Chapter 32
“They haven’t always been like this. My parents, I mean,” I tell Linden. It’s important to get that off my chest first so that he knows. Knows that my parents love me in their own way. That some of this will sound bad, but it doesn’t make them bad people.
He doesn’t respond to that at first, too busy walking around my little shoebox, his gray eyes darting over the interior.
There isn’t much to see—a banged-up closet that our landlord had stored in here, which then came in handy, my desk, a few textbooks, and the bed I’m currently lying on.
A fan and Keeping Noah mostly consume my bedside table: no memorabilia, no plants, no family pictures.
I used to have one, framed and all, but looking at it hurt, so I left it at my dad’s place when I moved to Bonham.
“So what have they been like? Tell me,” Linden asks when he slowly trails back to the bed.
I scoot to the side to create room for him, but he sits down on the edge, one hand reaching out for my ankle, squeezing it gently.
My skin prickles beneath his warm palm. I didn’t realize how much I missed his touch until now.
I clear my throat to force my focus back to our conversation.
“Wonderful,” I say, the first thing that comes to my mind.
“Like, really wonderful. My mom—she told the best stories, baked the best cookies, although I still don’t know how she did it, because, for a long time, we didn’t have a real oven, and she”—I press my lips together, my cheeks flushing—“she gave the best hugs.”
I cringe at the description, very aware of how odd that must sound for a guy my age. But it’s the first thing that always stands out when I think of her—her softness and warmth when she wrapped her arms around me.
“That does sound wonderful,” Linden agrees, a small smile playing around the corners of his lips. I’m pretty sure he’s thinking of his mom right now.
“Why didn’t you have a real oven, though?” The question comes completely unexpectedly, and I blink at first, confused about where he’s going with this, until he carefully adds, “Was it a…financial thing?”
“Ah, no.” I laugh, shaking my head. “I mean, I’m not sure. We weren’t rich or anything, but if we had money problems back then, my parents didn’t let me notice. It was because of the van.”
“The…van?” Linden echoes, his eyebrows drawn together now as he’s filing away that new piece of information.
I lick my lips, then push up into a sitting position, scooting closer to the wall until I can feel the headrest against my back.
“Yeah. We lived in a van up until I turned eight. It was amazing. We drove all over the country. I mean, that was before it was cool on the internet. They did mostly seasonal work. A lot of farm stuff and construction. I loved it!” I put a little too much emphasis on the last part, even when I’m serious.
I did love that time, which is probably why I have such clear memories of those early years.
My dad teaching me to swim on Californian beaches, my mom lifting me so I could pick a peach in Georgia, and me babbling about wanting to see wolves while hiking in Yellowstone.
Linden, however, doesn’t seem fully convinced. “Okay. And…school?” he asks tentatively.
I shrug. “My mom home-schooled me until I entered third grade. By then, they had made plans to put down roots. To be honest, I think the van became a little too crowded as I got older, and my parents had this dream of a homestead where they wanted to live mostly self-reliant. We talked a lot about getting a puppy—by that point, I had begged for one probably every day—and my mom kept asking me how I’d feel about being an older brother. ”
“How did you feel about that?”
I laugh when I detect his grin. “Great, actually. I was always kinda jealous of kids with siblings, low-key still am sometimes. But I also would’ve been okay with just a puppy.”
“Can’t relate,” Linden snorts, but then a different thought must cross his mind because his face falls. “But you never got a sibling? Or did they…”
“...no. No! No one died,” I assure him with my hands raised. This is a story of loss, but not that kind of loss after all.
“My mom never got pregnant again. I...we had everything ready. Like, it was a real challenge to go from a camper to a house. Even if it must have been tiny, because I would’ve had to share my room with a sibling, I didn’t care at all.
I was used to living in small spaces, and the house seemed ginormous at that time.
My dad did most of the renovations himself.
He found a job at a nearby factory, and after his shifts, we worked on the house together.
He was really good with his hands—still is.
He creates things out of thin air. I…wait, I can show you!
” I reach for my phone and scroll to the file that holds all the photographs I took before leaving for college.
They’re not the best quality, since they show the printed pictures Dad never got rid of, but even then, and through the broken screen of my cell, the beauty of that place is palpable.
A lush green backyard, a scenic forest, and high peaks looming in the distance, a small yellow house with a wooden wrap-around porch taking up the front.
“That looks so beautiful,” Linden whispers. He’s leaning forward to catch a better look, his fingers gently wrapping around my hand with the phone to keep it steady. I didn’t even notice it started to shake.
I clear my throat, locking the screen again. “Yeah, it was. Until we got sick.”
“Sick?” Linden’s head snaps up, his grip tightening around my wrist. “All three of you?”
I press my lips together and give a nod.
“Yeah. First, Benny—that’s what I called the pup they got me for my birthday.
He was a little”—I gesture to indicate the size—“a little German Shepherd because my dad wanted a protector for Mom and me when he wasn’t—” I break off when a lump appears in my throat, too big to speak around, so I swallow thickly, waving the topic away with my hand.
“Anyway, I remember him being completely fine. We spent the whole day playing by the little stream next to the house. That night, he started throwing up all over my bed. When Mom drove us to the vet the next morning, he was already so weak and I…fuck, this is stupid.” I shake Linden’s hand off to press the heels of my palms against my stinging eyes.
It’s been fourteen years, for fuck’s sake!
“Hey, hey, no, it’s not stupid,” Linden insists.
He crawls up the bed until he kneels in front of me, wrapping his arms around me without hesitation.
His warm breath tickles my ear as he speaks.
“Crying over a pet is never stupid—you wouldn’t believe how often I’ve seen my dad cry over the loss of an animal. ”
I sniff and give my eyes a final wipe before blinking up at him. It’s hard to imagine Brandon Woodrow crying.
“Yeah? He seems more like the kinda guy who gets stuff in his eyes,” I joke weakly.
“Oh yeah.” Linden snorts. “He gets stuff in his eyes a lot. Like when a calf doesn’t make it or a fox gets to the chickens.”
I bite my lower lip, nodding slowly as I remember the day he took me out to fix that fence. There’s a softer core to that man than he wants people to believe.
“Do you want to take a break?” Linden sits back on his heels, his hand squeezing my knee. “You don’t have to get it all out in one go.”
“No, it’s okay.” I know that picking this topic up again will be so much harder than just ripping it off like an old band-aid. I wet my lips and take a deep breath before giving him a small smile.
“After Benny…our goats got sick, too. We had three of them. Mom named them after Santa’s reindeer—Dasher, Dancer, and Donner. And then my mom and I.”
There’s a flash of fear darting over Linden’s face, and now it’s me who’s grabbing his hand and squeezing it, just to remind him that I’m still here, right next to him, big and ogre-sized and all.
“It was this terrible headache from the moment I opened my eyes to when I went to sleep at night, and just…nausea, you know? I remember being so tired all the time. It was better when I was at school, but it got worse when I came back home in the afternoon.” My legs are going heavy from the memory.
It felt like walking through mud, getting stuck at every other step.
“My mom went to every doctor she could find, but they all said it was probably stress, the move, the change, you know? Going from an ‘unstable’ life to this. That we’d both need time to adjust.”
“Did the goats need time to adjust, too?” Linden asks bitterly, anger vibrating in every word. I still laugh at the joke, once again squeezing his hand.
“To be honest, I don’t think my parents connected our issues to the goats,” I tell him.
“And my dad was mostly fine. He had random headaches, but nothing major. So that’s when they started fighting because…
well. He told Mom she was overreacting, that she should try to relax more, that she projected her symptoms onto me.
” I close my eyes, trying to push the mental images back down.
At first, they tried to keep these arguments to the evening, when they thought I was fast asleep, but after a while, they started as soon as my dad came through the door and found my mom lying on the couch with all the curtains closed and me hugged to her chest.
I sigh, shaking my head to come back to reality. “It went on for a whole year. It was better in winter, but our symptoms came back in spring. When the next summer rolled around, Mom didn’t even look the same anymore. There were days when she barely made it out of bed because she was so weak.”
“Fuck, Micah, I don’t know what to say,” Linden murmurs, and I shake my head again, unable to come up with anything in return.