Chapter 1
Chapter One
Dixon
Four and a Half Years Later
Hopping down from the seat I’d ridden bitch in for the last five hundred miles, I planted my boots on the pavement and breathed deeply, steadying myself with my hand on the mud-covered fuel tank.
Home was a place I’d avoided for too long—Wisper, Wyoming, a little-known corner of the Jackson Hole Valley. Up here in the mountains, the air was thin, but the weight of it felt thick and heavy in my lungs.
“Don’t forget your pack,” Ken said.
He’d been hauling lumber, and before we delivered his last load yesterday, he agreed to drop me off on his way back to Rock Springs. Wisper was a little out of his way, but he said he didn’t mind seeing the Tetons before he headed home to his wife.
How he’d known I was in recovery was a mystery to me. I hadn’t said anything to him when he picked me up at a truck stop outside Winnemucca, Nevada, but he said I just had that look. The ex-junkie look, but it never failed—fucked-up had a tendency to find fucked-up.
Like me, Ken was a recovering alcoholic, but the difference was that he quit before his love of alcohol escalated to other shit. He’d been sober twenty years, but he admitted he still thought about the burn from a shot sliding down his throat.
I’d been sober more than four years, and I still thought about the rush of dope in my veins. More than that, though, I craved the numbness it provided, the ability to let demons and fathers and disappointments fade away. Most of all now, I wished it could wash away my family’s shame.
But if I let the chemical bliss take over, I couldn’t remember my son. And fuck if I was letting Stuart get any further away from me.
Ken dropped me off a mile from the south side of town, like I asked him to. I needed the last stretch of road to prepare myself for my impending, unknown future.
It had come time to face my mother. My brothers and sister. It had come time to face all of them and to apologize for lying and stealing and abandoning them.
It was time to face Stuart.
Five years old now, Stu had probably already started school. He probably had friends and dreams and wishes. He wouldn’t understand addiction. He couldn’t understand the part I’d played in his mother’s death, even though I wasn’t the one who’d injected the heroin into her vein.
Some days, the jealousy I felt toward my oldest brother and his wife could swallow me whole.
Yeah, I was the one who gave up my kid. I handed him over to Bax when I knew I couldn’t take care of a baby, but that fact didn’t make my absence in my son’s life hurt any less.
All the things I’d missed gutted me on a daily basis: birthdays, Christmases, bad dreams, maybe his first lost tooth. His first laugh.
I’d missed it all, and there was no going back. That was the hardest pill to swallow, and God knew I was damn good at swallowing pills. This one, though, it just wouldn’t go down.
Walking along Highway 20 with the morning sun beating down on my face, all those precious, missed memories ran through my head, and I tried to picture Stu’s face when he saw Santa for the first time.
Did he smile? Was he excited or scared shitless?
I had a vague memory from my own childhood of seeing jolly old St. Nick and then running in the opposite direction, screaming.
He was just so big and tall, and my mama had told me so many times that if I was bad, Santa would know, and he’d be pissed.
All my life, it seemed everything I’d done was bad. At least that was how my “father” had seen it. It didn’t seem to matter to my subconscious that he was dead. His disproval had followed me everywhere I went.
Learning to live without his voice in the back of my mind, berating me and telling me all the ways I’d let my family down, had proven to be easier than I thought it would have, but that was only because my voice had replaced his, and now it was me who berated myself—for leaving my kid, for failing his mama, for failing my family, for being a fuck up.
For falling in love with my brother’s wife and then bailing when she died in my arms.
Candy had loved me, too, but not in the same way.
It had taken me a long time to realize that I’d loved her because she was the only good relationship in my life.
Eight years had passed since she died of an aneurysm on the side of the fucking road in the middle of downtown Wisper.
Eight years since I broke her ribs trying to give her CPR and bring her back to life.
Eight years since my brother asked me to tell him what happened, but instead I drowned myself in cheap liquor, then pills, and things only got worse after that.
“Fuck,” I breathed, wiping sweat from the side of my face with my hand.
I don’t know if I can do this.
Pulling out the tiny, folded scrap of Stu’s baby blanket I’d been carrying in my pocket for over four years, I squeezed it in my fist. It had worn thin between my fingers over time, but the red cartoon tractors and the frayed edges of the fabric soothed my fears and anxieties.
The only picture I had of Stu had been rubbed clean of its ink long ago.
Now, the only image I had of him was the one fixed in my mind, the one I’d stolen when I creeped on my family’s land, trying to catch a glimpse of his smile as my brother hoisted him over his shoulders, and Stu sat up there, thunking Bax on the head with his little fists.
If I could just get through the rough part with Bax and his new wife, and with my mama and Abey and Brand, maybe I could be a part of my kid’s world. Maybe they’d let me see him sometimes. Maybe then I’d know what his laugh sounded like.
When I made it into the center part of town and spotted the sheriff’s station, where I knew my sister would likely be, my heart began to pound. My mouth went dry, and as I leaned against the wall of the building across Main Street from the station, I realized I’d finished off the last of my water.
But it wasn’t a wall behind me; it was a door with a loose latch, and I stumbled through it.
“Can I help you?” asked a quiet voice behind me as I tried to stop my backward momentum and not fall on my ass.
I spun around and looked right into the eyes of my memory girl, and then her name hit me like a ton of bricks:
Avery Jane Harlowe.
AJ. My flower girl.
When she was little, she hated her first name, so she’d introduced herself to me as AJ, and it stuck. I used to weave wildflowers together and drape my homemade garland around her neck. She wasn’t a girl anymore though. She’d grown into a stunning woman, with hips made for a man’s hands.
“Hello-o-o?” She lifted her hand and waved it in front of my face. “Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe you don’t speak English. Um, hablas inglés?”
“Yeah,” I grunted. “I speak English.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. It’s just, you weren’t sayin’ anything, so I thought— Never mind. How can I help you?”
She hadn’t recognized me. I wasn’t surprised about that.
It had been a long lifetime since we’d last seen each other.
She had no way of knowing the bright sound of her laughter was the last thing I thought about every night before I fell asleep.
After a long day in the woods, that light, glittering sound had been a balm to my soul and my aching back.
I couldn’t exactly tell her I’d stumbled into her store because I was trying to avoid facing my family a few minutes longer.
Instead, I looked around.
“So is this your store, or…?”
Her store. She’d gone and done it, just like we’d talked about when we were little kids.
I felt like I’d fallen into an enchanted faerie land. The light seemed filtered somehow, dusky and peaceful. A quiet, lilting song played from a speaker somewhere, but it was so low that I imagined if I listened hard enough, I’d hear crickets chirping and birds singing.
Just like we’d made decades ago, strands of flowers lined one whole wall. They had to be fake flowers; there was no way she’d have the time to string that many flowers every day, but they looked so real.
Bouquets topped mismatched tables and pot stands everywhere. Live greenery seemed to be growing right out of the wood, and buckets of fresh stems lined the wall near the door to the back storeroom, filled with multi-colored roses and lilies, dahlias and daisies, and so much baby’s breath.
When we were young, we used to have the run of downtown, and we’d be out there for hours in the summers, exploring and adventuring, and we’d stop at the store every now and again to check in with AJ’s gran. She’d give us water and always had a healthy snack or PB I’d been dreaming about AJ’s eyes too.
“A bouquet for my mama,” I said so she wouldn’t think I’d lost my mind.
“I haven’t seen her in a while. Figured I’d better bring her some flowers.
Somethin’ small.” Small enough to be cheap.
I’d been saving the money I’d earned working a farm over near Medford, Oregon, and after that as a timber faller, but I needed all my resources so I could buy a used car and rent a room.
I wouldn’t ask to stay on my family’s land.
They probably wouldn’t want me anywhere near there, and I couldn’t blame them for that.
Reaching around Avery’s waist, I grabbed a premade bouquet of bright orange daisies off the display table behind her. She’d tied them together with a baby-blue ribbon. “How ’bout these? How much?”
She scrunched her nose, and the freckles smattered over the bridge twinkled like stars in an evening sky. “You love your mama, don’t you?”
“Yeah. ’Course I do.”
“Then you can’t give her those. They’re cheap and boring. Your mama likes pastel colors anyway.”
“Yeah, but how much are those gonna cost— Wait. You know my mama? You know who I am?”
“Yes, Dixon. You were my best friend in grade school. It took me a minute, but did you think I’d forgotten?”
“I-I… Well, yeah. It’s been a long time, and I’m not— I don’t look the same. I’m not the same person I used to be.”
Her eyes slid down my chest but quickly lifted back up to mine.
“I’m not the same either, but I could never forget those blue eyes.” She reached up tentatively and touched the tip of her finger to an overgrown lock of my hair that had fallen over my shoulder. “You should get your hair cut before you see your mama.”
Looking down at her finger still playing with my hair, I felt my cheeks heating with embarrassment. Another flash of heat ran through my body, much lower, but I shut that shit down as quick as I could and took a step backward.
She might have known me all those years ago, but she didn’t know me now. I wasn’t someone a beautiful, successful woman like her should want to know.
“The orange ones will be fine,” I said, and I pulled a sweaty and crumpled wad of cash from my front pocket, embarrassing me even more than I already was.
If AJ knew who I was, then she’d likely heard the gossip around town about me; there was no way Wisper hadn’t talked when I brought Stu to stay with Bax. And I was sure no one had forgotten my teenage years and my twenties. None of that would’ve been good.
“Suit yourself,” she said, seemingly disappointed at my mundane choice of flowers, and she grabbed the bouquet from my hand and whipped around to wrap them in tissue paper and ring me up at the cash register.
Her barely waving, blond hair fluttered out behind her, and the ends licked my forearm.
The movement pushed a rush of air in my direction, and when her sweet, floral scent hit my nose, I groaned.
She still smelled the same, like wildflowers and fresh air, and the memories of the two of us exploring the woods as kids sucked the breath right out of my chest.
God, how I wished I could go back to that time, when I was nothing more than an innocent boy.
Suddenly, I wanted to hear AJ’s laugh. I wanted the happy, tinkling sound to wrap me up and carry me the rest of the way home. Maybe it could wash away the evidence of my sins, like God himself had kept a tally score, every wrongdoing marked in cuts and fading needle marks on my skin.
Maybe then the fear would go away.
Maybe then I could face my son and my family with more confidence than I currently possessed… and a straight back.