In the evening, the cows up on the hill at the Lonesome Dove Ranch cry as if they’ve lost their calves. It reminds me of my last phone call with my father.

He had fallen and broken his hip while visiting my sister. He was in the final stage of losing his life to cancer and was in some hospital in San Antonio where the nurses thought he was better off dead. My sister and mother called and put him on the phone. The disease had inhabited his brain like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. All he could do was babble sorrowfully.

He tried over and over to tell me something. I’ll never know what it was.

Every time the cows cry, I wonder what he was trying to say, and I ache inside.