Page 8 of Westin

My brows shoot up to my hairline. “I don’t know if I can.”

He taps his watch. “Ready….and go.”

The tin cans waver in my eyeline. My breath goes still…and then I let it out in a soft puff. The cans come into focus. My finger squeezes, and I account for the kick.

I account for everything without noticing.

The breeze.

The distance.

The sun in my eyes.

My heart knows where each bullet needs to land. The cans flip off the railing, one after the other, leaving nothing but a whisp of dust.

The cicadas are silent.

“Good,” my father says. “Let’s go again.”

We go again and again until my mother rings the bell for breakfast and we head inside to wash up. This time, my father tells me to sit with him at the big table. For the first time, I see the clear connection between pleasing him and his affection.

I don’t have to work to please my mother. She loves me so hard.

My father slows down as I enter my teens. In high school, I meet my closest friend, Gerard Sovereign. I don’t notice it for a while, but he’s just as hardheaded and willful as my father, just less cold.

I want to resent my father, but instead, I become everything he wanted me to be without realizing it. When I’m old enough to strike out on my own, he gives me and Sovereign a piece of land. I have a steady aim and a willingness to do anything to succeed while Sovereign has the drive and the business sense to run an empire.

We build Sovereign Mountain Ranch.

Sovereign takes the helm, and I stick to what I do best—spinning a chamber and making sure no one stops him.

Ranch work is rewarding, but lonely. I find my comfort in the usual places—bars, the beds of women I won’t see again—until my loneliness is numbed enough that I can go out and face another day. Until a year into working together, Sovereign makes a comment about it.

“What’s the point of it?” he says one day while we’re out in the field.

“Of what?” I ask.

“The women, the bars,” he says. “You’re just coming back to an empty bed anyway.”

That hurts, but it snaps me out of it. In that way, he and my father are one and the same.

As he gets older, my father sells the rest of the farm to us and moves to South Platte with my mother. I bought the house for them somy mother would have somewhere to live when he was gone. For her, not for him.

My father and I sit at the table together, one day in my early twenties. He’s gray, his eyes weak now, but he’s still as stubborn as a mule. I’m a grown man, taller than him. Steam rises from my coffee, spiraling in the morning sun. My mother goes outside to gather strawberries from her boxes on the back porch and leaves us alone.

“When are you giving me a grandson?” my father says abruptly.

I freeze but recover quickly. “I’m not with anyone.”

“So get a woman,” he says, his voice flat, like it’s that easy. “I got your mother, and I’ve kept her this long.”

I rise under the pretext of warming my already-hot coffee. Through the window, my mother stands in the backyard. She looks so young compared to him, so free and hopeful. My mother is a caged bird, the door soon to be opened.

I find I’m happy for her.

“You’re old enough,” my father says.

“I’m working on it,” I murmur.

---