Eight years later, my daddy was lying in a hospital bed, dying. The doctors said it was a cancer, but I knew that my poor daddy's heart had enough of the mean old life it had been forced to lead. My momma, my stepdaddy, Jenny, Curt, Annie and I were all gathered around his bed. The doctors said he wouldn't last the night, and I for one wanted to be there for him.
'Round about two in the morning, some little old lady came busting right in. She sure looked meek, and she must have been nearing ninety, but she shooed away those nurses and doctors like they was flies round a sugarbowl. My daddy perked right up when he saw her, and if I hadn't known better, I'd have thought she was his momma by the way she was fussin' over him. He called her Mrs Twist in the faintest whisper I've ever heard, and I saw my momma turn her face away. I knew right then that this old lady was the momma of what had probably been the closest friend my daddy had ever had.
She told him not to worry 'bout a thing, and then she went on to say that her boy was waiting up on Brokeback Mountain. My daddy smiled up at her.
'You took his ashes up there?' He said, and she just smiled.
'Of course.'
'Round about this time, my momma got up and walked over to the window, facing away from all of us. Jenny and I just exchanged this look. We knew something was going on, and I was starting to get an inkling as to what.
'He's waiting.' She said again, and he seemed to relax, like he just couldn't feel the pain that those doctors had him on morphine for.
Then he looked away from her, and smiled at me and Jenny both where we sat next to each other. Annie got a smile on her daddy's knee, and my momma turned around to look at him, like she knew that this was it – this was the end. There were tears in her eyes, and she tried to smile at him. It didn't quite work, but he smiled back at her.
And he looked at my stepdaddy.
'You take good care of them.' He said, and my stepdaddy nodded, all seriousness.
His breathin' started becoming real difficult, and he looked past us all. Not at the wall, but as if he were looking at someone standing right there at the foot of the bed. Then the biggest smile I've ever seen on anyone crossed my daddy's face, and he whispered just the one word.
'Jack.'
And I knew that my daddy was home – that he'd gone back to the place where he had been the happiest in his life.
Back to Brokeback Mountain.
THE END - please don't ask for more...this is all there is!