Chapter 19 #2
Well, he was doing this. Whether he was ready or not.
He got out of his truck and knocked on the door.
It was his mother who answered, but she didn’t look surprised.
“Hi,” she said. “Come on in.”
“Thank you,” he said, his voice rough.
“What can I do for you?” his mom asked.
“I finished the diaries. I need to know if there’s more.”
“What do you mean?”
“I need to know if Butch ever wrote anything more.”
“He might have,” his mom said. “There are some unopened letters, stuck with different genealogies. I don’t think they were sealed by Butch. I think they were mailed between relatives.”
“And you haven’t read them?”
“They aren’t addressed to me,” she said.
West could only stare at her.
“Well, why are you here?” she pressed.
“I told you.” No, that wasn’t what she was asking. “I think I’m in love,” he said.
That got his dad’s attention too. Both of his parents were staring at him as he stood in the open doorway letting the cold air in.
He closed the door firmly behind himself.
“I think I’m in love, but I’m afraid I’m not good enough for her.
I’m afraid I’m not going to be enough. I …
I was bad at school. We are also weird,” he said, and he regretted the word the minute it came out of his mouth.
“We are. And she’s had a hard life. I don’t want to be part of the hard stuff, but I don’t know if I can be enough for her.
She deserves some guy who is stable and normal and grew up with a family that was normal and … God. I’m so sorry.”
It was his dad who surprised him. Who reached a hand out and touched his arm. “Apparently, we did some things that messed you up a little.”
He stood there, feeling angry. At the world for making things so difficult for him, for his dad, for his mom, for Jessie. At himself for saying something like that, and for feeling something like that.
“I love you both. You’re great parents.”
“That doesn’t mean we didn’t fuck you up.”
“You didn’t,” he said. “That’s not … It’s not you. It’s a lot of other people. It’s life.”
“That’s probably everyone’s biggest fear,” his dad said. “That you won’t be good enough. And I guess we weren’t, not in some ways.”
His father’s admission weighed on West, heavily. Made it difficult for him to breathe.
“Every person is so different; no one person can ever be all someone else needs,” his mom said. “In that way, none of us will ever be enough. I’m sorry that I wasn’t enough for you. I love you anyway.”
It was as if that star was shining directly into this trailer. None of them could ever be enough, not on their own. But you could love anyway. Imperfectly. An imperfect love would always be so much better than not trying. That was what Cassidy’s mom had done. What his parents had done.
They loved him with everything they had.
It was all that mattered.
“You were enough,” he said. “You’re the best mom.
And you’re a great dad. I … It was me. I needed something, and I couldn’t find it.
I did blame you. For parts of my problem.
And that wasn’t fair. I do wish that you could care a little bit more about the things that I’m interested in. About what I’m doing. About the ranch.”
“We can talk about that if you want,” William said.
There it was. The talking it over, just as Cassidy had said.
“Yeah. Well … I’ll do better. At saying what I want. Instead of doing dumb, rebellious teenage shit to try to get attention. Your love is enough,” he said. “It is.”
“Yours would be too, West,” Lucinda said. “And anyone would be lucky to have it.”
She looked at him and smiled before looking away again. Then she got up and wordlessly went into the other room. She returned with a large box. “This has our genealogy records—all of Butch and Sarah’s children, their children, all of our ancestors. And there might be something more in there.”
“He and Sarah stayed together.”
“Yes. Until his death.”
He nodded. Of course, he knew that Butch had been married.
They were his descendants. He had known there were children, but he had never thought about whether or not it was a love match, not until he had read Sarah’s diary.
“I read that whole diary,” he said. “It was just like you said, Mom. The world fell away. I guess I was interested enough.”
“Well, there’s no point giving your attention to something you’re not interested in.”
In that way, he thought his parents might be two of the smartest people he knew. They invested in the things they cared about. Didn’t give a shit about the things they didn’t.
Yeah. In that way, they kinda had it figured out.
“Can I open the letters?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“They aren’t addressed to me either.”
She laughed. “That’s okay. I get the feeling that doesn’t bother you.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
He tore the envelopes open. Inside were a few loose pieces of paper. Grocery lists, maybe? Ledgers, some other things that didn’t really make sense. And then he found one that was folded in half, and read On Our Anniversary.
He unfolded it and recognized Butch’s handwriting immediately.
Dearest Sarah,
I haven’t felt the need to write out my feelings, not since you came into my life and I finally had someone to talk to.
I used to write letters to myself, because it was the only place that I could find a way to speak.
I don’t need that anymore. But I wanted to write to you to tell you just how much I love you.
How much you changed me. I don’t think there’s such a thing as redemption for a man like me.
You may be as close to heaven as I’ll ever be allowed to get.
But I’m grateful, every day. I don’t deserve you.
I’m keenly aware of that. It weighs heavily on me that I stole this happiness from someone else.
Because I’m responsible for the death of a man who had a wife, children who loved him, and now here I am living with mine.
But I’ve also come to realize that in life we don’t get what we deserve, and men like me can only be grateful for that.
You are the single greatest gift I have ever been given.
And loving you is the only thing I’ve ever done that matters.
The heaviest burden I bear is knowing that it’s likely my sins will be my legacy, when it should be my love for you.
It would’ve been much easier to stay in the darkness.
It was what I earned. But you gave me the strength to walk into the light.
I would never say a villain can become a hero.
Because what I did is so villainous that it cannot be erased.
But you made my life mean something. My line would’ve ended with me, and now it will carry on.
And maybe someday, enough years on, all the bad will be washed away by the love we share.
By the love our descendants find. I’m grateful for you. I love you.
West touched the words on the page, a strange sorrow filling his chest. Butch had known. That forgiveness would be so hard to come by, his legacy would be the dark things he’d done rather than the love he’d ended up finding.
“Not anymore,” West said.
Because that was the other thing. It was easier to cling to the dark things. To the certainty that you didn’t deserve love of any kind.
So much harder to let go of it. To embrace the idea that you can have love without being perfect.
He’d always been trying to protect himself, he realized with stunning clarity.
Taking on the cloak of the villain meant that he didn’t have to try. Didn’t have to be disappointed anymore. Being the bad guy that everybody expected him to be meant he couldn’t really disappoint anyone, but part of him had always rebelled. Part of him had always wanted love.
God, he wanted it.
“You know,” his mom said, “I have a ring.”
“What?”
“There’s a ring in my collection. It’s the one Butch gave to Sarah. I think he probably bought it with stolen money.”
He had taken that stolen money and turned it into something beautiful. A symbol of his love for a woman he didn’t deserve.
“I’m going to need that ring,” he said.
“Are you sure?” his dad asked.
“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”