Charlene's Daughter

Tom inherited the small New Mexico ranch from his father. He scratched a living from the pecan grove and raising a few cattle. He had lived alone on the ranch since his parents died and had grown quite content with his life. He had not seen his sister, Charlene, in nearly ten years.
On a warm summer day when Tom was out by the barn repairing a fence, Charlene and her daughter unexpectedly showed up in a battered pickup truck. Watching his sister step out of the truck he could see by the way she was dressed that she hadn’t changed. Too much makeup, jeans too tight for a woman her age, too many futile trips around the block. It seems she had come home to stay, at least until some trucker or other miscreant came along and temped her to run off with him.
When Charlene’s daughter, Celia, finally decided to get out of the truck, he saw a carbon copy of her mother at that age. He saw a young rebel, a girl even prettier than her mother, a challenge in need of a father’s attention that she never had. What he didn’t see was the trouble the two women had left behind, or the way Celia would turn the life he had always known upside down.