Crazy Little Thing Called Love (13 page)

“Where is he?”

“What?” Arlene looked up after a long
minute.

“Where is he? Is he already out in the barn?
I’m not leaving without talking to him.”

“Oh, no… he uh, I think he’s still in bed
sweetheart.”

“Bed?” Confusion beat hard against her
frustration. Her father hadn’t slept past six am a single day of
his life. She looked at the clock on the microwave. It was after
eight. “What do you mean he’s still in bed?”

“He went to bed early last night. He wasn’t
feeling well so I’m sure he’s just sleeping in.”

“He didn’t feel well?” The tug of worry wiped
away all her other emotions.

“He was tired. That’s all.” Arlene waved as
if it wasn’t a big deal but she’d basically been raised by the
woman and she knew that look of concern.

“Arlene you have to tell me what’s going
on.”

“I’ll just go wake him. He’ll want to talk to
you before you leave.”

“Arlene!” She frowned as she watched the
older woman hurry from the room.

None of it made any sense. Her father went to
bed early and slept in late. Her father looked old and the town
thought he was sick. There was only one possible explanation but
she couldn’t even begin to wrap her head around what it meant.

Her father had never really been sick in her
entire life. She had vague memories of him having the flu when she
was about eight. Other than that, he’d always been well.

Nothing had ever slowed him down. Not a cold,
not that flu and not the time he got kicked by one of the bulls and
cracked his ribs. Whatever was going on this time had slowed him
down though and that scared her.

It scared her so much that she felt that urge
to get in her car and just go again. This time it had nothing to do
with wanting to avoid the man she’d let feel her up the night
before. This time it had everything to do with that scared little
girl she buried deep down that couldn’t stand the idea of watching
her father fade away.

“Blue? Bluebell!”

The sound of Arlene’s voice yelling her name
broke her out of her worry and sent a lead ball of fear straight to
her gut. She was on her feet and halfway across the kitchen when
Arlene came back into the room. The other woman ran straight into
her and they nearly knocked each other over. When she got a look at
Arlene’s face, the stark whiteness, the fear in her big eyes, the
tears that were already pooling over her lashes she knew. She knew
something was wrong.

“Call an ambulance Blue.”

“What?” She squeaked, not able to process
anything fast enough.

“Call an ambulance.”

“What?”

“I can’t get your daddy to wake up. Call an
ambulance.” Arlene held her shoulders and spoke straight into her
face.

“Oh God… Daddy.” She tried to step past her
but Arlene held tight.

“Call an ambulance.”

The next couple of hours were a rush of
activity that Blue couldn’t begin to sort through. Arlene was
crying. Ambulances wailed. Bobby showed up at some point and guided
her through the steps that got her to the hospital over in
Amarillo.

Very little of what she heard punctuated the
fog of confusion and grief. Words like cancer stuck in her head,
rattled around against shock and denial. The rush of information
was too much to take so she blocked out as much of it as she
could.

The doctors filled in all the blanks they
weren’t aware she had. They filled in the answers her father had
refused to give her. The answers he might have given if he’d woken
up and come downstairs to breakfast like he was supposed to.

Lyle Carter was dying. He had pancreatic
cancer, an advanced form that had already spread beyond the organ.
He’d stopped responding to treatment.

She heard the doctors question what
medications he’d been taking. She heard Arlene explain he took a
lortab prescription for the pain but nothing else. She listened
while Bobby explained the type of pain his employer and friend had
been experiencing in his abdomen and back. She listened as it
became obvious that everyone knew more about her father than she
did.

Just as she always did when confronted with
the adults that had helped raise her she felt like a useless child.
Bobby and Arlene knew every time she’d skipped curfew or got
detention. Even now, as an adult herself, she could feel their
superiority.

They’d stayed on the ranch. They’d stayed in
Fate. They’d stayed with her father and they’d known he was sick.
She on the other hand had left and she hadn’t been back in years.
Guilt heaved against the concern.

She should have been here. She should have
come home more often. She should have known even if he hadn’t told
her.

She was his daughter. She was the last of the
Montgomery’s, the last of the Carter’s. She was the heir to the
Montgomery Oaks Ranch and she should have been here.

She felt guilty that she’d stayed gone all
these years. She felt guilty that she’d let the distance between
them grow so wide. She felt guilty that deep down in that
traitorous dark part of herself she knew she’d never loved the
ranch enough, never wanted to be here enough to actually stay.

Even when she’d come home and seen how sick
her father looked her first instinct had been to run. Even when
she’d heard the gossip in town that he had been sick and she should
have been here her first instinct was to go. She didn’t want to be
here now and that was where her greatest guilt came from because
she knew this time she had to stay.

Her daddy was dying. She couldn’t think of
anything else. He was the only family she had so he had to be okay.
She reminded herself of that as she listened to the monitors beep
and watched his chest rise and fall in response. He was too strong
to die on her. He had to be.

He was still relatively young. He’d always
been healthy. He’d always been a survivor.

It was hard to believe in those truths when
she had to watch her father lie in that bed with tubes running out
of his body. Her heart squeezed tight and she shut her eyes and
pulled in a deep breath. Tears beat at the back of her eyes for the
hundredth time but not one fell. She told herself that he’d have
been proud of her for that.

“See Daddy, no crying. I’m sucking it up.”
She murmured.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d
cried. She was really good at pushing that urge down. She had years
of experience.

A nurse breezed into the room wearing sunny
yellow scrubs and a bright smile. Blue watched her hesitate, her
smile fading a couple of degrees. The woman moved over to check the
file at the end of the bed.

“Hi, I’m Sally.”

“Blue.”

“I’m sorry?” The woman’s head tilted
curiously.

“My name is Bluebell.” She hated her name for
the billionth time in her lifetime. “I’m his daughter.”

“That’s a pretty name.” She flipped through a
page on the files, “Your father’s vitals are improving.”

“What does that mean?”

“He may wake up soon. We’ll have to wait and
see but he appears to be coming around.”

“Good to hear. Thank you.”

“If you need anything, please just let me
know.”

“Thank you.”

She figured that was the polite answer. There
was no way to ask for a miracle and that’s all she needed. She
needed her father awake. She needed him healthy.

Her day that was supposed to be spent on the
road back to Denver was spent sitting in a hospital room where the
only noise was the constant beep of monitors. During the waiting
she called the newspaper and let them know she wouldn’t be back the
next day. When they asked about her return she gave them the only
answer she had. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone.

Bobby eventually went back to the ranch to
make sure things stayed on track. Arlene eventually stopped crying
and tried to apologize for not telling her sooner. She let them
both go and stayed by her father’s side like she should have years
ago.

She stayed by his side and she held herself
tight. She wrapped her arms around her middle and prayed if she
held tight enough the pain that felt like it was ripping her apart
would ease. She held herself together just like she had when she
was a little girl and there’d been nobody else to hold her when she
cried.

She could hear her father’s voice in her
head. It’d be easy to let go now, with him looking so frail in
front of her, when the only family she had left was dying and she
hadn’t even rated a phone call to let her know. It’d be easier to
let it out than to push it down but that wasn’t how she’d been
raised so she did what she always did.

She took a deep breath. She let it out. She
held her father’s hand and waited for him to come back so she could
be there for him like he’d never known how to be there for her.

It took a week. It took a week of sleeping in
a hotel room in Amarillo. It took a week of buying clothes at the
local mall and eating crappy hospital cafeteria food. It took a
week of calling the newspaper back and extending her stay. It took
a week for her to realize there wasn’t going to be a miracle and
she wasn’t going back to her real life anytime soon.

It had been a week of her father coming in
and out of consciousness and she still had no answers. Each time he
woke surlier and grumpier than the time before and in heart
wrenching pain. She tried to talk to him, to let him know she was
there but he simply stared at her for long periods of time and then
he turned away and faded back into sleep.

Arlene visited every other day, always
crying, always bringing some sort of food that Blue had yet to work
up an appetite to eat. She’d asked the older woman the same
questions and gotten only tears and apologies. Her father hadn’t
wanted her to know how bad it was and telling her shouldn’t have
fallen to the cook in his employ that just happened to have helped
raise her. She didn’t blame Arlene.

She blamed her father. She blamed him for
keeping her in the dark and not confiding in her. She could have
been there, should have been there and he’d taken that chance to be
with her father away. Now she might never have another chance to
make it right, to find some semblance of a real relationship with
him. But the more she wanted to blame the guiltier she felt.

“Daddy?” She walked into his room to find him
half-sitting, his dark eyes clearer than they’d been almost a week
and a half later.

“Son of a bitch that hurts.” He scowled at
the nurse.

“Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the
bed this morning.” Nurse Sally was back on duty and gave her a
reassuring smile.

Blue gave her a fake one in return and took
her seat next to her fathers’ bed. No need to inform Sally that was
simply the way Lyle Carter always woke. Surly by nature.

She listened to him curse some more and then,
once Sally had given up getting him to eat anything and retreated
she turned to him again. Calmly, she leaned forward and took his
big hand in hers. His hand had always been so much bigger than hers
and rough, calloused from decades of hard work. She squeezed
lightly and to her astonishment he returned the gesture before he
pulled away with a heavy harrumph.

“Daddy.”

“What?” He barked.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” It barely came out
as a whisper and she waited for the same glaze to settle over his
once lively eyes.

A long minute passed, “I was going to tell
you at breakfast. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before though? The
doctor told me you were diagnosed almost a year ago, that you took
treatments. They stopped working. You have cancer and you didn’t
even tell me.”

The tears worked their way into her voice but
she kept them back. She wouldn’t let him see her cry. She wouldn’t
let him break her so he could shut down but she had to watch him do
it anyway.

“What are you still doing here?”

“What?” She breathed deep.

“What are you doing here? You need to go
home.”

Her bottom lip trembled, “I am home
Daddy.”

He snorted and turned his head to face the
window. She hadn’t referred to Fate or the ranch as her home in a
very long time. Now, it was the only place she could think to be.
Maybe she had roots after all, except instead of being tied to the
land that her father adored, maybe they were simply tied to the man
himself. She steeled all of her resolve.

“I’m not leaving again Daddy. I’m going to be
here. We’re going to get through this together. We’re family. We
stick together.”

Silence was her only answer.

Almost two weeks after the confrontation with
Devin after Molly McBride’s wedding, Zach was sitting in a corner
booth at the Corner Diner, a clever name for the one place to get a
decent breakfast in all of Fate. Normally he wouldn’t be anywhere
near town at nine am but a promise was a promise so he sat drinking
coffee with his brothers and waiting for their meeting at the bank
to discuss a loan. He’d have rather a meteor struck down than go
through with it.

He’d only agreed to go along because he’d
dealt with the bank before. Years ago he’d gotten a loan for new
farm equipment. Despite Riley’s business degree he’d insisted his
older brother come along for the discussion of what they could get
out of First National. The three of them had always been a team so
they were going into this together despite Zach’s reservations
about buying the Montgomery land.

In anticipation of the meeting over farm
equipment he’d compiled bank statements, appraisal papers and
everything else he’d thought might help. He hadn’t done any of that
for this meeting. He’d promised Devin to look at buying the land,
that didn’t mean he had to go above and beyond. He wouldn’t do
anything to purposefully damage their chances though so there he
sat in his slacks and polo instead of on his land in his boots and
jeans.