9. Perry
Perry
Idon’t sleep, and the first face I see when I shut my eyes isn’t hers.
It’s Kendrick’s.
I’m flat on my back in my childhood bed at two in the morning, wired to a ceiling I’ve got memorized, and my best friend since we were boys is a thousand miles west in a bunk trusting me to keep my word.
He asked me for one thing. He looked me dead in the eye in that clinic with his sister’s name in his mouth and asked me for exactly one thing, and I said yeah, and then I put my mouth between her legs in the library her mama ran for forty years.
I’ve broken a lot of rules in my life. Speed limits, mostly. Hearts, if you ask around. But I’ve never once broken my word to Kendrick Barnes, not since we swore it over a pocketknife at nine years old, and I broke it last night with my whole chest, and I’d break it again tonight.
Kendrick came with me when I left. Nineteen, and I pointed a truck west, and he climbed in the passenger seat and said somebody had to keep me breathing.
Twelve years of truck stops and cheap motels, me getting stomped and him hauling me up out of the dirt every single time.
He’s the one steady thing I never left behind.
And I paid all of it back by getting my hands on the person he loves most in this world the first month his back was turned.
That’s the part that ought to gut me. It does. Just not as hard as it would gut a decent man.
The decent thing is a short list and I know every item on it. Call Kendrick and tell him. Better yet, stop, before this goes somewhere it can’t come back from. Pull out of the library. Hand the fundraiser to somebody else. Be the man I promised to be instead of the man I am.
I pick up my phone. I’ve got his name pulled up and my thumb hovering over it at two in the morning like a coward, and I sit there, and I don’t call.
If I call him, one of two things happens. He tells me to stop, and I have to. Or he tells me to stop, and I don’t, and then I’m not a man who broke his word by accident. I’m a man who broke it twice, on purpose, looking right at him.
So I don’t call. I set the phone face down. And I lie there and do the math on a woman I’ve got no business wanting and want anyhow.
Here’s the thing I truly can’t afford to look at, so naturally it’s the only thing I look at.
I’ve started picturing what staying would look like. I have never once done that in twelve years on the road.
Not like you picture a nice idea. Like you picture a real morning.
Her hair on my pillow. Me making coffee I finally know how to make, fixing hers how she likes it.
Walking down to that library and hanging her banners and losing a fight with her over what to name things.
Growing something. Staying somewhere long enough to watch it come up out of the ground.
Twelve years I’ve built my whole self around not staying. Around being the Sterling who leaves before the town learns his name. And a busted knee and a mean-mouthed librarian have got me lying awake at two in the morning wanting the exact thing I spent my life outrunning.
It isn’t only the wanting her, either. I’ve wanted plenty of women.
This is the other thing, the thing I’ve got no callus built up against. She looks at me and doesn’t see the poster.
She saw me hurting on that trail and didn’t look away from it.
She keeps a soft-spined western on her shelf and a mouth on her that could strip paint off a barn, and both of those are true at the same time, and I want to spend a long stretch of my life finding out how many other things about her are true at once.
It should terrify me. It does. That’s new, too. I don’t know the first thing about being a Sterling who stays. I wouldn’t know what to do with my own two hands.
Morning comes and I’m no smarter for the lack of sleep.
I’m at the kitchen table not eating Mama’s eggs when my phone lights up with a name I haven’t seen in three weeks. Dale Rifkin. My agent.
“Perry Sterling.” Dale’s got the voice of a man who is always closing. “How’s the leg, cowboy?”
“Still attached. What do you want, Dale.”
“I want to make you money and I want to make you famous, same as I always do. You sitting down? Because I have been on the phone all week, and I’ve got news that fixes your whole year.”
“I’m sitting.”
“Stetson’s people called. They want you.
Not a patch on your vest, Perry. The whole campaign.
The comeback story. Injured golden boy claws his way back, rides for a world title, the whole tearjerker.
” He’s grinning. I can hear it. “They cover your rehab. Top surgeon in Dallas, the good facility, all of it. You do the winter circuit healed and hungry, and come next December you ride for the buckle. First one in the family.”
The kitchen goes quiet around me.
First one in the family. Twelve years I’ve chased this exact sentence.
My daddy rode till the day his heart quit and never got within a mile of a world title, and I built my entire life around being the Sterling who finally would.
It’s the reason I left. It’s the reason I stayed gone.
It’s the thing I was reaching for on Diesel’s back the second before he decided otherwise.
And here it is. Handed back to me on a phone call, at my mother’s kitchen table, with frosting still on the plate from the rolls a librarian carried in three weeks ago.
“When would I have to leave,” I say.
“Soon as your surgeon signs off. We want you in Dallas inside the month. On the road by November.” A beat. “This is the one, Perry. Offers like this don’t circle back around. You in?”
I look out the window. Down the hill the pasture runs green and the fences run white, and four miles off a woman is unlocking a library she’s about to lose, fighting for a town I spent my whole life leaving.
Inside the month. The number sits down in my chest like a stone.
For one clean second I let myself want it like I did at nineteen.
The lights. The chute. My name over the loudspeaker and a buckle heavy enough to lay on my daddy’s grave and finally call the two of us even.
It’s right there, everything, close enough to touch.
All I’ve got to do is leave. Leaving has never once been the hard part for me.
“Let me talk to my surgeon,” I say. “Let me see where the knee’s at.”
“Attaboy. I’ll send the paperwork.” And Dale’s gone, off to close somebody else.
Mama’s at the counter. She’s been there the whole call, drying a pan she already dried, which is how my mother eavesdrops.
“That was Dale,” she says. Not a question. She’s never cared for Dale. “What’s he selling.”
“A comeback. The whole thing. Stetson, a title run, all of it.”
She’s quiet a moment. “And?”
“And it’s everything I ever wanted, Mama.”
“Mm.” She hangs the towel. “Your daddy wanted a lot of things, too. Chased most of them clean out of this county.” She looks at me, no push in it, just forty years of knowing me.
“He was happiest the summers he stayed put and let us grow something. He only never could sit still long enough to notice it till it was already behind him.” She pats my good shoulder on her way past. “You’re a lot like him, baby. In the good ways and the sorry ones.”
She leaves me there with my cold eggs and my two futures.
And all I can think, sitting in the kitchen I grew up in, is that every road out of this room runs over somebody.
Take the deal, and I end the thing with Kylie before it’s got a name, and I prove Kendrick right about the kind of man I am. Stay, and I hand back the only dream I’ve ever owned, and I still have to look Kendrick in the eye someday and tell him what I did to his sister.
There’s no version of this where I come out clean.
And the part that tells me exactly how far gone I am is this. Sitting here with the best news of my career going cold on the table, I’m not thinking about the buckle.
I’m thinking about her hair on my pillow.