Author's Note: 'A friend is a brother your heart chose for you.'
Disclaimer: I don't own any of this, except in the sense that love is ownership.
Now:
"Heath," Audra asked as the two rode home together from the Whitcombs' place, "why don't you invite Ward and Nora to the house?"
Heath was surprised by the suggestion. "Because I—" he stopped abruptly. Why hadn't he? Because they were his friends, from his old life, and he… had no right to invite them? The idea made him uneasy. To cover it, he asked, "Why didn't you?"
She smiled sheepishly. "Mother told me not to." Then, seeing Heath's shock, she explained, "When I mentioned it to her, she said if you wanted them to come to the house, you'd ask them yourself."
Heath was disturbed by the idea that Mother didn't want his friends at the house, and his sister could see he was hurt by it.
"Heath, I'm sure she didn't mean she didn't want them to come, only that you should invite them, not me, and that if you had some reason you didn't want to invite them, then I shouldn't pressure you to—" she broke off, since he obviously didn't believe her. "Heath, if you'd like them to come, just ask them."
He was silent, but from his expression she could tell that the problem was not that he did not want them at the house, but that he was afraid now that they wouldn't be welcome.
"If you don't believe me, ask Mother yourself."
He stared at her in alarm. The very last thing he wanted was to hear directly from Mother that she didn't want him to invite his friends over.
Audra was exasperated. "Fine," she declared, "I tell h—" she stopped. If she told Mother she had visited the Whitcombs and that Heath wanted them to come over, when Heath himself hadn't said so, Mother would think Audra had directly disobeyed her…but she hadn't, had she?
Heath was watching her. "I don't think it would work, sis," he told her in amusement, grateful in a way that she saw how impossible it was. "Anyway," he comforted them both, "can you imagine Nick sitting at table with Ward? Jarrod cutting a beefsteak in half between them wouldn't be the half of it!"
Audra laughed with him, but regretted that she'd screwed everything up with her interfering. Well, she'd think of some way to fix it by and by.
The ranch, over the course of the month or so the Whitcombs had resided there, had not improved much. Nora had done what she could with the house, fixing up old furniture for them, and arranging their few possessions as becomingly as possible. She worked in the yard around the house, but the bulk of the work on the little ranch fell to Ward, and he was not much of a worker.
"It's hard though, to fix a place up without money," he remarked to Heath one evening after supper as the two men leaned against the rail fence looking out into the near pasture. "If I could borrow even fifty dollars, I could really fix this place up."
"Is that right?" Heath asked his friend, not fooled.
"It sure is," Ward assured him earnestly. "I'd get right on it, ole buddy, and pretty soon I'd have everything around here running smooth as a whistle."
Heath laughed. "Boy Howdy, would we be amazed by the things you could do with this place," he teased, "and all for just fifty dollars! Why before you'd know it, we'd be living off the fat of the land, and then you and Nora and I'll—"
"It's easy for you to laugh," Ward cut in quietly. "Not all of us have found out we're part of a rich family. The rest of us, when we need help, have to help ourselves."
Silence pooled out between them. In their younger days—Heck, even a year or two ago, when Ward had spun his dreams, it had been for the three of them. Not just Ward and Nora, but Heath, too, was included in Ward's dreams of their living off the fat of the land.
Even Sarah, when she'd still been with him, had wondered at it. 'What is Ward to you?' she'd said.
'He's the closest thing I'll ever have to a brother,' Heath had said.
But now, now he had real brothers, and it had driven a wedge between himself and Ward. Heath sighed. He wondered how it was that Ward could always tell how much cash he had on him. "Would you really fix this place up if you had fifty dollars?" he asked wistfully.
Ward, who had been uncharacteristically gloomy for a moment, grinned. "I shore would!"
Heath pulled the money out of his pocket and handed it to his friend. "Don't spend all in one place now, ya hear?"
Ward threw his arm around Heath's shoulders. "I knew I could count on you, Heath."
