Rider’s Block

2. Chapter Two

Chapter two

“Dirt,” Florida Georgia Line

T hat night I finally allowed my brain to linger on something other than the impending trip ahead of me that is apparently inevitable.

Once every few months, my old girlfriends from college and I get together to host a cookbook-club-dinner. We treat it potluck style and bring a favorite dish from a new favorite cookbook we’ve recently discovered. Over the past year it’s gotten harder and harder to select a date, so when we’re finally able to all settle on a night to hang out, I do my best to keep my mind present and not stuck in my head.

Plus, as my night to host, so I have to be extra “on.”

I spend the rest of the day clearing out the back patio, making sure my string lights all work and are properly draped between the trees in my backyard. I scrub my kitchen spotless, despite Chester’s best attempts to knock things over as I go along. The little turd.

I’ve even gone so far as to move my book piles around to try and accommodate the five girls that will soon be filling my small space. After everything happened, I pretty much lost this friend group. The only time I see them is when it’s just the girls, so even though we don’t see each other apart from this gathering, I still sort of look forward to it.

By the time everyone arrives and has wine in their hand, the sun is starting to set, so we spread all of our dishes out and begin filling up all of our plates around a medley of conversations happening simultaneously from different parts of the table.

“…Yep, we’re thinking of getting married next spring, is that too long? What did you do, Miranda? I feel like I remember you and Ben having a short engagement and that being nice…” Erin asks Miranda down on one end of the table. She and her boyfriend of only five months just got engaged so the idea of a long engagement is comical to me, but seeing as I have zero experience in the marriage department, I don’t pipe in.

“Oh yeah, I wouldn’t go longer than a year. Hell, I’d even question going longer than half a year.” Miranda is the mom of us all, she married her college sweetheart right after graduation and they already have two kids and a third on the way.

I turn my head to the other side of the table to see if it’s a conversation I can add any value to, but sadly I’m almost more lost over here.

“Jessie said I should do a residency in the Midwest, but her roommate just started at a clinic in Rhode Island and I feel like if I don’t pick the right setting now I’ll get stuck in a practice I don’t actually love,” Sam says to Kelsey on my other side. They’re both in the medical field and comparing their next steps.

I look in front of me at Oliva. Both of us immediately try to suppress a laugh at how completely and totally we have our group in segments and silos, and how it’s funny the two of us almost always end up sitting next to each other.

In college I wouldn’t say Olivia was my best friend, but on this side of graduation we’ve stayed the closest. For one, she lives the closest to me, but for the other, neither one of us are married with kids or married to our occupations.

“So what’s new with you?” she asks when it’s been well and fully determined we’re the last ones standing.

“Not my day, honestly. My book got denied again.” I’m normally not this open with my life details, but Olivia never judges me.

“Which book?” she asks, shocked.

“The cowboy mystery I tried to write.”

“I didn’t know you were writing a mystery.”

“Yeah, well, apparently I’m not very good at it.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“I have fourteen denial letters that insinuate it.”

“Did they tell you the mystery was bad?”

“Well, not exactly…” I trail off.

“Then why did they deny it?”

“The good news is it’s fixable,” I say, trying to keep a pep in my step and not put a damper on the night, “but the bad news is I have no idea how I’m going to go about it. Apparently it was pretty obvious I’ve never spent much time in Northern Colorado.”

“Oh my god! I can help! I can actually help!” She’s so excited I don’t have any desire to squelch her enthusiasm even though I’m genuinely nervous for what’s about to come out of her mouth. “I have family in Northern Colorado! And they’re, like, real-life cowboys! Amelia, I can fix this. Give me a second.” Before I can protest, she has her phone out going through her contacts.

“No, no, I don’t want to intrude!” I practically shout from my side of the table. Panic sets in. When I do these things, I like to be anonymous, incognito. There are few things people hate more than nosy intruders who want to exploit information, and while nothing I’m doing is nefarious, I’m definitely going to write about what I see, and from experience I know that makes people uncomfortable. “When I do these kinds of trips, they’re usually for at least a month if not longer. I get hospitality but I couldn’t do that to your family.”

“Amelia this is perfect, they have cottages on their property that they Airbnb out when they don’t have ranch hands staying there—”

“Really?” I don’t want to get my hopes up at all but if I could have my own place that might be nice…

“Yeah, and my cousins are all in the rodeo circuit, so you’ll get the full experience, and look! Meant to be, my aunt Nancy says one of the cottages is unbooked and unused for the next three months because they just had a guy back out!” She’s holding up her phone for me to see as if trying to prove everything is working out perfectly.

“I would pay them for the cottage, obviously,” I say, trying to think of other objections I could use without hurting her feelings.

“Doubt they’ll let you, but I’ll let her know. Aunt Nancy is the best.”

“I always thought you went to the mountains when you went to see your family every summer.”

“Some of my family lives there, too, but most of my dad’s siblings stayed close to the family ranch. He and my uncle Tim were the black sheep of the family for moving away.”

“Are you sure it wouldn’t be intruding?”

“Of course not, Amelia!” And then looking me dead in the eye to show how sincere she’s being she adds, “Let me help you.”

And that is how I find myself packing my bags, dropping Chester off at Olivia’s house, and heading to the airport the next Tuesday.

When I finally accepted her offer, she gave me the entire rundown from who’s who, where they live, what they do, and what I can expect in their personalities. Normally I’m excellent with details. Goes without saying given what I do for a living now. But I don’t know if it’s my nerves or pride getting in the way, but every detail got rattled in my brain after takeoff.

At least I’d written down the address.

After collecting my luggage, I pick up my rental, which to my utter dread is a little red Prius. This is worst-case scenario. I love big cars. This clown car is not going to cut it.

“Won’t I need something with a little more…muscle?”

“Are you planning on going off-roading?” the snooty lady behind the counter asks with one eyebrow cocked up. The only spark of joy she has in her entire personality is in her red-rimmed cat-eye glasses, but everything else about her looks perpetually pissed off.

“No…” I trail off, not wanting to insinuate I’d abuse a rental car so egregiously. “I just don’t know what the roads are like and want to be prepared.”

“It’s Colorado, sweetie, not the boondocks. You’ll be just fine.”

And I was all the way through Denver, and then through the town of Fort Collins, which was the closest main strip to Olivia’s family’s ranch. But when I arrived at the address she’d given me and took the fork for the dirt road according to her clearly written directions…that’s when me and my Prius decided to quarrel. The bumps in the road jarred every coherent thought out of me, so even though I know better, I hit the gas trying to get the last leg of the drive over with as soon as possible.

Evidently, that was the wrong decision.

Before I know it the back of my car is whipping left and right in a way that I can’t get a handle on with such a squirrely car, then to my utmost horror I hear a jarring pop…and the offensive car sinks a good few inches. I slam the brakes, which just sends my back end swinging around to the front end, and by the time it’s all over my heart’s pounding through the roof. It takes several minutes of steadying breaths before I find the nerve to step out and assess the damage.

I’ve blown a tire. I’ve had the car for less than three hours… and I’ve already blown a tire.

Not knowing how to change a tire off the top of my mind, I pull up my phone to try and YouTube it, when I hear the sound of gravel flying down the road and a massive truck comes screaming down the lane.

But does the truck blow a tire? No, no, that was just me and my stupid micro-car.

I’m starting to actually fear being run over by this truck when it finally pulls to a stop right behind my red failure of a lift. I busy myself with inspecting the contents of the trunk so I don’t look entirely inept, but I’m immediately pulled from my pretend perusal when I hear the crunch of boots on gravel coming up behind me. They sound angry. I don’t know how I know these steps sound angry, but they do. For all I know I’ve just scared away some cow irreparably or done something heinous I don’t even know about because I’ve never actually been around enough cowboys to know how to offend them.

Plastering on my most sincere smile I turn around, prepared to apologize for my unknown offense, but the smile slips right off my face when I see the trouble that is walking right toward me.

Well shit , my hopeless mind can’t help but let out when it sees the mountain of a man headed my way, this is going to be a tough month.