Page 29 of Lucky Cowboy

It nagged at him like a toothache.

Especially since he’d tried yet again to get away, but to no avail. Blair’s car had broken down across town right as he’d been getting ready to leave, and since their mom didn’t drive—she didn’t even have a license and never had—Mark felt duty-bound to go pick her up.

And yes, his sister apologized profusely once she’d realized the inconvenience she’d caused. Blair was aware of Mark and Val’s situation. But that didn’t undo it. By the time he’d brought his sister where she needed to go and spoken to the mechanic himself to make sure she received a fair deal like any good brother should, the opportunity had vanished. Disappeared like smoke.

It’d been a longshot anyway, but still.

He couldn’t be mad at Blair—and he wasn’t—but he could spit nails at how fate kept yanking his chain. Was it taunting him? Leading him with a carrot on a string that would be forever out of reach? Was that what Val would always be? Out of his reach?

It was beginning to appear that way.

This morning Mark had gone ahead and visited Fred’s skilled nursing facility since he found out he had a three-hour window before he’d have to turn around and go back. But as soon as he arrived, he discovered that while Val had been there at her homestead two hours previous, she’d since gone. Departed for one of her rodeos.

It came as such a huge blow that he didn’t plan to tell her today. Maybe not ever. Mark had intended it as a special surprise anyway and didn’t want her disappointed. He even swore her dad to secrecy. It would be no use for her to feel as letdown as Mark himself did.

“Mark,” Fred said, as his nurses watched him get into bed. He was doing it just fine on his own now, but the place required supervision. “You went to all this trouble. I feel terrible.”

Internally, Mark thought,Tell me about it.

He just couldn’t seem to win for losing. So, left with no other choice, he did a one-eighty and returned home. Once there Mark did his best to focus on the constituents of his town. He continued to make safety his priority. He came up with busywork projects so he couldn’t concentrate on what had happened.

Yet the following day Mark realized that he had literally now spent more time with Fred Bernard than he had his daughter. His acknowledgement of that made it difficult to get through the rest of his day. How could such a scenario work out for he and Val in the end?

Mark didn’t know that it could.

On their next phone conversation, he tried to contribute, but he was losing heart. He kept offering her these long, drawn-out silences to the point that she finally said, “Well, you sound tired. Guess we’d better hang up.”

So they did, and he doubted things would ever improve.

His mom invited him over for dinner, and though he didn’t want to go, he did so out of obligation.

“Honey,” she said as he picked at his food, his chin in his hand. “You look terrible. Won’t you tell us what’s wrong?”

Mark delayed answering. He’d been the man of the house for so long, and giving his family cause to worry about him wasn’t what he was supposed to do. But then, as he slumped there almost despondently at the kitchen table, his mom rested her hands on his shoulders. Blair even seized his forearm.

“This is about Val, isn’t it?” his sister ventured. “About how you’re not often together.”

“We’renevertogether,” he blurted, louder than intended, so loudly in fact that it made his throat hurt. That wasn’t the only thing that hurt, either. His chest, his stomach, his head. It all hurt. Any time he missed her. Which turned out to basically be all the time. “I guess…” He didn’t have any desire to say this, but it’d become too much. “I guess I should split up with her.”

His mom squeezed his shoulders. “Did I ever tell you what your father and I used to do when we were dating?”

“Gross, Mom,” Blair objected, and their mother smacked her on the hand.

“When we met, I was just a girl. A fifteen-year-old girl. And my family was extremely old-fashioned. They didn’t believe in their daughter leaving the house with a boy until the age of sixteen. At that point, that was nine months away, so Alec and I, we wrote letters.”

His mother disappeared, and after a moment, returned with a massive cardboard box. There was nothing about the outside that identified it as special, but she held it like she might something irreplaceable and precious. She opened the top and inside were dozens of letters separated into two batches and tied with ribbons. On them, Mark could detect—how was that even possible after all these years?

“Is that Dad’s aftershave?”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “He never changed it. Not ever.”

“Ooh, what’d he write?” Blair wanted to know, but Mark wasn’t so sure. Particularly not when his mom went so far as to slip one out as if to read it.Aloud.

How could that possibly be a good idea?

“Isn’t that private?” he asked. This felt like crossing a line somewhere.

“Yes,” his mom said, undaunted. “But they’re also quite innocent.” She proceeded to read about the passing fancies of a teenage girl from decades ago, discussing subjects like which songs were her favorite on the radio and which magazines she liked to buy. “In my day, magazines used to be made of glossy paper with pictures and perfume inserts rather than being online.”

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