talking to him,” Kate said gently, still making excuses for him, as she always did. She rarely criticized their father.
“He only came around if it suited him. I’ve never known anyone more headstrong, stubborn, and self-centered, except maybe me,” Gemma said, and all three of them laughed. There was some truth to it. “I always think I’m right too.”
“I wish I did. I always think everyone else knows better than I do, like you two,” Caroline said wistfully. She was the meekest of the three of them, and yet she had gone after what she wanted too, fearlessly, and with determination, but quietly. She just had to get away from the ranch and her father to do it.
“We don’t know any better than you do,” Gemma assured her. “In fact, you’re smarter and better educated. You have a master’s degree,” she reminded her. “What’s Peter up to these days? I hardly spoke to him at the funeral.” Peter was never overly chatty with Caroline’s sisters, but Gemma usually managed to draw him out.
“He’s working on a big deal. He’ll only be with us for a week in Aspen. He has to go back to San Francisco. The kids don’t know yet, he just told me. They’re going to be disappointed. Billy loves to go fishing with him. So I guess I’ll be the one going fishing, and putting the worms on the hooks,” she said with a grimace and her sisters smiled at her. She really was the perfect mother; and now their own mother had turned up. She had been far from perfect if she’d given up her parental rights and abandoned them. What she’d done was worse than dying, and Gemma and Kate wanted to know about it, and how she justified it. Caroline said it didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, she hadn’t been around for them, and it was too late for her to make up for it now. She particularly had hated growing up without a mother, which was why she was so devoted to her kids and would do anything for them, and for Peter.
They left the restaurant and went back to the ranch, and the kids were just coming out of the barn with Thad. They’d had a long, full day and they were tired. They were city kids, and not used to all the fresh air and exercise. He had worn them out since early morning. He smiled at Kate when he saw her.
“They’re going to sleep well tonight,” he said, and she laughed. “We’ve been riding most of the day. They won’t be able to walk tomorrow,” he told Caroline, and she laughed too. She had known Thad since he’d come to the ranch at eighteen, when she was twenty. She’d had a crush on him for about five minutes, and then she got involved with Jock Thompson the summer of her junior year in college. They broke up at the end of the summer when she went back to Berkeley, and by Christmas when she came home, Jock had gotten a local girl pregnant and married her.
The girls reminisced about their teenage romances that night over dinner and laughed about them. Gemma had had a million boyfriends and flirted with everyone. Caroline had had two or three serious boyfriends in high school. And Kate had dated the captain of the football team at the local high school until she left for college. He’d gone to college in the East and never came back to California, then his family had moved away, and she’d lost track of him.
“So who are you dating now?” Gemma asked Kate. She hadn’t heard about a man in Kate’s life in a long time.
“There’s no one to date around here,” she said matter-of-factly, “and I’d probably fall asleep if anyone took me to dinner. I get up at four-thirty in the morning.” She had substituted work on the ranch for relationships for many years. Her father had kept her too busy to date.
“There must be someone,” Caroline chimed in.
“Not that I know of. The boys we grew up with have kids in college. Some of them are grandfathers. Now there’s a scary thought. They either left to work somewhere else, went to college and never came back, or married their high school sweethearts, and have been married for twenty-four years by now, since I went to school with them,” Kate said and didn’t seem to care.
“Jesus, that’s depressing,” Gemma commented. “You should get out of