Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 2: Earl’s funeral
CALEB
The funeral was on a Saturday.
Copper Creek’s church held a hundred people at full capacity and was three-quarters full, which said something about Earl Ryder that Caleb was still working out how to feel about. His father had not been an easy man. He had been respected — not liked by everyone, but respected, which in this valley was its own currency.
Caleb sat in the front pew with the Ryder Ranch’s two remaining hands, who had been with the operation for fifteen and twenty years respectively and who had the particular bearing of men attending the funeral of someone they had genuinely known.
He had not been back in twelve years.
He had called at Christmas and on his father’s birthday and received calls back that were brief and functional, the maintenance of a relationship that had required distance to remain intact. He had not known, until he was standing in the Ryder ranch house the day he arrived, how much of it he had been not looking at.
The house needed work. The books were worse than he’d expected. The two hands were loyal but they were not enough for the operation Earl had been trying to sustain.
He was still working out what he was going to do about all of it.
The eulogy was given by the Methodist minister, who had known his father for thirty years and who spoke about Earl’s relationship to the land with the specific accuracy of someone who understood that the land was the point, always had been, that Earl Ryder had been happiest with ground under his boots and sky overhead and a problem in front of him to work through.
Caleb looked at the church window.
He thought about his father. He thought about what it meant to sit in this specific church, in this specific pew, after twelve years of not sitting in it.
He had not been planning to come back permanently.
He had been planning to come back, handle the estate, make a decision about the property — sell, keep, some combination — and return to the circuit life he’d built. Except the circuit life no longer existed because his hip had been rebuilt twice in the last year and the doctors had been kind and clear about what rebuilt twice meant.
So he was here.
He looked across the church as the minister concluded, the way you looked at familiar rooms you hadn’t been in for a long time, registering what had changed and what hadn’t.
Sadie Brennan was in the fourth row on the right side.
He had been half-expecting this and was entirely unprepared for it anyway.
She was more herself than he remembered, which was the specific way people became when you saw them after a long time — they were not less than memory but more, the remembered version simplified, the real version complicated and alive and sitting in a church pew in a dark jacket with her hair down and her back straight.
She was not looking at him.
She was looking at the minister with the composed attention of a woman who was present and not performing presence.
She looked like someone who had been through things.
He looked away.
After the service, in the churchyard, he shook hands and received condolences and said the appropriate things. People he had grown up around. Faces that were familiar and older in the specific way that your own reflection was older when you looked at it honestly.
He saw Sadie across the churchyard, in conversation with a woman he recognized as the Brennan ranch’s neighbor. She was not looking his way.
He had her in his peripheral vision for twenty minutes.
He shook another hand.
He thought: the ranch is next door.
He thought: the water rights run through both properties.
He thought: there is going to be a conversation at some point and it is going to be the kind of conversation that twelve years of silence has been building toward and there is nothing to be done about that.
He got in his truck.
He drove back to the Ryder ranch.
He sat in his father’s kitchen, which smelled like the specific combination of coffee and dust that had apparently been unchanged since he was eighteen, and he looked at the books and the land maps and the list of things that needed doing.
He thought: she was right to look through him at the feed store.
He thought: I earned that.
He thought: I am going to be living on the other side of that fence for the foreseeable future and I need to figure out how to do that correctly.
He thought: correctly is going to require a conversation I don’t know how to start.
He made coffee.
He started the list.
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