to each other in hushed tones about how sad it was that such a beautiful little boy had a father like Glenn Dawson. Looking back, Luke figured the ladies knew his father paid for only about half of what he walked out of the store with, but none of them had the nerve to stop him. Luke overheard one of those charitable ladies say once that Glenn Dawson was a hard-edged man with cold, dead eyes that made nice folks think they were staring straight into the face of the devil. And from that moment on, that was exactly what Luke saw when he looked at his own father.
Then he got older, and all that sweetness they saw in that little boy turned into wariness, soon to become anger and resentment. One summer when he was twelve, he grew four inches and became a hundred times more insolent. After that, nobody said he was sweet anymore.
It was on this woman’s face, too, that smile that said she was ready to help, willing to help, it was her heavenly assignment to help, but he knew what she was thinking. You have nobody. That’s pitiful. Why are you in this terrible place with nobody to help you?
He believed she truly felt bad for him. But he’d come so far from being that person for whom other people felt bad, and he never wanted to go back there again. The truth was that he didn’t need anybody. He was making his own way in this world, climbing that sharp, craggy mountain to the summit, where people would be forced to look up to him whether they liked it or not.
Luke thanked the woman again, and she finally left. Still feeling a little woozy, he sat down on the bed, leaned against the headboard, and closed his eyes. Come hell or high water, he was climbing back on a bull the first week of November.
But in the meantime, how was he going to make ends meet?
He opened his eyes and looked around the room. Even at the price of this place, he couldn’t afford to stay much longer. He had plenty of friends, but they were other cowboys who were on the road most of the year and no more stable than he was. They were a great bunch of guys who’d help out anybody in a crisis, but you didn’t ask if there was any other way. What Luke needed most was money, and he’d be a dead man before he went begging for that.
If only he could get a job, at least he could support himself. Unfortunately, he was qualified to do only one thing besides riding bulls, and that was ranch work. But roping and bulldogging would only aggravate his damaged knee further right now. Even if he could find another job, it would likely involve heavy manual labor, and it was going to be a few weeks before he’d be able to use his knee the way he was supposed to. Still, he’d tried going to a few job search websites on his phone to look for other possibilities, but since this crappy little motel didn’t have Wi-Fi, he’d chewed through his minutes faster than a pit bull gnawing through a T-bone.
Then he’d thought about Bubba Daniels, who had quit the circuit two years ago after his fifth concussion, taking it as a sign that he was pushing his luck. Thinking he might have a spare bunk, Luke had called him, only to find out that Bubba had gotten married, left his family ranch in southern Idaho, and was living in an apartment in Boise selling used cars. The most unsettling feeling had come over Luke, as if Bubba’s future would be his, too, if he lost the championship. Sooner or later he’d be wearing a bad suit and persuading people to buy beat-up cars with more miles on them than the space shuttle.
Then he turned and saw the Austin newspaper Church Lady had left on the nightstand. He picked it up and flipped to the Help Wanted section, which consisted of exactly half a page of ads. Waiter at Red’s Barbecue? Not if he couldn’t walk for hours on end. Receptionist for a real estate company? Yeah, he could answer a phone, but he didn’t quite fit the expectation of what a receptionist was supposed to look like. Nursing, no…accounting, no…forklift operator? He could probably learn that pretty quickly, except there were probably a hundred other guys ahead of