LITMIR.BIZ

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I don’t want you to bother Mr. Joel while he’s working.”

      The boys’ faces fell.

      “Aw, Mom.” Wes put his fork down and frowned. He made it sound as if she’d just stomped on his dream.

      Todd stared down at his plate, too, his posture only emphasizing how much the boys wanted Joel Kaye to teach them how to throw a lariat.

      “I promise I’ll check with Mr. Waters to see if he’ll teach you how to throw.” Her words went over like lead weights on a rubber raft.

      “May I be excused?” Wes asked.

      “Me, too,” Todd added.

      She felt lower than a snake’s belly, stomping their hopes. She nodded and the boys slipped away from the table. Cora frowned, reaching for her brothers. April pulled Cora from her booster seat, wiped her hands and mouth, then set her on her feet. She hurried after her brothers.

      “Good job, April,” she murmured to herself. “No one’s happy.” And that included her.

      * * *

      April poured herself a large iced tea and wandered out onto the back porch. An hour and a half ago, she’d put three subdued children to bed, and those sad little faces had nearly brought her to her knees.

      Scanning the bare fields behind the house, April felt a ray of hope and a huge helping of pride.

      When Joel had told her the boys hired him, it’d taken her a moment to understand what he was saying. That her boys understood she needed help and wanted to provide it made her chest puff out with pride. It also disheartened her that they knew the ranch was in trouble.

      With the death of her husband and in-laws over the past three years, she was now the only adult left on this ranch. Her neighbors had helped for a couple of months after Vernon’s death, but they had their own ranches to care for. Lately, several of the ranchers at church had offered to rent her fields to plant their own cash crops.

      She’d toyed with the idea, but it felt as though she’d be giving up on the ranch, on her dreams. She loved this place and had never thought that she’d be in this position.

      Her father’s job as a rig manager for a major oil company had kept them on the move throughout her life. She’d lived on several continents and in some exotic places, but none had felt like home until they moved to this place in the Texas Panhandle. When her father had been transferred to Lubbock her junior year in high school, she’d found her heart’s desire on the Llano Estacado and the Caprock.

      Added to the feeling of coming home, the first day in English class she’d met Ross Landers. He’d smiled at her and she’d been smitten. Ross had introduced her to all his friends, but it was when he brought her home to this ranch that she knew she was in love.

      A home.

      Roots.

      And something that lasted. The Landers family had ranched this piece of land since the 1880s. Over five generations, through good times and bad, through times of plenty and drought, the family had persevered. That legacy flooded her with purpose and direction. She could do this. Needed to do this.

      April and Ross had married a week after graduating from high school and he’d immediately gone to work on a rig out in West Texas, which had surprised her, since Ross had never mentioned he didn’t want to stay on the ranch. He visited home often while she was pregnant with Wes but missed the baby’s birth. Two years later, when she got pregnant with Todd, Ross immediately got one of the treasured jobs as a roughneck on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico that her father oversaw. His excuse for taking that job had been that the extra money he’d receive would help with the expenses of the new baby.

      Ross never came back for any length of time after he left. He made it home sporadically for the next four years. When his mother, Grace, was diagnosed with breast cancer, Ross came home that Christmas. That gave April hope that he’d changed, but she quickly learned that wasn’t the case. Ross refused to take his mom to any of her chemo sessions. He did promise to attend Wes’s first-grade Christmas pageant, but he didn’t show. Instead he got drunk with other oil field workers from West Texas. With Todd, Ross would either throw the four-year-old around as if he was a rag doll, hold him upside down by his feet or ignore him, which confused the boy.

      When Ross took the assignment on a new rig in the Gulf, Vernon, Grace and April all breathed a sigh of relief that his disruptive presence was gone. Six weeks later Ross died in a freak accident. After they buried him, April discovered she was pregnant with Cora. The money she’d received from Ross’s life insurance, which her in-laws insisted she save and use for her babies, was now almost gone.

      Her father-in-law had had to borrow against the ranch to help finish paying for Grace’s care and meds in the last months of her life. She’d died a year ago Christmas. Vernon died the following September. Now April had to come up with a plan to pay off the loan or lose the ranch. Would the money she made on the sunflowers and hay be enough? Did she need to rent out the other fields on the ranch?

      She turned her eyes to the fallow field. Would she survive?

      “Lord, I know You have the answers to this problem, but—”

      “Mom, what are you doing out here?”

      She looked up and saw Todd standing by the back door in his superhero pajamas, his feet bare.

      “Thinking. Praying.”

      “Are you mad we hired Mr. Joel? He can do Mr. Moore’s job since he got hurt.”

      “No, I’m not mad. I’m proud of you and your brother for thinking about the ranch. Opa would be pleased, too.” Her solution to the problem wouldn’t have been to hire Joel, but she couldn’t ignore her sons’ solution. It still amazed her that Joel agreed to the deal for a dollar thirty-seven. Why’d he do it?

      A grin curved Todd’s mouth. “I’ll help Mr. Joel. So will Wes.”

      “I know you will.”

      “But I’m kinda worried about Sadie and Helo. Are they scared being in a new place?”

      “You’ll have to ask Mr. Joel tomorrow how they’re doing. He’ll know.”

      Todd thought about it, nodded and tore down the hall to his bedroom.

      Watching her younger son disappear into his room, she knew her boys would keep her on her toes with creative thinking all through school. Teenage years promised to be...a challenge.

      She retrieved her tea off the porch rail. Wouldn’t Vernon and Grace be proud of their grandsons? She knew they would.

      Would their father?

      * * *

      Joel lingered over his coffee, the empty plate that had held his barbecue sitting before him. Working with Jack Murphy doing whatever needed to be done around the rodeo helped defray his expenses on the road and kept him busy. What had he done when he was eighteen, traveling with the rodeo, and had the day off? Shoot the breeze with the other young cowboys or brag about his latest score in the different rodeo events? Of course, things hadn’t changed since he was eighteen. Cowboys still bragged about how good they were and how they would capture the ultimate prize of the championship belt buckle given to the number one cowboy in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, or PRCA.

      “You need a refill on that coffee?” Hank Calder asked. Hank ran the concessions for the rodeo. He also cooked for the rodeo workers. If any cowboy wanted a meal, they could buy it. Of course, meals were included with the deal Joel had struck with Jack and his boss, Steve Carter.

      “Sure.”

      Hank topped off the coffee and sat opposite Joel at the picnic table.

      “So, how’s it going? You enjoying this vagabond life?” Hank grinned. The instant Joel joined the rodeo, he and Hank had struck up a friendship.

      “I was just thinking about that. When you’re young and green,

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