The Wrangler. Lindsay McKenna

I wished I’d known sooner.”

      “My father was so careful to bruise me where no one would see it,” Val muttered. “He knew what he was doing. But my mother didn’t have the guts to call the sheriff. I still can’t believe she’d let my father beat the hell out of me.” Val shook her head, anger bubbling up within her as it always did when she thought about that time in her life. “Why didn’t my mother ever protect us, Gus?”

      “Honey,” Gus said gently, “your ma was so beaten down by that bastard that she didn’t know she could ask for help and get it.”

      “Why didn’t you take that information to the sheriff, Gus? I could never understand.”

      “Because your ma pleaded with me not to. She wanted to go back to Buck. She said she loved him. And when Pete suddenly died, I knew I had to get over here. I felt Buck would leave you two alone if I was in the house, and I was right. So while I couldn’t go to the authorities, I did the next best thing.”

      “You have no idea how grateful I was that you moved here, Gus.” Val gave her a look of admiration. “You gave up your whole way of life in order to protect us. I’ll never forget what you did.”

      Giving her a gentle look, Gus said, “Honey, I’d do it all over again. I have no regrets about any of my decisions. My gut told me that Buck would stop if I was around. He was the kind of man who was so wounded, so scarred by life, that all he knew how to do was take his anger out on others. Truth be told, I had a baseball bat hidden in the closet and I swore to myself that if he ever lifted a pinkie against either of you, I was going to beat the hell outta him.” Gus gave her a wicked smile.

      Val knew she meant it. Even Buck knew it. “You’re a force of nature, Gus. You always have been.” Val managed a slight smile toward her plucky grandmother.

      Val unconsciously rubbed her tightened stomach. Looking around the warm, bright kitchen, she uttered, “This place is nothing but a vat of lousy memories for me, Gus.”

      Gus reached out and patted her hand. “Honey, I know how much I was asking of you when I made that phone call to you in Bahrain. I knew you hated Buck and hated this house.”

      Val slipped her hands around the mug of hot coffee. Warmth against the iciness inhabiting her knotted gut. “Like I said, I’m here because of you, Gus. If you hadn’t broken your hip, I couldn’t have gotten out of the Air Force. Because of the situation, I was able to get what they call a hardship discharge.”

      “I’m so glad you’re here. An elder like me with a cranky hip can’t run this place alone.”

      “Gus, why save the Bar H at all?” Val drilled a look into her grandmother’s wrinkled, darkly tanned features.

      “Why not?” The elder perked up, feisty now. “This is your home, Val. It doesn’t have to always be the terrible place it was for you as a child. You can create happy memories here, too. I had to sell our ranch in Cheyenne and it was the last thing I wanted to do. Pete’s family started that ranch a hundred and twenty years ago. It broke my heart to have to leave it in order to come back here. But I did it. Sometimes, life puts huge demands on us we don’t want to face. But we must sacrifice for a greater good.”

      Guiltily, Val said, “You gave up so much. I knew you were grieving for Grandpa Pete’s passing. And I know you two spent your sixty years together building that spread into a profitable ranch. You walked away from all of it for us, Gus. Even at sixteen I realized the terrible sacrifice you made for us.”

      “I did it,” Gus said, her voice firm, “because you two were far more important than our ranch. Family comes first. Always. You’re my granddaughter and all I ever wanted for you was happiness.”

      “That didn’t happen,” Val said in a rasp, fighting back rising emotions. She held her grandmother’s teary blue gaze.

      “I just wanted to put this whole damn thing behind me, Gus. I never wanted to be here again.”

      “Then,” Gus said gently, “maybe it’s time to start healing up from it? Everyone deserves to have a home. A place where they came from. A place where they can come back to and call their own. Us Westerners believe in family, home and loyalty. Maybe between you and me some healing and good might come from this.”

      “You’re such an optimist, Gus.”

      Perking up, she grinned. “Yes, I hold out hope for hopeless, that’s for sure. Pete always called me a cockeyed idealist,” and she chuckled.

      Laughing a little with her grandmother, Val took a sip of the hearty coffee. She thought back on her life since she’d left this ranch. She’d gone to college at eighteen. From there, she went into the Air Force. She was twenty-eight now. She’d only spent six years in the military and had been counting on making it to twenty years so she’d have a pension. “This ranch’s back is broken, Gus. The corrals are in terrible shape. The barn needs a new roof. I don’t see any cattle. I see a few horses out in one pasture. This place is not a moneymaker, it’s nothing but a money pit.”

      Nodding, Gus said, “After Buck died of a heart attack, your mother made a lot of poor choices insofar as hiring good wranglers. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know how to budget because Buck kept her out of the money and finances. He refused to let her know anything about the running of the ranch, and he took all his knowledge of keeping this ranch solvent to the grave with him. I tried to pick up the slack, figure out the accounting books, but there was only so much I could do.”

      Val recalled that time. “I celebrated when Mom told me Buck had died.”

      “No one can blame you, honey. But without Buck, this ranch went to hell in a handbasket. Your mom was depressed. No matter what kind of medication the doctors put her on, she spiraled deeper and deeper into a very dark place. I couldn’t talk or reason with her. She just locked herself away in her room.”

      Val’s heart wrung with pain over her mother’s decline. She hadn’t been there to help her. She’d run as far away as she could.

      “When it came to finding the accounting books,” Gus continued, “and then discovering all the places Buck squirreled money away, it took me a year to figure it all out. And your mother, by that time, had been diagnosed with the most virulent form of breast cancer and she died six months afterward.”

      Val recalled the phone calls, the fact her mother was drifting away from her. Val had felt abandoned and adrift. “I remember the funeral.”

      “Yes, and I remember telling you not to worry, that I could handle the Bar H. I felt at the time, I could bring it back bit by bit. But your mom chose wranglers like she chose Buck. They were young men who talked the talk but couldn’t walk the walk. That series of wranglers did nothing but allow the ranch to slide further into destruction. Good wranglers are worth their weight in gold.”

      “And then, you fell and broke your hip,” Val said. She saw what the Bar H meant to her grandmother because of the fierce look that sparked in her watery blue eyes. Her jaw was set. Val knew the bulldog feistiness she’d always possessed was there even at eighty-four. “But even if that hadn’t happened, no one person could ever run this two-hundred-acre ranch by themselves.”

      “No, I couldn’t. And then the hip replacement went wrong, and I’m stuck with this damned cane for the rest of my life. I can’t ride a horse or go out and mend the fences. So much was taken away from me when I broke my hip, Val. I grieved over this situation a long time before calling and asking you to come home. I don’t want to see this ranch sold, too. It broke my heart to sell ours. I cried for weeks over that decision. I was hurting so badly from Pete suddenly being torn away from me, too. We were a good team. The best of friends. And then, suddenly, in one moment, he was gone….”

      Val reached out and gripped her grandmother’s hand, its knuckles slightly enlarged with arthritis. “You’ve had to go through so much, Gus. I’m sorry.”

      “Oh, honey, I know you are. We’ve all gone through our share, it seems. When Cheryl would bring you to