—
At eight p.m. I’m settled on top of my bed with a beer, holding my phone to my ear for my routine chat with Dad. Jackson doesn’t necessarily have an issue with our father, but he also doesn’t put in the effort to talk to him regularly. Austin hasn’t spoken with him since he left, and the two of them are too alike to work it out.
He comes for dinner on the anniversary of Mom’s death, and her birthday. But somewhere through the years—when Dad realized how much he was missing by not being here—he started calling me in the space between those dinners.
His gruff voice comes through the phone, “Hey, kid.”
After a deep breath, I dive right into it. Word-vomiting all over the place. “Blair’s back home to take care of her mom—remember I told you before that she’s sick. Anyway, maybe it’s a real bad choice…butdamn,I want to get her back. I have no clue if she’s still mad about everything, or if she’d even be interested in me anymore….”
“Blair’s back,” he muses.
“Yeah, she is.”
“Is it going to make anything worse if you try to fix things?”
I take a swig of my beer, unsure how anything could be worse than not speaking for over a decade. “Guess not.”
“There’s your answer. Now that’ll be a hundred bucks for your therapy session.”
“Yeah, put it on my tab.” I roll my eyes—not that he can see. Probably a good thing, too, or I’d get smacked upside the head. “Speaking of which, Odessa’s got this swear jar set up and some of us might as well toss our entire pay in there the moment we get it.”
Dad laughs wistfully.
I know he misses it here. Misses us. Things were hard afterMom died, and he needed to get away from the memories. Aus refuses to forgive him for it, but I’m too much like my dad in some ways to stay mad. I can’t blame him for running away, because I did the same thing. Sure, after losing Blair I didn’t physically leave Wells Canyon, but I still ran. To liquor, parties, misbehavior, women…I ran to anything I thought could help with the pain, just as he did.
For twenty minutes, I fill him in on the ranch, the lack of rain, and what his family’s up to. He blows me off every time I hint at him coming home. And when we hang up, I lie back on the pillow and fall asleep dreaming up all the ways I might be able to get my Blair back.
Denver
(fourteen years old)
I stepped off the school bus behind Blair and started up the long, sloping driveway. With a running start, I expertly jumped clear over the cattle guard and turned to smile at her.
“One day you’re going to screw that up and break your leg,” she said, carefully stepping on each metal bar laid across the driveway. “And your mom is gonna bemad.”
Sure, Mom had given me crap about jumping over cattle guards a few times. But I never missed.Worrywarts.
“Anyway”—Blair grabbed my forearm, holding me back so Jackson could get ahead—“look what I stole from my mom’s craft kit.”
With a shoulder shrug and shimmy, her backpack fell to the ground, and she crouched in the middle of the gravel driveway to dig through it.
“Ugh, where is it?” She huffed, tipping her backpack upside down and letting the contents spill across the rocks. A giant bag of gummy worms, a rubber duck, at least thirty pencils, and an apple so bruised it was almost unrecognizable were only a few of the random objects that caught my eye.
“Blair, what the heck are you doing?” I laughed and grabbed a stuffed bear keychain holding a heart with her name on it. “Cute.A little Blair bear.”
“Look, Ineverfind souvenirs with my name on them so how was I supposed to turn this little guy down when I sawhim?” She snatched the bear from me. “Anyway, that’s not what we’re here for.”
She continued rummaging through the pile of items for a moment, and I watched with a stupid grin on my face.
“Ta-da!” she exclaimed, holding up a bag of googly eyes. “Let’s stick these on the most random things we can think of in your house.”
The way her eyes were lit up, there’s no way I could say I thought her prank was silly. Nothing like the ideas I came up with, which usually involved potentially dangerous situations and pissing at least one of my brothers off.
“You’re going to give Grandpa a heart attack if he opens a cupboard at four a.m. and there’s a bunch of googly eyes staring back at him.”
She giggled, starting to cram everything else back into her backpack. “This isn’t any worse than the time you snuck a whoopie cushion onto his chair at the dinner table.”
“Good point,” I said, kneeling beside her to clean up the mess—namely the concerning number of colorful rubber bands strewn everywhere. “Why do you have a thousand hair ties in here?”
