Chapter 19
The town feels empty without you. I don’t know how to explain it. Sometimes I think if I go wait by Outlaw Lake, you’ll appear and tell me you’re my pirate captain and we have to go on an adventure. I can’t wait until you come home so that it feels like home again.
—A letter from Perry Bramble to Carson Wilder
A fter work the next day, Perry went straight to her old place, where Carson was working diligently.
She brought a picnic blanket, and a picnic basket that she’d picked up at the grocery store.
She just felt like … doing something. Being with him.
Giving him something nice. This was the only thing she could think of.
“Hey,” he said, getting up from the floor where he had his nail gun out.
“Hey.”
He walked over and wrapped his arm around her neck, pulling her in for a quick, rough kiss. How had they ever not done that by way of greeting? How was she ever going to forget that they’d once had this?
She was very conscious of the cliff’s edge again.
We’re not fragile.
“I talked to Cassidy this morning.”
“Oh?” she asked.
“Yeah. Apparently, she felt like she walked in on her siblings kissing.”
Perry guffawed. She couldn’t help it. “You know, of all the things that you’ve ever been to me, a brother isn’t one of them.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
She thought it was funny that he was so certain of that too. That he had never thought of her as a sister.
“I’m so hungry. Thank you for this.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I wanted to … give you something. You know, as a thank-you for fixing my house. And also get you some protein to keep your strength up for later.”
He lifted his brows. “Later?”
“Yeah. I think you know.”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I do.”
She sat on the blanket that she’d brought and started to get the food out.
A rotisserie chicken, coleslaw, and potato salad.
She got out the paper plates and plastic utensils, and the two of them dug in.
There was something about this moment that reminded her of when they were kids.
Of when Austin had brought them simple meals from the grocery store.
When Perry had been hiding from her family.
And Carson’s house had been empty of all responsible adults.
“I was always really grateful to have you,” he said, as if he had read her mind.
“Me too. You were safe to me in a way that nothing else was. Plus, we could be noisy at your house. Because even though your dad was a piece of work, he didn’t care about noise.”
“No. He didn’t. Damn.” He looked down. “I’m so sorry that your house was such a disaster. I feel like I know about it, but I don’t know about it. Because we grew up together, so we didn’t really talk about all that.”
“I know. You were the first person that I ever told about my dad hitting my mom. No one else would have believed it. Everybody liked him so much. And when things declined between them, they just moved away. To a different community, where people could get to know them all over again. You know, the versions of them they wanted people to know. I’m sure my dad is an elder at the church.
And he doesn’t see anything wrong with how he is.
Because he’s just the head of the household, and everybody should do what he wants.
He’s an asshole and a hypocrite, but he doesn’t see it. ”
“I’ve never regretted punching him in the face.”
She laughed. “You were my hero for that, honestly.” She was quiet for a moment.
“Sometimes it wasn’t even his hitting her or me that felt the worst. It was the calm before the explosion because you knew it would …
just come out of nowhere. The house was just a terrible, awful place to be.
I knew he might lose it at any moment, and I always felt like I had to be quiet.
I always felt like I had to watch my step.
I never felt like I was allowed to be in my own house.
Not as myself. I could be a cute, quiet little girl.
A good reflection of him. Of the kind of father he wanted the world to believe he was.
Neither of my parents have ever cared about who I was, or what I wanted.
I never really felt like I knew who I was until you.
You taught me how to be wild. In a way that I was never allowed to be. You gave me a childhood, Carson.”
He looked dumbfounded by that. “I never figured I had the power to give anybody much of anything. My brothers and I didn’t have a terrible childhood, I guess.
The ranch was what we had. Our dad was who we knew.
Later, it kind of hit me that it was messed up that our mom left.
Later, that felt painful. At the time I just kind of accepted it.
She wasn’t there. I thought maybe she had no choice.
But you know, you figure out how the world works later …
” He was silent for a moment. “One time a teacher told me that our mom left because she was a nice woman, who couldn’t stand to deal with rowdy kids like us. ”
“No,” she said, outrage blooming in her chest. “Who said that?”
“Mrs. Converse. You know, she was a sour old lemon.”
“Yes, she was. That is the cruelest thing that anyone could ever say to a child.”
“I had just put a garter snake in her desk.”
“It doesn’t matter. She was the adult. You were a child. And obviously acting out because of the way your home life was.”
“Not just my home life. The whole town. We were bad seeds from birth. And there were very few people around here who believed any different.”
“My dad thought you were bad news. I was forbidden to see you. And that was why I did. I didn’t know that it was wrong.
I didn’t know that it was wrong for men to hit their wives.
I didn’t know that dads were supposed to be kind to their children.
To look at them. Because in public we were the family that you saw on TV.
So I thought everybody had secrets like ours.
I thought it was how men were. It wasn’t until later that I knew it was wrong.
But even when I didn’t know … I didn’t want to obey him.
I didn’t care about what he wanted. That was why I went to visit you.
To see for myself. He said that you were bad.
That we were respectable. But I could never see anything respectable about us.
When I met you, somehow it was like I had a different way to look at the world.
Like I had a decoder ring. Because if you were bad, and we were good, but you were the single kindest person I had ever met, then I knew my dad was a liar.
I knew he was wrong.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. “That was important.”
Carson looked down at his hands. “I didn’t know. That I did that for you.”
“You did so much for me. That’s only one of the things.” She took a breath. “You made my life happier. You gave me a childhood. You taught me how to play. I would’ve just been a perfect little doll sitting on a shelf all the time if it wasn’t for you.”
“You did the same thing for me,” he said. “I was wild, and I was a pretty bad kid. But you brought some fun to it. You made me less self-destructive.”
Hope . That was the theme of it all. They had given each other hope for a life that was different from the one they knew.
That, she realized, had been an integral, important part of their friendship.
They had lost it somewhere along the way.
They had stopped believing that anything was possible.
She was very aware of there being a before and an after.
Of there being a time when she could believe that anything might happen, and a time when she had stopped believing.
Obviously, it had been true for him too.
Maybe the turning point was when you stopped believing you could love each other.
She pushed that thought away. It was a deep, sad thought, and she didn’t know what to do with it.
“I was mad at you when you took Elizabeth Grant to prom,” she said.
He looked at her. “Were you?”
Yeah. That was one of the things that had gotten between them.
When they were little, it hadn’t mattered that he was a boy and she was a girl.
It had started to matter. It had started to make her feel sad.
And she had started to wish that she hadn’t met him as a child, so that he could see her in a different way.
“Perry, I thought … once, down at the lake, I wanted to kiss you.”
His words were like a bomb going off in her chest. She tried to catch her breath and found that she couldn’t. She tried to breathe but it got caught.
“You looked scared of me,” he said. “And you were … your dad was such a bastard. I didn’t want to be another man who scared you. I didn’t want to be a man to you, if that made me scary. I wanted to be your hero. I never wanted you to run from me.”
She was gasping for air, for sanity. “I was running from me .”
“You remember that?”
“Yes. Clearly. I … I wore the dress because it was see-through. I wanted you to notice me that way … I didn’t know you wanted to kiss me.
I thought you were mad. Like you saw my body through that dress and hated that I was a woman.
Or … I don’t really know what I thought.
I was a virgin, and I was confused. I knew I wanted you, and I knew that I wanted you to see me, but I didn’t know what it meant.
Now that we’ve been together, I get why it felt dangerous. We’re not like anything else.”
He shook his head. “No, we aren’t.”
“I was running from something that was too … too big. And I could have asked you, but I was afraid.”
He leaned in and touched her chin. “Why?” He looked torn up in a way that devastated her.