“Not me. It’s too late for me.” He reached out and seized Chance’s hand. “You, though, it’s not too late for you to go. You and Petey. With your mama and your wife both gone and me breathing my last any day now, there’ll be nothing to hold you here.”
The mention of his late wife silenced Chance as nothing else could have. The wound of Mary’s death was still too raw and painful, even though it had been more than a year now since the flu had turned into pneumonia and a three-day blizzard had prevented them from getting the medical help she desperately needed. It had been his fault. He should have ridden out at the first sign she was sick, instead of listening to her reassurances she’d be fit as a fiddle again in no time.
Losing his sweet, gentle Mary had cost him his soul and hardened his heart. Had it not been for Petey, he might very well have lost his mind. Petey’s out-of-control behavior was fair warning that he had to go on living in the here and now. Hank’s illness had been the clincher.
What his father said was true enough, though. Chance had come to hate Montana and its bitter winters. He liked ranching, but there were other places he could settle down and start over. If Hank hadn’t been too ill and too ornery to move, Chance would have packed them all up and headed off to start over months ago. Once his father died, there really would be nothing left to keep him here. Still, as shiftless and irritating as Hank could be, Chance didn’t want to think about not having his father bossing him around and telling his tales.
“You’re going to live to be a hundred, you old coot,” he said, squeezing his father’s callused hand. “You’re too stubborn not to.”
A terrible racking cough seized his father just then as if to give lie to Chance’s prediction. When it was over, his father’s brow glistened with sweat. His color was ashen.
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice raspy. “You go to Texas. You have as much right to White Pines as anyone who’s left there. Maybe Harlan’s still alive, maybe he’s not, but that house, that land, was my heritage as much as his. He stole it from me. Take it back, Chance. Take it back for me. It’s the only way I’ll ever rest in peace, knowing that you and Petey have what’s due you.” His eyes glittered feverishly. “Promise me, son. Promise me.”
Chance feared the cost of an argument would be too great. “I promise you, Daddy. Petey and I will go to Los Piños,” he said, though he wasn’t sure he ever intended to follow through. He wasn’t certain he had the strength left to carry on an old family feud.
His father’s grip tightened. “Don’t say that just to pacify me, son. A promise made on a man’s deathbed has to be kept. It’s the next thing to making a promise to God. You understand that, don’t you?”
Hank had been well into his forties when his only son was born. He’d already been set in his no-account ways. Over the years Chance had fought with his father as often as he’d agreed with him. Their rows had been loud and legendary in these parts, but he loved the old coot.
“I understand,” he said softly, reaching for a damp cool cloth to wipe his father’s brow.
“Petey?” the old man whispered.
Petey crept closer. “I’m here, Granddaddy.”
“You’re a good boy, Petey. Wild and spirited, just the way I was, but you have a good heart, same as me. Don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise.”
Chance put a hand on his son’s shoulder and squeezed. Tears were spilling down Petey’s cheeks. It was clear he sensed the end was near.
“Granddaddy, don’t die,” he pleaded. “Please don’t die like Mama did.”
Hank Adams gave Chance’s hand one last squeeze, then reached out his arms for his grandson. Petey climbed onto the bed and hugged him back fiercely, refusing to let go.
“Shh, boy. Don’t cry for me. You have to be brave for your daddy. Make sure he takes you to Texas, okay? I won’t be here to see that he does, so you’ll have to do it for me.”
“Daddy!” Chance warned.
His father shot him a final stubborn look. “Just making sure you keep your promise, son. Now you won’t be able to look Petey in the eye if you don’t.”
Stunned and infuriated by such a sneaky tactic, Chance glared at him. “You’re a manipulative old son of a gun. You know that, don’t you?”
His father cackled. “Hell, boy, I’m an Adams. That’s our heritage as much as White Pines and cattle.”
He sighed then and closed his eyes. Chance had to coax a tearful Petey away from the bed.
It was a few more hours before Hank Adams died, but those were his last words, and they echoed in Chance’s head in the days to come.
By the time school was out for the year, he’d made up his mind. He put both houses—his and his daddy’s—on the market, packed up his and Petey’s belongings in the back of his pickup, paid one last visit to the cemetery where Mary and his mother and father had been laid to rest, said goodbye to neighbors he’d known all his life and headed south.
“It’s going to be just like it was for my great-great-granddaddy,” Petey said, bouncing in his seat with excitement. “We’re having a real adventure.”
“Yes,” Chance agreed with one last look at his past in the rearview mirror. Either they were going to have an incredible adventure, or they were heading straight for disaster. He wasn’t quite prepared to lay odds on which was the more likely.
Sweet heaven, it was true. Jenny Runningbear Adams stood just inside the doorway to her fourth-grade classroom and tried very hard not to panic. All around her chaos reigned, which just proved there was always a payback for the sins of the past. Years of childhood misdeeds were returning to haunt her.
If her stepfather could see this, he’d laugh till his sides split. Harlan Adams just loved irony. He’d always told her that one day she’d run across a child as impossible as she had been. Apparently this school year she was about to be confronted by a whole classroom of them.
She stared around her in horror and wondered what had possessed her to shift from teaching history and current events to eighth graders. She’d had some idealistic notion that elementary-school students would be more receptive, easier to mold. Obviously she’d lost her mind. The evidence of that was right in front of her.
The opening-day bell had barely rung and already chairs had been upended. Papers were strewn from one end of the dingy room to the other. Graffiti had been scrawled across the blackboard in every shade of chalk. Unfortunately, not even half the words had been spelled correctly. Stacks of textbooks she had neatened herself only yesterday were tumbled in disarray. Pandemonium was in full swing.
A freckle-faced girl was huddled at her desk sobbing as she clutched one fat braid in her hand, while the other bobbed on the left side of her head where it belonged. She looked like a lopsided doll after an encounter with a four-year-old’s scissors.
A pack of boys was circling the girl’s chair, whooping as if they’d just succeeded in scalping her. It was an image that sent a particularly nasty chill through Jenny’s part-Native American blood.
She took in the entire scene, drew a calming breath and prayed for patience, fortitude and maybe just a little divine intervention. At this moment she deeply regretted ever thinking of teaching as a way of giving something back to the community and sticking a little closer to home than she’d been in recent years.
More than one person had warned her that this would not be as simple as dealing with a bunch of hardheaded, shortsighted congressmen or even the eighth graders she’d had the year before. She had scoffed at that. Lobbying on Capitol Hill had been a three-ring circus. Eighth graders had been discovering the power of hormones. Fourth