The First Day

An unusually warm turnaround in the weather had been delivered like a long-awaited gift to the east side of the Kananaskis wilderness on this late March afternoon. Amy Fleming and her second-best friend, Jen, had decided to make the most of the respite from late winter blues and take their horses out for a ride just to escape the stuffy confines of the not-so-great indoors and breathe in some of the magnificent, fresh-off-the-mountains air offering its first hint of spring.

"It's good to see you smile again, Amy."

Jen could only imagine the pain her friend had suffered since the loss of her mother, Marion. She knew how close Amy was to her mother and was sure time and support from the people she cared about, as well as working with horses, would be the only cure for her loss. The two had hardly seen each other in the few weeks since the accident and their scarce conversations had only been a few emails and an occasional call since Amy had not yet been back to school or taken any interest in being social during her bereavement.

"Got a letter from Soroya this morning," Amy announced. "She'll be back from London in two more weeks!"

"Awesome!" Jen responded. "I've missed her so much."

"Me, too. She says she wants to stay with her Mom this summer and see how it goes. She also says she wants to finish high school here, in Hudson."

"Oh, Amy! That's great news!"

Whining of worn gears came from out of sight around the corner behind them, the crunching of gravel under the tires on the isolated range road subdued by the increasing volume from a radio cranked up to way past reasonable, and the girls moved their horses to the grassy shoulder across the ditch on the side of the road to make room for the odd vintage vehicle carrying a motorcycle in the back neither of them had ever seen before.

"Who's that?" Jen asked her friend.

"No idea," Amy replied, eyeing the stranger behind the wheel.

Just as the young man in the old blue truck neared them he pushed in his clutch and revved the engine, simultaneously jerking the wheel toward them to frighten the horses as if he thought that would be funny, which was evident in the way his head tossed back, laughing, after checking the effects of his actions in the rear view mirror.

"You, Sonofabitch!"

"Amy!" Jen shouted after her friend who had heeled her horse vigorously and bolted off after the person who had just pushed her beyond the limit she had been trying to avoid since she got back home from the hospital.

The ancient blue truck was still in sight, in fact, she realized she was catching him, but still too far behind to have the desired effect on his day.

Amy leaned back in the saddle and pulled up on the reins slightly as she saw the truck make an unexpected turn down the driveway under the Heartland Ranch sign at the entrance of her grandfather's property, the place where she had been raised and planned on never leaving.

The truck, old but apparently taken care of well enough to keep it running, stopped beside the hitching post in front of her grandfather's horse barn and when the door popped open on the drivers side she made a bee line down the drive, the horses hooves thundering toward the offender who was about to get a lesson in equestrian etiquette he would not likely ever forget.

The driver stretched for a second and looked across the fence surrounding a few horses who were paying no attention to him as they nosed into a feed trough lazily sharing a meal and enjoying the rare winter warmth of the sun on their backs. No sooner had he taken note of his first encounter with farm life had he become aware of a strange thunder growing threateningly louder from his rear and the second he turned to investigate, a huge shape the size of a horse and rider bore down on him as if he were a frightened deer in headlights, frozen and with no clue about how to avoid his impending demise.

He was a gonner, for sure, but doom stopped inches short of crushing him to bits and instead spewed horse slobber left over from the first brisk run of the year into his face.

"Hey! Watch it!" The young man slowly released his defensive posture as he considered how close he had just come to having his ticket into the afterlife punched. "What are you doin'?" he demanded, half out of breath.

Amy was pleased to see that she had gotten the degree of her displeasure across to the stranger and nudged her horse to slowly finish passing by, the fifteen year old teen's glare continuing to bore a hole through his forehead to keep the proof of her displeasure alive, "I wanna know what kind of idiot revs his truck around a horse!" she sneered, to finish off the effect.

Trying to relax, reasonably sure he was out of immediate danger, "Nice to meet you, too!" After a few long seconds with no response, "Name's Ty."

The still miffed horsewoman circled her horse around the other side of him and asked, "What are you doing here?"

"I'm workin'," nervously pulling out a cigarette and resting it between his lips.

The rider's eyebrows came together, "You can't smoke here."

Seeing that she meant business, "Whatever…" he muttered under his breath and put away the almost lit bad habit, something he didn't really like but did it anyway because he thought it made him look more formidable, just in case. "Some lady hired me, alright?" he explained, "Marion, Somebody?"

"Marion Fleming? My mother?"

Using his best defense in uncertain territory, he resorted to an air of sarcasm, "She as friendly as you are?"

"She was killed in a car accident a few weeks ago," the girl answered numbly, still holding back a hurt he could see in her eyes.

Ty's breath caught in his chest as her words pierced his facade, making him feel like the heel he had been presenting himself to be. "Gee, I'm sorry…, I…"

"Grandpa's in the house, over there," waiving her hand in the direction of a rustic looking log home across the driveway. "You need to go and talk to him," and left the man standing in shock as she eased off her mount and tugged him toward the barn, disappearing through the sizable square door that was slid to one side of the matching square hole adjacent to it.

Amy sank into her usual place on one side of a long rectangular table in the dining room, sitting across a foot she habitually curled under her when she was upset, which had become common practice as of late. "That guy, I see he's still here?" she asked to see what her grandfather had decided to do about her newest drama.

Jack Bartlett, patriarch of the current generation of a long line of ranchers occupying their six hundred acre sanctuary from the masses in Calgary sixty miles to the northeast, nodded and said, "That's what this family meeting is about. We have a situation that needs to be looked at, by all of us."

"What's he doing here?" asked Lou, the firstborn of two Fleming sisters sitting at either side of the older man who was leaning on his elbows and feeling the effects of having to deal with yet another unexpected situation of which there had been far too many for his liking in recent months.

"He was asked to come here by your mother a week or so before the accident, apparently," he began. "Marion did mention it to me, but I figured with everything that happened, your mother passing and all, that the arrangement would have changed, but I guess I was wrong," letting out a deep breath.

"Why is he still here?" Amy pried deeper into the mystery.

"Well," Jack looked for sensitive wording, "seems this boy has been in and out of the Juvenile Detention system since he was a young boy and got into a real bad situation with his abusive father when he was only thirteen. Ty, his name is Ty Borden, has been under a stricter confinement situation since then, up until about a month ago. You see, Marion met up with this Clint Riley fella, the same one that set us up with Scott ten years ago, and made a similar agreement to have him come here to Heartland and finish out his probation with us."

"Amy," Lou spoke up, "I understand your introduction to our, ummm, this Ty guy was less than hospitable?"

"He's a jackass."

"Amy!" The wiser voice of reason spoke up, "Don't you think it's a little early to be making those kinds of assumptions about someone you don't even know." It wasn't a question.

"I know all I need to know, Grandpa! He tried to run Jen and me down on his way here today!"

Jack had a way of taking his time to emphasize a point, "Amy?"

Her grandfather had always been the rock of Amy's life and the weight of the world came down on her when she felt he was displeased with something she had done, deserving or not. He was not all that talkative, even grumpy at times, but the youngest Fleming sister had never known him to give her bad advice and she loved him more than she could ever express.

"I'm sorry grandpa," bowing her head to regroup, "I guess it really wasn't all that big of a deal."

"Probably not," Jack nodded, pleased to see his youngest granddaughter soften a bit to be more like her old self for the first time since the accident that took away her mother. "You ever see anyone around here do something like that?" remembering an incident last fall when her sixteen year old boyfriend brought a carload of his friends by the ranch to show off his new Jeep. It was a gift from his wealthy mother to celebrate his new driver's license." You forgave him didn't you, for honking his horn at Pegasus and causing him to knock you on your butt when he bolted while you were brushing him in the barn?"

"This guy, Ty, just caught me when I wasn't in any mood for nonsense and I know now he has no idea about how he's supposed to behave when he's around horses, or someone who isn't from the city."

"Okay, girls, here's the deal. I called Clint just now to see about our situation and what our options are. He says that under the circumstances he wouldn't hold us to the deal Marion made with him and we could send Ty packing back to the detention center tomorrow, if that's what we decide to do. The other option is to think about what your mother saw in that boy to give him a chance to prove she knew more about him than the reports in this folder, here," pointing to a manila bundle of paperwork sitting on the table. "You never know what kind of effect you can have on someone's life when they need a little help. Look at how Scott turned out. He was a rascal, if I ever met one, when he first got here, but now he is the best veterinarian in these parts. That was your mother's doing, you know? Where would he have been if Marion hadn't used that sixth sense of hers and taken a chance on him?

Lou straightened up in her chair as a vivid memory from ten years ago crashed into her mind, the day Scott Cardinal had been sent to live with her family and work on the ranch for the last year of his probation, and she supposed Amy was feeling the same way she had felt back then. Deja vu has a way of bringing up both frustrating and truly wonderful memories, beginnings and endings to be relished and regretted, and on given days she might see her growing up years with Scott either way.

They all sat without further talk for a few minutes more reflecting about Scott and how valued he is to them all now as not only the trusted caretaker of their animals, but as one of their own.

Jack reminded his granddaughters to consider the influence their decision could make in the life of the stranger who was spending the night in the loft above their stables and not to take the decision lightly with the outcome being in their hands as to whether he would have his shot at a new life here at Heartland or left to the fate of possibly unsympathetic people who could care less if he made it in life, or not.

Two hours had passed since the family meeting. Jack had gone to the barn to fetch the family's newest ranch hand to invite him to share their supper table and eat his first meal with the three of them. No new drama came from the thirty minutes they were together but there was a noticeable awkwardness among them that would have to be outgrown.

No one pried into their dinner guest's past other than to ask if he had any family he wanted to contact or business he needed to take care of to get a fresh start here at his new job.

"I guess not," Ty said when Lou asked if he needed anything out in the barn for the first night at his new residence. "I've never lived in a barn before," chuckling to himself at the absurdity of accepting he was now a farm hand living in an actual barn and trying to visualize a new daily routine. "So, where do I take a shower, or use the bathroom?"

Jack had that amused look the girls knew well, the one where he was about to have some fun at someone else's expense.

"Well, Ty, you have the biggest bathroom of anybody you ever knew, I'll bet. You think a cowboy out in the open has to look for a roadside rest area to take a bathroom break when the need hits him?"

Amy and Lou watched, amused themselves to see the young man thinking his way through the latest of many dilemmas to besiege him.

"Ummm, well…what about the other, ummm, you know?"

He could have wilted under the table from embarrassment, especially with the two females present, but it was something that needed to be addressed.

Lou finally spoke up, feeling sorry for his distress, "You can come in the house and use our bathroom, Ty, but there are rules."

"Rules? To use the bathroom?"

"Rules," Lou reiterated. "At no time do you ever walk in to the bathroom without knocking first…, EVER!"

"Well, yeah, I get that, Lou. I'm not a complete moron."

"Second, there's the rule about leaving the lid up," going through the motions as if she were giving a pre flight instruction to a plane full of passengers.

"Okay, what's the deal about leaving the lid up. Like, you don't look before you sit? Surely, you haven't fallen in?"

Her right eyebrow raised like Mrs. Branstedder's, his third grade teacher who had sent him to the principal's office for tricking Mary Jane Hanson into rolling a nickel along her forehead via a supposed hand coordination challenge only to discover the edge had been coated with pencil lead, leaving a dark, vertical streak across her porcelain white forehead as if pointing toward her nose. The other classmates erupted in laughter, Mary Jane erupted into a hysterically embarrassed fit of crying, and the principal got his satisfaction by paddling the troublesome third grader's ass for the third time that year. Ty still felt bad about what he did to Mary Jane and hoped she had gotten over the trauma well enough to have a nice, normal life in spite of his setting her back a bit.

"Third, take off your shi…, ummm, dirty boots at the door if you are coming in from the barn, which you probably always will be, considering your new profession and residence."

"Got it." Not an unreasonable request, he thought.

"Fourth, no messes left in the sink or shower. Clean up after yourself and there will be peace in the house….and you won't be dropping your drawers in freezing weather out in the field beside a bush because of being banned from using the bathroom in the house."

She was testing him, he supposed, because she had that mischievous look in her eye much like her grandfather's, "Yes Ma'am!" but he went along with it anyway. Lou might turn out to be OK after all, he thought, giving her the eye right back to let her know that he knew she and Jack were taking advantage of his rookie vulnerabilities and using him for the evening's entertainment. "Thank you all for the nicest meal I've had since, well, I can't remember when. I think I'll head out to the new digs and try to get used to living like I'm hiding out from the law in someone's barn loft."

"Bet that comes naturally…," Amy popped off without thinking. "Sorry," noticing her grandfather's scowl, "I meant to say…"

Ty looked down to hide the sting of her comment, "Don't worry about it, what else would you think?" and pushed away from the table, put his silverware in his plate, and carried it to the sink. "Goodnight."

"Bright and early, Ty," Jack reminded him as he rose to pick up his own plate so as not to be outdone by the new employee, "Breakfast is at six."

Amy listened for the front door to click shut, "I shouldn't have said that."

Lou put down her own plate and moved toward her embattled little sister who was slumped in her chair, disappointed in herself for being snarky to her guest and realizing maybe he wasn't such an asshole after all. "The part about referring to him as being a fugitive?" The more experienced sister zeroing in on the teenage girl's reluctance to accept yet another change in her life.

"I can't believe I said that."

Jack weighed in, "He's tough, Amy. He'll get over it."

"Maybe…, but still…"

Homework was one of Amy's least favorite things in the entire world. 'Who needs this stuff, anyway?' There was never any material in her studies about ranching or taking care of horses, her only interest in anything since her hopes of becoming a ballerina had been dashed because of a badly sprained ankle when she was six and her mother deciding she had put Amy through enough of the experiment to help her baby girl get over losing her dad to a bad divorce.

Amy flipped the notebook she had been reviewing closed and stacked it along with everything else she would need to stuff inside her denim back pack on Monday when she returned to school. The time off because of her injuries and overwhelming loss had made her realize the day couldn't come soon enough when she would no longer be required to go to a place she did not want to be and forced to be with people she did not want to be with every weekday of her life. She had to live up to her mother's expectations, to take over the family business of rescuing abused horses and healing them so they could be rehomed, and to get that damned diploma, even if it killed her.

The hardest part of her burden to carry beyond the accident that took the person she loved most of all away from her and her family was the guilt eating away at her very being. It was at her urging that Marion was out on that stormy night helping her to rescue a beautiful black horse from a disreputable neighbor's barn where she had heard the distressed thoroughbred calling as if pleading for her to help him, and her fault that her mom was killed in the horrific crash into the ravine on their way home, and that she was the one who survived.

She lay on the bed and nuzzled into the fluffy pillows listening to her favorite radio station out of Hudson thinking the music might relax her enough to overcome the dread of going back to school. Enduring false sympathy from people that thought she, as well as her mother, were outcasts living out here away from everyone else and doing things none of them understood or cared about, including her part time boyfriend, Jessie Stanton, was the last thing she wanted to do.

Getting tired of feeling tired, Amy rolled off the bed and slipped into the hallway to walk quietly across the length of the wooden floor into the mud room beside the front door. She sat on the bench under the coat rack and put on her weathered and worn cowboy boots, favorite Wrangler jacket, complete with a few rips from barbed wire fences and tree limbs caused by brushing them away while on horseback and doing chores, and eased out the door toward the barn.

Thinking that seeing the horses would settle her nerves, Amy quietly entered the barn and slowly made her way up to the first stall. Jack's horse, Paint, was snoozing behind the rail barrier and she reached through the rustic natural limbs that made up the top part of the stall to run her fingers up and down his forehead.

The reminiscing cowgirl had barely had time to relax against the stall when she heard three chords rattling from an apparently live guitar serenade. Stopping what she had come to the barn to do, Amy carefully moved to peek around the corner of the wall separating the tack room from the stairs to the upstairs loft to see Ty leaning back on the steps trying to remember where his fingers were supposed to go to repeat the first G chord he had mastered, or thought so before he failed to make anything short of an unrecognizable clang from the obviously dead strings.

"You play pretty well," she lied, trying to make amends for the way she had behaved at the supper table.

"You kidding? I suck."

"Maybe you could take some lessons."

"Lessons? I won this guitar in a card game from a guy who knifed his old man," watching her reaction but seeing he hadn't managed to scare her into running back to the safety of her warm room in the house. "But lessons? Yeah, where do I sign up?"

"Okay…. I get it," Amy was quick to read that she was invading his comfort zone and shrugged off the defensive new guy's attempt to get the best of her, "I'm just here to check up on the horses. And by the way, you do suck," turning on her heels and then heading toward the door.

"Hey, wait!"

Amy thought she should probably leave well enough alone but turned around and leaned against the wall again, just enough to peek her face around the door to hear Ty's request, "You probably shouldn't tell Jack that you came to the barn this late all by yourself."

"I'll have you know I have been coming to the barn and doing night checks on the horses by myself since I was six years old."

"Yeah, but not with ME in it!"

"What's that supposed to mean? I'm not scared of…, you," displaying her second disapproval toward him in the barely six hours since they had met.

"That's not what I meant. It's me who is afraid, of Jack, if he ever finds out that you were here alone with me."

"It's not like we are ever going to do anything to make him worry," Amy assured the overconfident city boy who apparently had heard one too many farmer's daughter jokes.

"I'm the one who is worried. He told me that any part of me that gets within ten feet of either one of his granddaughters will be removed, and I like all my parts just where they are."

She envisioned the glare her grandfather would have used to plant the seeds of authority in the curious new ranch hand's mind and saying exactly that to gain the necessary advantage over a young man who had had more than his fair share of issues with said authority.

Trying to keep from chuckling out loud, "He's not going to harm you…, as long as you behave yourself."

"Easy to say when it ain't your body parts we're talkin' about, here."

"That it? Nothing else you want to ask?"

"Okay, well, there's one more thing. What are you going to do with that crazy one over there?"

"Spartan?"

"Your Grandad told me you were gonna fix him?"

"Yeah, but I don't know if I'm any good at that kind of stuff."

"Well, maybe you could take some lessons…, 'cause somebody'd better do something. It's not right keepin' him locked up in that stall like that."

Amy scoffed, realizing she had just been had by a sly twist of one-upmanship, but wasn't angry because she saw a compassion in her accuser's eyes that she hadn't expected to see, and it surprised her so much as to leave her uncharacteristically speechless when confronted by his criticism, even if it was constructive. "I guess we'll have to see about all that tomorrow," she answered and disappeared from his view.

Ty heard the wild horse banging a hoof against the door of his stall as she passed by on her way back to the house, apparently to second the motion of his new ally's assessment of his current living arrangement. As soon as Amy shut down the lights in the aisle and closed the door, the agitated horse calmed back down as if satisfied with having voiced his opinion, and the not-too-promising cowboy singer listened to the distancing sound of gravel under the farm girl's boots as she walked away. Normally he would welcome the rare opportunity for solitude, but something about Amy Fleming made him wish she would have stayed a little longer if only to talk some more about, anything really. There was something in her voice and a hurting compassion in her eyes that made him want to know more about the girl, even at the risk of losing precious body parts.

He rose from the stairs and put down his guitar after deciding to make one more exploratory circle around his new residence before turning in for his first night in a barn. When he came to the back he unlatched the hook and rolled the huge sliding door enough to allow him to peer into the chilly moonlit night. He took note of the pond a hundred feet away, the few horses nearby in the covered stalls out back, and any bushes in sight just in case he ever broke one of Lou's many bathroom rules.

Back in her room, illuminated only by the green glow of the alarm clock that read 12:03 a.m., Amy relaxed again into the fluffy pillows on her bed and rested her laptop on her bent up thighs and flipped up the top.

AMY: HEY SOROYA. I KNOW YOU AREN'T AWAKE BUT I CAN'T SLEEP. DREADING GOING BACK TO SCHOOL ON MONDAY.

SORAYA: I'M UP. CAN'T SLEEP EITHER. THINKING ABOUT COMING HOME SOON.

AMY: CAN'T WAIT TO SEE YOU!

SOROYA: SO, WHAT'S THIS ABOUT A HOT NEW RANCH HAND AT HEARTLAND?

AMY: HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY KNOW ABOUT THAT? YOU'RE LIKE A MILLION MILES AWAY AND IT JUST HAPPENED TODAY!

SOROYA: I STILL HAVE MY CONNECTIONS. MOM SAID THIS BEAUTIFUL BOY STOPPED BY MAGGIES TODAY AND ASKED WHERE HEARTLAND RANCH WAS. SAID HE WAS WORKING THERE NOW?

AMY: YUP. HE IS, I GUESS. WE'LL HAVE TO SEE HOW IT GOES.

SOROYA: WHAT HAVE YOU FOUND OUT ABOUT HIM?

AMY: NOTHING REALLY. ANOTHER HARD LUCK CASE LIKE SCOTT, I GUESS.

SOROYA: BET I KNOW MORE ABOUT HIM THAN YOU DO, HA!

AMY: REALLY? LIKE WHAT?

SOROYA: I KNOW THAT HE DRIVES AN OLD TRUCK, WEARS A WORN OUT OLD LEATHER BOMBER JACKET, HAS A MOTORCYCLE, AND HAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GREEN EYES!

AMY: YOU REALLY DO KNOW MORE THAN ME. GO FIGURE.

SOROYA: LIFE IN A SMALL TOWN. WHAT CAN I SAY?

AMY: EXCEPT YOU ARE A MILLION MILES AWAY…..STILL

SOROYA: NOT MUCH LONGER. MISS YOU AND THE GUYS SO MUCH

AMY: MISS YOU TOO. COME SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU GET HOME, OK?

SOROYA: YOU GOT IT, BABE!

AMY: GOOD NIGHT, OR MORNING, WHATEVER THE HELL IT IS OVER THERE IN GOOL OL' LONDON.

SOROYA: SLEEP TIGHT. LOVE YOU, AMY! SEE YOU SOON.

Finally fading from a long eventful day, Amy pulled up one layer of covers to break a chill remaining from walking outside in the night air. She could not get past the surprise of her encounter with the new ranch hand in the barn. 'How could no one else see it?' It wasn't the obvious beauty of the hue that would wake up many a girls' interest, but the depth in those brilliant green eyes of his made her wonder why no one else had ever bothered to notice it for what it was, a storm raging inside them and the desire to reach for a way out. Where was his mother? How could she have given up on such a beautiful son and allowed him to be subjected to a life of hardship that had plagued the young man for most of his life? Was he hurt so deeply by the people he should have been able to depend on for so long that he couldn't be saved?

It suddenly occurred to her that someone had seen what she had seen when it felt as though she had fallen into his very soul hidden deep inside the luminescent green wonder of his eyes. What was the reason he was here in the first place? Her own mother had seen it, the depth of his spirit, a hurting, but still hunting for hope, a yearning to love and be loved.

It wasn't just with horses, but with any living thing that Marion Fleming understood how to heal. It was that passion that drove her to live without thoughts of profit being her motivation each day.

Amy understood for the first time what it was like to be in that moment when a troubled soul revealed itself to her. Could she leave it in the hands of someone who would never understand what it was to make a connection like that? No way! Could she be the one to help him find his way? She had no idea if she had what it would take, with Ty or with Spartan, but she had to try.

Her mother used to tell her that changes were inevitable, but the biggest challenge was getting past the first day. What was in the past was done and could not be changed, but tomorrow would be the first day in the rest of her life and she had everything to do with how it turned out.

'A spirit like Spartan's or Ty's were too rare and precious to waste,' she thought.

Neither would ever be lost if she had anything to say about it.

The End