Blood Lines by Mel Odom Page B

broad-shouldered as Shel was, but looking at the two of them together, a person would know where Shel had gotten his build.
    Don had always thought—though he would never mention it to either one of the other men in his family—that his daddy and Shel were more alike than they were different. If anyone didn’t fit into that family, Don felt certain it was him.
    Tyrel’s hair had finished going iron gray a few years back. Long exposure to a blistering sun and harsh winters had bronzed his skin. Permanent wrinkles wreathed his cold blue eyes and pleated his leathery cheeks, which he kept smooth and shiny with a straight razor he used every morning and every evening if he was going to go out.
    He wore straight-legged jeans tucked into cowboy boots. Tyrel had always maintained that the difference between a working ranch hand and a drugstore cowboy had been whether the jeans were worn on the outside of his boots or tucked in. A ranch hand tucked them in so they didn’t catch in the stirrups or get caught on anything while he was working.
    The black Western shirt was carefully pressed and had white pearl snaps. Tyrel’s high-crowned black cowboy hat sported a silver hatband etched with Native American symbols. Don’s mama, part Lipan Apache, had made the hatband for her husband and marked it with signs that she’d claimed would bring him peace.
    Though his mama had been a devout Christian woman who went to church every Wednesday and Sunday, she’d also held on to some of the old ways because she hadn’t wanted the culture to disappear. And if her husband was dead set against believing in the works of the Good Lord, maybe he’d have been a little more open to something else. Anything that would have brought him peace.
    Tyrel smoked an unfiltered Camel cigarette and kept his gaze focused on the baseball game on the big-screen TV on the wall. A handful of other men sat quietly and watched the game as well.
    Don approached his daddy and stood nearby. Even as a grown man, he’d never walked up to his daddy without being acknowledged first.
    â€œWhat do you want, boy?” Tyrel asked in his coarse voice. He never turned his gaze from the TV.
    â€œI came to see you, Daddy,” Don said.
    â€œI thought you just did come to see me.”
    â€œYes, sir. But that was back in May.” Don’s mother had succumbed to her illness on May 12, and Don always visited on that anniversary so his daddy wouldn’t have to be alone.
    â€œYou came out to put flowers on your mama’s grave.”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    Tyrel nodded in quiet satisfaction. “She’d have liked that. You looking after her like that.”
    â€œYes, sir.” When he’d arrived at the grave, Don had discovered a woven flower blanket that covered his mama’s final resting spot. His daddy made them himself. At least, Don hadn’t ever found out if anyone else did them. And the braiding was similar to the rope mending his daddy had taught him to do.
    â€œWell, you planning on standing there all night?” Tyrel asked. “I thought you had a church to run.”
    â€œYou don’t exactly run a church, Daddy,” Don said. “It’s not a business.”
    â€œSeems to me you get paid by people who go there. That’s a business.”
    Don knew his daddy was deliberately baiting him and avoided the old argument. “People go there to be with God. They leave money so they have a house to do that together in. And to help out people in the congregation that aren’t able to fend for themselves.”
    Tyrel flicked ash from his cigarette in annoyance. He took another draw on the Camel and breathed out a cloud of smoke.
    â€œYou say toe-may-toe; I say toe-may-tah.”
    Don had long since given up trying to caution his father about smoking. Tyrel McHenry wasn’t a man much given to listening to advice he didn’t want to hear.
    â€œDon’t you gotta