Anyone who wasn’t on board with that strategy was useless. Luke needed to hit this fast and hard so that he could recover and get back to work. He didn’t have time or patience to pussyfoot around with careful exercises or gentle treatments. It was so clear to Luke they weren’t up to the challenge that he’d groused them away in a single session each. He knew full well Gran wanted to take a switch to him for the way he’d treated the last two therapists they’d sent. Luke didn’t buy his grandmother’s sugar-sweet tone. The new therapist is due about now, isn’t she? If Dad was still alive, wouldn’t he have had a field day with how those plans turned out? He’d planned to come home a national champion. Luke had always envisioned his eventual return to Martins Gap as the grandest of victory laps-a homecoming for the local golden boy whose future had always been too big for this place. Isn’t that Luke Buckton, home on the Blue Thorn? Did you see he limps now? In the days and weeks since he’d returned, he’d heard the whispers, caught the rumors and ignored the stares. His hometown of Martins Gap was as gossipy as a small Texas town could get.
Luke took the coffee and gave Gran the answer he gave everyone: Better. He’d left six years ago in such a fury of pride and defiance-and had returned home so full of bitterness and dissatisfaction-that he couldn’t quite understand how Gran found it possible to be nice to him. How are you feeling? Gran asked as she approached him with a cup of coffee. And the anger and frustration made him mean to just about everyone, including his grandmother who’d just come up behind him. That threatened his career worse than the largest, meanest bull on earth. He could think stand but couldn’t feel it, even when he was standing. Now, he couldn’t always tell where his leg ended and the ground began. Luke could ride in pain, could win in pain-he had, in fact, on dozens of occasions. It messed with his mind and defied submission. The numbness he fought now? That was a whole other kind of enemy. Luke hadn’t come close to winning the Touring Pro Series championship by paying attention to pain. Sure, you got hurt-everyone got hurt-but you cowboyed up after an injury and got back in there, period. Bull riding was dangerous-that’s what made it exciting. Every bull rider knew pain went with the territory.
Pain came with a life spent trying to stay on top of 1,700 pounds of bucking bull. Luke Buckton stood on the porch of the Blue Thorn Ranch, his childhood home, disgusted at how he needed to grip the handrail to keep his balance.
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