“No. My mother worked as a waitress.” She isn’t a socialite, ordering tables inlaid with turquoise. “My stepfather was a day laborer when he worked at all, which wasn’t often. He was more interested in trying to get some kind of disability check out of the government so he could play pool all day. In fact, if he’d worked half as hard at a real job as he did at getting on the dole, he might have accomplished something.”
“So it all fell on you? You weren’t legally responsible, Cheyenne. Why take on something like that?”
“Mitch is my brother,” she said. For her, that was reason enough. The hospitals and doctors had written off a lot of the initial costs, and Mitch received a stipend from Social Security. At nineteen, he was on Medicare. But the gap between the things they wouldn’t pay for and the things he needed was wide. “He can survive on his benefits. I want him to do more than survive—I want him to have a life.”
“Enough to sacrifice your own?”
Cheyenne was silent for a long time. “I didn’t think it was going to be this hard,” she finally admitted, to herself as well as Jesse. “I thought there would be an end to it. That Mitch would walk again. That everything would be normal.”
I wish I could have a job and a girlfriend, she heard her brother telling her the night before in his room. I wish I could ride a horse.
“And my selling you five hundred acres of good land would change any of that? Make things ‘normal’ again?”
Cheyenne sighed, swallowed more water, pushed back her chair to stand. Plan A was down the swirler; best get cracking with plan B. Whatever the hell that was. “No,” she said. “No, it wouldn’t.”
She returned to the bathroom then, changed clothes, brought the jeans, boots and flannel shirt back to Jesse.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She believed him—that was the crazy thing. “Thanks for the ride,” she told him.
He opened the kitchen door for her, walked her to the car.
“Friends?” he asked, once she was behind the wheel.
“Friends,” she said, starting the engine.
“Then maybe you’d do me a favor,” Jesse pressed.
She frowned up at him, puzzled. What kind of favor could she possibly do for him?
“There’s a party Saturday night, sort of a pre-wedding thing my cousin Sierra and her fiancé are throwing. Barbecue, a hayride, that kind of thing. I need a date.”
If there was one thing Jesse McKettrick didn’t lack for, besides money, it was available women. “Why me?” she asked.
“Because I like you. Your mom and Mitch can come, too. It’ll be a good way for them to get reacquainted with the locals.”
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