Page 6 of The Lawyer & the Christmas Tree Farmer

LAURA

“S

o you grew up in the Rockaways,” Ethan said as they sat down at Bucko’s Barbecue.

It wasn’t technically in the Rockaways, in fact the Rockaways didn’t have a restaurant any longer, not since the Diner had closed a little over a year prior. Ethan had told her than when he picked her up, and immediately got on the highway in towards Pueblo. There were supposedly plans for new businesses to come in, but so far, nothing. “How was it?”

“You’re not a native?” Laura asked, surprised. She hadn’t really been listening all that well on the drive in. She’d been distracted by Ethan. He was what a lot of people would call “solidly built,” without any fluff on him. Nothing like the gym muscles she saw on men in the city.

Then again, city men didn’t need to work the same way Ethan did. She knew how much physical labor was involved with tree farming, and suddenly felt bad about her gym membership back in the city. Three times a week Body Pump classes and some yoga at her apartment was nothing compared to what Ethan put himself through every day.

Now that she thought about it, how many men did she know back east compared physically to Ethan? None. Nobody had that shade of warm brown eyes, a day’s worth of stubble on his cheeks, and neatly trimmed, brown hair. A firm jaw, and amazingly sensitive looking lips underneath a strong nose that canted just slightly, probably the result of it getting broken at one time or another.

“Nope, native of Ruidoso, New Mexico,” Ethan said. “It’s a lot like the Rockaways, although there’s more tourist action there. There’s some skiing up in that area, but I wasn’t that sort of kid.”

“What sort of kid were you?” Laura asked playfully. “Let me guess… bad boy with a jacked-up pickup, maybe linebacker on the Ruidoso High football team?”

“Linebacker, yes,” Ethan said, and Laura could hear in his voice that she’d messed up. “Jacked-up truck? No. My parents died when I was young, so I grew up in the foster system. No money for any sort of truck there.”

Laura cleared her throat, ashamed. “I’m sorry. I sounded really stuck up there, didn’t I?”

“No, Mr.Bennett told me some of what you went through,” Ethan said. “We’re more alike than different, I guess. Just that you went to college, and I didn’t. I’m sure I could have figured out a way, join the Army maybe, or UNM had some pretty decent programs for kids like me. But I needed to get away. So right after graduating, I started looking for a job. Bopped around here and there for a while, working through… a lot of issues… Then about ten years ago, I was working as a pump jockey for Speedy, and your grandfather came in.”

“Speedy, huh?” Laura asked, and Ethan nodded. She shook her head. “That truck stop is going to last until there’s nothing but robots driving on the highways.”

“Probably, but, at the time, the manager and I, we didn’t get along too well,” Ethan said. “In fact, I sort of knocked one of his teeth out.”

“Oh no!”

“Eh, he deserved it after breaking my nose,” Ethan said, tapping the tip, “but I was out of a job, and lucky not to be arrested. Mr.Bennett saw what had happened, and he offered me a job. Since I was low on funds and low on choices, I said yes. He changed my life.”

Laura looked down, nodding. “He was like that.”

“He did raise you, after all,” Ethan said. “How was it?”

“Hard on both of us,” Laura admitted. “At first, Gram was still with us, so that was okay. But then she passed, she left a fifty-seven-year-old man with a seven-year-old girl. He’d only had one child, my father, and didn’t know anything about raising little girls. He tried, though.”

She chuckled, thinking back. She’d been a tomboy at first, running rampant around the farm, darting through the trees, setting up cartoonish traps to try and catch a “pet.” Thankfully it never worked.

“He showed me a picture of you once, when you were still probably in elementary school,” Ethan said. “This was very early on, he let me stay in the house with him while I got my feet under me financially, and he had this picture of you on the wall with a rifle?—”

“BB gun, actually,” Laura corrected him. She smiled. “Yeah, Paw-Paw taught me how to shoot, starting with an actual old Red Ryder BB gun. We’d sit in the back yard, plinking at empty cans. Later on, when he saw that I was getting pretty good, he got me a better one, a Crossman with a rifled barrel that could do pellets or BBs. I entered a few competitions, and that was my win.”

“Why’d you stop?” Ethan asked. “I mean, that’s sort of cool, and there’s air rifles in the Olympics even.”

“True, but that was the problem,” Laura said. “The cost. The Crossman Paw-Paw got me? It cost him a hundred and twenty-seven dollars. I know because I found the receipt in the trash. That might not sound like a lot, but growing up?”

“A hundred and twenty-seven dollars was my entire clothing budget for the year when I was that age,” Ethan said.

Laura nodded.

“so, yes, I understand.”

“Then you’ll understand when I tell you that we looked at what it would take for me to be competitive, even at the state level,” Laura said. “Pawpaw took me up to Colorado Springs to the Olympic Training Center even, and we asked around. To even get started at that level, just be started, I would have needed a three-hundred-dollar rifle. To actually start to compete? Thousand…”

Ethan whistled softly, and shook his head. “Yeesh.”

“It was okay, by then I was discovering my girly side anyway,” Laura admitted, a little sadly. “I started having to take the bus into Pueblo to go to high school, and then… well, stuff. Life, really. Pawpaw tried, he really did. But…”

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