He had a family, people better than me to look up to.My brother and his girls were raising my Stuey.He had love around him.Before my car died, I’d driven up to check on him, to make sure my family had come through for me this time.
They had.Stuart was happy and healthy.He was up on my family’s land right this very minute, and when he grew big enough, he’d run free like I had when I was his age, laughing and learning, maybe picking flowers with his own memory girl.
But he needed his dad in his life.Even if my brother would always be Stuey’sdaddy, his father figure, and I could only be his friend, if it was all I could give my son, I would.
I’d be his best friend if that was what was healthiest for him.
I loved him enough to do that for him, no matter that just thinking about him never knowing the real me made me ache like I’d never ached before.
And I’d known plenty of fucking ache in my life.
But my baby boy didn’t need to know anything about that.
He needed smiles and tinkling laughs, mountain air, dirt to dig in, grass to roll in.He needed birds singing to him from the trees and evenings spent around a happy dinner table.Nights filled with stories from books with silly cartoons on the front and bubble baths.
My son deserved good dreams and good memories, and I intended someday to give those to him.
But I still had to make it through these first thirty days.And after that?
Well, I wasn’t sure.I didn’t have a pot to piss in either, or any kind of direction about the path my sober life would take.
But I was goddamned determined to figure it out.
ChapterOne
Dixon
Four and a Half Years Later
Hoppingdown from the seat I’d ridden bitch in for the last five hundred miles, I planted my boots on the pavement and breathed deeply, steadying myself with my hand on the mud-covered fuel tank.
Home was a place I’d avoided for too long—Wisper, Wyoming, a little-known corner of the Jackson Hole Valley.Up here in the mountains, the air was thin, but the weight of it felt thick and heavy in my lungs.
“Don’t forget your pack,” Ken said.
He’d been hauling lumber, and before we delivered his last load yesterday, he agreed to drop me off on his way back to Rock Springs.Wisper was a little out of his way, but he said he didn’t mind seeing the Tetons before he headed home to his wife.
How he’d known I was in recovery was a mystery to me.I hadn’t said anything to him when he picked me up at a truck stop outside Winnemucca, Nevada, but he said I just had that look.The ex-junkie look, but it never failed—fucked-up had a tendency to find fucked-up.
Like me, Ken was a recovering alcoholic, but the difference was that he quit before his love of alcohol escalated to other shit.He’d been sober twenty years, but he admitted he still thought about the burn from a shot sliding down his throat.
I’d been sober more than four years, and I still thought about the rush of dope in my veins.More than that, though, I craved the numbness it provided, the ability to let demons and fathers and disappointments fade away.Most of all now, I wished it could wash away my family’s shame.
But if I let the chemical bliss take over, I couldn’t remember my son.And fuck if I was letting Stuart get any further away from me.
Ken dropped me off a mile from the south side of town, like I asked him to.I needed the last stretch of road to prepare myself for my impending, unknown future.
It had come time to face my mother.My brothers and sister.It had come time to face all of them and to apologize for lying and stealing and abandoning them.
It was time to face Stuart.
Five years old now, Stu had probably already started school.He probably had friends and dreams and wishes.He wouldn’t understand addiction.He couldn’t understand the part I’d played in his mother’s death, even though I wasn’t the one who’d injected the heroin into her vein.
Some days, the jealousy I felt toward my oldest brother and his wife could swallow me whole.Yeah, I was the one who gave up my kid.I handed him over to Bax when I knew I couldn’t take care of a baby, but that fact didn’t make my absence in my son’s life hurt any less.All the things I’d missed gutted me on a daily basis: birthdays, Christmases, bad dreams, maybe his first lost tooth.His first laugh.
I’d missed it all, and there was no going back.That was the hardest pill to swallow, and God knew I was damn good at swallowing pills.This one, though, it just wouldn’t go down.
Walking along Highway 20 with the morning sun beating down on my face, all those precious, missed memories ran through my head, and I tried to picture Stu’s face when he saw Santa for the first time.Did he smile?Was he excited or scared shitless?I had a vague memory from my own childhood of seeing jolly old St.Nick and then running in the opposite direction, screaming.He was just so big and tall, and my mama had told me so many times that if I was bad, Santa would know, and he’d be pissed.
