Page 2 of Dust Storm

For a split second, the vultures were distracted.

And I ran.

1

CHRISTIAN

“Come on squirrels—get a move on!” I hollered up the stairs.

“Dad!” one squirrel said with a giggle. “We’regirls,not squirrels!”

The hand-held radio sitting by the coffee pot crackled as my youngest brother, CJ, gave a report on the herd movement.

The nine thousand head of cattle that sprawled across the Griffith Brothers Ranch kept us on our toes, but what kept me busiest were the two tornadoes who were supposed to be getting ready for school.

When I didn’t hear them moving upstairs, I set the spatula down and craned around the corner. “Bree! Gracie! Finish getting dressed, brush your hair, and brush your teeth!”

“I want braids!” Bree called as she thundered down the stairs with the stomp force of a linebacker.

“Me too!” Gracie echoed from their bathroom.

“No! I called braids. Do something else,” Bree snapped.

“Hey! No fighting this early in the morning,” I bellowed loud enough for them to hear me around the corner.

“But I called braids first!” Bree huffed as she stormed into the kitchen and grabbed a pancake off of the pile I was busy making.

I rinsed my hands off and did a quick towel dry. “You can both have braids.”

“But she’s copying me.”

At thirteen, all Bree wanted was for eleven-year-old Gracie to stop following her around like a wide-eyed puppy.

It made me chuckle at the years Gretchen and I thought having two toddlers was bad. Now, I had two middle schoolers all on my own.

“Then I’ll give you different braids,” I said as I turned back to the stove and finished cooking the batch of pancakes. “Get the box.”

Bree heaved the giant tackle box I used to organize all their hair accessories on top of the kitchen table and plopped down in a chair. I slid a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her to go with the pilfered pancake she’d stolen from the counter. She chowed down while I pawed through the little compartments full of elastics, hair clips, combs, brushes, and a million other things the girls insisted on.

“What kind of braids today?” I asked in a yawn as I ran a brush through her dirty blonde hair, catching the few tangles she had missed.

“Fishtails,” she said around a mouthful of scrambled eggs.

“Tight or loose?”

“Loose. The puffy kind. With clips.”

Life wasn’t easy. There was running the ranch. There was fatherhood. There was finding time for myself, which usually fell by the wayside.

Doing it on my own sucked, but I never wanted my girls to feel like they were a burden. I wasn’t great at everything. The way I’d stammered through the period talk with Bree a few months ago was proof of that.

But I tried.

Dammit, I tried hard.

Bree sat stock-still as I sectioned her hair and started weaving flat strands, one on top of the other.

Braids were easy. It was that fucking curling iron that was the death of me.

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