Ryan’s ideas had gone mostly unspoken up to this point, because his father and his uncle were set in their ways, much like a mountain was set in the earth. They were about as immovable as the mountain on any given thing when it came to the running of the ranch.
But now that Redmond was retired and Orin was slowing down, Ryan saw his opportunity to change a few things. Do a little tweaking. Put the Ryan Delaney touch on the place, as he’d been longing to do.
Late in the afternoon, with the hazy sun slanting in through windows that were filmed with dirt, Ryan surveyed the inside of the guest cottage. He saw the dirt, the broken moldings, the disrepair.
But he also saw possibilities.
He adjusted the baseball cap on his head and poked around in the bedroom, the tiny bathroom, the closet. His shoes scuffed against the wood floor as he went from room to room.
Wood floors. Yeah, they were beat to hell, but he could get someone in here to refinish them. He walked to the front window in the main room, wiped a clean spot with his sleeve, and peered out. Fantastic view. Oak trees and tall grass and, off in the distance, a strip of blue ocean.
The best way, he figured, was to just get some workers going on it, and then tell his parents after the fact, when they started asking about the trucks and the hammering and the invoices. The dishonesty of that—the sneakiness—might have bothered him for a minute or two, but he knew they’d be pleased when the work was done.
That’s how his family was. They had to be dragged toward progress, usually by the ankles.
He wasn’t sure what they would do with the cottage once it was done. Breanna and her boys could use some privacy, no doubt, but the place was too small for them. Ryan himself sometimes longed to break away from the whole living-with-the-family thing, God knew. But he also knew he’d miss the busy bustle of the main house.
If he could spin it to his dad as income property—get some tenants in the place, maybe even put it out there as a vacation rental—then the family would have a hard time arguing that there was no point to having the work done.
Vacation on the coast, at a working cattle ranch. That had some potential.
He pulled out his cell phone, scrolled through his contacts, and called Will Bachman, a friend who worked as caretaker at a big estate up the highway. He’d know some construction guys, some plumbing guys. Hell, better get some interior decorator guys—or girls, he guessed—on the job too, while he was at it.
The crew Will had recommended to him had been on the job for two days before Orin noticed. That wasn’t anything unusual; the guest cottage wasn’t visible from the main house, and the crews had taken an access road to get to the site. Eventually, though, the noise and dust became obvious.
“What in the hell you got going on over there?” Orin asked Ryan one day as the two of them were just coming in from the workday, Ryan dirty and sweaty, Orin considerably less so, since he’d cut back on his ranch duties.
Breanna’s boys—Lucas, age five, and Michael, age seven—mobbed Ryan as he came in the door, as was their habit. Ryan lifted Michael high into the air and set the boy on his shoulders, and he picked up Lucas and held him under one arm like a log of firewood. The boys giggled with glee.
“Just fixing the place up,” Ryan said, continuing the conversation as though he didn’t have a hundred pounds of squirming boy all over his body.
“What the hell for?” Orin demanded. The look on his face suggested that he was troubled by some irritating condition like poison oak or heat rash.
“You seen it lately? Place is practically falling apart. It’s about time it got some maintenance,” Ryan said. He carried the boys over to the big leather sofa that stood in front of the stone fireplace. He dumped Lucas onto the sofa with a whump, then lifted Michael off his shoulders and deposited him beside his brother. Then he proceeded to tickle both of the boys until they were in helpless hysterics.
Orin scratched at one ear. “Well, what are you havin’ ‘em do out there?”
Ryan shrugged. “Fix the plumbing. Do a little roofing. Maybe some paint.” He left out a few details—like the new electrical system—that he thought would send his father into more discomfort than either one of them could handle.
“Aw, hell,” Orin said.
Ryan went through the usual coming-home routine with the boys, in which he tickled them until they screamed and begged him to stop, and then he stopped, and then they begged him to do it all over again.
When the screams of “Uncle Ryyyaaannnn!” got to be too much, he patted them on the butt and sent them off to find their mom or their grandma.
“I wish you’d told me you were going to do all that before you started,” Orin said, sounding irritable but not angry, as was his way. Orin never got truly angry, but he had a way of scrunching up his face and looking as though he’d just discovered his hat was full of bees.
“If I’d told you, you’d have said no,” Ryan said as he plucked Michael’s jacket off the floor and hung it on a peg near the front door. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Well, you’re not wrong,” Orin admitted. “I guess I don’t see the point, is all, since nobody ever uses the place. I don’t see why that old guest house would be a priority.”
Ryan continued moving around the living room, straightening things up. He put away some Legos the boys had left out on the coffee table, scooping some off the floor and into their plastic bucket.
“That’s just it,” he said. “It’s never been a priority. That’s why it’s just about falling down. Aren’t you the one who taught me how important maintenance is? Well, I’m doing maintenance.”
Orin scratched at the back of his head. “Well, I guess when I said that, I meant maintenance on the stuff we actually use.”
“If we fix up the guest house, we’ll use it,” Ryan said.
Orin scrunched up his face in a mask of skepticism. “How you figure? Who’s going to use it?”
Ryan stopped what he was doing and started ticking off points on his fingers. “Colin or Liam might use it when they’re here for visits,” he said, referring to his brothers. “Or some of the cousins, during the holidays. Or we could rent it out, bring in some income. Or …” He’d saved this option, his favorite, for last. “Or we could rent it as a vacation place.”
Orin looked puzzled. “Well, who’d want to take a vacation here?”
“Jeez, I don’t know, Dad. What with the ocean and the grass and the trees and the fresh air, this place isn’t much better than a Turkish prison.” He looked at his father with scorn.
“All right, all right,” Orin said. “You can just quit with the sarcasm.”
“Well.”
“And who’s going to deal with all these vacationers, when we get them?” Orin was arguing with renewed vigor, now that he’d seized on a new argument.
“I will.”
“You.”
“Yes, me. Why not me?”
Orin squirmed with discomfort. “Well, what about all the work you do around here? How are you gonna have the time?”
“I’ll figure it out.” Ryan slapped his dad on the back in a way that was supposed to be both friendly and reassuring. “Trust me.”