their offspring’s excitement, or admonish them for excessively sticky, marshmallow covered fingers – and it always made me shake my head a little. I’d give anything to have what they had. Finding a wife – making our own troop of little “snot-nosed tyrants” – and creating a life that was just ours... Man oh man. Those people were so lucky they’d forgotten what luck was.
Mom had always loved the campfires – whether they were for the visitors or just our own family hanging out. I was just fourteen when she had passed, but that was plenty old enough to have memory upon memory of her laughter – her hugs – the way she made you feel loved just by looking at you. Maybe Mom was one of the main reasons I enjoyed hosting the campfires so much. They made me feel close to her – as close as I could be, considering she was gone. If I focused on the flames long enough, tracing the bright red tips all the way down to the searing hot white-blue base, I could almost convince myself that maybe she was there somehow.
It felt like she was.
Payden avoided the campfires like the plague. He’d admitted to me once, and only once, that they made him too horribly depressed. They reminded him of mom too, but in such a way that Payden’s quiet soul couldn’t seem to bear.
Preston had rarely been able to sit still long enough to enjoy the campfires when we were kids, let alone now that he was an adult with adult things to do. (Namely, run the ranch, make the money, and party away every responsibility and memory that he possibly could as soon as the sun set.)
No one ever even said the word “campfire” to Pierce. Of course, he had the same bittersweet recall of mom that we all did, but Sarah’s death had added to his pain in such an extreme way that he simply pretended certain things didn’t exist at all. Avy and Braden weren’t allowed to attend – I assumed it was because even one happy word about their experience would have crushed Pierce with sadness. Sarah had hosted the campfires before her accident. Pierce had attended every single one just to be near her.
My father wasn’t ever to be found at these nightly gatherings either. He said it was because he was an old man, and darkness was an old man’s signal to sleep. But he’d confessed to me on more than one occasion (usually after a glass or two of Cabernet Sauvignon), that he missed “his River” so much just thinking about former campfires – actually going to one was unthinkable.
My father had bought this ranch for my mother – Miss River Leigh Hayes – exactly one year after making her Mrs. Paul Hardick. Born into an extravagantly wealthy family, he’d inherited his father’s oil rig business and all the dollar signs that went with it. But his new bride, River, hadn’t ever much liked the idea of her children being heirs to such an environmentally controversial kingdom. She’d been raised by what my father called “leftover hippies” and was obsessed with all things nature and animal. He’d sold the oil rigs and bought the massive Colorado ranch, and they’d left his home state of Texas behind for good.
It had worked in his favor as well. All he’d ever wanted to do was write books, and as he realized just how much River loved running the ranch (nearly entirely on her own) he’d been able to attempt his own pursuits in the world of fictional publication. He’d been able to completely exceed his visions of those pursuits, in time.
Mom started popping out little Hardick boys and Dad, in turn, began slinging his own new creations into the world. By the time Preston was born, he had four best-selling novels under his belt. By the time I was born, that number had doubled. Contemporary western romance – cowboys with hearts, he’d always joke – had been his bread and butter. He said it was easy to write them, because between his Texas upbringing and the Colorado ranch, he had all the inspiration he could need for such a genre. He also held that every single heroine was inspired by “his lovely River”, and therefore the romance also flowed from his pen with a great, natural ease.
I was five when the first major motion picture based on one of his novels hit theaters. Dad had called it