Homecoming Ranch Read Free Page A

on the
phone
with my
daughter!
I said I’d be there in a minute!” her mother shouted. “I swear, the things I have to put up with. I have to go, Madeline. We’ll talk later. But you think about what you just said. Because I think you want to understand more about the man who gave you life. And you need to go see what we got.”
    Madeline had wanted to understand more about her father a very long time ago. And when the answers didn’t come, she’d stopped caring. How could her mother not realize that? “No, Mom. I don’t care who he was, and I don’t want anything of his.” There was, Madeline had realized with surprise, so much resentment in her voice.
So much.
    She’d expected her mother to argue, but in a rare moment of maternal instinct, Clarissa Pruett sighed. “He cared about you, Maddie. He
loved
you. But he was a weak man. Now I really have to go. I need some help with my car payment this month and it’s best to keep Big John happy.” She hung up.
    “I’m not going,” Madeline said into the dead line. And she meant it.
    She had no intention of uprooting her carefully constructed life, of dropping everything to fly out to Colorado.

    Trudi was not satisfied with Madeline’s response either. “Don’t be stupid,” she said when they met up.
    Madeline had known Trudi since the first grade. They’d met in Mrs. Bever’s class—Madeline, the skinny, dark-haired, dirty kid who was always late because her mother couldn’t wake up after a night of partying. And Trudi, the overweight, red-cheeked redhead with sparkling green eyes. They were outsiders, the kids on the fringe. But as they grew older, Trudi’s personality far outshone her weight, and she became friend to all and enemy to none. She’d still experienced crushing moments—mean boys, meaner girls—but Madeline was always there, on her side.
    And Trudi had been steadfastly loyal to Madeline in return.
    Madeline used to envy Trudi. She’d had the home life Madeline had always craved: a real house, a mother and a father and a sister and a brother. Her mother got her up in the morning and fed her breakfast, and she was there when Trudi came home from school. She washed Trudi’s clothes and helped her with her homework and took her shopping and went to all her school events and made cookies for the class.
    Madeline and her mother had lived hand-to-mouth most of her life, putting down roots with whomever would take them in, living off the men her mother met, and then, whenever her mother was offended, which had been often, pulling up from their shallow moorings and blowing away. Mom had held a dozen jobs or more, had relied heavily on her blue-collar parents long after it was decent to do so, and had bristled when Madeline would beg for a house like Trudi’s.
    Well, Mom finally had the house. She’d inherited it when her parents had died, long after Madeline had left home determined to make a life completely different than the one her mother had shown her.
    “You
have
to go.” Trudi peeled a nacho from an enormous plate of them. “I am not going to let you sit there like a geeky bump on a log with your highlighters and flat shoes and miss this opportunity.” She tucked the guacamole-laden chip into her mouth.
    “What’s wrong with my shoes?” Madeline asked. They were ballet flats, purchased on sale from Kohl’s.
    “I’ve told you before, Mad,” Trudi said in that patient, motherly voice usually reserved for her daughter, Esme, or her husband, Rick, “there is practical, and then there is
too
practical. Anyway, we’re not talking about your shoes, we are talking about
you
and the little bubble you live in, and your unwillingness to step outside of that bubble.”
    “I don’t know what you mean,” Madeline sniffed. “I have too stepped out of my bubble.” She ignored the nagging thought that she had turned off her cell phone so that she would not receive messages from anyone who could possibly pull her out of her