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Hugh Senior moved in for a longer and deeper kiss with his wife.
She slid her hands around his waist, and he put his arms around her, too.
When she felt the effect of it in his body, she murmured, “No wonder you’re so cranky.” A
He didn’t get a chance to answer because Bobby, their youngest, wandered in at that moment, looking for breakfast. “Stop that,” he commanded his parents, with a look of exaggerated distaste for their show of affection. Then he raised his hands in self-defense and said to his dad, “Don’t yell at me like you’ve been yelling at everybody else, okay? I’m just here for bacon, and I can fix it myself.”
“You’d better fix it yourself,” his father snapped back at him as he and A
“Hugh,” A
He muttered, “Worthless,” as he grabbed a towel to dry his hands. Then he strode out of the room, brushing roughly against Bobby’s shoulder, causing the eighteen-year-old to exclaim, sarcastically, “Excuse me, Dad!”
A
“What’s eating him?” Bobby asked her.
“I don’t know,” she said, although she hoped she did.
She hoped Hugh’s foul mood was due to Billy Crosby, or to nothing more serious than too long between times with her in bed. She prayed that it didn’t have anything to do with the thing that had her worried, the thing she had not confided in him and, with any luck, would never need to say.
A few minutes later she sat down across from her youngest as he forked fried eggs into his mouth.
“Bobby, will you at least think about applying to Emporia State?”
When mother and son sat across from each other at the kitchen table at High Rock Ranch, arguing about college, it was seven-fifteen in the morning. They were less than twenty-four hours away from tragedy, and what their family didn’t know had already begun to hurt them.
5
AFTER EVERYBODY in her family finally left the house, A
She wanted to combine responsibility with pleasure.
On her way out to saddle up her chestnut horse-named Dallas for the city of her birth-A
It was late for a morning ride; the day was already heating up.
But she felt a pressing need to escape from the argumentative air in her home that day. Plus, she had things to think over, including her husband’s foul mood. Hugh Senior rarely wavered in his tenderness toward her, but overall A
It scared her sometimes, that increasing hardness.
Seeing people encounter it in him was like watching them race headlong into a steel wall and get bounced back violently. From the new distance they rubbed their noses and stared as if seeing him anew. When they attempted to get close again, they encountered a hostile formality in him that kept them at more than arm’s length. Permanently. If the ranch manager in Colorado, for instance, was stealing from them-even if only dimes-he would rebound off that steel in Hugh so hard he’d land in another state, where he’d be job hunting.
She hoped it wasn’t so.
The irony, to A
When Belle got shoved down, she tended to stay down.
The change in Hugh Senior didn’t scare A
Once atop Dallas, she pointed the horse down a rut in the dirt, in the direction she wanted to go, draped the reins over his withers and let him have his head while she peeled and ate her banana.
The grass under his hooves looked worse than dormant, it looked dead.
They hadn’t had precipitation since May. Instead of depending on grass to feed the cattle, the ranch was being forced to truck in hay to some of the herds, as if it were already winter.
It was the kind of weather that her husband called expensive.
The morning had a smell of toasted vegetation, even though no sane rancher would have set a match to burn pastures in these conditions. A further fire hazard loomed out west: the threat of lightning in thunderclouds. At this point a storm would be a mixed blessing, welcome for rain, as long as there wasn’t too much of it at one time, and unwelcome for the lightning that accompanied it.
They reached a gate and she slid down off Dallas to open it, coax him through, and then refasten the gate and remount him.
She was looking for a particular group of cattle-the pregnant mamas the men had weaned from their most recent calves yesterday. Now that she was in their pasture, she was surprised not to hear any bawling from the mothers or from the calves that had been separated from them. Usually she’d have expected to find all the calves lined up on one side of a fence, crying for their moms, and the cows bunched on the other side, mooing back at their six-month-old babies.
But the pasture was silent this morning.
It was quiet enough to hear a whip-poor-will and to hear Dallas crunch small rocks under his metal shoes, still enough to hear the buzz of a small plane overhead in the distance and catch the honk of a truck horn on the highway.