Rodeo Baby. Mary Sullivan

Dad ever talked about Rodeo? It didn’t look so bad. Just the opposite in fact, charming but real, unpretentious and normal compared to Manhattan, where people seemed compelled to jump on every trend.

      In this town, every man, woman and child wore well-used denim. Sam detected not a single pair of designer jeans.

      Thank God the jeans he’d bought before they left home were plain and would fit in. He’d gone to a work-wear clothing store to find denim without embroidered pockets or slashed knees or distress wash thighs or fake-faded creases or any of the other fads going around.

      Certain he fit in, he adjusted his cowboy hat. Here, almost everyone wore a cowboy hat.

      Sam soaked it all up like the proverbial sponge. Gramps hadn’t lied about his good-looking, if rustic, town.

      And Sam was immediately smitten.

      “What are you doing, Dad?”

      “Savoring the heritage I’ve never checked out until now.”

      “Why didn’t you ever check it out?”

      “School and then work and then getting married and then having you. You know...” He shrugged. “Life.”

      “Let’s go to the car,” Chelsea demanded. Back to doom, gloom and ’tude, as Violet had called it, all traces of the friendly girl who’d laughed with the waitress dissipated on the cool air.

      Sam grimaced. When he’d married Tiffany, he’d believed in “for better or for worse.” Apparently, she hadn’t.

      He’d loved her. Not so much since her betrayal, though.

      He felt the same way about children. You loved them. You did not give up on them. Purely and simply, they deserved to be loved through thick and thin, without question. He just wished right now that it were easier, especially when he had so much on his mind.

      “Let’s go visit Gramps,” he said.

      Chelsea ran to their vehicle. “Come on, Dad. Don’t be so slow.”

      Ah, enthusiasm. She did love her grandfather. Until recently, he’d come to Manhattan for Christmas every year, but now lived in a retirement home.

      “We should have come here sooner to visit Gramps.”

      Yep. Love for her grandfather for sure.

      Correction, his grandfather, but they’d dispensed with the great part of great-grandfather when Chelsea was little and it had proved too much of a mouthful for her. To Chelsea, he was just Gramps, exactly as he was for Sam.

      An old cowboy nodded to him and Sam smiled and nodded back. Friendly people.

      They drove toward the next small town, where a seniors’ residence that served the entire county housed Sam’s nearest and dearest. They passed spectacular scenery on the way.

      Chelsea shouted, “Dad, look!”

      Sam glanced to his right. In the field a pair of young lambs ran up one side of a small hillock and down the other, kicking up their heels at the top.

      “Frisky,” he commented.

      “So cute.” In her voice, he heard longing and wonder, refreshing to hear after her recent negativity. His daughter loved animals.

      “Remember when you saw all of those baby lambs at that petting zoo and we couldn’t drag you away for an hour? You were only six years old and fascinated.”

      Good memories.

      She smiled. “That was awesome. You convinced them to let me sit on some hay and hold one for, like, an hour.”

      Sam squeezed her hand. “It was only fifteen minutes, but you were small and that was a long time for you. I think I took twenty photographs. You were so cute.”

      “It was the best, but it’s even better to see them out frolicking in their natural habitat, isn’t it?”

      “It sure is.” He slowed down. “Do you want to watch for a while?”

      “Can we?” She sounded so hopeful he couldn’t disappoint her.

      He sat on the shoulder for fifteen minutes listening to Chelsea laugh, the sound a sweet balm for his ravaged psyche. For the past year and a half, he’d missed his ex-wife’s presence in his life, but even more, he’d missed his daughter’s laughter. He wanted to make her happy again.

      “I guess we should go,” he said reluctantly.

      Sounding contented, she said, “Yeah. I want to see Gramps.”

      A couple of miles later, Sam pulled onto the shoulder of the small highway with a squeal of brakes and spraying gravel.

      “Dad, what are you doing?”

      “Look.”

      He pointed across the road.

      “What’s that?” Chelsea asked.

      “That, my dear child, is your heritage.”

      “That’s Gramps’s amusement park?”

      He heard the doubt in her voice. It echoed in his chest.

      Gramps might have raved about his fairgrounds during his visits, but it looked bad. Most of the rides were rusty. A few were in the process of being updated and fixed. One was being dismantled by a couple of old men with a pair of tractors.

      Far off to the right and back from the road a fair distance was Gramps’s house but Gramps was no longer there.

      Sam had never seen the house but he recognized it from his grandfather’s descriptions and old photographs. Some of those had been black-and-white, shot in the days when the fairgrounds were brand-new more than a century ago, and built by Gramps’s father.

      A tidal wave of emotion swept through him, longing, need and anger culminating in one word: mine.

      He owned a beautiful apartment in the city overlooking Central Park and a huge home in upstate New York. So why should a plain two-story brick home with tilting front steps affect him so? With its modest proportions, two windows on the first floor and three above, the ordinary house didn’t compare well to the showstopper he owned with ten spacious bedrooms. This one had, what? Three? Four, maybe?

      Yet he wanted it.

      That house, these fairgrounds, leased now to a bunch of locals intent on making a profit from his grandfather’s belongings, were out of Sam’s reach.

      An old saying or song lyric, Sam couldn’t remember which, thrummed through him. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Wasn’t that the truth?

      Throughout the busy years, thoughts of Rodeo had been stored in a far corner of his mind, taken out only at Christmas when Gramps came to visit. In all of those years, he had thought the town, and the fairgrounds, would be here waiting for him.

      Then his life had changed. Drastically.

      Last year, it had taken a crazy turn. Now he was about to start a new business in New York.

      Success is the best revenge.

      The idea consumed him. Even so, a part of him yearned for the house, toward knowing and understanding his rural heritage.

      But, for the short time he would be here, he wouldn’t be able to get to know it.

      At least for the next year, those women had control of Sam’s heritage. Worse, Gramps couldn’t remember how long he’d agreed to make the lease. What if it was two, three, five years before Sam got it back?

      “Dad, isn’t it beautiful?” Chelsea’s voice whispered out on a breathy sigh. “It’s awesome.”

      The fairgrounds? Maybe after a massive amount of work. But now? Awesome? No.

      She pointed to something and his eyes adjusted