Sunrise Ranch - Carolyn Brown Page 0,5
Vivien? Can she chew up railroad spikes and spit out staples? That’s what Ezra said about her mama.” He stooped down and scratched the ears of the part Catahoula dog that had been named for Bonnie’s mother. The dog yipped and went to stretch out on the cool hardwood floor with Martha right behind her. Polly, the dog named for Shiloh’s mother, stuck around begging for doggy treats.
“Lot of help you are,” Rusty muttered as he gave her a Milk-Bone.
* * *
When the alarm went off the next morning, he rolled over to see three sets of eyes peering up at him over the side of the bed. “How’d it get to be morning so quick?”
All the dogs turned around and raced toward the door. He pushed back the covers and hurried across the large living room to let them out. In another week, there would be ten hired hands living here, mostly teenage boys he’d have to shake out of the bunk beds lining the walls every morning. When the boys arrived, the dogs would be perfectly happy to sleep outside.
Rusty dressed in work jeans, a faded chambray shirt that he left open at the throat, a faded T-shirt showing underneath, and a pair of tan work boots. He made himself a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, poured a thermos full of coffee and filled a large cooler with sweet tea and ice. Then he put together three bologna sandwiches and shoved them into a plastic bag.
When he reached the field that morning, the sun was just rising over the eastern crest of the canyon.
“Sunrise Ranch,” he muttered. “I’m going to own this ranch if I have to mortgage my soul and all three of those dogs to get it, and I’m going to rename the place Sunrise Ranch. It has a good ring to it, and Ezra can just weep and moan about it. He should’ve done right by me.”
Don’t you dare change the name of this place. Ezra’s gruff old voice scolded him. It started off as Malloy Ranch back at Texas statehood days, and by damn, it will stay that way until the crack of doom.
Rusty knotted his hands into fists. He’d worked hard for Ezra, had given him an honest day’s work for what he got paid. Ezra was dead. He could name the ranch whatever he pleased. When Ezra got sick and barely had the energy to go from his recliner to the kitchen, Rusty had run both the ranch and the house for the old guy. Then a week or so before he died, he’d called in the lawyer and changed his will. Rusty had been disappointed, but Ezra assured him that his daughters were like their worthless mothers and wouldn’t last a week on the ranch.
Guess who was wrong, he thought as he crawled up into the tractor, ate his peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, and waited for good daylight to begin his day.
* * *
Bonnie planned on keeping her word and sleeping until noon, but she had a restless night and was more than ready to crawl out of bed at five o’clock that morning. She ate a bowl of cereal and two muffins, then packed a lunch to take to the field. If she was honest, she missed Rusty coming in to eat with her that morning, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still mad at him for his arrogance the night before.
What about your stubborn pride? Shiloh’s voice whispered in her head. Y’all are just alike. Neither one of you will give an inch.
“I’m up, and I’m going to the field. That’s giving a mile, not an inch,” Bonnie said as she grabbed her sack and jug of sweet tea. “Stay on your side of the barbed wire, sister. I don’t need your advice. I can take care of myself.”
From day one, Bonnie had never given a damn what Ezra wanted done. He hadn’t even cared enough to take a look at her when she was born her mother had told her, and he hadn’t been around to see one single solitary accomplishment in her life, so he didn’t deserve the right to call her daughter after he was dead.
As she crawled up into the driver’s seat of the tractor that she usually drove, she remembered that Loretta, Jackson Bailey’s wife from the adjoining ranch to the north, had welcomed them to the canyon, and said, “It’s kind of bare right now, but in a few weeks, when the