Shake the Trees by Rod Helmers Page A

about the raise, the time off, or even going back to school.  I don’t care about any of that.”
    Sandi turned away so Sam couldn’t judge the depth of her feelings.  She had been taken by surprise and was trying to keep her emotions in check.  She took a deep breath and turned back to him.
    “I don’t trust that woman, Sam.  I don’t trust what she’s telling you.  Are you sure about this?”
    “I’m not sure about any of this, Sandi.  But I need to find out.  I need to check this out.”
    “So what if it checks out?  Then what?”
    “Sandi, San Luis is where my heart is.  But this could be a good thing for both of us.  For a while.”
    “This is about San Diego, isn’t it?”
    “You know about San Diego?”
    “You haven’t googled yourself, have you?”
    Sam shook his head.  “There’s no such thing as privacy anymore.”
    “Is that what this is about?  About proving yourself?” 
    “I failed, Sandi.  I failed and this is where I ran to hide.”
    “You’ve proven yourself here, Sam.”
    Sam looked up.  Her statement touched him, and he paused a moment before speaking.
    “There’s more to it, Sandi.  And you know it.  Why are we still just friends after all this time?”
    Sandi looked shocked.  An unspoken taboo in their relationship had been breached, and she wasn’t expecting it.
    “I . . . uh.  We work together, Sam.  That’s very difficult.  I don’t know if . . .”
    “Lots of people work together.  It’s more than that.  You know it is.  It’s me.  It’s something I need to fix or at least find out about myself.  Maybe this will help.”
    “Sam, I don’t understand.  But if this is something you have to do, I’ll support you.  I’ll support you any way I can.”
     
    Sandi was a welcome surprise to a father approaching fifty and a mother well into her forties; she came nearly sixteen years after their last child.  She had grown up on a ten thousand acre ranch, which in the semi-arid high country sounded like a lot more than it really was.  The land had been in the Rimes family for four generations.  Five generations if one of her two big-city brothers eventually returned to the valley, though their off-ranch success made that appear unlikely.  Ranching had always been a difficult way to make a living, and with the run-up in property values the options were now more tempting.  The Rimes family was land rich and cash poor.  But for many men like Sandi’s father, the options were never given serious consideration.
    Rodger Rimes loved his God, his family, his country, and his land - in that order.  He appreciated the cowboy lifestyle and admired the sacrifice made to acquire and hold onto the land by those who came before him.  His great-grandfather had homesteaded the ranch, and every generation since had worked it and improved it.  He wasn’t going anywhere.  Except for nineteen bloody months in Korea, Rodger Rimes had spent his entire life on his ranch, and he expected and hoped to die there.
    “It’s about time you two knuckle-heads talked about it, for god’s sake,” Rodger said to his daughter the morning after her emotional conversation with Sam. 
    Sandi was having morning coffee with her parents in their sprawling adobe-style ranch house.  It was part of her daily routine.  She lived in the old foreman’s cabin, which was nearly a quarter mile from the ranch house and sat next to the “maternity ward”.  The maternity ward was a narrow and lush area in a box canyon where the cows that were “springing”, or expecting to calve soon, were pastured. 
    Actually the term “box canyon” was a bit of a misnomer, because the tiny valley was open to the rest of the ranch on the end where her cabin stood.  The log cabin was separated from the well-watered pasture by a split rail fence.  Inside the pasture stood a simple three-sided lean-to structure made out of old telephone poles, rough-cut cedar siding, and a tin roof.  The