Free Forever Together by Leeanna Morgan

land
like the skeleton of a dinosaur. A line of nozzles under its belly
had sprayed water across the pasture, drenching the soil with
spring fed water.
    “I promised Anna I’d bake some cookies for dessert tonight.”
    Tom lifted his arm to let her know he’d heard
her. “I’ll get you back with time to spare.”
    Kate wasn’t sure she had any spare time. The
Beauty Box was closing at four o’clock to give everyone time to get
ready for the fashion show. By half past five, Loretta, Kate, and three other stylists would be at
the Emerson Center doing the hair and makeup of the models.
    Her dad didn’t seem to be in a hurry. They
drove slowly across the ranch, stopping at a place not far from
where they’d moved cattle the first morning she’d helped. Tom found
his moisture kit in the box on the back of his bike and started
taking readings.
    “It doesn’t look as though this drought is
going to break anytime soon.” He pushed his hat back on his head.
“This pasture will be okay today. I’ve got worse that need
irrigating.”
    “What do you do when you run out of
water?”
    “Pay for trucks to haul it onto the ranch.
It’s damn expensive. I can’t complain, though. We’re better off
than a lot of ranches around here.”
    Kate watched her dad study the land. He never
said much, but when he did people listened. He was so different to
the man Kate remembered from her childhood that she could have been
looking at a stranger.
    “Why did you leave mom?” Kate bit her bottom
lip. She hadn’t meant to ask her dad about their past. Her mom
never wanted to talk about it, so for most of her life Kate had
blamed herself. As a child, she’d
thought it was something she’d done to turn her father away from
them. As an adult, she knew
better. But sometimes doubt crept in and she felt guilty for what
had happened after he’d left.
    Her dad’s answer wasn’t quick in coming.
“Your mom and I were…” Tom hesitated. He pointed to the pasture in
front of them. “If you don’t nourish the soil, give back more than
you take, you end up with land that looks okay, but doesn’t sustain anything. Your mom and I were
like that. She always wanted to be somewhere different, someone
different. She had a need in her that I didn’t understand.”
    “Is that why you moved to San Diego?”
    “It’s why we moved to a lot of places. Before
you were born we lived in three
different towns. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her…I did. But I’d
lived my entire life in Montana. I turned my back on land that
three generations of ranchers had lost blood and tears over. Your
mom used to say I had roots in my boots and she wasn’t wrong.”
    Tom hesitated and Kate waited. Her dad was
thinking, weighing up what needed to be said against what was best left alone.
    He braced his hands on his hips, stared long
and hard at the mountains in the distance. “Somewhere along the way
we lost each other. When my father died, I had to come home. Your mom…she wanted to keep
traveling.”
    Kate knew her mom had a hard time staying in
one place. It was only Lily’s illness that had kept them in San
Diego. After Lily had died her mom
had packed everything they owned into the back of her car. She’d
driven through more States than Kate could remember and still
couldn’t find what she’d been looking for.
    “Why didn’t you write to me?” It wasn’t the
question she most wanted an answer to, but it would do for now.
Kate had spent half her life wondering why her dad hadn’t loved her
enough to stay. The half that led her down so many wrong paths that
she almost didn’t find her way out.
    “I tried, baby girl, I really did.”
    Kate held her breath. Her dad had called her
his baby girl even when she was twelve years old and almost as tall
as her mom.
    “I wrote most weeks, let you know what I was
doing, how much I missed you. Your mom would occasionally call , but never talked for long. A
couple of years after I left, my letters started