It was risky since a lot of my customers contacted me on my cell, but I had a feeling I knew who it was, so I didn’t answer, and the caller never left a voicemail.A customer would have, or they’d text when I didn’t answer.It wasn’t Cody’s style to leave a message.Whatever he wanted to say to me, he would say it to my face, whether I wanted him to or not.
It was exhausting trying to predict when that might be, so instead of waiting around for the unpleasant inevitable, I called Manny Perez to talk to him about starting my self-defense lessons.He only lived three blocks away, and he said, “No time like the present,” so I walked to his house after work with a bouquet I whipped together from garden clippings for his wife, Yolanda.
Wisper in late summer was a slow, quiet, all-American haven.Birds twittered and chirped beneath a clear blue sky, swooping in and out of cottonwoods.Kids raced by me on their bikes as I walked, and every few houses, neighbors were out tending their lawns.Mrs.Darby and her husband Bo planted a garden every spring that could win contests.A fair few of the arrangements I’d made over the years had been inspired by the whimsical, English-cottage vibes of the Darbys’ garden.
I waved to them sipping iced tea on their front porch, and they waved back a hello.
“Your lavender and lilies look amazing this year, Mrs.Darby.”
“Thank you, dear!”
“Welcome,” I called back as I turned the corner and started counting the familiar sidewalk cracks I’d been keeping track of since I was eight.I ran my hand along the Darbys’ freshly painted fence, but before I made it all the way to the end—one hundred and fourteen wooden slats and thirty-seven cracks later—two large, worn cowboy boots appeared in my view, straddling the thirty-eighth crack and blocking my path.
“You’d think the county would’ve repoured these sidewalks by now,” Dixon said as I looked up and into his sunglasses, trying to see the depths of the blue behind them.He removed the glasses and let them dangle from his fingers next to his thigh, and somehow, seeing the lifetime in those eyes felt like home, even though now they showed years of a hard life, told in lines and creases of his skin.“How many cracks now?”
“Dixon, I know you know this because you’re older than me, but I’m almost thirty-five years old.I don’t count cracks in the sidewalk anymore.I haven’t since we were kids.”
He cocked an eyebrow.“How many?”
I rolled my eyes and conceded.“You’re standin’ on number thirty-eight.”Looking around the large bulge of his bicep, I noticed the sheriff on her phone by her truck parked next to the curb, and then I looked at the boarding house behind the Darbys’.“Are you stayin’ here?”
“Yeah.Just checked in.You still live at home?”
“No.Well, yes, technically on the same property, but I stay out back in the guest house.Gran let me renovate it.It’s small, but it’s all mine.I even have a cat, Fancy.”
Swinging his arm toward the bouquet I’d made, he said, “That’s pretty.You make it?”
“Yeah.”
He smiled, and I tried not to gasp out loud.The way his eyes lit up and the curve of his mouth reminded me how much I used to love him.By the time he turned fifteen, Dixon had already been headed down a much darker path than me, but it hadn’t stopped me from admiring him from afar and wishing we could be close like when we were little.
He’d always possessed the talent to make whatever he did seem effortless, but I had known the truth—that the hurt and the fear raging inside him made everything harder.Honestly, I’d never really been surprised he’d turned to drugs.Dixon was an empath.He always had been.He felt every single emotion so deeply, and he took on the emotions of the people around him, whether he wanted to or not.
It had to be a lot to shoulder.And on top of all that, his dad had been awful to Dixon his entire life.I never understood why.Dixon tried everything in his power to make his dad happy when we were kids, but it was never enough.
There was a story Dixon used to tell.He told it to his brothers and sister, to anyone who’d listen, about a magic man who had come to the Lee farm to find his faerie princess.Everyone scoffed and laughed at Dixon.Magic didn’t exist.Not for the people of Wisper, Wyoming, not back then.They worked crap jobs, drove crap cars and trucks.Farms and ranches failed all the time, and half the stores on Main Street had been vacant.If you needed something, you drove to Jackson.So, if magic existed, why wouldn’t it fix all those horrible things?
But Dixon said all his naysayers were wrong.The magic mandidfind his princess—Dixon’s mama, Mervella Lee.
When she was young, she had flowing hair of gold and eyes the color of the blue Wyoming sky.All the men in town lusted after her, desperate just to hear a kind hello from her lips, but her husband was possessive and mean, and she didn’t dare speak to any of those men.
But the magic man believed in fate, and he fell in love with Dixon’s mama.She fell in love with him, too, because he made her laugh and forget about all the things that made her sad.
And then they made a baby.
When the faerie princess’s husband found out, his anger grew so big that the whole town of Wisper felt it.The ogre’s anger grew and grew until it was the size of an evil, fire-breathing dragon, a dragon with one mission: to find the magic man and vanquish him from the earth.
And that was what the dragon did, or so Dixon used to say, because the magic man was never heard from again.
“And your mama and Gran,” Dixon asked, yanking me right out of my memories, “how are they?I was kinda flustered this mornin’.I didn’t say hello to ’em.”
“They’re good.They were really curious about you.They didn’t recognize you.”
“Tell ’em I’m a travelin’ acrobat, and I’ve come to swing from mountaintop to mountaintop until there ain’t no more mountains to conquer.”
Laughing, I said, “I see you’re still makin’ up stories.You probably got a ton by now.You should write a book.”
“I could tell a story about a guy who writes a book, but actually writin’ one?Naw.I wouldn’t have the first clue about that.”He kicked at the crack in the sidewalk between us with the tip of his boot.“So, where you headed this fine afternoon?”
