Chapter 6
CHAPTER
SIX
Van
Lunch turned into an entire day event. Isla, or Issy as she insists on me calling her, spent hours with Gagey.
She did time with him, fed him his bottle and the mushed food I’d processed for him before we left home for the road.
She told me stories about Gage and things they did and got into as kids roaming the ranch.
They started competing in rodeos together and eventually branched out into doing it solo.
She shared the same worries as I did every time he rode those damn bulls.
As I dropped her off, I felt as if I’d made a new, lifelong friend.
I swore to her, no matter where I end up, she can be a part of my son’s life.
She’ll be his forever aunt, a gift for Gagey from his father because I’m an only child, whose parents passed not long after graduating high school, so he has no living relatives on my side of the family.
She’s someone who can tell him things about his dad that I’ll never be able to and that brings a smile to my face.
It’s times like this, when I’m feeling conflicted, that I wish I had someone to talk to.
Gage was that person for me and now he’s gone.
The only thing Issy was willing to tell me was that he made some bad choices that made his childhood friends question his loyalty.
Our timelines matched up and were concurrent with when I noticed a drastic change in him.
It makes me more curious about what he’d gotten himself into than ever before.
This morning, I woke up to a message on my phone from Rio.
He and a friend from out of town, another man who grew up with Gage, are coming to my place for a chat.
But now that the time has drawn near, when I anticipate I’ll be getting some of the answers I’ve been seeking, I’m both nervous and hesitant on if I still want to hear about what they have to say.
My thoughts and feelings are all over the map, and they can’t make up their mind of where they want to land.
My boy is in his crib with some toys to keep him occupied while I run around putting together finger foods for us to munch on while we talk.
When I get nervous I eat, but I try to be healthy about it while doing so since my curves are more prominent now than they were before I got pregnant.
I’m splitting and cutting some stalks of celery and broccoli into bite-sized pieces, unwrapping the cellophane bag of carrots, and making cucumber sandwiches with cups of ranch on the side to dip everything into.
I know it’s not manly food and the guys may recoil at it but seeing as I don’t keep bread and other starches around they’ll have to deal or go without.
As soon as I set the platter down on the kitchen table there's a knock at the door. I wipe my sweaty palms on the thighs of my jeans and inhale then slowly release it. I notice they’re shaky but I’m out of time to try and steady myself by meditating to calm my racing heart down, so I use the breathing techniques I learned at Lamaze class as I make my way through the arch of the entrance.
I gather my wits and swing it open. “Hello,” I utter in greeting.
“Hey, Van,” Rio says in response. “This is my blood cousin and club brother from East Texas, Riptide.”
“Nice to meet you,” I reply, swinging the door open wider and waving them in.
“Come in and take a seat. I moved Gagey’s crib into the living room so I can keep an eye on him but he’s not underneath our feet.
I hope y’all are alright with that, I don’t do well when he’s out of my sight when there are strangers around. ”
“That’s no bother at all,” the man, Riptide, tells me. “I was actually hoping to meet the little guy.”
“Well, you’ll have plenty of opportunities for that while you’re here,” I banter. “He loves attention.”
“Just like his dad,” Rio states. “He used to do the wildest things and rope us all into his shenanigans.”
“Hell yeah, he did,” Riptide chortles. “I used to get my ass spanked raw for some of the shit he talked me into.”
“Issy told me a few things. He was a bit wild and wily from what she shared,” I tell them.
“There was this one time, he wanted to build Big Tex, you know who that is, don’t ya?” Riptide asks me.
“I do. He’s the feature at the State Fair of Texas,” I remark.
“You can’t miss him since he stands as tall as a skyscraper and talks during certain periods of the day, his baritone voice carries for miles around the park.
He was a favorite attraction of mine when we had school sanctioned fair days. ”
“That’d be him,” Riptide laughs. “Anyway, he took our paps’ favorite pair of cowboy boots and nailed them to a thick sheet of plywood.
Drove that nail straight through the tops of them and grabbed one of the ranch hands’ cowboy hat and superglued a string to it so it’d stay on our paper maché man.
He had Rio and me steal some chicken wire, all of the newspaper we could find, which just so happened to be on everyone’s porches from the delivery boy from that same morning, and we got to building.
Somehow, he got Issy involved and had her steal a shirt and pair of pants from the wardrobe of those who were competing and we had our very own version of Big Tex. ”
“Oh no,” I gasp. “I bet y’all paid for that.”
“Paps eventually found us out in the woods where we had just finished constructing it and whooped our asses with a switch all the way back to the clubhouse,” Rio mirthlessly chuckles. “I think I still have a scar on my ass cheek from it.”
“He whipped it like it was a lasso and got all three of us in one swing as we sprinted through the pasture. Running never helped because that old timer had some speed. I’d never jumped so high in my life as I did when that thing hit my skin,” Riptide muses.
“Gage was hopping like a rabbit every time he got a swat,” Rio recalls. “Funniest shit ever.”
“If we hadn’t been running for our lives, that shit would’ve no doubt been comical,” Riptide summarizes. “Nobody scared the living daylights out of me like Paps could.”
As I hand the guys a mug and set the carafe and fixings, such as creamer and sugar on the coffee table, I ask them, “What else can you tell me about Gage as a kid?”
Riptide mulls it over while he fixes his coffee and snickers. “When we were twelve or so, he convinced us that if we wore a cape we could fly like Superman.”
“What?” I ask, befuddled.
“Fuck we were impressionable,” Rio grumbles. “We were old enough to know better but too young to care. We were adventurous shitheads.”
“We never could say no to a direct challenge,” Riptide tacks on. “Needless to say, there were a lot of bruised body parts as well as egos.”
“What did y’all do? Jump out of a tree?” I query.
“Nope, off the roof of the clubhouse. Thank fuck there was a shitload of bushes and other stuff laying around to break our fall.”
“Fall? You mean leap, right?” I continue my line of questioning.
“Nope, we lost our nerve when we saw the height we’d be jumping from and started pushing each other toward the ladder so we could climb back down. During our freak out, we pushed each other right off the pitch of the roof,” Riptide corrects.
“Y’all pushed, I lost my balance,” Rio harrumphs. “We would’ve been fine if y’all hadn’t started shoving each other and me getting caught up in it.”
“You’re so full of shit, Rio,” Riptide says, shoving him with his shoulder. “You’re the one who tripped over his own feet and had us hurtling off the side of the clubhouse.”
“Lies!” Rio hisses, but the smile on his face and the laughter in his eye contradicts his words. “Don’t listen to him, Van, his memory isn’t what it used to be.”
These guys crack me up. Tears are flowing down the sides of my cheeks from how hard I’m giggling. “I can see how y’all ended up being the best of friends growing up. Your personalities and zest for life complement one another.”
“Those were the days,” Rio ruminates.
“What happened?” I ask, getting to the crux of why they’re here.
“We grew up, went our own way,” Riptide answers. “I moved to East Texas, Rio stayed here, and Gage followed the circuit.”
“You didn’t stay in contact with one another?” I probe.
“We did,” Rio explains. “It just wasn’t the same. Our lives took different paths.”
“Did Gage tell you about us?” Riptide inquires.
“He hinted at y’all but didn’t get into any specifics. I couldn’t understand why at the time, but now I’m starting to,” I admit.
“Why do you think that was?” Rio asks.
“In his way, he was either protecting y’all from me or me from y’all,” I describe. “I’m not sure which it was because I was sheltered so I’m presuming it was for my benefit.”
“Sheltered how?” Riptide queries.
“My parents were older when they had me. They hadn’t planned on having kids, they were career driven, so imagine their shock when my mom, who was forty-six, discovered she was carrying me,” I say, painting them that mental image.
“My parents were very open and honest with me and they told me once that they struggled with the decision of keeping me or placing me up for adoption. They weren’t sure they could give me the quality of life they felt I deserved because they weren’t physically capable of keeping up with me like they would’ve been in their twenties.
Up until the day of my birth, when my mom looked at me, she was conflicted.
But she says the moment our eyes met she knew that I was meant to be with them. ”
“I can see how that’d be problematic,” Riptide mentions.
I snort then inform them, “They got lucky with me though. I was a homebody as a child. They tried putting me into sports and dance, but I wasn’t coordinated and hated every bit of it. I’d rather have had a book in my hands than learning how to pirouette or juggle a ball.”
“I bet Gage loved that,” Rio huffs. “He was always on the go. The man never saw a stop sign he didn’t breeze through.”
“He’d tap on the brakes.” I laugh because it was just that, a gentle tap, and as long as there wasn’t traffic coming from either direction, he’d press on the gas.
Then say with shrugged shoulders, “I adjusted. When he was home I went places with him and enjoyed it. But when he was on the road, I reverted back to my childhood ways.” I breathe in through my nose and gather my courage, then broach the topic we’ve been tiptoeing around.
“What changed with Gage? What did he do that has y’all standoffish and second guessing yourselves anytime his name is mentioned? ”