Birthright

off his hat, and that light breeze danced his hair back from his face as he sketched.
    “Why didn’t you make a living out of that? Out of, you know, art?”
    “Not good enough.”
    She rolled over on her stomach. “Art wasn’t good enough, or you weren’t?”
    “Both. Painting, if that’s what you mean, didn’t interest me enough to give it the time and study it required. Not to mention it wouldn’t have been macho enough for me when I started college. Bad enough I never intended to work the family ranch, but then to work at becoming a painter? Jesus, my old man would’ve died of embarrassment.”
    “He wouldn’t have supported you?”
    Jake glanced over, then flipped a page on his sketch pad and started another. “He wouldn’t have stopped me, or tried to. But he wouldn’t have understood it. I wouldn’t have either. Men in my family work the land, or with horses, with cattle. We don’t work in offices or the arts. I was the first in my family to earn a college degree.”
    “I never knew that.”
    He shrugged. “Just the way it is. I got interested in anthropology when I was a kid. To keep me out of trouble, my parents let me go to a couple of knap-ins in the summer. It was a big gift because they needed me on the ranch. And sending me to college because I wanted to go was a big sacrifice, even with the scholarships.”
    “Are they proud of you?”
    He was silent for a moment. “The last time I was home, I guess about five, six months ago, I just swung by. Didn’t let them know I was coming. My mother put an extra plate on the table. Well, two, one for Digger. My father came in, shook my hand. We ate, talked about the ranch, the family, what I’d been doing. I hadn’t seen them in nearly a year, but it was just like I’d been there the day before. No fatted calf, if you get me. But later on, I happened to glance at the shelf in the living room. There were two books on anthropology there, mixed in with my father’s Louis L’Amours. It meant a lot to me to see that, to know they’d been reading about what I do.”
    She brushed a hand over his ankle. “That’s the nicest story you’ve ever told me about them.”
    “Here.” He turned the pad over so she could see. “It’s rough, but it’s pretty close to what they look like.”
    She saw a sketch of a woman with a long face, quiet eyes with lines dug at the corners, and a mouth just barely curved into a smile. Her hair was long, straight, streaked with gray. The man had strong cheekbones, a straight nose and a serious mouth. His eyes were deep-set and his face weathered as if from sun and time.
    “You look like him.”
    “Some.”
    “If you sent this to them, they’d frame it and hang it on the wall.”
    “Get out.”
    She glanced up in time to catch the baffled embarrassment on his face, and in time to jerk the pad out of his reach. “Bet. A hundred bucks says if you send this to them, it’s framed and on the wall the next time you go home. You can mail it in the morning. Any water in the cooler?”
    “Probably.” He scowled at her, then shifted to open it. He stayed turned away for so long, she kicked him in the ankle.
    “Is there or not?”
    “Yeah. Found some.” He turned back. “Somebody’s in the woods with a flashlight.” He spoke in the same casual tone as he handed her the water.
    Her eyes stayed locked with his for a beat, then shifted over his shoulder. Even as her heart kicked in her chest, she unscrewed the cap on the bottle, lifted it for a drink as she watched the beam of light move through the silhouettes of trees.
    “Could be kids, or your general species of assholes.”
    “Could be. Why don’t you go in the trailer, call the sheriff?”
    “Why?” Slowly, Callie capped the bottle again. “Because if I do, you’ll head out there without me. And if it turns out to be a couple of Bubbas in training hoping to spook the flatlanders, I’m the one who’ll look like the idiot. We’ll check it out first. Both of us.”
    “The last time you went into the woods, you came out with a concussion.”
    Like Jake, she continued to follow the progress of the beam of light. “And you dodged bullets. We keep sitting here like this, they could shoot us like ducks in a pond if that’s the goal.” She slid her hand into her pack, closed her fingers over the handle of a trowel. “We go to the trailer and make the call together, or we go into the woods and check it out together.”
    He looked down at her hand.