John Riley's Girl. Inglath Cooper
weren’t many excuses he could have made without sounding like a selfish jerk. So here he stood, cursing the decision that ensured there was no earthly way he could get out of going to the thing now.
On a normal day, Rolling Hills Farm was not an inactive place. In the summer heat, horses were worked early, starting at 6:00 a.m. There was usually a tractor or two running somewhere within earshot, a cow calling for its calf, a mare nickering for her foal. But the reunion being staged on his front lawn had turned it into nothing short of chaos.
Given the choice, he’d gladly snap his fingers and make it all disappear, the Great Party Setup’s cotton-candy-pink van and all.
Across the yard stood a man in overalls, a sleeveless T-shirt and a tattoo of a rooster on his left arm. He hammered a tent stake into the ground, straightened and, without missing a beat, sent a stream of tobacco juice arcing over his right shoulder. It landed on a cluster of snow-white azaleas encircling the base of an old oak tree.
Anger launched John straight across the stretch of grass between the barn and the house where he lit into the man like fire on October leaves.
“Those were my wife’s flowers you just spit on,” he said, the words curt.
The man wiped the back of his hand across the tobacco leak at the corner of his mouth. “Hey, bud, I’m really sorry.”
“Next time maybe you could have a little more courtesy for where you’re aiming.”
“No problem.” The man grabbed his tools and trotted back to his truck, lobbing worried glances over his shoulder as he went.
John snatched the hose from the side of the house, turned on the faucet and rinsed every speck of tobacco juice from the flowers, turning them white again.
He looked down the hill at the farm spread out below with its bright spots of color. After Laura had found out she was sick, she had begun planting things everywhere. Pear trees, peach trees, boxwoods. Her favorite had been the white azaleas. She had never said it, and John would never have put his thoughts into words, but he knew it had been her way of leaving something of herself behind. When he had first realized what she was doing, he couldn’t look at her without going off by himself and crying in impotent rage. He had never let her see him. And it was now one of his greatest regrets. He’d wanted to be strong for her, to pretend that everything was going to be all right, when they both knew that it wasn’t. He wished now that he’d let her see his sadness. He’d tried to do what he thought was the right thing for her. It was only after she died, unexpectedly one night, that he realized she would never know how great his loss had been.
And for that he couldn’t forgive himself.
Looking back on it, he’d thought going on with their lives was the right thing to do. If they saw the doctors, underwent the treatments, then she would get well. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to work? Part of that had to be believing she would get well. If they talked about the possibility that she might die, then it might happen.
And it had.
He hung the hose up, stomped back across the yard to the white-and-green barn where Hank Owens stood in the middle of the big sliding doors, arms folded across his chest, a frown on his weathered face.
“I know I’m a jackass, Hank. I don’t need you to tell me again.”
Hank stopped him at the door with a gloved hand. “I don’t blame you for tearing into his butt. I saw how hard she worked on those darn flowers.”
A mixture of approval and disapproval laced his voice, deep and resonant, like a Baptist preacher’s at a revival. To most of the world, Hank was an intimidating man. He had shoulders wider than a stall door, hands callused from decades of hard work, legs slightly bowed from a lifetime of sitting on a horse. He had been at Rolling Hills longer than John had been alive, and John had no illusions about who was the glue that had held the place together in the first few months after Laura had died.
“It’s been almost two years, John.” Compassion softened the rough edge of Hank’s voice. “Maybe you oughta talk to somebody about this. Somebody impartial.”
“So they can tell me how it’s normal to be angry because my wife died long before I figured out how to make her happy?”
Hank shook his head and managed to look more worried. “She was happy, John.”
“Not the way she could have been if I—”
“If you’d what?”
“Nothing,” he said, putting brakes on the conversation. Talking about it didn’t do any good, anyway. He couldn’t change any of it—couldn’t go back and make himself a better husband. No matter how much he might wish for the chance.
“You gotta get a handle on this, son. Somehow. Someway.” Hank’s words were low and insistent. “If not for anybody else, then for her.” He tipped his gaze toward the road at the foot of the driveway where a school bus had just slowed to a halt.
The stop sign popped out from the side, warning lights flashing. The door opened, and out bounded Flora, pigtails bobbing, her Black Beauty lunch box in one hand, a Barbie backpack slung over her other shoulder.
She looked both ways before crossing the road, just as John had taught her. His heart swelled. She walked until she reached the gates to the farm, but as soon as her sneakers left the main road, she was off and running, up the long driveway to the house.
In the months after Laura had died, he had insisted on picking Flora up from school every day, but she had wanted to ride the bus and had finally told him so. “Daddy, I’ll come back. I won’t leave like Mommy did. I promise.” Her intuition had been entirely too accurate for a seven-year-old. Enough so that he had given in and made it a daily struggle not to let her sense his irrational fear that he would somehow lose her, too.
She was skipping now, zigzagging back and forth on the hardtop driveway. Halfway up, she stopped and picked a cluster of yellow buttercups, which he knew would be for Sophia.
He waited where he was, raising a hand in greeting when she looked toward the barn and caught sight of Hank and him. She made an all-out sprint across the grass then, the smile on her face putting that now-predictable squeeze on his heart. The strength of I’ll-do-anything-for-you love was something he had never understood until he experienced it firsthand.
“Daddy!” Her voice was strong and clear, and it carried across the wide expanse of lawn that stretched between the house and the brood-mare barn.
“Hey, sweet pea. Looks like you could just about outrun Naddie today.”
The sound of his daughter’s laughter was the only thing capable of thawing the coldness Laura’s death had left inside him. Flora loved nothing more than being compared to Nadine, the two-and-a-half-year-old filly who was all but guaranteed to become cutting-horse royalty.
Nadine’s entrance into the world had been anything but easy. They had nearly lost her, and once her spindly legs had found their way to the ground, the mare had rejected her. By all logic, the foal should have died. But she had more than her share of fight in her. John had his own belief about the connection between the young horse and his daughter. From the first moment Flora had stuck her hand through the rails of the foal’s stall, a bond had formed. Flora had witnessed her own mother’s extraordinary will to live, and John could only think that on some level, she and the young filly both understood what it was to fight for life and refuse to let go.
Ten feet from the barn door, Flora dropped her backpack and lunch box, and whirled at John like a tiny tornado, launching herself into his arms.
“Whoa there, little pony.”
She giggled again, locking her arms around his neck. Sweet emotion flooded through him. Love. Pure, simple, undiluted, unconditional. There were no strings attached, no “I’ll-love-you-forever-ifs.” It simply was.
“Are we having a circus, Daddy?”
“All but,” John said, ignoring