“As grateful as I am, and as much as I wish his physical health was all I had to worry about,” she murmurs to me. “Things aren’t going to get any easier.”
No one knows that better than I do.
* * *
Time at the hospital passes in weird chunks.
Macey leaves the room for a little while, and I see her in the hallway, swiping her phone before she returns to my side. I don’t ask her what that was about, and she doesn’t offer. I have a feeling it’s about her family’s business, but I don’t want to press when she’s got enough people pulling at her.
Eventually, she falls asleep on my shoulder. Her siblings and mother have all gone home. But Macey stays because she’s the rock of her family, and they never make a single decision without her.
I drift off myself, and when I wake, my dad’s standing in front of me. Cowboy hat in hand, dark hair that’s graying at the temples, and blue eyes that mask the hell he’s been through, my father is a cowboy to his core. Hard on the edges, hates to be penned in, especially by emotions, and he learned ways to numb rather than feel.
“I feel bad about the bull,” he says in his typical cut-to-the-chase style.
“Not your fault,” I say. “Obviously, Mr. Henwood was inebriated and not thinking straight.”
He nods, and we lapse into our usual awkward silence.
I think maybe he’s going to lash out at me for skipping work today, but he takes a long look at Macey sleeping on my shoulder.
Then, he puts his weathered hand on my other shoulder and says in a low voice, “How’s Benjamin doing?”
“He’s stable. Should be free to go day after tomorrow.”
There’s a long pause where neither of us states the obvious.
Finally, my dad asks, “What are they going to do?”
I look down at Macey to make sure she’s really asleep before I look up at him. “Stage another intervention.”
He and I both know what that’s like.
We’ve lived through it too—he as the addict and me as the kid who just wanted his father to be sober.
My dad’s one of the lucky ones.
He made it out.
Nine years and counting.
Macey’s daddy hasn’t escaped his hell. Not yet.
“Take tomorrow off, too,” my dad says.
I jerk my head up. His eyes are on Macey, and they’re…soft. For Roy Wild, the man who won’t listen to a word I say when I tell him I want to paint and not run the ranch, this is a moment. A moment I have no fucking clue what to do with.
“Take care of her.” His voice is gruffer than usual.
He nods at me, and then he’s gone.
I watch him disappear around the corner of the ICU. And I decide that, for tonight, I’m going to do just that.
