Montana Sky

back, or I’ll borrow a rig.”
    “I’d rest easier,” Sarah put in before Willa could refuseagain. “It’s a shameful thing what’s happened here. We’d all rest easier knowing Ben’s with you.”
    “All right, then.”
    Once the good-byes were said, with the rest of the McKinnons walking them to the door, Will climbed behind the wheel of the rig. “You’re a lucky man, McKinnon.”
    “Why is that?”
    She shook her head and stayed silent until they’d left the ranch house behind. “You can’t know, you can’t possibly understand how lucky you are because it just is for you. It’s just the way it is and always has been.”
    Baffled, he shifted in his seat to study her profile. “What are you talking about?”
    “Family. Your family. I sat there in that kitchen. I’ve sat there before, but I don’t know if it all sank in. It did today. The ease and affection, the history, the bond. You wouldn’t know what it’s like not to have any of that. It’s just yours.”
    It was true enough, and he didn’t know if he’d ever thought it through. “You’ve got sisters now, Willa. There’s a bond there, and it’s easy to see.”
    “Maybe there’s the beginnings of something, but there’s no history. No memories. I’ve seen you start a story and Zack finish it. I’ve heard your mother laugh over something stupid the two of you did as boys. I never heard my mother laugh. I’m not being maudlin,” she said quickly. “It just hit me, sitting there today, watching you and your family. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah, I’d say it is.”
    “He stole that from us. I’m just beginning to realize how much he stole from all three of us. Not just me. I’m going to make a detour.”
    When they came to the boundary of Mercy land, she shifted into four-wheel drive and swung onto a winter-rutted access road. He didn’t ask where she was heading. He’d already figured it out.
    Snow was mounded over the graves, burying the headstones, smothering the wild grass and tender flowers. She thought it looked like a postcard, so perfect, so undisturbed, with only Jack Mercy’s stone, higher, brighter than all therest, thrusting up out of the snow toward the darkening sky.
    “Do you want me to go with you?”
    “No, I’d rather you didn’t. If you could just wait here. I won’t be long.”
    “Take your time,” he murmured as she climbed out.
    She sank knee-deep in snow, trudged her way through it. It was cold, bitterly, with the wind slapping the air, sending snow swirling from its bed. She saw deer, a small herd of doe on the rise of a hill, like sentinels for the dead.
    There was no sound but the wind, and the wind was like the first stars groaning as she made her way to her father’s grave.
    The headstone was carved as he’d ordered, carved as he’d lived his life. Without a thought to anyone but himself. What did it matter? she wondered, for he was as dead as her mother, who was said to have lived kind, and gentle.
    She had come from that, Willa thought, from the kind and the cruel. What it made her she couldn’t say. Selfish on some levels. Generous on others, she hoped. Proud and filled with self-doubt. Impatient, but not without compassion.
    Neither kind, she decided, nor cruel, and that wasn’t so bad, all in all.
    What she did understand, standing there in the rough wind, in the rougher silence, was that she had loved them both. The mother she had never known, and the father she had never touched.
    “I wanted you to be proud of me,” she said aloud. “Even if you couldn’t love me. To be . . . satisfied with me. But it never happened. Ham was right today. You slapped me all my life. Not just the physical slaps—there wasn’t much punch behind those because you didn’t really give a damn. Emotionally. You hit me emotionally more times than I can count. And I just came back, my head lowered like a kicked dog, so you could do it again. I guess I’m here to tell you I’m done with that. Or I’m going to try to be.”
    She was going to try, very hard.
    “You thought you’d pit the three of us against each other. I see that now. Doesn’t look like we’re going to oblige you.We’re keeping the ranch, you selfish son of a bitch. And I think we may just keep each other too. We’re going to make it work. To spite you. We may not be much of a family now, but we’re not done yet.”
    She walked away the way she’d come.
    He hadn’t taken his eyes