Chapter 7 #2
She felt West shift beside her, and she looked at him. He had slowed the truck down, and his eyes connected with hers fiercely.
“Nothing ever happened to me,” she said quickly.
She didn’t want him imagining grim abuse or anything like that. She’d been lucky and she knew it. Predators were tricky. They could hide themselves, seem safe and be secretly evil. Some of them hid so well in plain sight that even a vigilant parent could be fooled.
But she had been unsupervised, with a large number of men around her. She could have been a very easy target.
“A few of the other dancers were really annoyed that my mom brought me. They would usually sit with me and get me juice. They kind of protected me. At a certain point my mom just started leaving me home. She would lock me in the apartment, and I would be there all night by myself. Because the best shifts at the club were late.”
“That’s … I can’t imagine.”
She looked at his face. His jaw was slightly slack, his eyes wider than usual as he stared at the road ahead.
She had shocked West Hancock. The baddest man in Rustler Mountain. Well.
That made her feel a little sorry for herself. If she seemed tragic to West then she must be really tragic.
“Mainly, we lived in cities. It was so different from here. I felt … free when she left me. I can remember, we landed at the Medford airport, and there was just one baggage carousel. We walked by—we hadn’t checked any bags.
She didn’t bring very many of my things with me.
She got a rental car and drove me up to the top of the mountain.
And then she … wished me luck. She said that I was going to spend the second half of my childhood with my dad. ”
“That was it?”
“Yes,” she said, her throat tight. “And as soon as I got out of the car, she drove away. So I just went and hid. For about an hour. There was this little cabin on the property …” The cabin that was now her house.
Renovated and turned into a cute little home for her.
“I hid inside. I waited until it was dark. And then finally I got up the courage to go and knock on the door. Because I was so hungry. Cold. I had never felt cold like that. There was snow up in the mountains, and I had never seen that either. Anyway, I went and knocked on the door. Austin answered. That was when I found out that my dad was dead.”
“Jesus Christ,” West said. “That’s horrendous.”
“It wasn’t great. But … Austin took me in. They were all … so concerned about me. They believed me, instantly. That I was who I said I was. And they just made me part of the family right away. I was never hungry again. I was never lonely. All the stuff that happened before doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, bullshit it doesn’t,” West said. “That’s straight-up trauma. It would affect anyone.”
She bristled. She didn’t know why she rejected his assertion so strongly.
“Maybe. But you know a lot of people never escape that kind of life. And then they just become my mom. That’s what would’ve happened to me.
I would be dancing in a club, probably with a kid of my own that I couldn’t take care of. ”
The image was such a stark contrast to the life she had now.
And maybe it wouldn’t have happened that way.
Maybe, even without Flynn and Carson and Austin, she would have gone on to make something of herself.
Maybe she hadn’t needed their influence to turn into the person she was. But she thought she probably had.
“I was lucky,” she said. “Because none of my mom’s boyfriends hurt me. But if I had lived with her until I was eighteen? What are the chances that nothing would’ve ever happened? I just … Her leaving me here saved me. I think maybe even she knew it.”
She needed to believe that. She really did. That on some level, her mother had abandoned her because she loved her. Because she knew that she couldn’t take care of her daughter. Maybe it was a lie. But again, if she never contacted her mother, she never had to know.
“I was never curious about you,” he said.
“Thanks?”
“I just mean,” he said, accelerating the truck a little bit, “I knew that your mother had left you here when you were a kid, but I didn’t really wonder about the details.”
“I never talk about them. Nobody … You know, I never told my brothers that I hid in that cabin.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. It doesn’t matter. From the day they took me in, I’ve been happy.
All that stuff about us being outlawed by the town is true, but we lived in our own little snow globe at the Wilder ranch, and what other people thought never mattered to me.
It was us against the world, and it was beautiful.
I don’t need to dwell on the pain in my past. My brothers have taken care of me. You said you were never taken care of.”
His arms went stiff as he held the steering wheel. “My parents aren’t like your mom,” he said. “They love us.”
“I didn’t say that my mom didn’t love me,” she said, the words acrid on her tongue.
“Sorry.”
For some reason, his apology wounded her. “I just think she … she was lost.”
“I guess that doesn’t really matter. Because you got found.”
“Exactly.”
They rounded the corner, and a long, white-and-green single-wide trailer came into view. There was a stack of logs, neatly cut, right up against the side. “This is my place. For now.”
“You’re living here while you build your ranch?”
“Yep.”
“And you’ll ranch … cattle?”
“Yes. I’m sure your brother is going to love competing with me.”
“I’m quite sure my brother will never admit that he’s competing with you,” she said.
“I guess your brother also makes his living off books now.”
“He’s deciding what he wants to write next. The book about the Wilder family was his pet project, and it was successful enough that he could sell another book if he wanted to, but it’s not something he’s been … That one story was his dream. So he kind of has to figure the rest out.”
“He could write Butch Hancock’s story,” West said.
Cassidy laughed. “You have to be kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“Nobody knows what happened to Butch.”
West spread his hands out. “That’s not true. He came back here. We know that. If he hadn’t, then we wouldn’t be here. He got married, he had kids.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know how. What happened in between. How he met that wife and what she knew about his past. There are records, I assume, but no story, not like with my ancestor Austin.”
“If any documents exist, my mom has them. I could talk to her about it.”
“But Austin probably wouldn’t want to tell that story.”
“Hey. Fine, then. I’m certainly never going to write it. I didn’t even graduate from high school.”
Somehow, she hadn’t realized that. He was so far ahead of her in school she hadn’t known him, but still. It was surprising that she hadn’t heard people talk about it before. Bad old West Hancock, hadn’t even graduated from high school.
Maybe it had always been implied when people talked about his being good for nothing.
“You didn’t?” she asked.
“No,” he said, shrugging.
“Oh.”
“I can’t stand sitting still. And I don’t like busy work. If I am going to sit still, there has to be something interesting happening, and no class at my high school was ever interesting enough.”
“I was so behind when I got here …” She shook her head. “Never mind. It’s not about me.”
“Sure it is.”
“No. We were talking about you.”
“Me and my ADHD aren’t all that interesting.”
She tilted her head to the side and stared at him. “Oh, you …”
“Family trait.”
“I didn’t realize.”
“Well. It’s not all that interesting. It’s just the reason I do certain things, I guess.”
“And nobody helped you in school?”
“Oh, I found out way after school. Eventually, I talked to a doctor about it and got a referral. It made me understand my dad a lot better. But he doesn’t want to hear about all that. He thinks doctors are stripping away our individuality by pathologizing everything.”
She laughed. “And what do you think?”
“It’s nice to know there’s a reason my brain works the way it does, and it’s not that I’m an idiot.”
“Well, you’re obviously not an idiot.”
“There’s nothing obvious about it when you spend your whole life struggling to do things that other people find simple.”
She nodded. She hadn’t really considered that before. But then, she couldn’t say she had thought much about ADHD before.
It made sense. There was a restless energy about West. She’d compared him to a horse before, but she’d been thinking about livestock. West was wild. It would take more than sugar cubes to tame him—if he could be tamed.
Not that she was interested in doing any taming.
“Now I’ve derailed the conversation,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t. I … Yeah, I was just behind.
I got caught up. Austin helped. But I can’t say that I’ve ever been enamored with academics.
And yes, Austin probably could finance his life with book royalties for a while.
But I don’t know if he’s going to be a writer forever.
Ranching is in his blood. And it’s really the only thing that I’m qualified to do. I love it.”
“Well, I promise not to put your ranch out of business.”
“Thanks. Appreciated.”
“All right, let’s go get the horses.”
They pulled away from his trailer without his showing her anything else, and she felt a little deflated.
As if she wanted to go back and comb through all his things.
Instead, he had told her something about himself.
It didn’t really change the way she saw him, though.
It only added a little bit of context to the man.
The man she had spilled her guts to, so uncharacteristically.
She hadn’t expected him to be charming.
Because she had never really seen any of that charm. He had always been so … abrasive with her. And then suddenly she had wanted to tell him everything. Maybe because he wasn’t really part of her life. Maybe because he was a relative stranger.