Page 16 of Brett and Rowdy
“Some places, yeah. Believe it or not, the worst places are airports and stuff. Or big box stores. Places where they ought to know better.”
“Seriously?” Crystal sounded downright outraged. “They’re supposed to have all this training.”
“Yep. But I guess they have the most fakers too, right? I walk into a restaurant in Chama, they haven’t seen a couple hundred ill-behaved emotional support dogs. But in Walmart in Albuquerque, they have.” He’d had a couple of those crappy-owner dogs come after his over the years. Rowdy never blamed the dogs, just the assholes who let them be a problem.
“That’s not cool, man.”
“Your cousin doesn’t have a dog?” Rowdy asked.
“No, he uses a cane, but he’s better at distance than at close up, so he does okay.”
“Ah.” They all shut up then, digging in, and Ashley helped him out with butter and syrup on the waffle and butter on the grits. She was so used to it by now that they didn’t even discuss it, and he wondered what Brett’s face was saying that wasn’t coming out aloud. He’d have to ask Ash.
“So, Ashley, I bet you’re going to miss your girl.”
Ashley snorted at Crystal’s words. “I missed Madison when she was at the dorms because she didn’t want to live with me. I missed Madison when she got her own apartment. But I have to tell you, knowing that she’s going to be with her dad, where she’s wanted to be for her entire life? I sort of hate him.”
Rowdy chuckled softly, tickled to death. “She’s a cowgirl to the bone. She’s not meant to sell real estate, honey.”
“No she’s not, not even a little. You know, she’s never once wanted to do anything else but be a cowgirl on that ranch. Neverwanted to be a ballerina, never wanted to be an astronaut, never wanted to do anything else.”
Poor momma, losing her calf to the great wide world. “Well, it’s not like you can’t come see her whenever you want to. I think you’re always welcome.” He stopped and grinned. “You can stay on her side of the house.”
Because it wasn’t like they didn’t have ten thousand square feet of main house plus eight casitas. It was very rare that all the casitas were rented out.
“So what is she going to do out there in New Mexico?” Brett asked, like she was going to the damn moon.
“She’s got a lot of ideas, actually. We’re going to bring her in as a junior partner, let her do some planning. My father and I are co-owners, and we both agreed to give her ten percent of our ownership, so she would have a twenty percent stake. And for that, she’ll have to work her little butt off. Then, once my dad retires, we’ll renegotiate ownership, and when I retire, it’ll be hers. But she has a lot of thoughts about livestock management. We also run a bunch of outdoor excursions. We have elk tags. We have stocked ponds for fishermen, we’ve got a certain amount of mustangs that we run, and then there’s the beef. And there are some discussions about churro sheep. We’ve got a nice little herd, and she has some ideas about all that stuff. So we’re going to kind of—not let her have her head, per se—but let her implement some ideas, take some risks in a controlled situation so that she can figure out what works, what doesn’t, and get some real-life experience.”
He was proud of her and her ideas. And honestly, he and his dad had enough of a solid base to let her make some mistakes, take some risks, and be the cowboy she’d always wanted to be.
“You sound excited,” Crystal said.
And Brett added, “You sound like such a dad.”
“I am, thank you.” What else would he sound like? He was Madison’s daddy, all the way to the core. “And Madison is the neatest kid you’ll ever meet. Smart. Sure. Steady, stubborn as the day is long. The idea that I could get up and have coffee with her and not be thinking about when I was going to have to send her back home? It’s pretty damn appealing.”
“But I get her back when she’s forty-two, right?”
He snorted at Ash. “Shit, when she’s forty-two, we’re going to have grandbabies.”
And wasn’t that a wild thought? Grandbabies? Them.
“What does Dan think about all this?” Brett asked, and his voice sounded tight in Rowdy’s ears.
“I don’t know, Brett, what does Dan think about this? You two do have a beer every now and again.” Ashley chuckled. “He’s damn proud of her, and he’s gonna miss her, but he loves having the excuse to go out to New Mexico and go fishing. In fact, if I told him tomorrow that we were going to retire and move to New Mexico to fish? The house would be packed in ten point five seconds, no question, no comment. He’s just waiting for me to tell him that all he has to do is fish for the rest of his life.”
Like Ashley would be any happier in New Mexico than he would have been here. Ashley needed a certain amount of gentility and a lot more humidity than they had.
They finished their meals and Rowdy sat back, taking a deep breath. “Damn, that was good shit. I do love a good bowl of grits.”
“I bet they don’t do good grits out your way,” Brett said, and Rowdy shrugged.
“Rose makes them, but not very often.”
“Rose?” Brett sounded confused as fuck.
He nodded. “My housekeeper. She cooks for me, my dad. She’s a good lady. Her husband is a trail guide for me, and her kids do all sorts of odds and ends at the ranch.” It was a greatsituation for him because he could just—he trusted Rose and Javier with his life. It was hard not to blush, though. Because even Ashley didn’t have a full-time housekeeper. “Y’all ready to go get that beer?”
