Dad’s an only child, so everything – a vast fortune that includes the sprawling ranch and an oil company worth ten figures – goes to him. To them.
They’ve been married longer than I’ve been alive. I came along years after they’d gotten married and were set in their ways. I’ve always believed I was the only oops that they couldn’t buy their way out of. Or that Gramps couldn’t pay their way out of.
I’ve heard more than once that they’d already have a third home on Lanai or some other exotic island if I hadn’t accidentally come along.
But neither of them felt like raising a child overseas anyway.
Raising one in the States hasn’t been so good either.
Another tinge of guilt strikes.
I get it. We’re loaded, even without Dad getting a hundred times richer today. I should be grateful.
I’ve never wanted for anything, and as far as parents go, they haven’t been total monsters. Not compared to some. And I always had Gramps.
But not anymore. Now, we just have his assets. And soon, I won’t even have the one place I always considered home.
The Reed Ranch.
When I was little, I loved hearing my parents say they were going on vacation because that meant I was going to stay with Gramps. I spent every summer there for as long as I can remember, and practically every school break, too.
I even missed school during the times when my parents ‘just had to get away for a while.’
I’ve never figured out exactly what they had to get away from. Neither of them has ever worked a normal job. Dad sits on the executive board of directors for North Earhart Oil, which is really just a made-up position, yet it sounds better than simply admitting his father’s company sends him a check every month to stay away.
Another mystery. I don’t know what happened between them, why there’s bad blood, other than Gramps told me once that it didn’t work for him and my father to spend too much time together. He more or less paid him to stay away.
Family dinners full of love and laughs weren’t our gig. Or holidays where someone would have a little too much wine and wind up spilling some shocking secret over the table.
It was always just me and Gramps, or me and my parents. Two exclusive worlds running forever parallel, never to meet.
Except...I hadn’t spent much time in the world I loved with Gramps, had I? Not recently.
There’s that pesky guilt again.
It’s not like anyone paid me to stay away. But somehow, in a flash, it’s been six freaking years since I was here, visiting Dallas, North Dakota.
Time has no chill. I spent my last summer with Gramps after my high school graduation. Then I moved to California and started college.
Summer vacays became a thing of the past. Hell, so did vacations of any kind. Six years blurred by in a flash flood of life of attempted adulting.
That thing they tell you not to do in life? I did it.
I blinked.
And when I was done, I already had one failed business and was working frantically to save my second. Now, I just dissolved my third.
Three strikes, Bella – you’rrrrre out!
I wish I’d known the first two times.
Real estate, plus California, plus me? That’s an equation even Einstein couldn’t fix.
No, I didn’t lose my shirt, as Gramps would’ve put it, but I barely made enough scratch to pay my parents back each time – something Gramps, my true backer, always insisted I use for my next 'adventure.'
More accurately, my next failure.
If I had a dime for every time I ever wished I was home, at the ranch, I’d be richer than my parents are, or will be once this godforsaken meeting ends.
I’m pinching my thigh under the table, imagining the next six months of misery.
They’ll sell the old ranch first thing. That’s for sure.
Mom hates the place, so Dad does too. She’s the reason he left it in the first place, and never came back. She’d wanted out of this town and knew my father was her ticket to the moon. It worked...and it’s been 'working' for more than twenty years in the screwiest family unit imaginable.
Mother’s gasp stops my rabbiting thoughts.
“Now, see here!” Dad yells, holding up a finger. “You’re a smart man. There’s no way – no goddamn way – my father would’ve ever set it up this way. There’s been a mistake.”