Chapter 4 #2
“Hear me out,” Flynn said. “ You could have a baby with her.” Carson had never wished that he was still drinking more than he did at that moment. Him? Have a baby with Perry. His Perry. His sweet, perfect Perry?
He was the furthest thing from sweet, the furthest thing from perfect, and the furthest thing from what she needed.
“What? No . I am not … No way.”
“You seem to like each other well enough,” Dalton said. “Yeah. I do. I like her. I have, since we were kids. That’s not …”
“Why not?” Cassidy asked.
“Because that’s not how life works, squirt.”
“I was under the impression that when you were an adult, you got to choose how life works,” Cassidy said.
“I would think you might recognize that I am exhibit A, proving you have no fucking control over how your life works, no matter how old you are.”
Cassidy winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean … I mean, I guess I get it. You were so in love with Alyssa, and now you probably can’t imagine …”
She let her sentence trail off. And he let his own guilt on that subject die off with it. He wasn’t going to get into his marriage, least of all with his little sister.
Hell no.
“So,” said Flynn. “Perry is moving away, and … what are you going to do?”
“For now, I’m going to help her get ready. I’m her friend. And I’ve been … not a great one.”
“That’s not true,” Cassidy said.
His sister’s loyalty warmed his heart. It really did. She was a sweet kid, and the truth was, having been raised by Austin, Flynn, and himself, it was kind of a miracle.
“That isn’t what I meant,” said Flynn. “I meant what are you going to do with your life. Because … Perry is kind of your life.”
And that was the rub. That was where it came right back down to what Perry had said about codependence.
“I guess … do the same things I always do. Just without her. Work the ranch, eat dinner.”
“You’ve never even gotten your ranch going,” Flynn pointed out. “Do you want to run Austin’s place by yourself?”
“I sure as hell do not. I’m only saying that there’s a lot you could do.”
He liked ranching. He had sought to expand the Wilder outfit when he bought his own property.
It had seemed like the right thing to do when he had a wife.
It seemed like a reasonable, decent thing to do when he’d been thinking about building something.
About what it took to be a real man. The man of the house. Something their father had never been.
Alyssa had come from a great, functional family. And he hadn’t known anything about that sort of life.
But she had been happy to put a little distance between herself and her parents, and most especially the shitty guy she’d been dating before him, who had proved to be a total loser.
Carson had promised to be the good man she needed.
She had wanted freedom. She had been happy to get a couple of states away from everyone.
It had seemed healthy to him. But then, she had never seemed quite as happy here as he had hoped she would be.
“When are you going to start dating?” Flynn asked.
Carson nearly spit out his Coke. “Dating. Hell. I don’t want to date.”
“Why not?”
“Because I never want to get married again.”
“So,” Flynn said. “I don’t want to get married either.”
“I don’t understand the point of dating, then.”
“Put it this way,” said Flynn, taking a drink of his beer. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life celibate? I find that very hard to believe.”
“I don’t need you to believe anything about the state of my sex life.”
“Your dead sex life,” Cassidy said, looking up at him.
“My wife is dead, Cassidy. That was a very insensitive thing to say.”
He felt mean scolding her, because he knew his sister didn’t mean it that way, and it was unkind of him to make her feel bad.
Especially because …
Well. Hell.
Because things were different from what he let everyone believe. Pain was pain, though. Maybe.
“Don’t do that to her,” said Flynn. “You’re not offended. My point is, your best friend is going to move to another town, your older brother is married, they’re going to have a baby. And you’re just going to … what? Spend every evening at home?”
“I’m not home now.”
“You don’t even drink alcohol anymore, Carson. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“It’s not a bad thing,” said Cassidy. “Not for you.”
“Yeah. I know. That’s why I stopped drinking.”
“Also as a middle finger to Dad, I suppose,” Flynn said, and Carson was shocked by how unerring his brother’s observation was.
“I figure if I do things differently from Dad, I’m halfway to being a good man.”
Flynn chuckled. “Maybe.”
“Was he so bad?” Cassidy asked.
He felt guilty then. Because Cassidy hadn’t known their father at all, and he hadn’t been the worst. When compared with Perry’s dad, he’d been a pretty decent guy. Uninterested in his kids sometimes, sure. But pretty decent.
He’d gotten them motorcycles and they’d terrorized the town on them. They’d had dirt bikes and four-wheelers and rifles. Oftentimes not a full pantry of food, but that had been their dad’s problem.
He’d been a big, cheerful narcissist.
He’d delighted in everything that felt good, everything temporary, everything wild and free. Carson had always hated that attitude. He’d tried to be a real man.
But look at him now. Spending all his days working his brother’s ranch, spending his evenings on what? He wasn’t hurting anything, but he wasn’t helping either.
Maybe that was part of the point Perry was making.
They were both sort of treading water. Not advancing their lives. And they were in their thirties. It felt wrong. Because he had spent a lot of his young adult years trying. Joining the military. Marrying Alyssa.
He felt pretty damned justified in sitting down and stopping for a little while. But now he supposed it was time to start trying again. He didn’t want to make the same mistakes over again. Didn’t want to go over the same decisions.
“You should download dating apps,” Flynn said.
“God Almighty,” said Carson. “Do I really have to do that?”
“I don’t think you do,” said Cassidy. “Mostly because I don’t really care what you do or don’t do as far as all that goes. I don’t think that’s the key to happiness. Look around town. Half the people are miserable because of sex, not because of the lack of it.”
“Not wrong,” said Carson.
“A little wrong,” said Flynn. “They’re miserable because they’re chasing the high of sex, little sister, and it’s taking them down dark alleyways. I thought you were old enough to understand that by now.”
Cassidy blanched. “Gross. Don’t talk to me about such things.”
“We’re all grown,” said Flynn.
“That doesn’t mean I want insight into your psyche, Flynn Wilder.”
“I’m not giving you insight into my psyche. I’m just talking philosophically.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to hear your philosophy.”
“Your loss.”
Cassidy stuck her tongue out.
“Give her a break,” said Carson. “She had the bad luck to be raised by us. That means she deserves niceness.”
“Says the man who just poked at her.”
“A reminder for myself too,” said Carson.
“I don’t need you to baby me, Carson,” said Cassidy.
“Somebody ought to, Cassidy.”
He did believe that. Firmly. Not that anybody had ever really … babied any of them. Maybe that was the problem now. He just struggled to see the point of things. Because … he didn’t believe in happiness. Or at least, it was hard for him. Austin and Millie were happy.
It did him a lot of good to see his brother so happy.
If Austin had a different set of experiences, it might give the rest of them hope.
Maybe that was his problem. He was always trying to look down the road to find some kind of happiness.
The mythical nuclear family that he had never truly experienced.
A feeling of being settled. Of having all the difficult things in life be complete so he could just rest. Enjoy.
Maybe he needed to look at things a little bit more the way Flynn did.
Flynn liked to feel good for a moment. Carson could remember being that way when he’d been in high school, but after their father had died, something in him had changed.
Everything just felt pointless. Silly. He felt he was wasting his life.
He was just sort of floating along now, though he’d never chosen that lifestyle.
Maybe he needed to make the decision. To approach pleasure the way Flynn did. And as far as the ranch …
He wasn’t sure ranching was what he wanted. Not really. He wanted to keep his property, yes. But he wasn’t sure cattle were his future.
Hell, he knew what he loved to do. Woodworking. Restoration. Now that there was some funding for the Historical Society, he had been thinking about offering his services.
That would be a hell of a thing.
He’d gotten into restoring old things when he and Austin had worked to reinvigorate a Conestoga wagon that had been in their family for generations. The Historical Society used it now for reenactments, and Cassidy often drove it through town.
A regular Oregon Trail covered wagon. It was a great draw.
Then, of course, there was the Wilder house. The one on Main Street that his family still owned, that the original Austin Wilder— his six-times great-grandfather, and his older brother’s namesake— had built for his wife.
It was a project part of him had always wanted to take on. He hadn’t, though, because there had always been other priorities.
Other things that he was supposed to be working on. Other things he was supposed to be striving for.
A part of him had always found peace in restoration work. Making something old into something new. Gee. He wondered why that was.
Maybe that was the problem. He hadn’t pursued that dream even a little bit. Instead, he had grabbed on to the sweetest thing from his past.
Perry Bramble.
And he had held them both back while doing it.
“If I do this, I’m going to blame you,” he said, looking directly at Flynn.
“Blame me. Credit me. I don’t care. It’s all the same to me.” He grinned in that shameless way of his. And Carson knew what he’d said was true.
His thoughts turned to Perry’s old Victorian. He needed to fix the place up. That’s what he needed to do. He could help her get the most money possible out of it.
And keep it all original, which he knew was a really big deal when it came to historic homes.
That’s what I need to do.
He needed to make old things new.
He was committed to that idea. It felt like progress. And it felt better than he could’ve imagined.
So out of what had been a pretty terrible week, he suddenly had a revelation.
There was a point and purpose to everything if he could get a handle on what it meant to be a better man. Maybe he couldn’t do it the way he had before, but he could help Perry, and in the process, he could help himself.
It was as if the clouds had parted and he could see.
Perry had thrown him for a loop when she’d said she was moving.
Alyssa’s death had knocked the wind out of him, left him uncertain of so many things and stewing in his own failure.
But there was still hope for him to come out of this life a hero, and dammit, he was going to meet that challenge no matter what.