Chapter Twenty-Two
“Denver!”
The pounding on the door mimicked the pounding in his head. He had gotten extremely drunk after Sheena had left, and had fallen
asleep on the couch. Now he felt . . . none of the blessed numbness that he felt right after consuming the alcohol. He just
felt pain. Everywhere.
“Just a minute,” he grumbled, getting up from the couch and opening the door.
To see all of his brothers standing there, looking like the Sons of Thunder.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“We heard your dumb ass needed an intervention,” said Justice.
“What are you talking about?”
“Have you seen your truck?” Landry asked.
“My truck?”
He stumbled out the front door and went down the steps, and saw a dent at the end of the bed, and then two very obvious key marks trailing down the side of the whole body. “Son of a bitch,” he said.
“Yeah, it was a son of a bitch,” Landry said. “You. You caused that.”
“Sheena keyed my truck?”
“That’s the word on the street. By which I mean, that’s what Bix told me,” said Daughtry.
“What does Bix have to do with this?”
“Bix saw Sheena walking down the driveway this morning crying. And picked her up. We’ve been waiting for you to come back
to the land of the living so that we could tear you a new one.”
He snarled, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Relationships end, okay? And ours wasn’t even really a relationship.
It was . . . it was just a thing. It ran its course. Okay? I’m sorry that she thought it meant more than it actually did.”
He nearly choked on those words, and he knew they could all see it.
“Wow,” said Justice. “I feel like I should step away from you, because you’re in danger of being hit by a lightning bolt for
telling that kind of lie.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re in love with her, dumbass,” said Landry. “And believe me, I am so familiar with all the ways in which you can mess
things up even when you’re in love with a woman, but you have got to pull yourself together. At least I was sixteen. You’re
in your thirties.”
“It’s embarrassing,” said Justice.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I seem to recall that all you married men did not exactly have an easy path to this.”
“No. And in some instances we only made it through because our big brother showed up and told us to pull our heads out of
our asses. So that’s what we’re here to do for you.”
It really was like an intervention. He hated it.
“I’m the one that takes care of all of you.”
“Yes,” said Daughtry. “It’s true. You’re the one that takes care of all of us, and I think that because we didn’t do something
to change that sooner we did a big disservice to you.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It let you keep all your boundaries. And it’s not helping you,” Justice said.
“We are a family. You don’t have to do everything for us, and you don’t have to carry everything. It was so clear to everybody
that you were basically dying inside last night while you were being praised.”
“I . . .”
“Denver, we all love you. We all love you so much. And you don’t have to keep doing things to prove that you’re worthy of
that.”
It was the plainest, simplest way to look at his life, he supposed. To see the way he kept on doing things, to see how he
was always trying to move to the next thing, and then the next. To keep adding all this work to his tally that showed he was
worthy.
And it was . . . He was afraid that it was damned true.
Was he that simple? Was that what he was doing? Was he so self-loathing that he thought he had to give people money and build
event spaces and atone forever because if he didn’t he wouldn’t matter, and they wouldn’t care about him?
There was still that fear, that baseline fear that he had clung to, which was that he was protecting everyone else. But Sheena
was right. That was thin.
He had gotten close to that realization last night when they had played poker. Alcohol. Sex. Gambling. Him. All those things
had gone to Vegas, and he had been ashamed of it then. But with her, there was no shame. He was the same man, but living a
different way, and it didn’t feel wrong.
It made him think what she had said was right. That what mattered was what you were doing, but more than that, what mattered was why you did the things, where you did the things and who you did them with.
So that poked holes in his theory that he was a ticking time bomb. And it only left that one baseline truth.
That Sheena was right about him, and he was a coward. That his real fear was that if he rested, for even a moment, he would
stop mattering. Because his father hadn’t loved any of them. He had only seen them as tools to be used. And Denver had never
figured out his value beyond that. Even when he had discovered that he was being used badly, even when he had learned to despise
his father and what he had done, he had never learned how to separate love from serving that person whose love you wanted.
That’s what he was doing, on a grand scale. With the town. With his siblings. With Sheena. Maybe she was right. Maybe he had
stayed away from her all those years because part of him sensed this.
Because he would rather leave envelopes of money in the mail than ever connect with her, for real. But it was too late. They’d
done it.
And he had lied to her when he’d said he didn’t want this. He did. He wanted it more than anything in the whole damned world.
“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” said Landry. “You need to come up with a grand gesture, or you’re going to lose her.”
“A grand gesture?”
“Yes. You need to do something. A big something, to fix this.”
“But I . . . I’m just now figuring out how to fix myself.”
“We can see that,” said Justice. “But you’re really lucky, because you found a woman who seems to like you just like you are.”
“But . . . what if she stops?”
He felt weak asking that question. Foolish.
“Life is a real pain in the ass sometimes,” said Daughtry. “And you never know when the bad things are going to come. At a
certain point, you have to trust in the love of the people around you. There are no guarantees. But that’s true whether you’re
living life alone or with somebody who loves you. You just kinda have to surrender.”
Daughtry, the brother who had worked with his father as much as he had, Daughtry, the one who carried as much guilt as Denver
did, believed that. And if Daughtry believed it, then he had to be able to find some kind of way to it.
“I don’t know how.”
“Go tell her that you love her. It will make sense. Because . . . I had to figure out how to be the man that Bix deserved.
Because I knew I couldn’t live without her.”
That was his real fear. That someday he would have to live without her, so he had gone and made the decision for them, in
advance.
He was a fool. Though at least he’d been the same kind of fool for more than thirty years, so he supposed there was a little
bit of an excuse there.
He looked back at his mangled truck. Well. Sheena clearly didn’t have time for his bullshit.
But that was what he . . . that was what he loved about her. She wasn’t afraid of him. Not any part of him. And she . . .
she had behaved any kind of way to keep him with her. She had been honest.
Because he could trust her.
And how had he repaid that? With cowardice.
Well. He was done with that.
Even though it made him want to run for the hills. And he would never have admitted that, even to his own self until just
now.
But maybe being brave enough to love her wasn’t about not being afraid to do it. Maybe being brave enough to love her was about feeling scared to death but doing it anyway.
She had said that love was strength. He had always been afraid of it for that reason.
He had always been scared that it was stronger than he was. And right now, he needed that to be true.
Because this was the weakest thing he had ever done.
He wasn’t sure he had found the answer in his own soul.
So he needed love to be the answer.
He looked down, and in the dirt right next to the truck, he saw a glimmer of purple. The necklace.
The vinca. That had to be what Sheena had gotten that symbolized her strength. Her refusal to be destroyed by the things that
had happened to her in life. He had not made that same commitment to himself. And he had let it destroy parts of him.
He picked up the necklace, and looked at it. Delicate, but strong. Too precious for the likes of him.
But he wanted it all the same. And her.
He needed it to be strong where he was weak.
He needed Sheena.
He didn’t have to know anything else.
Except . . .
“I’m going to need you guys to explain to me what counts as a grand gesture.”