Page 12 of Beside the Rolling Waves
The men laughed, but Rodney also cringed a bit inside. Right now, Becky would not consider him her friend.
He could almost hear her saying, friends stayed in touch. Friends didn’t ghost their friends. Friends talked to their friends when they had a problem. Friends gave their friends their phone numbers. Friends didn’t walk away from their friends.
“In all seriousness, you can’t worry about letting people down.” Matt nodded at Rodney, as though trying to get him to agree.
He knew that Davis and Matt were right. Ford wasn’t going to be upset, and obviously they weren’t either. He had millions made already, and he had his fingers in a bunch of different pots to continue making money. But it was almost like when someone was starting out, they had to put their heart and soul and everything they had into building. A person couldn’t build a multimillion-dollar empire by fiddling around with other things. They had to go deep with everything they had.
But he was already more than successful. He’d already made more fortunes than most men saw in a lifetime. He could stop. He could stop where he was, and yeah, he wouldn’t have reached any of his goals, but no one who saw him would think that he wasn’t successful. Except, his mentors had known that his dream was to be a billionaire, not just a millionaire, and he was going to stop short of that, hence his fear of letting people down.
But Davis and Matt were right. No one who knew him was going to be upset. They were all going to say that he was choosing the better thing. It was one thing to put your heart and soul into something when you didn’t have people who depended on you. But now was the time for him to step up, maybe like he should have done five years ago, and be there for Becky. And her sister, and her twins.
“Are the twins girls or boys or one of each?” Matt asked, completely changing the subject.
“You know, I never even thought to ask. I was just so flabbergasted that she had cancer and that she was pregnant. I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know either.” Matt lifted a shoulder. “She might have been trying to keep it quiet, because she was ashamed.”
Rodney nodded. Considering that she and Becky had always said they wanted better for their kids, it was more than possible, but he didn’t say anything more.
They talked about a few other things, but Rodney really did need to get to Chicago. Especially if he was going to wind things down. After talking to these men, he really thought he should. He needed to step out of his mindset of building wealth and think instead about building family. He was pretty sure that Becky would come around, and the two of them would figure things out. After all, he waited his whole life for her. She was the only one he wanted. And as far as he knew, she’d done the same for him. Of course, they hadn’t talked in the last five years, but he couldn’t imagine that anything had truly changed.
Six
Tuesday night, after finishing up the horse chores, Becky took the small space heater upstairs and used some of the precious heat to warm the area where her shower was.
It wasn’t really a shower. It was an old-fashioned metal washtub with a shower curtain on a wire around the top of it and an old spigot that doubled as a showerhead with hot and cold water that splashed down in it.
She would have to empty the tub when she was done, but it served to get her clean, although this winter, she was embarrassed to admit how seldom she used it. Not only was it freezing cold in her small apartment, but taking all the layers of clothes off and then having all the work to empty the tub made it so that for her to take a shower, she really, really had to want one.
But she and Rick were going to the snowmobile races tonight, and for some reason, it was extremely important that Rick look at her with…maybe not love, but admiration or something. Not disgust. She didn’t want him to wrinkle up his nose and ask her how long it had been since she’d been in her old metal washtub. Which was how he politely asked how long it had been since she showered.
Snowmobile races were not her favorite, but Rick liked them, so she went with him. Plus, it was something to do on the long winter evenings, and it got her out of her apartment. Even though her heart longed to be with her sister, Rita had insisted she was fine and would rather Becky use her favors to have people take care of her horses when the twins were born. Going out would take her mind off Rita and the cancer and the kids she didn’t know how she was going to afford to care for.
Not that she minded being by herself. She really didn’t. And if she got lonely, her horses weren’t far away.
But the more she thought about it, the more she thought that the one thing she could do to help her sister out was to sell her horses, and it was selfish of her not to.
But selling her horses not only meant losing the best friends she had but also giving up her dreams of having her own business. It was…hard to think about. Because it was all she had wanted since before she had graduated from high school. Still, there was no way she could take care of twin babies right now. So, while she was going to wait to talk to Rodney and see what he said, she was almost certain that that was what she was going to have to do.
Really, she would rather spend the night with her horses than at the snowmobile races, but she bundled up and was waiting at the barn door when Rick pulled up in his jacked-up, tricked-out truck.
He was so proud of it, and he spent all of his extra money on it.
It was part of the reason she figured their relationship hadn’t gotten any more serious than what it had. He didn’t have enough money for a girlfriend and the truck. So, he had Becky, who was an almost girlfriend and was content there, since she didn’t have money for a boyfriend and her horses.
They were very similar in that regard. She was pretty sure that was where their similarities ended, but Rick was nice to her, and he wasn’t a mean drunk, which was saying something, because finding a guy who didn’t consume copious amounts of alcohol any time he wasn’t working was rather hard to do.
Becky had never seen alcohol make anyone act smarter, and she’d seen it make a lot of people do a lot of dumb things. Which was enough to convince her that she didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
But to each his own, she supposed, though there were a ton of biblical principles that she could apply to the idea that one should not indulge.
Regardless, he wouldn’t drink and drive, so he wouldn’t be drinking right now. Although, more than once she’d ended up driving his truck home while he crashed in her driveway until he was sober enough to drive home in the morning.
Hopefully tonight would not be one of those nights.
He pulled up to the barn and laid on the horn.
She hurried out and got in the truck. He preferred not to have to get out. Not only because he would be wearing cowboy boots and it would be slippery for him to walk around in them, but also because it was cold out, and he didn’t like the cold.
