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I fill my mouth with food to keep from having to respond.
“Now, I get that you were just a kid. And we lost your daddy around that same time, so maybe you were going through something. But why all the lies, Wyatt? Lord knows I raised you better than that.”
I wash my bite down with a cold gulp of tea and clear my throat. “What’s done is done. It’s in the past. It’d be in everyone’s best interest to let it go and move on.”
“What, like you have?” she snickers. “You haven’t so much as looked at another woman since the two of you broke up. Is this about … do you not like … are you into men, Wyatt? Because if you are, it’s okay.”
Mama snakes her hand across the table, weaving between glasses and cutlery, and places her palm over mine.
I jerk it back. “No, Mama. I’m not into men.”
“All I know is that girl loved you. I mean, really loved you. With all your faults and everything. I have half a mind to think she still does.”
“Well, she shouldn’t.”
“And why the heck not? You’re both grown now. She ran off and got her education and because of you this farm is more profitable than it was the whole twenty years your daddy ran it. Maybe it’s time you went off and got yourself your own plot of land, start your own operation. Been thinking maybe it’s time to sell … finally retire.”
My jaw flexes. “You really think Abbott will let you sell it?”
“Why wouldn’t he? We haven’t missed a single payment.”
“Yeah, but Mama, you weren’t buying the property back from him—you were leasing it. He owns this place. Every tractor, every acre, every last head of cattle. If you want to sell it, you’ll have to buy it back from him first.”
“And why wouldn’t he sell it back to me?” Her brows lift and her tone is matter of fact. “We’re old friends. He wouldn’t screw me over like that, not after everything.”
He would do it in a heartbeat, but I can’t tell her that.
In Oliver’s eyes, his hold over this ranch is the one thing keeping me away from his daughter.
“Anyway, back to Blaire.” Mama swats a fly away from her plate. “Maybe you should reach out to her, try to patch things up. She’s not going to be here much longer, and who knows when she’s coming back.”
“That ship has sailed, Mama,” I say. “Besides, I don’t have anything to offer her. She’d be a fool to stick around this place for me.”
With her head cocked, she gives me a death look. “Now you listen here, Wyatt Dean, that girl has never wanted anything from you except you. You were enough for her. You and only you. You always were.”
A few minutes later, I finish my sandwich and haul my dishes to the sink where Mama’s filling the basin with soap and warm water. A quick glance down and I spot the white, semi-circle shaped scar on her left hand from the night Daddy placed it on a hot stove burner.
He’d worked a long day in the field, slammed a six-pack while waiting for supper, and somehow or another, Mama accidentally burned the chicken and vegetables she’d been planning to serve.
I’ll never forget the screaming pleas that came from the kitchen. It wasn’t their ordinary fighting—it was one of sheer horror. For as long as I could remember, they would get in their little fights and he would occasionally knock her around when he’d had far too much to drink. He was careful never to do it in front of us though, and Mama was an old pro at covering her marks with various shades of heavy corrective makeup.
Still, I knew.
I always knew.
But that particular day, I caught him with his fist around her delicate wrist, pressing it down against a red-hot metal burner.
Mama released a blood-curdling scream and I body-checked my father, shoving him into the wall so hard it left a body-shaped outline in the plaster.
“You touch her again, I’ll kill you,” I told him, hovering over his drunken sorry ass. He wiped the spittle from the corner of his mouth and glared at me with nothing but pure hatred in his eyes.
“I’d like to see you try, boy.” He hobbled up, laughing at the entire thing as my mother still sobbed in the background, her hand running under a stream of cold faucet water. After that, he grabbed his keys, got in his truck, and left—presumably to get some food in town.
“I think we should take you into town,” I told Mama. “It looks pretty bad.”
She sniffed and wiped her tears on the back of her non-injured hand. “There’s nothing they can do for it that I can’t do for myself. Go in the bathroom and grab me some of that burn salve and some gauze pads, will you?”
