. . . as this fine man here has already observed”—he indicated Garner—“I’m a little too big for the opening, and I’d like to get my box back. But that’s a minor detail. Bigger one is I can’t leave this spot, because your brother knows where to find it for himself. After all the work I’ve done, he’d surely find this place a lot quicker than I would.”
“Levi took your notebook,” Beth said, recalling Jacob’s account of their argument.
“Read it back to back, no doubt,” Wally accused. “No telling what that boy might do if I let this place out of my sight.”
Garner was kneeling by the hole now, holding back the Apache plume and looking in.
Rose’s voice took on a more gentle tone. “What’s in your box that Levi would want, Wally?”
Wally’s expression took on a sudden look of anxiety.
“Your ‘legal tender’?” Beth prompted, recalling Wally’s frustration the first night the box went missing. “You have money in the box?”
“What? Fifty bucks? Pfft. He can have it,” Wally said. “I used to be a rich man, you know, back in my Wall Street days. Wish I still was—once upon a time I could have helped you all out. But the people who call themselves my family sank their teeth into that gold mine long ago. Where there’s money, there’s always someone who wants it. It’s something I like about the Blazing B, you know. The simple life.”
He was talking over his worry now, Beth thought: he couldn’t remember why it was so important he guard the lockbox from Levi. There was no proper response to that, just as it wasn’t right for Beth to speak the truth: the survival of this “simple life” was dependent on quite a large sum of money.
Oddly, though, that truth didn’t drive a knife through her heart the way it might have a week earlier. She looked at her mother and grandfather. There was something good and right about this moment, these three family members making their way through loss by returning to each other, each of them having nothing, and repairing what was broken.
Wally licked his thumb and began to search for the answer in his book. “It was important.” He seemed flummoxed that he couldn’t find what he had previously written down. “It was really important.”
“It’s okay, Wally,” Beth said. She knelt beside him and rested her palm on his shoulder. “We can stay here until it comes to you. Let’s think of a way to get it out. I might be small enough to climb in.”
“You will not,” her mother ordered.
Garner fished through some fallen leaves for Wally’s discarded flashlight, found it, and aimed it into the hole for a clearer look.
Wally sighed. In his right hand he let his notebook fall shut, and he raised his left hand to press it against Beth’s cheek. His skin was dusty and cracked and as gentle as a loving father’s touch.
“Do you ever see something and find that it reminds you of something else, but your mind can’t make the connection?” he asked her. “That’s what most of my days are like now, since the stroke. But the reason I could always remember your father is because when I laid eyes on him, my old, broken brain always made the connection. I could remember why I came to this ranch, and what a gift that man had extended to me.”
Beth placed her own hand atop Wally’s, holding it next to her skin.
“My family found a way to get my money, but they couldn’t be bothered by the old man who has trouble remembering what he ate for breakfast. You know what kind of life awaits someone like me?”
Beth could guess. She nodded once.
“Your father gave me something that exceeded every imagination, every hope. And he never asked about the money. Never needed it. Such a man is impossible to forget.”
Beth closed her eyes and called up her own unforgettable memories of the man she missed so much. She heard Wally’s notebook hit the dirt, and he placed his other hand on her other cheek and pulled her bowed head toward him. He planted a soft kiss on the middle of her forehead and then let her rest her face on his narrow shoulder. He smelled like alfalfa and rainwater. She leaned into his kindness, his hands warm on her back.
Her nose picked up another scent too, in the breeze that enveloped them. It was musky and earthy, solid, rich. It was the scent