Chapter 8 Breaking and Entering
Breaking and Entering
RYDER
Resting my wrists on the lip of the sink, I sigh. “Sure.”
“I’m worried about you.” Duke’s eyes burn a hole through my head. “You wanna come hang at the cottage with me and Wheeler for a bit?”
Wheeler reaches out to squeeze my arm. “You’re always welcome. Duke’s s’mores game has gotten pretty excellent.”
“I’m an expert.” Duke pats his chest proudly. “Wheeler has me makin’ ’em every damn night, so I’d better be.”
“You’re the best.” She grins up at him.
Grabbing a towel, I use it to wipe my hands. “Y’all clearly need to get a room.”
“We have been making something else every night too.” Wheeler’s lips twitch.
Mollie nods sagely from her perch at the table where she’s nursing her daughter. “It’s so good when you’re pregnant.”
“What is?” Cash says with a smile.
So many babies.
So many people and families and new beginnings.
I’m thrilled for my brothers. Genuinely. When they’re happy, I’m happy.
Can you be happy, though, when you’re kinda-sorta lying to yourself? When you haven’t faced shit in years, and now all of a sudden, it’s coming back to haunt you for reasons you don’t entirely understand?
All I know is that I can barely breathe around the moon in my throat. Excusing myself, I make a quick exit.
Next thing I know, I’m in my truck and driving through the deepening darkness. My hands shake as I guide the truck to the Rivers’ side of the ranch.
When the green clapboard siding of the storage shed comes into view, a rush of heat hits the backs of my eyes.
The house I grew up in was barely a thousand square feet, with very little storage or attic space. So my dad built this little shed beside the equipment barn to serve as a storage space.
The shed is where we kept all our shit when we were growing up.
Hopefully no one’s messed with it since I was here last. Why would they?
Last I checked years ago, there wasn’t anything of value in the shed.
Just a bunch of photograph albums, bins of our artwork from school, and other random stuff like bikes and baby walkers.
My legs feel like Jell-O as I walk across the gravel road, which has been taken over by weeds. The shed’s never had a lock, so I’m able to walk right through the door.
I’m hit by the smells of hay and must. Underneath all that, though, I can detect the faintest trace of a familiar scent.
Home. Fresh laundry and rose-scented lotion.
Yeah, this obviously isn’t the physical structure I grew up in. But this is the stuff I grew up with. I guess that particular scent’s clung to our things the same way it clung to the house itself.
My chest cramps as memories unfurl inside my head.
Mom rubbing lotion into her hands after doing the dishes.
The way my stomach would growl when the smell of whatever she was cooking filled the house at the end of the day.
Waking up to the smells of coffee and fried bacon.
How Mom would let us sleep with her on the rare occasions Dad was out of town.
I remember how his pillow smelled like the Listerine mouthwash he used.
Tears leak out of my eyes. I don’t try to fight them. Surely that’s a step in the right direction?
Instead, I reach overhead to pull on a string. I pull it again, and again. Nothing happens.
Welp, the light doesn’t work anymore.
I turn on my phone’s flashlight and wade forward. The shed is still, warm, and quiet.
It’s also a mess, which is a relief. No one’s touched it.
I don’t spend much time browsing. Hurts too much to see the old crib Mom kept for God knows what reason, or the tarnished gold figurines of trophies that poke over the top of a nearby box. Cash was always the overachiever of the family, so my guess is those trophies belong to him.
I guide the beam of my flashlight over the undulating landscape of stuff.
So. Much. Stuff.
Then again, Mom and Dad did have five kids. They were so proud of us, and I get why they didn’t want to throw away anything they didn’t have to.
The light catches on something reflective, and I blink at the sudden flash. My stomach seizes as the familiar curves of a guitar come into focus. Reaching over a pile of old National Geographic magazines, I carefully curl my fingers around the guitar’s neck and lift it up.
It’s an acoustic guitar, the one Mom and Dad gave me for Christmas when I was in seventh grade. Up until then, I’d rented one from school. But I loved playing so much that my parents bought me my own.
It was a big deal considering we really had no money growing up. Hell, my brothers and I only recently paid off the mountain of debt my parents left when they died.
My throat closes in all over again when I think about all the sacrifices they made to give us the best childhood ever.
I wish they were still around.
The force of that desire, the weight of it, knocks the wind out of me.
This is why I don’t revisit the past.
This is why I don’t play the damn guitar anymore.
Before the accident, I never went anywhere without this guitar. That’s why I had it with me the night I played Taylor Swift for Billie. I loved showing off, playing songs by ear. She was so freaking delighted that I’d even try to learn what she liked.
The skin on my face feels tight from tears that have already dried. A voice in my head repeats over and over again that I should put the guitar back down. What business do I have playing music? I’m a grown-ass adult. I got things to do. Sleep to catch up on. Feelings to avoid.
Only I’m not trying to avoid them anymore. I’m trying to feel them, sit with them without dying, and I think this guitar might help me do that.
Ain’t gonna be any sleep for me tonight anyway.
Maybe…hell, maybe playing will also help me capture some of that joy, that exhilaration, I saw on Billie’s face when she was racing.
I can’t stop thinking about it. The good’s gotta come with the bad, right?
Right now, all I’m feeling is shitty stuff.
Grief and sorrow and regret. But there’s two sides to every coin.
What if joy’s waiting for me on the other side of this valley of awfulness?
So before I can talk myself out of it, I tuck the guitar under my arm and head outside. There’s a full moon tonight, and the gravel drive is lit up enough for me to see across the yard.
My knees crack as I sit on the step by the door and settle the guitar on my lap.
Gliding my fingers along the dusty strings—by some miracle, all six are still there—emotion clogs my throat.
I realize I’ve already curled my body around the guitar the way I did when I would play, left hand on the neck, right arm draped over the front of the instrument.
I’m leaning forward a little, just enough so I can see the strings.
Muscle memory is a weird fucking thing.
The knife in my pocket digs into my thigh. I suddenly remember that time Mom lost her wedding ring. Dad used his knife to cut a length of kitchen twine and tied it in a little circle before slipping it onto her finger.
Touching my fingertips to the strings, I hesitate. What if this just makes the grief worse by unleashing…I don’t know, memories that will kill me to revisit?
Today, I faced down a five-hundred-pound bull, had several near misses with a huge rattler that followed me around everywhere, and dodged a literal bullet when Colt’s shotgun misfired.
And yet playing a guitar is the thing that scares the living daylight out of me.
Which means I gotta play, right? Otherwise this will haunt me too—the knowledge that I was too chickenshit to pick out a single song.
I brush my fingers over the strings, and I’m shocked when I let out a bark of laughter. The guitar is horribly out of tune.
I take a minute to tune the strings as best as I can. Years of heat and humidity have clearly done a number on my instrument.
I’m taken aback by the knowledgeable way my fingers turn the knobs that tighten the strings.
It’s like I’ve been possessed by the ghost of my middle school music teacher, Mr. Martinez, who taught me how to tune my guitar.
The experience of not knowing how to do something, but still doing it, is a mind fuck.
I strum the strings. They need to be replaced, but I get them to a good enough place to play.
My fingers slow. I adjust my leg, straightening my knee a little.
Next thing I know, I’m playing a song.
My whole body rises on a tide of feeling that has goose bumps breaking out on my arms when I realize—
Hell, it’s a Brooks & Dunn song. A love song—“Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You.”
Brooks & Dunn was Garrett Luck’s favorite band.
Mom played their music a lot, too, on the little portable speaker she kept on the windowsill in the kitchen.
She was always shimmying to one country song or another, with regular appearances by Fleetwood Mac, Carole King, and Bonnie Raitt interspersed between Tim McGraw and Trisha Yearwood.
I don’t sing the lyrics, but I do hum along as I pick out the notes. I only stop when a tear lands on the top of my thumb.
I can’t breathe.
I can only hang my head, my fingertips falling off the strings, and try not to die from feeling, well, all these fucking feelings.
Mom, I wish I could call you.
I wish I could hear your voice and see your eyes light up when you smile.
I wish we could be together again, all seven of us, and talk about everything and nothing over the King Ranch casserole you’d make. The one with the corn tortillas and chicken and cheese? God, that was good. We all loved it so much there’d never be any leftovers even though you’d double the recipe.
Remember that, Mom? Because I do.
My heart feels bruised, like it’s been run over and left for dead.
It’s too much.
This is all too fucking much.
This is what I was worried about. I’m sitting with my grief, and it is absolutely kicking my ass.
I start to play again, only because I don’t know what else to do. The stuff inside me is too big and too heavy to keep inside, so I let it out note by note with my fingertips.
Now I’m playing a sad Brooks & Dunn song—“You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone.” And while I feel sad playing it—and angry and lonely and drained—when I’m done, I feel…
No better. But lighter, maybe? Like I can breathe a little easier.
Shit, I just survived something, didn’t I?
I just connected with feelings—a side of myself—I’ve had closed off, and I didn’t die.
I just took a swan dive into the grief I haven’t let myself feel in more than a decade, and playing my guitar from middle school, of all things, is what kept me from drowning in pain.
What in the world? Can simply acknowledging your feelings make them less terrifying?
Cash always says the universe is one sick motherfucker. I believe him now.
Billie, this is all your fault. She’s the one who put the idea of connection in my head. She’s the one who had me humming songs and being playful and wanting…I don’t know, wanting to feel more than mostly numb.
I do not feel numb right now.
Flattened? Yes.
Exhausted and terrified and lost? Yes, yes, and yes.
But I gotta give credit where credit is due. Billie was onto something here. What if I kept playing?
What if I leaned into this instead of running scared?
You risk even more pain. More loss. No big deal.
My life—it’s good enough, right? I don’t gotta open myself up to all this shit to do my job and keep my family’s legacy alive.
But you do need to open up if you wanna be free, truly and deeply free. The way Billie was in the arena.
And the thought of living the rest of my life holed up in this weird little fortress I’ve built, safe but never free, distanced from everyone, distanced from myself—
My center spasms.
Fuck me.
Really, fuck Billie Wallace. I was fine before. I’m fine now.
But suddenly, fine ain’t good enough.
Whatever Billie gave me, I want more of it.
I wanna thank her for getting my ass out here tonight. Yeah, playing music again hurts like hell. It’s also the first time in forever I had the courage and the patience to feel something.
And turns out, you have to feel to, well, feel better.
Finishing the song, I rise to my feet. Dust off my jeans.
I head home, my guitar riding shotgun beside me in the passenger seat. I have some ideas. And a favor or two to ask.