Chapter 33

Chapter Thirty-Three

“ C an you give me five minutes?” Angel asked as she sprinted across the back deck toward her door. She didn’t want to tell Henry that she had to go to the bathroom, but she was in desperate need.

“Yes,” he clipped out, and Angel said, “Great, I’ll—” but then cut off as she heard the beep of him hanging up.

“Just great,” she muttered as she whipped open the door and ran through the kitchen. “He’s mad about something.”

And not just something. The fact that she’d handed out the employee handbooks without him.

Angel hadn’t been able to put it off for another day. She had them, and just because Henry had a family emergency didn’t mean everybody on the ranch did. She needed the teams and crews to function as teams and crews, and that included following the new guidelines and principles in the employee handbook.

So, she’d met with the master farriers and the foremen on Monday. Henry had left on Saturday before they’d had any time to make a plan at all for how they might announce their relationship.

It needed to be handed out, so she’d simply omitted the part where she and Henry were dating. When she told everyone from the platform that morning that they had new employee handbooks, she said their team leads or captains would be going over any changes and new procedures and rules they needed to know about, and she expected they would do that.

She took care of her business, thinking that someone had obviously told Henry about the new handbook, which didn’t surprise her. Angel knew Levi had been keeping Henry up-to-date with everything, just as Levi was supposed to. Angel wasn’t mad about that. She was mad that Henry thought she should handle their business by her self. She didn’t want to handle their relationship by herself. He was one half of it, and he should be here when they stood up in front of everyone and told them that they were dating.

She had half a mind not to call Henry back, but she wasn’t petty or immature. So, she sat down at her dining room table to enjoy a few extra moments of blessed air conditioning while she talked to her boyfriend. Since she didn’t think the conversation would be pleasant, she figured she didn’t need to bake while she did it.

“Hey,” she chirped happily when he picked up.

“If you’re busy, this can wait,” he said.

“I’m not busy,” she said. “I just needed to get in my house real quick.”

“All right,” he said, and then he sat there. Classic Henry move, trying to figure out what to say in the nicest way possible when what he wanted to say wasn’t all that nice.

“You’re mad about the handbook, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I’m not mad about the handbook itself,” he grumbled.

“You’re mad I didn’t tell everyone by myself that we’re together. That’s what you’re mad about.”

Stony silence came through the line, and then he exhaled heavily. “I’m not mad at all.”

“Yeah, sure sounds like you’re not,” she said. “Sounds like you’re having a party there. Did your momma bring over cake?”

“All right,” he grumped at her.

“I’m not really sure what you want me to do, Henry,” she said. “You seem to have an idea of how this is going to go, and I’m not doing it right. So why don’t you just tell me how you want it to go, and I’ll do my best to do it.”

“We both know that’s not true,” he said.

“What? That I’m not going to do my best to meet your needs?” She scoffed, her own irritation shooting through the roof. “Is that really what you think?” She couldn’t sit and have this conversation, and Angel burst to her feet and started pacing in the kitchen. “Because if that’s what you think, I think we should?—”

“I don’t think that,” he cut her off, his voice low and dangerous but nowhere near loud. “All right? I’m sorry; I don’t think that.”

Angel calmed down, but she still spun and walked back toward the sink and then took another lap toward the fridge. “What do you think?” she asked, her voice remarkably calm and smooth.

“I think I’m frustrated with this whole situation,” he said.

“Which situation?” she asked. “The one where you’re sitting in a hospital in Three Rivers, or the one where I was forced to hand out the handbook so that we could move forward here on the ranch, but you weren’t here?”

“Both,” he clipped out.

“Yeah, I am too,” she said. After a couple of moments where they both sat with themselves, the fire inside Angel started to burn out.

“Henry, baby, I’m real sorry about your grandma.” Angel realized the quiet could be incredibly charged with emotions, and this was one of those times. When she’d sat with her momma in the hospital, the quiet had not been this sad or this emotionally charged. Everything about Henry amplified the world around Angel. “I’ve sat with my mom in the hospital before,” she said. “It’s never easy.”

“No,” Henry said, and this time his voice didn’t sound like his at all.

“Is that where you are right now?” Angel asked.

“Yep.”

“Who’s coming in tonight?” An idea started to form in her head, and Angel wasn’t sure she could pull it off because it was a long drive to Three Rivers, and Henry had a lot of family surrounding him.

“Tonight is Sammy and Mike,” he said. His cousins.

“All right,” Angel said. “Well, maybe I can meet you for dinner.”

“You don’t need to do that,” he said. “It’s a long drive.”

“Yeah, and we would have a few hours together.”

He scoffed and said, “Angel, do you know what time it is?”

At least he’d started kidding again, and Angel giggled. “I miss you, Henry.”

“I miss you too, sweetheart.”

“I’m real sorry about the handbooks,” she said. “None of it is playing out the way I imagined.”

“Life rarely does,” he said. “And maybe it’s just God telling me it doesn’t matter. We can tell them when we tell them.”

“That’s right,” Angel said. “We’ll tell them when we tell them.”

“I want to see you,” he whispered. “But maybe let’s plan on dinner tomorrow. My momma and my aunt have been cooking all afternoon, and she’s going to have a feast at the house tonight. And then Paul said he’d go with me to look at a couple places in Stinnett.”

Alarms went off in Angel’s head all over again, and she resumed her pacing. “A couple places in Stinnett?” she asked, an icy undertone in her voice.

Henry obviously heard it too because he said, “Yeah,” in a higher-pitched voice. “Remember, I’ve talked to you about finding somewhere else to live?”

“The way you phrase that as a question tells me you know that no, I did not remember that,” she said. “And number two, no, we’ve not talked about that.”

“We have,” he said. “Remember when I mentioned that I thought it would be better if we didn’t live at Lone Star? I need a break from that place, and so do you. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that’s true.”

Angel hadn’t thought about it at all. So much of her life had been mapped out for her, and all she had to do was move box by box, from one thing to the next. Yes, Trevor’s accident had caused a major landslide in her plans, and her entire road had been detoured to another one. But still, her life revolved around Lone Star, and she’d never once considered not living there.

“Stinnett?” she asked.

“Baby,” he said quietly. “When I imagine the future, it’s me and you.” He didn’t say , I love you , but he might as well have with that soft, husky tone.

It’s me and you sure sounded nice.

“I know we haven’t talked a lot about marriage, or kids, or where we’ll live yet, but we need to start doing that.”

“Yeah,” she whispered.

“And one of those things that I see in the future for us is not Lone Star.”

Angel couldn’t get her feet to move. “Lone Star is my whole life.”

“We’ll work there,” he said. “Heck, we can give a lot of ourselves to that place—our hearts and our souls and our sweat and our blood. But me and you, we’ve got to give ourselves to each other. And that’s going to require a new place for us, a place that we find and that we make our own. So when I look into the future and I see me and you together, I don’t see us at Lone Star.”

“Okay,” she said. “I think I’m following.”

“Are you?”

“I think so,” she said. “You want to live somewhere else. Somewhere close where we can commute, where we can work and do all the things that we love, but then have somewhere we can retreat to.”

“Exactly that,” he said.

“And I’m just wondering if you hear yourself at all,” she asked as she collapsed back at the dining room table.

“I hear myself just fine,” he said.

“Do you?” she challenged. “Because you used the word ‘we’ a lot in those sentences you just said, and not once have you invited me to come look at any of the places around Three Rivers or Stinnett or Amarillo or wherever else you’re looking.”

This silence felt full of truth and tension, and Henry said, “You’re right. I guess I just—I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought.”

“If you want us to build that life independent of Lone Star so that we have each other, then I have to look at the places too, Henry.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think that’s about right.”

“So are you gonna go look at them with Paul tonight? Do you have appointments with a real estate agent?”

“No,” he said. “We were just gonna drive by.”

“Well, Stinnett’s not that far from here,” she said. “I could meet you there to do that.”

“If I’m coming from the ranch, it’ll be over an hour to Stinnett,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

“You’ll think about it.”

“Wait, that’s not what I meant. I just won’t go tonight.”

“You sound tired, Henry,” she said.

“I am tired, sweetheart.” His voice wavered. “Grams is awake and doing well. They get her up to walk every now and then, but her potassium is still too high, and they won’t let her go.”

“Sorry, baby,” Angel whispered. “If I could be there to help you, I would. You know that, right?”

“I know that,” he said. “Paul mentioned that we could do an equine therapy session before I told him about the houses in Stinnett. We’ll do that tonight. I’ll feel better, I promise.”

“Yeah,” Angel said. “And at the risk of bringing up another thing that we’re going to argue about….” She let her words hang there, and Henry chuckled into the silence.

“Baby, just say it. We’ll work it out.”

She liked his confidence in her, and in them. She’d been feeling real serious and heavy things for Henry, and it sure was nice that he’d been obviously experiencing those things too.

“It’s about the equine therapy,” she said. “Because I know you’ve been doing some of that with Trevor.”

“You know ?” he asked. “How do you know ?”

“He told me,” she shot back.

“Okay, first, it’s not real equine therapy,” Henry said. “I’m not a licensed trainer or anything. Second, equine therapy requires a human therapist aspect, none of which Trevor is doing. And third?—”

Angel burst out laughing at his prickly defense. “All right, all right,” she said. “But you’re definitely having Trevor work with Palermo as much as you’re trying to rehabilitate Palermo. Just admit it.”

“I’m not going to not admit it,” Henry said.

Angel giggled and shook her head. She got to her feet and pulled a bottle of water out of the fridge. “All right, cowboy. I have to get back to work.”

“You’re not mad about the equine therapy?”

“Oh, so you admit it’s equine therapy.” Henry clammed right up again, and Angel laughed. “I’m not mad about it,” she said. “Trevor gushes about it, thinks it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him. He’s out there every evening working with Palermo. So, I guess you’re replaceable.”

“Oh, don’t say that, sweetheart,” he said. “That’s my worst nightmare.”

And he meant it. Henry wanted to be important, and he didn’t want to be replaceable. And so, as Angel left her house, she said, “Henry, you’re irreplaceable to me, and all of us at Lone Star are dying without you.”

He chuckled this time and said, “You don’t have to be a liar on my behalf.”

“I’m not lying, baby,” she said as she crossed the deck. “We all miss you. But I think I miss you the most.”

“You better,” he growled. And then he said, “I’ll talk to you later. Bye, my angel.”

She hung up, and as Angel went back to the blue barn to start going through next week’s orders at the feed store, her mind kept wandering down the road to Stinnett and then to Three Rivers.

She and Henry sometimes went together like vinegar and oil. Sometimes like night and day, and other times like rainbows and unicorns and sunshine. As she thought about the conversation they’d just had, they’d moved through three pretty serious disagreements.

He would get mad and blow off steam for literally a few seconds and then come right back down. She did that too, something that usually didn’t happen quite so fast. When she got her ire up, it would stay there for hours, and she’d have to vent to multiple people to get herself to calm down. But with Henry, that didn’t happen.

Angel didn’t know what it meant. And she decided she could do the same thing that Henry had obviously been doing—looking into the future to see what she saw. Was it the two of them together? And if so, where and when? Angel had more than that to consider. She had Lone Star, and she’d always been dedicated to this ranch. So, if she left and lived somewhere else, how would that impact those around her?

She went over to Trevor’s every morning and then her parents’ house, and while she had reduced a lot of the load on her shoulders, she would not put that burden on someone who wasn’t blood.

She glanced over to Trevor’s house as she walked by and thought, You kind of already have. Trevor had two full-time helpers when he was working on the ranch to make sure he could get in and out of the saddle, to make sure that if he fell off the horse, someone was there to help him immediately, to help him get around. Everybody helped Trevor, and Angel wondered how much of the help she provided was necessary and how much she just simply liked doing.

“And you could still do it,” she whispered to herself. She pushed into the blue barn, grateful for air conditioning, and hurried down the hall to her office.

Momma was doing really good right now. Though she’d never be off oxygen and she still rarely left the house, it didn’t mean she was bedridden. She hadn’t been hospitalized in a couple of years. And besides, Stinnett was only thirty minutes away.

Angel caught sight of a box of the employee handbooks as she entered her office. As she let her mind flow into the future, she did see her and Henry together. She wasn’t quite sure where, and that unsettled her. And then the two of them disappeared completely, like a whiff of smoke, there and then blown away by a brisk breeze.

She ran her fingertips along the coil of the book. “Maybe when we tell everyone that we’ve been together for months,” she said. “There’ll be more fallout than I’m imagining.”

She tried to think of the individual reactions from the men she’d worked with for years, but nothing would come forward. Angel’s future was wide open, white, and completely blank.

No matter what she did for the rest of the afternoon, she couldn’t make anything solidify on it. She didn’t know what that meant. As she liked to plan and had always been able to plan, now she felt like she was marching out into the great wide open, completely vulnerable with armies all around her, weapons pointed in her direction.

She really needed Henry to come home and help her, but she didn’t want to add to his burdens by texting him INACH . So she did her best to cheer herself and stay busy, and she prayed that God would make up the rest until Henry returned.