“Find Garner Remke before your mother sells the ranch.”
Remke was her mother’s maiden name. Was Garner a brother? An uncle? She couldn’t ignore a request like this one. “Who’s he?”
“It’s impossible for a father to stop loving his girl.”
“He’s my grandfather?”
“Do you hear me, Beth?”
Slow and stiff, she unfolded from the chair and reached out to take his hand, which seemed featherlight and withered. All wrong. Not a rancher’s hand.
“What happened?” she asked. “To Mom and Garner?”
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes, I’ll find him.”
“It’s impossible for a father to stop.”
Weakness sucked him back into sleep. Beth stayed next to her father and held tight to his frail words, imagining that he spoke them about her.
She gripped his fingers until dawn, her back gradually sagging until her forehead came to rest on his pillow. Still she held on, waiting for that inexplicable cold to wash over her and pass through to him. Waiting for the antelope to rise, for the bird to fly.
The claw mark on her shoulder throbbed deep below the surface of her skin.
Whatever you did before, God, please do it again now. You did it for a sparrow—a worthless sparrow! Please do it for my father. My daddy.
Please.
Please.
God would not.
On the morning that her father died, Beth fled the hospital, disbelieving everything but that God was unmerciful and cruel, that his punishments were unfair. She would have done anything to pay any price for that mistake of stealing a saddle and a ride on Joe—any price but this one, which was wrong for anyone to demand. Including God.
She walked for miles under the searing August sun until Jacob found her, hatless and sunburned, dehydrated and mindless, on the highway that led back to the ranch. She didn’t know his truck when it pulled off the road in front of her, and she didn’t recognize his familiar face even after he got out of the cab and came toward her.
But his voice unlatched the gate that released the bucking bull of her spirit.
“Beth,” he said. He reached out to touch her arm. “Oh, Beth. I’m so sorry.”
She responded with a rage like she’d never experienced, and a surge of violence she shouldn’t have had the strength to deliver. All the grief in her heart kicked its way out of her throat, burning like vomit. She resented his compassionate platitude. She ordered him to get away from her. She blamed him for all the suffering in the world and demanded he justify the very existence of God.
When it became clear that she would neither reason with him or let him take her home, he grabbed her from behind in an embrace that pinned her arms. She swore and strained and then begged, sobbing, for him to let her go. But Jacob had wrestled steers more than ten times her weight, and he held on easily, though her shoes dented his knees and bruised his shins.
Beth’s fury didn’t burn out. She had an infinite amount of grief for fuel. But when Danny emerged from the passenger side of Jacob’s truck with red-rimmed eyes, the sight of him was like the smothering blast of a fire extinguisher. Fifteen and fatherless, he’d never looked younger to her, or more frightened by the unknown, and by her lack of self-control. He had no big words to rope her with this time.
As if Jacob could sense Beth’s mind shift onto Danny’s needs, he released her and she reached for her brother, whose more innocent sadness encased the three of them in pained silence while they stood, lost, at the side of the road.
16
Tea had stopped fixing Garner’s restlessness. He was standing in his artificially lit greenhouse basement Thursday when he noticed this. That is, he noticed the three half-drunk cups of tea gone cold and abandoned among his plants. Never before had a brew of good-quality leaves failed to put him in a good mood—energize him if he was tired, pique his mind if he was bored, calm his heart if he was agitated.
And yet now, though his stomach sloshed with tea, he seemed to stand in a garden of sadness. He had overwatered his lemongrass so that it was turning yellow, and pinched fresh buds rather than deadheads off the blooming calendula. The plant shouldn’t have had any dead blooms at all, but he’d forgotten to harvest them at the right time. He feared it might not flower again for several months, and that was disappointing, because the orange petals