Her Four Cowboys

I couldn’t help but think of the look on her face when she’d learned I’d dropped out of college. Maybe it was just that she’d seen me as a kindred spirit. Since I was the only one of my siblings to go to college, and she was the first one in her family to go; maybe it was that she’d seen that as something the two of us had in common.

Our dreams were too small for Rock Ledge to contain, and the fact that the same was just not the case with the other people that we knew. No one else could truly relate to what it was like to not having your needs met by living in the same town for your entire life, not gaining any further knowledge or experience of the world than what they could find in their own backyard. And what Lucy and I shared was a craving to see something beyond the simple understandings of the world that we’d been raised with.

The thoughts cheered me up as I continued to work on all the doors that I’d taken off their hinges, rehanging them and making sure that each of them hung perfectly on the stall hinges.

It hadn’t been an easy decision for me to back out of college and come back home, especially when I knew that my parents were never going to ask me to do so. But when I’d come home for Christmas that year, it had become abundantly clear what a burden it was to my parents. While I was studying in Boulder, my family needed me back at home.

It had taken a few conversations with my brothers—but particularly with Aaron, who had the gravity and understanding to ground me while I was trying to make the decision—before I was able to reach the conclusion that leaving school was the right choice.

I figured that school would always be there, if I felt the need to go back down the road and when it came time to do so, I’d actually have the life experience to balance my decisions more clearly. That way, if I needed to take out loans, all personal responsibilities and burdens would fall on my shoulders.

But now that I was faced by someone who had taken her dream and seen it through from beginning to end, I started to wonder whether I was underestimating my own abilities to shoulder those burdens back when I’d had the chance. There had been so many things working in my favor, and I’d known that at the time.

Thinking back to the way Lucy had looked that night, sitting at Spurs and that light that had seemed more like disappointment than anything else shining from her eyes, I couldn’t help wondering whether it was just the unacknowledged emotions of the last few years that were finally finding an outlet. After all, I couldn’t know for sure whether she was disappointed that I’d dropped out. The two of us hadn’t had a single one-on-one conversation in a decade. So, there was a very distinct probability that I was just projecting all of my own disappointments onto her.

Finishing the rest of the retrofitting, I left my wood-working tools on the table in the barn and packed the rest of the tools that I would need to see to the next task on my to-do list and headed out to the field. There was a tractor out there that my brothers had told me was having trouble starting.

Trekking out to the field, which was even more shockingly cold now than the ranch had been this morning, I dropped my toolbox on the ground next to the tractor and started up the winch that began to heave the old piece of equipment up, which would allow me to be able to get underneath it and look around. At the same time, I opened the hood and began to poke around at the engine, ensuring that I would be able to troubleshoot the problem a little bit easier.

A soft tongue clicking got my attention, and I turned to look at behind me at where Austin was seeing to a few of the horses that were milling around the field, carefully examining their ankles as he went from horse to horse, pulling up their fetlocks and making sure they were shod well.

I turned away from him, smiling to myself with amusement. I knew that he did feel some type of way about not having had the opportunity to go to veterinary school, and that he’d been feeling that type of way about Lucy ever since she’d been a scrawny little tomboy, coming around the ranch and dogging his every step, cheerfully proving him wrong about his diagnoses every second she could.

Turning back to the tractor, I started to get under it making sure that Adam hadn’t driven over anything that had gotten stuck in the workings. If it turned out that there was something that gummed up the engine, there was no chance I’d be able to fix anything else.