Chapter 8 #2
Garrett looks at me for a long moment. Then he pushes off the wall and walks out the barn door into the morning light.
I stand there and listen to his truck start.
I walk out.
***
Kade finds me twenty minutes later and tells me the cabin garbage needs hauling to the dump bin.
He says it the way Kade says everything, plain enough that there's nothing to push back on.
I've worked alongside Kade long enough to know the difference between a task that needs doing and a task that needs doing right now.
Kade sizes up people the same way he sizes up horses.
He doesn't say anything about it. He just finds you something to do.
The side-by-side is already loaded when I get to it. I get in and start it up. I'm pulling away when Sutton comes running across the property, waving his arm like I'm a bus he's about to miss. Bingo loping alongside him with his ears flopping.
I stop and wait.
Sutton throws himself into the passenger seat, breathing hard. Bingo puts his front paws up on the side and looks at me. I reach over and haul him up into the back and keep driving.
"Where are we going?" Sutton asks.
"Garbage run."
"Cool," he says, like that's exactly what he was hoping for.
The access road runs along the back edge of the property, past the far pasture and out through the back gate toward the dump bin.
I take it slow, the side-by-side rattling along the lane, the clinic sounds fading behind us, and Sutton is already into a story about Shelby debating Sawyer this morning about the run order before the session even started.
"She talked for a really long time," Sutton says. "Like a lot of words. Reasons and everything."
"What did Sawyer do?"
"Mom just said okay and then did it her way anyway."
"Sounds about right."
"Shelby's still mad," Sutton says. "She keeps making this face."
I turn along the fence line. Through the gap in the trees, I can see the arena from the back, the barrel pattern running, a rider turning a can and pushing for home. Cassie's at the rail, visible for three seconds before the tree line closes again.
Sutton's still talking. I hear the word garbage and lose the rest of it, because something in the shape of the morning, the truck, the gate, the leaving, has already pulled me somewhere else.
And then I'm seventeen.
Not here. Not the side-by-side, not the access road.
Standing at the back of my truck with my bag in my hand and the house behind me and the smell of the place everywhere, old wood and cattle and diesel and something underneath all of it that had never been right, that had been wrong for so long I'd stopped being able to name it.
Garrett came out of the barn, running.
He stopped a few feet away, jaw tight, trying not to cry and furious about it at the same time.
"You can't just leave," he said. "You can't!"
"Garrett."
"He's gonna get worse without you here! You know that!"
"I know."
"Then why are you going?" It came out cracked down the middle, the way his voice did sometimes that year, still a kid's voice, not quite anything else yet.
I looked at my boots. At the tailgate latch. At anything that wasn't his face.
"I can't stay," I said. "I can't watch him run this place into the ground and not be able to do a single thing about it. I can't do it anymore."
"So you're just leaving me here with him."
I didn't say anything.
"Levi." His voice dropped. All the anger went out of it, and what was left was worse. "You can't leave me here with him."
That was all. I got in the truck anyway. I drove out the gate. I looked in the mirror, and he was standing in the yard watching me go. I kept driving until I couldn't see him anymore.
"Hey," Sutton says. "You just passed it."
I blink. The dump bin is twenty yards behind us. I back the side-by-side up. Sutton hops out and starts throwing the bags in without making a thing of the fact that I just drove straight past a bin I could find in the dark.
Bingo jumps down and immediately finds something in the grass to investigate.
"He's gonna find something dead," I say.
"He always finds dead things," Sutton says. "It's so cool."
"That's gross, bud."
"I know," Sutton says, grinning. "But it's still cool."
Sutton throws the last bag in, dusts his hands off on his jeans, and calls for Bingo, who ignores him.
I sit in the side-by-side and let myself look at the property for a minute.
The barn roof visible over the tree line.
The clinic running in the arena, I can't quite see from here.
The whole place is going about its afternoon like nothing happened this morning.
Garrett drove out. That sits in my chest the way it's going to sit there for a while.
I don't know what I'm going to do about any of it. I know I should. I know what's sitting on the other end of it waiting for me. I just can't make myself point toward it yet.
***
The fire is low by the time Cassie sits down.
The barrel clients turned in twenty minutes ago.
Kade drifted back toward his cabin, and Rhea passed through on her way somewhere.
Then the property went quiet the way it does late, that kind of quiet that moves in around the edges of things when the work is done and people turn in for the night.
I've been sitting with my elbows on my knees and my hands loose, the guitar on the ground next to me that I haven't touched.
I hear her coming from the direction of our cabins before I see her. She doesn't say anything. She takes the chair across from me, wraps her hands around her knees, and looks at the fire.
I don't make a joke. I just sit there.
After a while, I say, "My dad drank."
She doesn't move.
"Not falling-down drunk. Functional. Which is almost worse because it means he could keep doing it for a long time without anyone making him stop.
" I look at the fire. "He wasn't always like that.
When my mom was alive, the ranch was good.
He was different. Then she died, and he just stopped being able to hold it together.
Started drinking instead and never really stopped. The ranch went with him."
A log shifts in the fire. Sparks lift and scatter.
"Garrett and I held it together as long as we could.
We were kids. Getting up before school to feed, coming home to whatever state he was in, trying to keep the numbers from getting any worse.
" I stop. Start again. "I left when I was seventeen.
I told myself it was because there was nothing left to save.
That was true enough that I could believe it. "
I look over at her. She's watching me. I look back at the fire.
"Garrett was fourteen. He couldn't leave. I drove out the gate. Told myself I wasn't going to look back." I pause. "I looked back. He was still standing there in the mirror, watching me go. I kept driving anyway."
The fire pops, the wood settles, and somewhere out in the dark, the crickets are running the way they do all summer.
I don't say anything else. There isn't anything else to say.
She doesn't fill the silence. Doesn't tell me it wasn't my fault, that I did what I had to do, or any of the things people say when they don't know what else to offer. She just sits there with me and lets it be what it is.
That's the thing that gets me. She doesn't say a word.
After a while, she stands up. She doesn't say anything. On her way past, she puts her hand on my shoulder for just a second, and then she's gone, her footsteps quiet on the path back toward the cabins.
I sit with that long after she's gone, the fire burning down to coals, and I can't decide if it made anything easier.