Chapter 16 #3
Cody didn’t say anything, but Walker’s words had taken the air out of the space.
“Sorry,” Walker said. “I can’t romanticize obsession.”
“But it is... I told her she was going to see God. Instead I did. I’m not going to minimize that. But there’s nothing so good it can’t be worked out rigorously in bed. I’ve never yet had a thing with a woman and not gotten tired of it.”
“Wow. Charming. Really fucking charming.”
“Can you be honest with me for a second?”
“You only have a second, so you better choose your question carefully.” Walker didn’t know which topic he wanted to address less. His dad or Addison.
“Who is your dad?”
“James Holland. He’s a petty criminal. Lives several counties over, at least he did last time he was arrested.
I’m a chip off the old block, Cody. I’m just a con man with access to more resources.
Oh, and I’m not addicted to meth, which means that I make slightly better decisions. But only slightly.”
“Wow. When did you find that out?”
“Two years ago,” he said, mad now that he was repeating the same information he had given out last night. Why the hell had he thought this was a good idea?
“And you didn’t say anything. It must have... messed with your whole idea of who you were.”
“Nah. It didn’t. I always knew, Cody. I’m not dumb. I don’t look like you, I don’t look like Lila. I don’t look like Mom, I don’t look like David. It had to be somebody. Wasn’t aliens. That would have been cool though.”
“I’m being serious,” Cody said. “It... are you okay?”
“No. I’m not okay. Are any of us okay? Me finding out that my dad is a con man and a meth head, honestly...
both those things rank very low on my list of reasons that I have trauma and am not okay.
No, I’m not okay. None of us are okay. My goal isn’t to be okay.
It’s to be rich as hell. And I’ve achieved that goal. I’m good.”
“The thing is, though, it’s not good. It’s not good enough. I know that. I had achieved all of that, and it didn’t do anything to fix the wound inside of me. It didn’t do anything to help repair that feeling that I’m just not... not enough. But Marlowe...”
“You’re still afraid of this whole engagement thing.”
“Yeah, being healed doesn’t mean that nothing ever pops up anymore.
Sure, I get nervous when things are going too well.
I don’t have a great track record of that in my life.
But I’m learning. And it isn’t the money that’s changing me.
It isn’t the money that’s teaching me. It’s...
you, and Lila. It’s family, and Marlowe.
It’s watching Zane and Cara fall in love.
It’s realizing that I don’t have to distance myself completely from all the bullshit from our childhood.
I can just accept it. I can accept it, and I can be happy anyway.
I don’t have to run from it. I don’t have to make myself feel superior to anybody, I don’t have to. I can just live. And I can be happy.”
Walker liked the sound of that in theory, but in actual fact, it didn’t make a lot of sense to him.
His basic philosophy was that something had been broken in him a long time ago.
Maybe at birth. Maybe that was it. Maybe it was genetic.
Or maybe it was life. But the chip on his shoulder was too big, and honestly, he didn’t have that much interest in healing it.
Because it motivated him. Having people to show.
It motivated him, having nemeses that he had to perform for.
He didn’t want to lose that. He would lose his edge.
And he sure as hell didn’t want to do that. That felt like a ticket to ending up stealing copper coils to pay for meth, honestly. He had no interest in it.
“I can see that you’re not going to listen to me,” Cody said.
“I do my best to listen to you,” Walker said. “The God’s honest truth, Cody, is that I think you’re a better man than me.”
The words scraped his throat raw, but they were true. Deeply and truly.
“I’m not,” Cody said. “The only difference between you and me is I just decided that I wasn’t going to let the past continue to decide how I want my future to look.”
“But you say that like it’s easy. And I don’t think it is.”
More than that, and the thing he couldn’t quite figure out how to articulate was that you had to want that.
And Walker just didn’t. He had been walking in the darkness for too long.
He had been dealing in ways that used his trauma to his advantage for too long.
He didn’t want to be healed. He wanted to be mad.
He wanted to use it to fuel him. To make him exceptional.
And that required intense focus on himself, and frankly, his own wounds, his own wants, his own desires.
And another person just couldn’t figure into that. Not at all.
“You’re a good man, Cody,” Walker said. “I wish I was as good as you want me to be.”
He turned away from his brother, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and began to walk back toward his truck.
If Cody tried to say anything else to him, Walker just ignored it.