belong to someone. Sometimes, Sam could feel it slipping around in his marrow, tugging at his conscious thoughts. He could feel the ache of wanting children settling into the crevasses of his heart.

As for Libby . . .

He couldn’t even define what it was that he felt about her. Frustration. Sympathy. More. Whatever
more
was, he didn’t want to look too close. No good could come of his worry or his growing infatuation for her. The last thing he needed was to complicate his life with a woman like her. It was best for him stay up on the mountain with his birdhouses and devote himself to helping those who were in a spot he’d once been in. Like Tony D’Angelo. If he could keep Tony from falling off the wagon, if that was the only thing Sam did with his life, he’d be happy.

That’s what he told himself.