Chapter Thirteen Somewhere in the Badlands Present Day
Chapter Thirteen
Somewhere in the Badlands
Present Day
“If I’d have known you were going to go off and get world-famous, I’d have negotiated better terms and conditions.”
Chrissie sat back in the passenger seat of the car, her feet up on the dashboard—very dangerous—and an arm hanging out the window—also dangerous. She was once again wearing the volleyball mom sweatshirt, her hair blowing in the wind and nary a scrap of makeup on her face.
She felt fantastic.
“Please don’t remind me,” she said into the phone.
Both Scarlett and River had begged her to put the call through the car speakers so they could listen as she checked in with Walsh, but she’d shut that idea down right away.
“I don’t really understand why people are making a big deal out of this.
There are thousands of musicians out there who are more talented than us. ”
Walsh’s low, rich chuckle sounded. Even though it was ten o’clock in the morning and he was probably sitting at his desk crunching important accounting numbers, he’d picked up the call on the first ring.
That made her feel fantastic, too.
“It’s the spontaneity, I think,” he said, treating her playful question as though it required a not-so-playful answer.
That had always been a trait she’d admired in him: his ability to cut through a joke with honesty.
Few people could do that without sounding like a complete stick-in-the-mud.
She certainly couldn’t. “No one has any idea what kind of random location you’re going to pop up in next.
Lily and Kat showed me an online poll where people are trying to guess where the next video will come from.
A lot of people seem to think you’re fleeing to Canada. ”
Chrissie’s feet dropped to the floor of the car. She was careful not to look over at where Scarlett sat behind the wheel of the car, but she could feel her friend’s eyes on her.
“I’m sorry. Say that again?”
The other trait Chrissie admired in Walsh was that she didn’t have to explain herself to him. Six years of tournaments and practices and carefully neutral flirtations had done wonders in getting them onto the same page.
“I know, right?” he said, his grin practically audible through the phone. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when I walked in to find them hunched over Lily’s laptop together.”
“No one was being strangled?”
“There was nary a ligature mark in sight.”
“And everyone’s hair was still attached to her head?”
“As far as I could tell, the claws were fully retracted. Mind you, I’m not promising the truce will last, but they seem to have offered a stalemate over, and I quote, ‘the most embarrassing mother ever to walk the earth.’”
Chrissie gurgled on a laugh. Scarlett was so surprised by the sound that she touched the brakes too hard, sending them all lurching against their seat belts.
Chrissie turned to glare at her but otherwise continued her phone call.
There was no reason not to—the South Dakota Badlands offered sights of nothing but white clay and rocky desiccation in every direction.
Some people might find the desolation pretty, but Chrissie had grown up in stark surroundings and refused to return to them.
Give her over-the-top florals or give her death.
“It was the sweatshirt, wasn’t it?” Chrissie asked. She sighed happily. “I knew it was a good idea to wear it.” Then, with a less happy sigh, “She didn’t pick up my call this morning. I wonder if I should apologize.”
“Don’t you dare!”
The shout came at her from all angles—through the phone, from the driver’s seat, and from the back.
Scarlett was the first to follow up. “So help me, Chrissie, if you apologize to that girl for wearing your own damn clothes on your own damn vacation, I’m dropping you off at the next mile marker and making you walk the rest of the way.”
“I’m with Scarlett,” Walsh said, still with the smile in his voice. “I don’t condone leaving you to die on the side of the road, obviously, but Kat’s not nearly as upset as she’s pretending. I think she’s proud of you, honestly. We all are.”
Chrissie was quick to get off the phone after that. Not because she didn’t want to hear more about how her daughter and Walsh felt about her, but because she didn’t want to hear more about how her daughter and Walsh felt about her while Scarlett was weaving dangerously across the lanes.
“Would you please slow down and focus on your driving?” she said as she tucked her phone away and adjusted her seat belt to a more lifesaving position. “I refuse to die on a day when Kat and her nemesis bonded for the first time in their lives.”
“I am focused,” Scarlett responded. “I just wanted to hear what Walsh was saying. Did he declare his everlasting love for you and your ugly sweatshirt?”
Chrissie snorted, but she’d have been lying if she didn’t admit that her heart gave a small stutter at the thought. That stutter became more pronounced—dangerously so—when River leaned over the console and asked, “What’s up with this Walsh guy, anyway? Are you guys, like, dating?”
“No,” Chrissie said at the same time Scarlett said, “Yes.”
River laughed and took Scarlett’s side—which, given Chrissie’s track record with teenagers, seemed par for the course.
Nothing Chrissie ever did was good enough for her daughter, but in Kat’s eyes, Scarlett could do no wrong.
She was glamorous and worldly wise, the “fun aunt” who swept into town and swept her off her feet simultaneously.
Even though Chrissie was the one who’d insisted they rescue River, this situation was turning out to be very much the same.
“Okay, Scarlett,” River said. “Tell me everything.”
“I wish I could. I don’t know nearly as much as I want to.
Chrissie has always been tight-lipped about her love life.
Even as a teenager, she never kissed and told.
But I do know that Walsh has been her daughter’s volleyball coach for six years, and he’s been pining after her hard for at least five of those. ”
“That’s not true!” Chrissie protested, but she was about as involved in this conversation as the scrubby weeds they were passing in a blur.
“What’s wrong with him?” River chewed on one of her fingernails. “Like, is he ugly or mean to animals or something?”
“Show him that picture, Chrissie.”
The last thing Chrissie wanted to do was play one of Scarlett’s mind games—especially one around such a barbed topic—but she pulled up Walsh’s barbecue apron selfie all the same. She felt oddly nervous as she showed River, but she needn’t have worried.
“Oh, he’s cute. You know, in a middle-aged, Jordan Peele sort of way. Aren’t you kind of young for him?”
Chrissie didn’t point out the obvious fact that her age was much closer to Walsh’s than River’s had been to the bartender back in Boise. The high road had always been her preferred method of travel.
“I’m an old soul,” was all she said.
“And not only is he nice to animals, but he’s literally training Chrissie’s elderly cat to pee on a patch of fake grass right now—even though she begged him not to.
” Scarlett laughed and swerved to avoid a tumbleweed.
“That’s how bad he wants in, but the poor guy has no idea how steep the climb is to reach her. ”
A hand slid between the seats and gently touched Chrissie’s shoulder. “You mean because of your daughter?”
Chrissie opened her mouth to reply in a strong affirmative, but Scarlett beat her to the punch. “That’s the reason she’ll tell you, but it actually has more to do with her first love. Grimshaw Pemberly.”
Chrissie’s teenage boyfriend was the last topic she wanted to introduce into the conversation right now, but River only giggled.
“No way. That can’t be his real name. It sounds like something from a romance novel—one of those really good ones where the lady’s dress is being yanked off by a naked Fabio. ”
“Oh, it’s real, all right.” Scarlett nudged Chrissie with her elbow. “Tell River the story of your torrid teenage love affair. I’m sure she’d enjoy it. We have to do something to pass the time between here and Minnesota, and a trip down memory lane seems as good as anything else.”
“The situations with Grimshaw and Walsh are nothing alike,” Chrissie said with a firm set of her jaw. “And I’m not talking about this. Not unless you’re prepared to tell your part of the story.”
She could have almost laughed at how quickly that shut the conversation down.
Less amusing was how quiet River had grown in the back seat.
Like any child of trauma, she’d caught the heavy, unpleasant undertones of the conversation and absorbed them as her own.
Chrissie had spent so many years doing the same thing, eating her parents’ long silences for dinner, curling up under the blanket of their unspoken loss, that she felt instantly ashamed.
She also backtracked the only way she knew how.
“I accidentally sent Walsh a bikini photo our first night on the road,” she confessed. “I’m afraid he liked it a lot more than I expected him to.”
“No way,” River breathed, once again returned to the light, airy eighteen-year-old she deserved a chance to be. “Now that’s a story I definitely want to hear.”
* * *
The main benefit—if not the only one—of Scarlett’s refusal to sleep past six o’clock in the morning was how much ground they could cover in any given day.
Although it had been their original intention to enjoy the journey, stopping every few hours to take in the sights, rest, and spend time together, River’s addition to the party had changed the tenor of things.
Now, instead of the laid-back atmosphere Chrissie had been hoping for, a sense of urgency swept over her at every gas station and bathroom pit stop, every convenience store where they stocked up on cheap snacks.
Not because she thought they were being tailed, and not because she wasn’t enjoying River’s company, but because she couldn’t rest until she knew the girl was where she belonged.