“He left that night. It was a Friday. There was no ice on the roads, no bad weather. He was supposed to make it home.” My exhale was shaky. “He never did. A drunk driver hit his truck. Slammed him right into a tree.” I tried to swallow again, but my throat was too thick. “He was dead on impact.”
Parker’s strokes didn’t falter, but I felt her melt further into me as my hurt spread from my body to hers.
“There was no salvaging his truck. It was so mutilated, the police guessed the other driver was going at least one twenty, if not more. Somehow, though, that longhorn skull in my living room survived. He’d had them on the grille of his truck, and since the driver hit him from the side, they were barely scratched.”
One of Parker’s hands slid up my arm to my bicep, squeezing me there. “I’m so sorry, Beckham.”
I shook my head. “I should’ve been there.”
“Beck…”
“If I had gone like I’d told him I would, maybe he would have left five minutes later and missed that driver. Maybe he would’ve been alive today, eating that shepherd’s pie with his mother and laughing and reminiscing on all the times he bruised his tailbone.”
I shifted to pull out my wallet, opening it and sliding out a worn Polaroid. “This was the two of us, three weeks before his accident. We’d gone out on a lake up in Montana for Memorial Day weekend.”
Parker delicately took the photo, her other hand releasing my bicep to swipe at her cheek.
As she studied the last photo of my best friend, I slid out the only other photo I kept in my wallet. When her gaze moved to it, she seemed to stop breathing. It was so worn from years of being stored and touched, the creases had turned into thick strips of white. Still, though, she could tell it was her.
“The night we went to the drive-ins in your truck,” she whispered.
“We brought every snack from my mom’s pantry.”
A wet, heavy rush of breath left her. A sad laugh. “Even your dad’s bland unsalted almonds.”
“I had to buy him six containers just to make up for the one we threw away.”
The memory lightened the mood, but not for long.
Parker looked at me, the orange sun reflecting in the tears clinging to her lash line. “If you focus on what could have been, you’ll never heal from what happened.”
“I know.” But my mind couldn’t help but dwell on it. With so much guilt on my conscience, it felt like I owed it to Garrett to imagine that unreachable future for him.
“He’s watching over you in little ways. With Bucky. With me.” Her hand, holding that memory of Garrett in her fingers, rested on her stomach. “With everything.”
With the Polaroid of her in my hand, I placed my palm over hers. “Oh, I know he is. Garrett couldn’t let me live without him.” He wasn’t physically here, but he still showed up in the wind. In the way Bucky never left me alone when I visited. When dawn shone rays of light through my curtained window. When I felt like hope was futile, and blades of grass would brush my skin and reassure me I was alive and well.
I was down for the count when I got the phone call with the news of Garrett’s accident. Even worse for wear when I heard about Parker’s father’s passing. But no matter what, that flicker of hope remained an ember inside of me, never once letting the storms put out itslight. I could say that was because of me. That I fought the mental battle of losing my best friend and won. But there was no mistaking that Parker had taught me to persevere, even when all of life was against me.
She’d grown up in a not-so-perfect house with a struggling family, finding salvation on my parents’ ranch on the days she felt the most hopeless.
So that’s what I did. I sat with Bucky on the days I lost myself to the emptiness of my mind. I talked to him, repeated myself over and over about how it was my fault Garrett passed. That it was my desire to be more than I was that took me away from Parker.
And it all worked out in the end.
I got the girl. And I still have my best friend. Maybe not sitting next to me, cracking jokes and giving me shit. But he lived on in the land. In Bucky, and in me.
In the memories and that longhorn skull in my living room.
In the Polaroid in my wallet.
In my heart.
“I have one more place I want to take you.”
Parker looked at me like I hung the moon. Little did she know, she did that all on her own.
“Anywhere.”
