Page 31 of Brett and Rowdy
“You know it; I was just going over old shit.” Woolgathering and making his belly acidy.
“I’m telling you, man, that’s not good for you. You get stuck in the past and then you forget to move forward.”
He didn’t feel bad, not even trying to control his expression. It wasn’t as if Rowdy could see it. “Uh-huh. How did you learn that?”
Rowdy shrugged, those lean shoulders rolling, showing off some of the scars he’d explored last night. “Well, I think part of it was my girl. But honestly, it was mostly my daddy. You know, as old as the land is, and with as much as we try to stick with the old ways, sometimes you gotta modernize, and sometimes you gotta take a gift that the good Lord gave you and run with it. Then you find out that it was for the good. Sometimes, the most amazing thing that you could have asked for in your whole life is handed to you. Sometimes, you just gotta make some changes, give up the old shit, and trust.”
He pondered that. Yeah, well, maybe folks did that in New Mexico. Where he was, they wallowed in their past shit and clung to their crazy…
He put Rowdy’s coffee down on the table. “Right at noon, man. How do you want to do breakfast? We can go out, or I can just make a scramble and some English muffins.”
“Well, unless you washed my clothes overnight, I probably ought to say breakfast in.”
Brett snorted. “Well, it’s not like you could see everyone stare.”
“Shut up.” But Rowdy grinned huge, didn’t he? Just boom. “I might need to borrow a shirt. I think mine was in the bed part of the night. My jeans made it, but…”
“Oh. Wow. Okay. Do you need to be back?”
Rowdy grimaced. “Yeah. I got about a million things to do with Ash and Madison, and Dan is flying back in today. But I got time.”
“Okay, cool.” Brett grabbed his good egg pan, then headed to the fridge to grab eggs and veg and the muffins. He would whip something up with a scramble and some cheese and—He thought he had pre-shredded hash browns. Yeah. So like what his mom had called “ranch hands” breakfast. With his homemade salsa.
“So what’s your favorite breakfast food?” Rowdy was tracing the scarred-up old table top with his fingers, just “seeing” it, he guessed.
“Of all time?” Shit, that was a challenge. He didn’t eat breakfast in the morning all that often, but he ate it all the time for supper and late in the night. “Probably pancakes and bacon, with grits as a close second. You?”
“Breakfast tacos.” Rowdy grinned, the expression wicked as hell. “I don’t care what’s in them—bacon, sausage, chicharron, heuvos, salsa, queso? I’m easy.”
“And you said you have a cook?” He couldn’t imagine. He just didn’t get it. “Do you just tell her—cook me eggs?”
Rowdy’s eyes went wide. “Rose? Dios mio, she’d kick my ass. No, no. She gives us a menu, and if there’s something I’m dying to eat, I ask her if she’d mind. Nicely.”
“Oh, I see.” He kinda didn’t, but that was okay. Maybe Rose was like a granny.
“Trust me, there are folks you treat like they are the angels that they are, and the person who runs the house and feeds you?” Rowdy took a deep swig of his coffee. “She’s on the top of the list.”
So definitely like a granny.
“I can see that.” He grabbed out the cheese and salsa, then started cracking eggs. “It’s just been me for a while.”
“Yeah. I reckon I can see that. Rose feeds a good many folks unless they’re out with the chuck wagon.”
“Wow. So she feeds all the hands and stuff.”
“Not everyone, no, but she does put on one big meal a day. The bunkhouse has its own kitchen, and some of the guys are a whiz with eggs and stuff.”
“Eggs, I can do.”
“You watch any cooking shows?”
Brett blinked as the subject shifted again. “Not too many, no.”
“Well, there’s all these chefs who say that eggs are the hardest thing to cook. ‘Egg cookery’,” Rowdy said in a snooty chef voice. “It’s the most precise and difficult thing.”
“So you watch cooking shows?”
“My dad does. With Madison. It’s a hoot. I read a lot while they do.”
