Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Dakota
One hour earlier…
I'm seventy-three miles from home when I pull off at the Valero outside Brady.
The sun is coming up over the scrub pine east of the highway.
Pink at the edge. The kind of pink that doesn't mean anything except that Texas is about to be another day.
I park at the pump. Don't cut the engine. Don't look at the phone on the passenger seat.
Jaeger shifts in the trailer behind me.
I feel it through the hitch, the way I always feel him—like the truck, the trailer, the horse, and I are one long connected thing, and whatever happens to one of us registers in all four.
He's tired as all hell. He ran clean yesterday. He ran clean the day before.
He earned the silver on my dash and the ribbon I have tucked away in the storage part of my trailer.
I lean forward and rest my forehead on the steering wheel.
George Strait is on the radio. I’d almost laugh if I wasn’t so drained.
I didn't put him there. I don't even know what station this is.
I had the dial on something else when I left the hotel. Somewhere between San Angelo and here, the signal died. When I didn't reach over to change it, the radio did what radios do and kept searching, and George is what it found.
Because George is what it always finds.
Because he is on this radio whether I want him or not.
I’ve been hearing George Strait on drives home since I was fifteen years old, riding shotgun with my mother in a truck she shouldn't have been driving, with a bottle of Crown she shouldn't have been drinking, with the windows rolled down because the air conditioning never worked, with the hot Texas wind on my face.
Oh, and how could I forget her voice being horribly off-key and happy beside me singing about Amarillo.
The radio crackles. George keeps going. The Texas highway keeps going. And my mother, who I haven’t heard from in almost a year now, is a ghost in the wind.
I sit with my forehead on the wheel and I listen to George tell me how he oughta be somewhere else, but he's here.
"Same, George," I say out loud. To nobody.
I straighten up and cut the engine.
The Valero sign buzzes like a dying thing.
Four-fifty-two diesel.
Three-eighty-nine regular.
The attendant inside is watching me through the glass the way men watch women at gas stations at dawn—assessing whether I'm a problem and deciding I'm not.
I push the door open. Texas air hits me. Cool still, but barely.
Another hour and it'll be warm. Another three and it'll be punishing.
I walk around to the trailer, drop the side door a few inches, and peek in.
Jaeger's nose comes up. His eyes find me.
"Hey, bud."
He snorts.
The snort that means “I'm fine but I'd like to be out of this trailer now, please.”
"Thirty more minutes, buddy. Then breakfast."
He lowers his head. Patient. A horse who's been my partner since he was four years old has learned that thirty more minutes is always thirty more minutes, and I don't lie to him.
I close the door gently, the way my mother used to close trailer doors.
Not a slam. A settle. A horse in a trailer hears everything.
A closed door with anger in it and a closed door with care in it are two different sounds—and my mother taught me when I was a child that you close a trailer door the way you'd close a door on a sleeping child.
She knew some stuff about horses. I'll give her that.
Whatever else she was, she at least had some knowledge.
I walk inside the Valero.
The coffee is bad. I know it's bad before I pour it by the stench that hits me.
The Bunn machine has a sticker that says CLEANED DAILY, and I’d bet it’s been cleaned approximately once since the Bush administration.
But I pour it anyway because this is what I normally do. My ritual. The ritual I follow so I don't have to do the other thing.
The other thing is think. The other thing is feel. The other thing is cry, and I don't cry.
I haven't cried since before Mom left us in her dust.
The clerk's a woman about sixty with a nametag that says Linda.
She takes my two dollars for a coffee I wouldn't give to a dog, looks at me, and says, "Long drive, honey?"
"Yeah."
"Where you coming from?"
"Regionals."
Her face lights up.
One of those older ranch Texas women who saw a barrel racer at a county fair once and has been a fan of the sport ever since.
"You win?"
I hold up my left hand.
Flash the bandage across the knuckles from where Jaeger caught my glove on a barrel and stripped skin off the third finger. "Yeah," I say. "I won."
"Bless your heart, honey. Drive safe."
"Yes, ma'am."
I take my coffee, walk back out to my truck, and I put it in the cup holder. I sit with my hands on the wheel for a few moments, but I don’t put the truck in drive.
Not yet.
Not until I've done the thing.
I unlock my phone.
The screen lights up. Three notifications.
Pops called twenty minutes ago—I'll deal with that next. Presley texted at six-oh-two. Grace texted at five-fifty-eight.
I ignore all three and swipe to my camera roll, scroll to the top.
She's there at the top of everything.
She's been at the top of everything for almost eleven months, because every time I screenshot it I push it one more day into the present.
The screenshot of the screenshot of the screenshot.
I open it.
Sorry kids but I had to leave. I'm going to visit some family and get a break from here.
Twenty-two words. I've counted. Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up and I've already been counting.
My body counts in my sleep.
Twenty-two words that fit her whole absence into a text bubble the size of my thumbnail.
I read it, then I read it again.
Then—because I know the damn thing by heart and have for ten months and fourteen days—I screenshot it.
New screenshot. Same image. A photo of a photo of a photo.
The file goes to the top of my camera roll.
Above yesterday's win photos. Above Jaeger in the warm-up pen.
She goes on top of everything because she is the thing on top of everything.
I close the camera roll and open my contacts.
Scroll to M.
Mom.
The little blue letter next to her name from the last time I edited her contact card.
I was fifteen.
I added a photo—her on the fence at the ranch, squinting into the sun, one of Dad's Shiner Bocks in her hand.
I press the green button. My thumb hovers over ‘call.’
I don't press it. I have never pressed it. If she wanted to reach out, she would’ve called me by now.
But I’ve been hovering for nearly eleven months now.
I know—because Shiver found out six months ago and told me when he was drunk and crying about it—that they disconnected her line two months after she left.
The number doesn't ring anywhere.
My thumb doesn't know that.
My thumb keeps thinking if I press the button she'll answer.
I lock the phone and put it face-down on the passenger seat.
Both hands on the wheel.
Breathe.
One. Two. Three. Four.
She taught me that too.
Breathing before a run, breathing before a fight, breathing before you have to go back in a room and pretend you weren't just crying in the bathroom.
I don't know what I resent more, some days.
That she left me, or that every useful thing I know about surviving her leaving—she taught me.
Pops is going to be worried if I don't call him back.
He called twenty minutes ago, but he won't call again.
Pops doesn't chase. He calls once.
You call back or you don't, and if you don't, he remembers it and waits. He doesn't mention it when you finally show up, but you know he clocked it.
I pick the phone up off the passenger seat.
Face it up.
My thumb hesitates over Mom for a split second before I scroll past her to Pops.
I breathe and press call.
It rings half a ring before he answers.
"Baby girl."
His voice is coffee-rough and soft at the edges, the way it gets in the mornings, and for one second I’m eight years old and sitting on the kitchen counter while he makes me pancakes shaped like horses, and the whole house smells like bacon and I don’t know anything about what's coming.
"Hey, Pops."
"You drive safe?"
"Yes, sir. I'm not far out."
"Second place, huh?"
"First."
A pause, then a low laugh, the kind he does when he's proud and doesn't want to say it so loud that the universe hears and takes it back.
"Damn right, baby girl."
"Yeah. Damn right."
"Jaeger run clean?"
"Like a dream."
"He’s a good boy."
We sit there, him in Sharp and me at a Valero outside Brady, breathing at each other.
Neither of us are saying the other thing. The thing we've been not saying for months.
"Come home," he says.
"I'm coming."
"Marlena's got breakfast. Biscuits and gravy. Bacon for the boys. Presley drove up last night from College Station. Cal is walking. He's been walking for three weeks, but she's still going to make you watch him walk like it's the first time, so brace yourself."
"I'll brace myself."
"Grace is bringing Waylon if his face isn't a ruined thing."
"Got it."
There’s a moment of silence. "Your uncles want to see you."
I almost laugh.
Your uncles.
He means all of the patched Shotgun Saints, half of whom taught me how to throw a punch by the time I was ten, and Pops still calls them my uncles like he's protecting my innocence from his own club.
"I want to see them too, Pops."
"Spur's around."
It's just a fact, dropped into the middle of a conversation like a rock into a still pond.
My hand tightens on the wheel. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
Silence.
He knows. He’s always known.
He has known since I was a young woman and he caught Spur looking at me across the clubhouse on a July night.
The first time I ever met that sexy bastard.
"Okay, Pops."
"Okay, baby girl."
"See you in a bit."
"Drive safe."
I hang up and look right at Presley’s text.
Can't wait to see you. No pressure to hang. Just glad you're coming home.
No pressure to hang.
That's Presley’s way of being a sister.
She won’t ask me for anything. Hell, she won’t pressure me to include her in my life.