A pipe dream. Foolish. Based on a younger man’s heart. Based on a love grown out of innocence, so long ago that sometimes Dale felt he’d imagined it. He needed to let go and move on, but first, he had a rescue to complete.He got into the truck, turned on the engine, and put the heat on full blast. Had he been any farther from home, he would have been quite worried about the amount of snow that had built on his windshield in the short time he’d been inside the trailer.
He was close to home, so close he could have closed his eyes and driven the distance by memory. But as he pulled out onto the snow-covered road, he kept his eyes open, for he had a burden to carry, so precious to him that he even went slower than he normally would, just to make sure they all arrived in one piece.
CHAPTER 5 - PETE
When Pete opened his eyes, he didn’t know where he was. The last thing he remembered clearly was collapsing on the couch the second he’d shut the door to the old trailer behind him.
His grandparents, who had owned the land, had long ago moved away, retiring to Arizona, years before the old farmhouse had collapsed. Another relative had purchased the single-wide trailer and moved it to the location, perhaps with aspirations of starting the farm up again, or maybe they’d just wanted a place to set up camp when they’d go hunting.
At any rate, the trailer had offered shelter from the storm he knew was coming so that’s where he’d gone. But no matter how bad the blizzard was predicted to be, it was smaller and more insignificant than the disaster he’d left behind. No, scratch that, that he’d been running from. With two little girls in tow and barely enough time to gather their things together.
Rebecca and Melanie had been real troopers the entire journey, wide-eyed and brave as they pressed their noses against the windows of the Greyhound bus and watched the world go by. Watched the landscape of southern Texas turn into the bumpy,high-altitude stretch of Colorado, and then to the windy slope of the middle of Wyoming.
Twelve years ago, he’d believed Raynette when she told him she was pregnant with his child. He’d married her and they’d moved to Houston, Texas, and his old life had been subsumed beneath the polished suburban life that Raynette wanted.
And he’d wanted to please her, at least in the beginning. He’d gone to accounting school, and taken a job at a downtown firm, and spent many an hour in a cubicle on the 8th floor without a view of the sky. Which was one of the things he’d missed most of all. The sky. The fleecy clouds chasing each other. Real air, untouched by an air conditioner. Corn on the cob, fresh from the field, and dropped into boiling water on the stove as soon as it could be shucked.
Well, Houston wasn’t to blame for how it had all turned out, nor was the state of Texas. Turned out that the sweet, romantic beginning of their marriage, including the birth of two amazing little girls, silky haired, dark eyed, and sweet as sugar, could not have foretold how it would end.
With screaming matches. Doors being slammed. A useless month’s worth of marriage counseling. The girls, Melanie, and especially Rebecca, suffering silently until the nightmares suddenly showed up more nights than they did not.
As to why? Raynette had discovered, at around the same time as Pete himself had discovered, that Pete wasn’t in love with her. That Pete, in fact, preferred men to women. That he’d been bringing up the idea of going to Cheyenne for a week, just to see their old stomping grounds. Maybe attend the high school reunion. Maybe see his old friend Dale, who had moved up to Wheatland.
She wouldn’t have it. She wanted a Caribbean cruise instead. Not a Disney World cruise, where they could bring the girls, but an adults-only cruise, with cocktails and shuffleboard and some glamorous week-long event that she could paradeherself about as though to announce to the world how wonderful she was. As for Rebecca and Melanie, Raynette wanted to find some nanny to move in and look after them while they were away.
Even as half of him balked at having a stranger looking after the girls, he’d started looking at cruises, thinking that if he could make her happy in this one thing, that would cascade into the rest of her, and she’d be happy with him.
That was when Pete had finally found out how many credit cards Raynette had been using, had maxed out. She’d hidden her spending from him, and then screamed at him for not making more. Working harder. Kissing more ass in exchange for raises.
It had turned vicious from there. The bankruptcy proceedings had gotten him fired from his job at the accounting firm. They lost the house, the cars, everything. The only blessing, and the one thing he’d insisted on, was custody of the girls. The judge had agreed, and Raynette had gone ballistic. The truth came out, then, the secret she’d been hiding for years. Melanie was not his child, but Rebecca most assuredly was.
In his heart, they were both his true child, and the third time Raynette had come to the little apartment Pete had found while he figured things out, drunk, banging on the door, waking up the girls, he knew he’d had enough. It was time to go home to Wheatland, where his grandparents owned some land.
And then there had been–yes, he had to admit it to himself, other reasons than simply wanting a glimpse of the wild fields around Wheatland, a breath of that high prairie air–he wanted to see Dale.
Coming home meant he could take up the edges of his past and pull them closer to him. Walking those same simply small town streets meant that he could retrace his steps and find out where he’d gone wrong.
And finally, after all these years, he could discover whether those boyish feelings he’d had in junior high, in high school, andall the summers in between, meant anything or whether they’d been his imagination.
A rush of air escaped him as he looked at the darkness of the ceiling of a home he’d never been inside of before, but yet knew. He’d come to Wheatland because he knew Dale lived there and he’d been hoping to bump into him at some point. Instead, Dale had rescued him from that trailer that, rather than being an island providing respite, had paper-thin walls and a furnace that barely cut the chill.
This was Dale’s house. Dale, who had inexplicably showed up just when Pete needed him most. Who had entered that trailer all tall and grown up, with shoulders broad enough to move mountains, hands enough to lift the world, and legs long enough to stride him right back into Pete’s life.
Pete remembered feeling a little shocked at Dale’s five o’clock shadow scruffing his chin, his jawline, making him more impossibly handsome than he had been in Pete’s memory.
And, oh, those blue eyes had been the same, just the same, looking at Pete as though Pete was someone Dale liked looking at, very much. That Dale liked him, all the way down to his bones.
It had never been anything they’d talked about, him and Dale. But there had been gazes between them over the years, long ones, as though they were on the verge of breaking the silence between them and telling the truths of their hearts.
Just around the end of ninth grade, when the world of junior high was about to burst forth into the best summer of their lives before entering high school, he’d turned and there was Dale.
Of course, Dale was always there, had always been there. But that time, just pushing into manhood, tall, gangly, Dale had looked at Pete in a way he’d never done before. And Pete had been smitten from that moment on.
Not smitten enough to do anything about it, no. But obsessed enough to take tons of photos on his camera of Dale,whether they were amidst a group of their friends goofing off at Lake McConaughy, or alone in Dale’s dad’s truck, running an errand, bringing back bags of salt or grain for the cattle. Dale, Dale, Dale, over and over, as though the camera simply didn’t want to focus on anyone else.
He’d always thought that Dale hadn’t noticed, or wasn’t paying attention. But then, he started finding pictures of himself on his own phone, as if Dale had picked it up when Pete had put it down, taken the picture and then quickly returned the phone. It was not as if Pete wouldn’t find out eventually, but they never did talk about it…except that Dale seemed to be posing more deliberately, as if he wanted to create the nicest image for his friend Pete.
The poses included Dale looking over his shoulder at Pete, or looking away so Pete could capture the line of his profile against a clear blue and pink Wyoming sunset. Or he would pretend to be asleep so Pete could stare and stare and stare to his heart’s content until finally taking that picture, only to moon over it later. For hours.
