LITMIR.BIZ

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that evening as she stood on the porch watching the stars come out. Jethro had taken the girls inside to read them one of his cowboy stories—Jethro had written down stories for as long as Gabe could remember, and was taking full advantage of his tiny new audience. The quiet of the falling dusk was as thick as a blanket after the commotion of moving-in day. Gabe felt like he could exhale for the first time since that wild meeting on Roz’s porch.

      “Who?” Gabe replied. He had a notion who she meant, since she’d just refused a tour of the ranch—her grandfather’s home—but felt he ought to ask anyway.

      “Grandpa Cyrus. Well, Cyrus Culpepper to all of you. Even before I knew who he was, I hated him.”

      Between the imposter Avery and the real Avery, Gabe was having trouble keeping his Cyrus stories straight. “I thought you never knew Cyrus.” Of course, Gabe knew knowing didn’t really come into a situation like this—he, of all people, knew how easy it was to hate someone you’d barely known. In fact, it was almost easier to hate the idea of someone than to hate an actual person. He resented his own grandfather deeply for abandoning him at a young age; it wasn’t hard to believe Avery felt the same.

      “Daddy would always say that if things went bad, Grandpa would come and save us. ‘Grandpa will do this’ and ‘Grandpa will do that.’” She turned to look at Gabe, pain filling her eyes. “I know I was only six, but I remember the promises. And I waited. After Daddy died, I waited in one foster home after another. Only Grandpa never came. Never. That man never did a single thing to help me.” Her words were sharp and bitter.

      “You’re sure? I mean, he could have been trying.” Gabe remembered harboring the silly hope that somehow his own grandfather had tried valiantly to get in touch with Mom. He made up all kinds of reasons how their many moves had stumped Grandpa Theo’s efforts. After a while, the hard truth of his abandonment won out over the optimism of such stories. Gabe knew what a hollow space that left.

      Avery turned to look at him. “That’d make a nice story, wouldn’t it? Only no. The foster service tried multiple times to find him and reach him. They had contact information for him. No one ever answered.” She hugged herself, shoulders bunching up. A sore point to be sure, and who could blame her?

      “That must have been hard,” Gabe offered.

      She didn’t answer, simply nodded.

      “I’m sorry,” he tried again, even though it felt intrusive and inadequate. Gabe was all too familiar with how rejection brewed a slow, sour kind of pain, one that was deep and hard to shake. “I think maybe Cyrus regretted it in the end, if that helps.”

      She gave a lifeless laugh. “It doesn’t.”

      Gabe walked over beside her, putting one boot up on the lower rung of the porch rail. It made him think of the chorus of “Mr. Boots!” he’d heard all afternoon, and he felt the surprise of a smile curl up the corners of his mouth. “It’s why the boys ranch is so important, you know.”

      “The bumper crop of lousy parents in the world?”

      It was becoming clear that Avery Culpepper rarely minced words. In that way, she was a lot like her grandfather—not that he’d be foolish enough to point that out at the moment. “Sure, some parents are lousy,” Gabe replied. “Some are just gone. And some just plain don’t have it in them. More helpless than mean.”

      “No one has the right to abandon a child. I’d bleed to the last drop before I’d walk away from my girls.” She didn’t say “like their father did,” but Gabe felt it hang in the air just the same.

      “That’s the way it should be. Only it doesn’t always happen that way, does it? The kids at the ranch did nothing wrong—well, some of them have acted out in bad ways, but you know what I mean. They didn’t set their lives up badly, but things haven’t worked out for them just the same. And that’s not fair.”

      “I suppose not. I never felt much of life was fair, to tell you the truth.”

      “It isn’t. That’s what keeps me working for the boys ranch. Every boy we house and counsel is one less man who grows up hauling a ball of hate around.” Even as he spoke the words, Gabe wondered if he really believed them. After all, he’d been a resident at the ranch some twenty-odd years ago, and the ball of hate was still following him around like a lead shadow.

      Avery leaned up against the thick porch column, her arms still wrapped around her chest. “I didn’t ask to be the only thing saving the Culpepper land from becoming a strip mall. I can’t say for certain that I can stay all the way until the twentieth.”

      “I understand you need to do what’s best for you and your girls. But that doesn’t change how much we need your cooperation. Think about it this way—if you’d had a girls ranch to go to instead of that long string of foster homes, would things have turned out differently for you?”

      She didn’t reply, which told Gabe he’d perhaps made his point, so he went on. “The boys ranch is a good thing. It’s worth expanding.” Gabe planted his hands on top of the porch rail and looked out in the direction where the ranch lay beyond a line of trees. If he could just get her there, even once, it would help to convince her.

      “And while I wish old Cyrus would have been nice enough to help that without all these hijinks, I’ve got to take his help the way it came.”

      Avery’s dark laugh returned. “‘Hijinks.’ That’s one way to put it.” She ran one hand through the neat fringe of brown hair that framed her round face. “You know, those messages and emails from Darcy Hill just about knocked me over. I didn’t know what to think. It’s a crazy scheme, even you have to admit that. I only decided to come on the hopes I’d get some answers. Or maybe I came half out of curiosity. Or amusement.” She paused for a long moment, then added, “I didn’t count on it hurting so much, you know?”

      Gabe shifted his gaze to her, startled by the admission. “How so?”

      “To walk around here and see this picture postcard of a little town. To know I could have been here rather than those dumps of foster homes if only he’d...” Her words fell off and she turned away. “Like I said, I know it’s not very Christian of me, but I hate him.”

      Up until this moment, Gabe hadn’t been able to fathom what would allow Avery to walk away from a possible inheritance. Here he’d thought it was just the frustration of living under Roz Sackett’s glare, that getting her here would solve everything and be worth the chaos he’d just launched upon his household.

      That wasn’t the half of it. What was eating Avery Culpepper was so much more than just squirrelly twins. Cyrus Culpepper cast a long, cold shadow here in Haven, and he couldn’t blame her for not wanting to spend any time in it. Neither her nor her girls. It was, as Pastor Walsh would put it, “a God-sized problem” of history and pain.

      History and pain. The world was flooded with it. He’d lived it, she’d lived it. The boys ranch fought against it, one young life at a time. How do I solve this, Lord? How can I override twenty years of a dead man’s neglect? I’ve got to find a way. Gabe pleaded to the heaven he’d once imagined hid behind the veil of stars. Somehow he’d have to convince this woman to set aside the mountain of pride and pain she clearly carried while trying to make his own grandfather appear out of thin air.

      A God-sized problem indeed.

      * * *

      Avery groped her way toward the kitchen coffeemaker Wednesday morning, every bone aching from lack of sleep. How had the girls managed to be so sleepless and fidgety well into the wee hours after such an eventful day?

      “Oh, dear,” said Marlene as she stood slicing bread at the counter. “You don’t look like you’ve slept a wink.”

      “I think it was three...four, maybe, by the time the both of them finally nodded off for good.” Avery didn’t even have the energy to stifle her yawn. “I thought they’d be exhausted. I sure am.”

      Marlene looked crestfallen. “They

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