Kicking Rocks
Bill stared at Huxley, unsure how to respond to that. Huxley knew why he’d left. And Bill had already explained why he’d never come back, even for a visit, why he’d never called or so much as sent a text in ten years.
Now it sounded like a lot of excuses.
How did he ask why Huxley had held on so long with no word from him without sounding incredulous?
And how to tell him he’d also been holding out for them without sounding like he was saying it just because Huxley had?
“Shit. I knew I shouldn’t have told you that.” Huxley pushed his chair back. “Sorry I brought it up. I shouldn’t have said?—”
“Hux.”
But Huxley was already speeding for the door.
Tossing bills onto the table, Bill rushed after him.
“Hux!”
“Forget I said anything,” Huxley said, turning to walk backward down the sidewalk. “It was stupid. You left for a reason, and I just really wanted it not to be me.”
“Hux. Would you stop?”
Instead, Huxley turned back around and picked up his pace. “I should have known it was too much to hope you’d still be interested in a guy who never left his hometown.”
“God, Hux.”
“You’ve been all over the world. I never even got off the farm.” He tossed his arms up and let them fall. “Sorry that I?—”
Bill rushed him then, grabbed his face in both hands and shook him. “Would you please. Shut. Up.”
Huxley stared at him, eyes too bright, cheeks too pink under his unkempt beard.
“I didn’t leave because of you, Hux. I maybe stayed away because of you, and definitely came back because of you.”
Huxley’s eyes narrowed.
“Okay.” Bill let him go. “Eventually, I came back.” He sighed heavily. “Can we walk? Maybe don’t sprint off on me? Your legs are longer. I’d never keep up.”
Huxley grunted and they fell into step.
“I can look back and understand why I behaved how I did,” Bill said. “And I can say it made absolute sense to me at the time. Although now?” He shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked a broken bit of a concrete planter along the sidewalk ahead of them. “It sounds a lot like excuses.”
Huxley kicked the chunk of concrete as it rolled in front of him, reminding Bill, suddenly, of that hunk of slag in Huxley’s kitchen, and why it had seemed familiar. Maybe it was the exact one they had kicked along the street between their graduation ceremony and Huxley’s truck the day they had ditched high school and walked into a summer that had not been nearly long enough.
“Tell me,” Huxley demanded, kicking the concrete again.
“Okay. Well. Obviously, vet school was down south. I had no choice about that. But it would have been the same if I’d chosen to go to law school.” It was Bill’s turn to kick the rock.
“Sure. And…”
Bill waited.
“And so.” Huxley let out an explosive breath. “I suppose I always knew you were going to leave for school. Maybe. But you were so clear you did not want to go to law school, and so maybe part of me thought you said that because you wanted to stay with me, and hoped you wouldn’t leave at all. When you decided to do something that took you away anyway, I might have…taken that personally. A bit.” He kicked the rock a little harder than necessary and grunted, because maybe that had hurt his toe as much as the rest probably hurt his pride to admit.
“Which is why you didn’t come to help me pack,” Bill guessed, remembering with vivid clarity shoving clothes and books into boxes alone and resenting the hell out of his best friend for not being there to help.
“Might have been.”
“You stayed mad for a while.”
“Until Susan came home and told me how miserable you were.”
The rock rolled and clunked along ahead of them, and Bill did a little dance to keep it from dropping off the curb into the gutter.
“I was mad, too. That you didn’t come say good-bye. That I was packing, with my father standing in the doorway watching me as if looming like that would make me change my mind, and no one was there to shield me.”
“Didn’t figure you needed me for that if you’d made up your mind to go against his will already.” Huxley’s frown drew his shaggy eyebrows down. “I never did a thing without my family’s approval.”
“Their approval always aligned with what you wanted.”
“I know that now. I didn’t get how it was for you back then. Not really. I never thought your father would refuse to be your father unless you did what he wanted. That made no sense to me. I thought he’d give up being an asshole when he realized you were serious.”
“He didn’t. Like I said, he completely cut me off. No money, no help. He didn’t even tell my uncles what was going on, so they didn’t know I was working two jobs to afford to live, going to school, doing my internships, all of that, without his support.” He kicked the rock to the edge of the sidewalk at the corner. “Only Susan really knew everything, and I swore her to secrecy.”
They stopped at the corner, standing there while traffic rolled slowly through the four-way stop signs. “She didn’t keep your secret, exactly. She didn’t tell me about your dad, but she did say you were struggling. All of this would have been fixed if I hadn’t ditched my bike trying to come down there to see you.”
“Or if you hadn’t kept that accident a secret.”
“You would have come back.”
“Probably.”
“Which would have put you right back under your father’s thumb.”
“Maybe.”
“Didn’t want to risk it.” He kicked the rock hard to get it all the way across the intersection and into the parking lot where their trucks sat in side-by-side parking spots. “That hurt.”
“Not telling me?”
“Kicking that damn rock.”
Bill snorted. “When I hadn’t heard anything from you by Christmas, I decided not to come home because I didn’t want to spend the entire holiday in my father’s house, and I didn’t think you’d want me around. And I thought maybe I’d end up pining so much I wouldn’t go back to school. Susan was right. I wasn’t in a great place. I was scared I’d give up school completely. That trying to get you back might take over everything, and I wouldn’t be strong enough to leave you behind again.”
“And maybe seeing my leg in traction would have sealed that deal. Sounds like we both made the right decision for you.”
Bill snorted. “Too bad we didn’t talk about it to each other. Could have saved a lot of heartache”
“We were eighteen.”
“So what’s been our excuse for the last two years?”
He waited for some kind of response as they crossed to their trucks. Finally, Huxley let out one of those hard, fast breaths. “I want to say ‘I haven’t gone anywhere. I’m exactly where you left me, so you tell me’ but that’s petty.”
“And you said yourself you’re not the same guy, so it’s not exactly true, either.”
“Not exactly.”
Bill waited beside his truck a few minutes more while Huxley stood, still, hand on his door, staring into nowhere.
He remembered these pauses of Huxley’s. Always so still and silent. Except when he wasn’t.
“We’re here now,” he ventured.
“Where is here, though?”
“Haven’t we already established it’s not where we left off.”
“Yes.”
“But also not at the beginning, right?”
“No.”
“And not at the end.” He was not risking forming that into a question.
Finally, Huxley met his gaze over the hood of his truck. “So somewhere in the muddled middle.”
“Seems like.”
As Bill watched, Huxley ran his fingertips over his lips. “Okay then,” he said.
“Okay then?”
“I’ll give you a shout when I hear from the MNR.”
“Okay then.” It was disappointing. But really, what had he expected to happen now? Nodding, he got into his truck and backed out of his spot. By the time he got to the lot entrance and glanced in his rearview mirror, Huxley was still standing beside the driver’s door of his own truck, turning something over in his hand.
He was studying the chunk of concrete they had kicked down the road as they talked. Bill watched in the mirror as Huxley tossed it into the air, caught it, and kept it clutched in one hand as he got into his vehicle. What he did with it after that, Bill wasn’t sure. All he did know was that he hadn’t tossed it away.