Page 9 of Rancher's Return

“Maybe people were just careful. Around me.”

“Well. Perhaps. Though, then they open you up to a moment like this. Where you were bound to run into me without a moment’s notice. I see you have my son.”

Her eyes went round. “He’s your son.”

“Yes he is. Has he been causing trouble?”

“I... I don’t even know how to... I...”

“What have you been up to, you termite?” Buck asked Colton. He figured he might get more of a direct answer from the young man himself than the decidedly flustered Marigold.

“It wasn’t what it looked like,” Colton said.

“Shoot, kid. That is the wrong thing to say to the likes of me. Because I’ll be the first to tell you, whatever it is, it is always what it looks like.”

That seemed to jolt Marigold out of whatever trance she was in. “When I came home from grocery shopping today, I went upstairs to check on my daughter. And found your son in her room.”

And right in that moment, it didn’t matter so much that the woman standing on his doorstep was Marigold Rivers. What mattered was the very clear and sudden realization that he had been thrown into the deep end of parenting, and this was something he had no idea how to navigate.

“You did what?”

“I have concerns,” Marigold said. “And believe me, my daughter has agency, and I’m going to talk to her about it—”

But he wasn’t listening. Not anymore. “Listen here,” he said to Colton. “And you listen real good. This is a small town, and people talk. You go messing around with a girl, and she is going to get a reputation you’re not going to get. Do you understand? The responsibility that she’s going to bear will be so much bigger than yours. You have to be careful. Not just in terms of safe sex, but all these other things. Because no son of mine is going to walk around thinking he’s exempt from consequences.”

“Yes, sir,” Colton mumbled.

“Get your ass in the house. I’m going to talk to Marigold for a second.”

“All right,” he said.

Marigold simply looked stunned.

“I didn’t know... I was about to say that I didn’t know you had a son, but I didn’t know you were back here. I haven’t known a thing about you for twenty years.”

“Well, I only recently have a son.”

“What?”

“I just adopted three teenagers. And I’m realizing right now that I’m maybe in over my head. I spent the last sixteen years or so working at a camp for troubled boys. And the thing about working at a camp for troubled boys is that there are no girls there. So there’s a little less of this kind of thing. Not none, mind you, but at least nobody can get pregnant.”

She looked stricken by that.

“Not saying that anybody here is going to get pregnant.”

“She can’t. She’s going to college. She’s going to get out of here, and she’s going to do better than me.”

“I’m going to talk to him.”

“I... I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that this is the first boy she sneaks into her room.”

“Listen, I know you have plenty of reason to hate me.”

She looked away, and then back up at him. “I don’t hate you. I recognize now that my reactions back then were... I was young. I was angry. But do the math on how old I was when you left and how old I am now. And the fact that I have a kid the same age as yours.”

“You were still in high school when you had her,” he said, not needing to do the figures to understand what she was getting at.

“I was. I got my life back on track. The pregnancy forced me to get things together, and it forced me to let go of the things that were no longer serving me. I’m grateful for her. I wouldn’t change my life. But I don’t want this for her. I want better.”

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