The Ranch

“I'm sorry about your son,” Zoe said, and instinctively touched her arm. “Tanya told me… it's so unfair… I deal with it all the time, and it's never right, but especially at his age. I'm really sorry.”

“Thanks, Zoe,” she said, her eyes filled with tears as she turned away from her. She didn't want Zoe to see it, but Zoe had sensed it, and she moved away so as not to offend her.

“Have we figured out what bedrooms yet?” Tanya came back into the room and she saw that Mary Stuart had been crying, and she wondered if they'd been fighting, but neither of them looked angry, and then she suspected it was about Todd, and when she raised an eyebrow Zoe nodded.

In the end, they all selected rooms. The slightly larger one had a sunken bathtub and a Jacuzzi, and Zoe and Mary Stuart both insisted that Tanya have it, although she would have given it up to either one of them. And when she agreed to use it, she told them to use the Jacuzzi anytime, but they both pointed out they'd be leaving in the morning. And Tanya almost told them she thought they were both disgustingly stubborn, but she didn't say it. She just went to her own room to change for dinner, and the others did the same a moment later.

Zoe called home from her room, and everything was fine. Jade was eating dinner when she called, and Inge said everything was going smoothly and she put Jade on the phone, and she didn't even cry when she heard her mother. She thought of paging Sam, just to see how things were, but she decided not to. He would be paged by plenty of her patients, so she didn't.

And shortly before seven o'clock they all met in the living room. Tanya was wearing skin-tight black suede pants, and a beaded cowboy shirt, with her blond hair loosely tied in a black ribbon behind her. And she was wearing tall, black suede cowboy boots that she had bought for the occasion. Zoe was wearing jeans, a soft, pale blue sweater and hiking boots, and Mary Stuart was wearing gray slacks, a beige sweater, and Chanel loafers. They were all as they had always been, surprisingly compatible, and yet totally different. There was a kind of mesh between them that, even now, with the rift between two of them, was still more powerful than they were. And Tanya knew that if they'd been honest with each other, they would have admitted that they felt it. She did, she felt drawn to both of them, as though there was an invisible cord around them pulling them closer. When she came back into the living room, Mary Stuart was asking Zoe about her clinic, and she was talking animatedly about it, while Mary Stuart listened in fascination.

“What an enormous undertaking,” Mary Stuart said admiringly, but as they left for the dining room, they both fell silent, as though they had each remembered they weren't supposed to be speaking to each other. But once they were at the dinner table, the conversation got under way again. Tanya talked at length about her next concert tour, and the movie she was about to close a deal on, and they were both excited for her. It was obvious that they were both genuinely fond of her and wanted to protect her. They had been put at a table in the corner of the room, and although they all saw heads turn, no one came to ask for autographs, or to speak to them, except eventually the head of the ranch, Charlotte Collins, who stopped at the table to make them feel welcome.

She was a remarkable woman with a wide smile and piercing blue eyes, who seemed to see all, and kept her hand in every pie, and in every room, and on every person. She knew exactly what every one of her employees was doing at the time, and what each guest needed at that precise moment. And somehow, she managed to coordinate the two to the nth degree. Tanya was enormously impressed by the entire operation, as were the others, and they said so.

“Well, we hope you'll enjoy your stay with us. It's very important to us,” she said, and looked as though she meant it. And neither Zoe nor Mary Stuart had the courage to ask her about planes or tell her they were leaving in the morning.

“I'll ask at the desk after breakfast,” Mary Stuart said, after Charlotte Collins moved on. There would be plenty of time then, and she could always fly to L.A. and spend a night at the Beverly Wilshire. Or to Denver. And Zoe's route was fairly simple. She would just go home the same way she had come there.

“I don't want to talk about this now,” Tanya said sternly. “I want both of you to think about what you're doing. Do you really have so many friends that you can afford to lose someone you've known for half your life?” But what had blown them apart had been pretty brutal and Tanya knew it. She just didn't want it to go on forever. After twenty-one years, they had a right to end it. They all needed each other too badly to let go and walk away forever.