not her fault, nor is it Audie’s, that her employer happens to be DelTex.”
His grandmother’s face took on the legendary Buckton stubbornness, a narrow-eyed I will not back down set of features Gunner knew spelled his surrender.
“You’d better bake a lot of cookies.”
She smiled. “Actually, I was thinking brownies. And ice cream. A regular ice-cream social out on the lawn.”
Two dozen sticky, squirmy, sugared-up third graders tearing up his front lawn. The thought was enough to make him want to move to the city and take up accounting. Blue Thorn was taking a lot more than he was prepared to give these days.
As if she’d heard his thoughts, Gran’s hand came up to cover his. “Your father would be proud of what you’ve done. Of what you’re doing.”
That struck a raw nerve. Gunner and his father hadn’t seen eye to eye on anything in the years before his death. Not that Gunner had been around much to test that. He’d put Blue Thorn in his rearview mirror shortly after college, sick of Dad looking down his nose at the wild life Gunner loved. Dad’s expectations had smothered Gunner, and even Gran’s compassionate spirit hadn’t been enough to keep him on the ranch. With his mom gone when he was seventeen, Gunner saw no point in staying where he wasn’t understood. One by one his siblings had followed suit, heading off the ranch and out from underneath Gunner Senior’s judgmental glare until the old man had died years later practically alone and nearly bankrupt.
Gran had written Gunner then, pleading for him to return to the ranch and save Blue Thorn. He’d come for Gran. Gunner had come to prove Dad wrong about the kind of man he was, and to overhaul Blue Thorn with his own stamp. He wasn’t sure Dad would ever be proud of what he was doing here, but the sentiment raised an unwanted lump in Gunner’s throat anyway.
“Click on that green arrow there,” he said, not looking her in the eye. “That’s how you forward an email. I’ll invite them to come out, and you can stuff them full of whatever goodies you want.”
He felt, rather than saw, her smile. “You’ll have such fun, you wait and see.”
There’s where you’re wrong, he thought to himself, regretting the whole thing already.
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