Page 57 of The Bride
The worst of him. That he’d been screwing me all along.
“We can still get divorced…” I said, and stopped when he put his hand on my knee.
“I’m not sure what’s worse. I stay here and we’re not married. I stay here and we are. But what I do know is I can’t leave you. Not now. You’re right, you can’t do this on your own, and now there is no money to bring someone on to help. Storms like this are once every twenty, thirty years. They happen, and ranching operations survive, but it’s going to take years, Ellie.”
I nodded. “You’re trapped. Wow. It’s like a fucking prison sentence. Sure, Jake. Marry me. Sixteen months. What’s the big deal…”
He squeezed my knee to stop me from speaking, but I couldn’t hold the words inside.
“You’ll hate me. When all this is done, you’ll resent and hate me.”
“I will not. Not ever.”
But he would. How could he not? I could feel tears happening and I swallowed a bunch of times to try to force them down. “The whole time I thought you were mad at me because… but really you’re mad that you’re stuck here.”
“I’m not mad about that, Ellie. I promise you. You are my family. You need help right now and so I’m not going anywhere. Hell, not that I have anywhere to go to. With what your father was going to give me I barely had enough money to put down on the land. I can’t buy the land, buy cattle, and build a house from scratch all at the same time.”
He was trying to make me feel better, but it wasn’t working. I felt like shit. Then I said the scary thing. The thing I had to consider.
“I can sell it. The operation, the land.”
Jake closed his eyes. As if what I had said was blasphemous. Worse than any curse I had ever shouted. Masons had been on this land for five generations.
Until it got to me.
“Ellie…”
“No, Jake. Don’t you see? It’s the only way. I can sell it and give you the money and then you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I won’t have to lift a calf, or cut fence line or any of it… You would be free.”
He looked at me then and I could see I had shocked him.
“You would do that? You would give up all of this, your legacy, your future… you would do that for me?”
I nodded. It was only fair.
He reached up with his finger and brushed my cheek. Like I was some odd fairy he discovered in the forest. But then he was shaking his head. “Ellie, you and I both know you come into some money when you’re twenty-one. That money is there for you so you can have choices. If all we have to do is wait another three years…”
“Three years! Jake, that is three more years of your life. You’ll be thirty!”
He smiled then and I wanted to hit his arm.
Instead he bumped his shoulder against mine. “Yes, I’ll be thirty, but I won’t be dead. You do this drastic thing now, you can never undo it. We wait three years and then you’ll have the money I need…”
“It’s not enough. If you’re going to give up another three years of your life, then you deserve more. You have to give that to me. You have to make this so it’s not all about me taking, but giving back to you too.”
“Okay. We’ll talk to Howard. We’ll work something out. Something that’s fair for both of us.”
We sat there then quietly as reality started to close in around me. I had started crushing on Jake hard, pretending I wasn’t because I knew he was going to be leaving soon. Jake knew I was crushing on him and was being gentle with me because he didn’t feel the same but didn’t want to hurt my feelings when he left.
Through it all we seemed to have had this light at the end of the tunnel. April twenty-second and it would be behind us.
Instead, it was three more years ahead of us.
“What are you mad about, then?” I asked him.
He turned his head to me. “What?”
“You said you weren’t mad about being stuck here, but you’re obviously upset about something.”
