I’m a rancher. My father was a rancher, and his father before him. I was born to it, you might say. Family tradition. We’re old Norwegian stock. Pioneers.
There was a time when I thought I could escape my destiny. Outrun the demons of my DNA. I would move to the city. Avoid the pitying glances. Evade the narrow minds. Walk down the street without someone saying, “There’s Old Martin’s boy. You’d never think it to look at him, would you?” Because they wouldn’t let me live it down, you know. Not then. Not ever. Small towns have long memories.
But I never quite reached escape velocity. Oh, I moved to the city. Got accepted into the pre-med program over to Lincoln. Met the most remarkable girl. Made plans for the future that didn’t include mending fences and fixing windmills and tending stock. I dared to believe I had put the past behind me. And while it lasted, it was bliss.
Alyss wasn’t like any other girl I’d ever known. There was no beauty there to speak of. She wasn’t tall or blonde or particularly well-endowed. She was small. Dark. Freckled. At first glance, she looked unkempt, frumpy even. She favored flannel shirts, torn jeams, buffalo sandals. But there was something in the way she looked right through you; something in the way she laughed. It was mesmerizing.
She seemed to have been born lucky, succeeding at everything she tried. Not that she was cocky about it. In fact, she did everything in her power to avoid drawing attention to herself. She just had this unshakeable confidence at the core of her being that she could do anything she set her mind to. She had me convinced that I could do the same.
And then my mother died during my senior year and my fate was sealed. Pop couldn’t take care of the ranch. Hell, he couldn’t even take care of himself. I was trapped, just as I had always known I would be. Penned in as neatly as a calf on branding day.
I never made it to graduation. Never got the degree. And I never said goodbye to Alyss. It was her eyes, you know. They were an amber sort of brown and deep, so deep you could lose yourself in them. And somewhere at the bottom, where even her laughter never reached, there was this terrible, wounded sadness that hinted at tragedy too great to bear. There were things she never spoke about. And things she never asked about. We were kindred souls. I knew she’d understand why I left so silently. And I knew she’d never seek me out.
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