“Hey, Bella, can you give Grandpa and me a minute?”
Bella squinted her eyes at me. “Okay. I’m going to check the horses.”
I placed my hand on the pinewood paling and tested its strength. I knew it would irk my father and cause him to look up.
“Don’t touch it, boy. I just set it in,” he said sternly without looking at my face.
He stopped and leaned on the wooden paling. I braced myself for the lecture of a lifetime. His worn face looked weary and full of worry. I noted the lines furrowed around his eyes.
“You know, I thought about what I would do if you had been shot in that barn. What it would be like for Bella to grow up with both her parents gone. And I cried and cried for my boy.” My father shook his head as he took out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. “I said that poor girl is going to grow up without her father. She’s going to be an orphan. I don’t know what you’re into, Colt,” he said as his eyes looked back at me, searching for an answer, “but you need to get out of it and stay out of it. You’ve got the ranch. You got yourself a nice girl. You got this place. You got your daughter. What more can a man ask for?”
I looked heavenward and breathed out a sigh. “It was self-defense. The guy was on my property, and I had to do something. The charges were dropped. I served my time, and there’s no way I want to go back to prison, Pop. I’m sorry I let you down. All I ever wanted to do was protect my family. To bring in a little more money.”
My father broke into tears as if he’d been holding it in. It pained me to see him this way. He clutched on to my shoulder with his thick working-man hands. “Son, never do that to me again. I don’t want to lose you. Come here, boy.”
A trickle of water fell from my eye as I hugged my father. I didn’t let him go for some time.
“I love you, too, Pop. I promise I’m here for the long haul. I won’t let anything happen to me. Just an unfortunate incident from the past.” I unlocked from his embrace and faced him in the sun.
“Son, if I saw that bastard, and he was here when I was, I would have shot him with my rifle and blown his head clean off. Don’t worry about his ankle.” My father spoke with a viciousness I’d only witnessed a time or two. I laughed and enjoyed the moment of bonding with him.
“It’s over, Pop. I don’t know about the nice girl part. Amber might not want to be with me after this.”
My father had resumed marking the palings, so he whipped out his measuring tape and lined up his wood. He pulled a black marker out of his top pocket and marked it. “Why wouldn’t she? Not like it was your fault that the guy was here.”
My father shot me a look, daring me to confirm his statement. A feeling of guilt deep down left me feeling like it was partly my fault. I had to make a call to Amber.
“No, it’s not. She’s a good girl. She’s a social worker.”
“No such thing as a good girl. Did I ever tell you about the time your mother got caught with a pound of weed back in the day? This was in the seventies…”
The dread which loomed earlier transformed into storytelling between father and son. I found it hard to concentrate on what my father was saying. Amber was rattling around in my brain, looking for a place to land.
“Pop, I have to handle a few things. I’ll be down in the barn, okay?”
My father trotted to the next paling. “Okay, son.”
His look told me he understood what I was about to do next. I strode to the barn and found Bella talking to the horses. My special girl was humming to the horses, keeping them company. I scuffled up the dry dirt from the ground, making it past the barn. I wanted privacy.
“Hello,” a soft, delicate voice answered the phone.
“Amber, hi. Baby, are you okay? I wanted to call you earlier, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want you to be implicated.”
“I get it.” She sounded fed up and weary.
“No charges were filed against me. Not one. Hosea is in lock-up.”
Amber coughed uncomfortably. “We seem to cause one another nothing but pain, don’t we?”
Fear is not an emotion I had to wrangle with often, but it was rising to the precipice now.
“We have love, Amber, and there’s no way I want to live this dream out without you. I need you in my life.” I let out my heartfelt plea to her.
“I don’t know. This is a lot to deal with. I need some time to think, Colt. Can you give me some time?”
Devastated, I ran one hand through my hair and fought back the tears on the dirt trail path.
“Sure, Amber. Whatever you need.”
Twenty-Eight
Amber
Hopelessly in love is not something I ever thought I would call myself. I did a lot for my community with my social work. I wanted the prison systems to be better. I wanted foster children to feel safe in the homes they were sent to. I wanted perpetrators to be sent to jail if they harmed them. I wanted domestic violence to stop. I fought for justice in a lot of different areas of my life, but never for myself. My relationship with Colt felt like an injustice. Like we would never make it.
I wrestled with myself as I sat on my porch, watching the sun go down. I recognized the guilt I had in my heart from putting him in the situation with Hector. If it wasn’t for me asking for his help, that guy wouldn’t have been in his barn. He was from that night that they wouldn’t tell me about. I put two and two together. I was good at doing that.
I sat silently, listening to the world at dusk, wiping my tears. Could we have a life together? Thing is, I loved Bella. She’d called me after Colt’s arrest. I flashed back to the call.
“Hi, Ms. Atwood. I wanted to ask if you would come to dinner soon? I haven’t seen you. I miss you.”
I gulped down silent tears on the phone. “I’m really busy, but I will try to come and see you really soon. How about that? We can go out for ice cream.”
“Yay!”
“Bella?”
“Yes, Ms. Atwood?”
“Don’t call me that. Call me Amber. We’re friends now.”
She repeated it back to me. “We’re friends now. Okay. I understand,” she said in that sweet little voice of hers. “Amber, can I ask you something?”
I sniffed on the other end of the line. “Yes, honey, what is it?”
“Are you sad about something? You sound like you’ve been crying.”
The set off the motion of another set of tears that I had to fight back. I had to get off the phone. “No, no, no,” I lied. “I just have bad allergies. I do have to go, but I will see you soon, darling.”
“I hope you come back real soon. Daddy is sad without you here.”
“Bye, Bella.”
I’d cried for hours after that. What the hell was I supposed to do? The wind picked up, causing me to shiver, shifting my hair over my face. I turned upward to the sky. It looked like a storm was brewing. Funny how California weather could just turn like that. My placemats started to fly off the little ramshackle table I had out front, and the wind began to howl. I wrapped my sweater around me, trying to keep warm.
“Dammit!” I ran after the flimsy cloth placemat into my driveway. I squatted to pick it up. My eyes landed on a pair of tan, detailed cowboy boots. They were attached to thick, toned, muscular legs, most likely from hard work over the years on the farm. I peered up. Colt. He put his boot over the placemat to stop it from flying away.