Redeeming the Rancher (Meier Ranch Brothers 2)

“You what? Wouldn’ta honored their memory?” Willie said. “It’s a fine thing you did.”

Be nice to see this spot replaced with something positive. Something that resembles the future.

He took more time with the sculpture. Art was, after all, deeply personal. Livie knew Willie’s interpretation would not be hers. She couldn’t possibly know his pain. On some level, she hoped it was provocative enough to transcend her message of patriotism and tolerance and the caring that was so important to Wes.

After a time, she stood beside Willie and brought her arm around his shoulders. “It’s a fine thing we did. The base you made is impeccable. Thank you. For everything.”

“Wes is stayin’ at the auto repair shop out on the highway, south of town,” said Willie.

Livie kissed the old man’s cheek.

* * *

Hammering out dents in an eighty-year-old truck was therapeutic. Until it wasn’t.

At some point, imperfections become a memory and all you’re left with are distant reminders of the way it used to be and the realization that restoring the blemishes of a human life in the way a mallet and dolly restore steel can never happen. Will never happen. And that maybe, just maybe, the blemishes were what drew you in all along.

Wes stood before Clem’s fully-restored 1939 Ford V8 farm truck: computer-matched Bright Coach Maroon beneath a finish as striking as a newly-minted penny; custom-stitched, hand-dyed caramel-colored calfskin seats; chestnut-stained boards running the length of the bed that warmed the back profile enough to make the ficklest homebody consider roaming the country and sleeping out under the stars.

He knew; he was one of them.

Pride didn’t begin to cover his satisfaction with the hard work he had put into restoring Clem’s first set of wheels, bought when his boots landed stateside after World War II. The feeling was second only to standing beside his brothers in arms, to fight, and his brothers on the ranch, to keep the place thriving and viable. Wes’s only regret was that he hadn’t seen the rust spots and scars for what they represented before he erased them. The goal should never have been to go back. The notion was absurd, really. The goal, all along, should have been to look back on a truck well-used and well-loved. Part of him wanted to unscrew the shiny chrome bumper and replace it with a plank of raw wood, maybe write fuck the bumper on it. But that was probably just his isolation talking.

His friend, who specialized in body work and paint, had long since gone. He left Wes the keys to the place, his family’s auto shop that had fallen into disrepair after his old man ran a hose from the tailpipe into the closed interior of his Challenger where he sat with a note some five years ago. Somewhere along the way, his father had served with honor—Navy in the Pacific theater. In the quiet nights since the truck’s shell was complete, Wes felt the weight of the father’s terminal diagnosis, hell-bent on going out on his terms, and wished the legacy of Lezario’s Collision and Repair could have been more than a headline in the Close Caller-Times and a faded for-sale sign fallen down beside the highway.

Wes had just finished polishing the headlamp glass when he realized he wasn’t alone. Silhouetted against the morning light, the visitor wore a dark-colored duster that lifted on the breeze. It took his mind one breath to realize it was Olive. His heart turned over in his chest in a fraction of that time.

He straightened, shoved the rag in his back pocket. There were no barriers here to hide behind. His restless legs didn’t know where to stand, how to be, but every other part of him knew with absolute certainty that simply standing beside her, being in her gravity, had brought out his best.

And worst.

“Hey,” she said.

The simplicity of the word when there was so much left to be said—namely I’m sorry—underwhelmed him. She carried something in her hand he couldn’t make out.

“Who told you I was here?” he asked.

“Willie.”

Wes nodded. “Guy could talk a door off its hinges.”

“Why didn’t you tell me Augusta and Mildred were his girls?”

His thoughts raced, tried to grab a handhold. What did Willie’s girls have to do with her being there? “Never came up, I guess. Some things are best left in the past.”

“And some things are best replaced with something positive. Something that resembles the future.”

He hated it when people threw his own words back in his face. Context was different. Everything about life when he’d said that had been different. He was different.

“Why are you here?” Wes placed added importance on buffing out smudges on the headlamp casing, hoping his dismissive tone hid the hitch in his voice and his absolute conviction that if she came to him, right now, he would fold like lawn chair, make love to her on the chestnut-stained boards then suggest they take the Ford to Maryland, follow the same route Clem traveled all those years back. Worked out for him, for the family in general, since future generations had depended on Clem’s ability to seal the deal with Wes’s grandmother.

“I’m leaving today. Movers just left with the pieces. The rest has to happen at a foundry—the wax chasing, the casting and pouring. Then there’s the break-out and sandblasting of the bronze…”

She caught herself, going on about things he didn’t know in order to avoid the honesty they had promised each other. Even in goodbye, that promise was less substantial than her precious clay.

“I wanted to give you these.” Olive stepped forward, into the garage’s shadows, and placed a small bundle of papers on the truck bed. In truth, it was the only flat surface in the whole place, but that real estate represented so much more to him, to his memories, to his fantasies of a future with her that would never come.

She didn’t believe in happiness; his ambitions would go the way of Lezario if he didn’t chase happiness every moment.