Rustic Hearts

Sophie

 

“What is this receipt for?”

I hold the sheet of paper up for Braxton to look at it. He carved out a small window for me this morning and is being way more amicable about the whole thing than he was last time.

“Semen.”

I turn it around and look at it again. “That’s what I thought it said. Why are we buying thirty thousand dollars’ worth of semen?”

“To inseminate the cows and heifers. You know, so they will birth calves, and we have a herd to sell every year to keep the ranch ru

He looks at me like I’m the crazy one.

“I thought bulls and cows did that … you know, the old-fashioned way.”

“We have a few bulls to catch the ones that don’t take to the artificial insemination, but it’s more cost-effective to heat-synchronize the cows and inseminate them all at once. That way, we can concentrate the breeding and calving seasons and have a strong herd to take to auction.”

“Can you not heat-sync the cows and still let the bulls do their thing and not pay all this money for semen?”

“We could, but we would have to purchase several more bulls. Those with good quality from a certified breeding line can be upward of five grand each. Then, you have the cost of feeding them and vet bills and hoping they don’t catch any infections or die. With the frozen semen, we know the quality and the breeding stock. We inseminate all the cows at once and get about a sixty to seventy percent impregnation rate. The cleanup bulls take care of the other thirty percent, and we can keep our employment costs down by hiring extra hands only when the calves arrive in the spring.”

“That makes sense.”

He grins. “I know. That’s why we do it.”

“I guess this goes under material goods?” I ask.

“What qualifies as a material good?”

“A tangible commodity. Something you can hold, touch, or taste.”

“I would say semen is definitely something you could touch or taste.”

His stare bores into me, and it feels like the temperature in the room shoots up about ten degrees.

“Are you flirting with me, Brax?”

“Depends. Does bull semen turn you on?”

“Ew, no.”

He laughs.

“Material goods. Got it,” I mumble.

He sits with me for another hour before his patience runs thin, so I let him off the hook, and we join everyone for lunch.

“I appreciate the help today,” I tell him as I pass the pasta salad.

“You’re welcome, Princess.”

I smile at him and reach for the plate of burgers as Daddy hands it in my direction. I catch the look he’s giving the two of us—a look that is skeptical and curious. Not that I can blame him. I’m thrown by our behavior too.

After we finish eating, Aunt Doreen drives me into town for the meeting with Mr. Stroupe, the branch manager at the local bank. She has to sign off for him to be able to share the ranch’s financial information with me. After which, she heads to Janelle’s salon for her appointment while we sit in the conference room and go over account statements and set up all the banking online.

“And these debits, what are they for?”

“About ten years ago, your Gram and Pop decided to give family members shares in the company instead of paying them as employees. Making everyone a shareholder or a part-owner of Rustic Peak. So, they are no longer paid a salary, and instead, they get a profit share percentage at the end of each season. If the ranch has a good year, the split is a sizable sum.” He gestures to the spreadsheet on his computer. “These are the debits for those payments from Rustic Peak’s main account, and these are the accounts they deposit into.”

He loads the accounts on the screen. Pop and Gram have a joint account, as do Daddy and Madeline. Doreen, Ria, Braxton, and Elowyn have individual accounts, and then there is another account under Gram’s name.

“Gram has two accounts?” I ask for clarification as I make notes.

“No, she had her name put on that one as a joint account, so she could make the deposits and move the money around if she ever needed to.”

“Who does the account belong to?” I ask as I begin to load the information into the system.

He looks at me in confusion. “Why, you, Sophia.”

“Excuse me, what?”

“You have been getting an equal share of the ranch’s profit since you turned eighteen. That’s the age that each grandchild was added. Being as you’ve never made a withdrawal, it’s a fairly sizable account at this point.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Didn’t you know that you were named a shareholder?”

“No, I had no idea.”

“This is your social security number, correct?”

He pulls up the account on his screen, and I verify all the information as mine. Then, I get a good look at the balance. Holy shit. There is enough to pay Stanhope back every single pe

We finish up the meeting, and by the end, we have all the ranch’s banking set up online and linked to the QuickBooks program. We have the utilities set up to auto-pay and all the payroll on automatic draft.

Aunt Doreen arrives to pick me up, and I thank Mr. Stroupe for all his help.

“It was my pleasure. I tried for years to talk Gram into letting me get this all done for her to make her life easier, and she wouldn’t hear of it. She didn’t place much trust in technology.”

On the ride back to Rustic Peak, I get lost in my thoughts.

“You all right, Sophie?” Aunt Doreen asks as we turn onto the old country road leading to home.

“Did you know that Gram has been putting money in an account in my name all these years?”

“She has?”

“Yes. A profit-sharing account.”

“I didn’t, but that makes perfect sense. You are a Lancaster.”

“But I’m not part of the ranch.”

“You’re a part of the family, Sophia. Her granddaughter. Do you think she ever forgot that?”

“I just … I didn’t expect it.”

“No one here ever stopped loving you or stopped waiting for you to come home, Sophie. Least of all Gram.”

Guilt and grief wash over me like a tidal wave. I could’ve come sooner. I could have picked up the phone and called or visited. I just assumed that everyone in Colorado had forgotten all about me and moved on to love the new family members, just like Daddy had. That wasn’t fair. So much wasted time all because I was scared to face him.

“I always intended to come see you guys one day. I thought about it a lot, especially when I was younger. Then, time slipped by, and I was in college. Life got busy, and the longer I waited, the harder it was to imagine just showing up here. The scarier it seemed. I would push it to the back of my Someday list. I ran out of somedays while I wasn’t looking.”

For the first time, I cry. Really cry. I let the sobs take over, and I cry for the girl who lost her grandmother—not just a few weeks ago, but a lifetime ago. I cry for wasted time.

Time is the most valuable thing any of us owns. We can’t hoard it or save it, can’t borrow it from another person, can’t buy it or even pray for more of it. You are allotted only so many days on this Earth, so many birthdays and Christmases. Some get ninety, and some get far less. Gram got seventy-four birthdays. Braxton and Elle’s momma got only thirty. Some get less than that. Yet time is the one thing we waste more of than anything else, and we never even notice. We always think we have more until we don’t. We are even so careless as to wish it away. Wishing for the weekend to hurry up and come or the workday to be over with or the winter months to pass. Never appreciating the moment we have right now and never stopping to truly live it.