Page 2 of The Bride
See, he even talked like a cowboy. Which was not how most guys in my class talked, but Jake wasn’t like most guys. Not even when he’d been in high school. My dad used to say Jake had an old soul.
“Okay.”
It was cold too. I was in a dress, my only nice one, and my legs were freaking blocks of ice because my nicest coat only barely covered my ass. Leggings versus Montana in January #leggingslose.
I held the rose out over the hole, careful to keep my feet on the green mat covering the ground, and opened my hand. The rose fell. I heard it hit the top of the coffin. I had this crazy idea that maybe I didn’t do it right. Maybe I should jump in, get it, crawl out and do it over again.
But Jake put his arm around my shoulders and started moving me back to where the line of cars was waiting outside the cemetery. He’d driven me in his truck. We weren’t fancy people who needed limousines to go to a burial.
Once I was inside, I buckled up and watched the line of people who were still dropping roses. There were a lot. That was good, I thought. It meant my dad was liked, and that was important.
Except I didn’t know why exactly.
“Are there a lot of people coming back do you think?” I asked.
I looked over at Jake and he just raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah. I guess so,” I answered myself. “We’ll have lots of casserole and stuff. Mrs. Petty will bring her Bundt cake. You love that cake.”
“Ellie…”
“I’m not crying. Why aren’t I crying?”
“You’re in shock still. It’s natural.”
“When are we going to talk about… you know. All of it.”
“Not today. I told Howard today was for family and friends. About saying goodbye to a good man.”
Howard was my dad’s lawyer. A friend too, and basically the only lawyer in town. He’d be the one to figure out how all of this got sorted out. The ranch, me.
Because here was the really bad thing. Beyond being an orphan, beyond being underage, what Jake said about family wasn’t really true. There wasn’t a lot. There was my mom’s crazy sister who lived in Florida, and I had only met her once at my mom’s funeral.
She’d sobbed and cried, and then I think she’d tried to hit on my dad because he’d gotten really mad at her and told her to leave and never come back.
My dad wasn’t Tom Cruise, but he had that kind of old-western cowboy look that I guess women were drawn to.
Since then, there had been nothing. Not a card, not a call. That was it. Both grandparents were deceased. My parents had met a little later in life. My mom was thirty-eight when she had me. My dad’s mom was the only grandparent I could even remember, but she had passed away before my mom did.
A lot of death. Right? I’m too young for so many to have died.
What Jake said gave me a little bit of an out. I didn’t have to be scared about what Howard was going to say today. I could worry about that tomorrow.
Ugh. Tomorrow. What a freaking orphan word.
No, I was going to try and smile, sadly of course, reassure everyone I was fine and eat some of Mrs. Petty’s cake.
“You know I’m here, right Ellie? I’m not going anywhere.”
Until someone said he had to go. Which would really suck for him. Jake had been part of this ranch for the last six years.
His dad and my dad had been friends growing up. Jake grew up on the property next to ours. The Talley River Ranch hadn’t been as large as our operation, but it was a nice chunk of property on really quality grazing land. Only Jake’s dad, Ernie, had been a drunk. A bad one. My dad had tried to support them both for as long as he could, but eventually the bank foreclosed.
After that, most folks said Ernest Talley drank himself to death.
My dad had given Jake a place to live and work. A chance to earn enough to someday buy back his family’s land. Right now we were leasing the property to extend our grazing area. But really my dad had been holding on to it until Jake was ready to buy it back.
Yeah, Jake was shaking in his boots as much as I was because we had both been reading up on things since Dad died three days ago.
