Chapter 2 #2
What she will do is be sweet about it, forever, even though she is also Pops's blood and has as much right to be there as I do.
She’s twenty-one years old.
She has Marlena's red hair instead of my mother's blonde, and Pops's blue eyes, and a softness none of us inherited from either of them.
She is what Pops got when he didn't know he had her—a second daughter carrying his jaw, his stubbornness, and none of my mom’s teeth. At least she got to miss out on having braces.
I hate how much I like her.
I type:
See you in a little bit, Pres. Drive was fine.
Don't hit send.
Delete it.
Type:
Thanks. Can't wait to see you too.
Don't hit send.
Delete it.
I lock the phone, put it face-down on the seat.
I'll answer her when I get home.
In person.
Because I’ve been ignoring her texts for months and maybe today is the day I stop ignoring her texts.
But maybe it isn't. I don’t know yet. I'll decide when I see her face.
I sit there.
Jaeger shifts in the trailer.
The radio shifts to some new artist I don't recognize.
The sun is up properly now. Pink is gone. Sky's the color of a faded pair of jeans.
I should drive. I'm going to drive in a minute.
I let myself think about her—about my mother—for thirty seconds.
That's the deal I make with myself.
Thirty seconds a morning, and not more, because more than thirty seconds is the thing that breaks me.
Thirty seconds. The thermos. Hers.
Dented on the side, scratched silver, and she drank coffee out of it at the fence line every morning when she watched me ride as a girl.
The cigarette.
She smoked one a day. Just one. On the porch at sunset. She said every woman needs one thing nobody's allowed to comment on.
The fourth of July, last year. The yard.
Her hair coming down in pieces. The Jack Daniel's in a Solo cup.
Her pointing at Marlena across the yard and screaming you home wrecking bitch and then the grenade—and that one, that girl, that's his daughter.
Presley's face. Pops's face.
My mother—blonde hair wild, makeup smeared, the woman who used to drink coffee out of a dented thermos at the fence line—screaming the name Presley across her ex-husband's yard like she was throwing glass at him.
I watched it. Hell, everyone did.
I couldn't move. I couldn't look away.
Thirty seconds. Time's up.
I put the truck in drive.
* * *
Earl is buried under the oak on his ranch in the east pasture.
I don't drive past him.
I cross over on the county road that doesn't go by him, the way I have every day since they put him in the ground.
I was at a qualifier in Lubbock when Bex called me.
I answered on the second ring because Bex never called, Bex only texted, and a Bex call meant something had happened.
I sat down in the parking lot of a Red Lion in Lubbock with the phone pressed to my ear and Bex crying softly on the other end.
Not loud. Bex doesn't cry loud. Bex cries the way Bex does everything—quiet, contained, in her own skin.
I loaded Jaeger into the trailer and I drove home that night.
I sat on his porch.
The porch where he passed away with Banshee beside him, sitting in his favorite chair, with a cold cup of coffee in his hand and a smile on his face.
I didn’t cry.
His knife is in my boot. Has been since the funeral.
Five-inch folding blade with a bone handle, his initials in scrimshaw on the side.
He gave it to me when I was twelve. Told me every woman in Texas needs a knife and the knowledge not to reach for it first.
I haven't reached for it yet, but it's there.
I cross the county line at seven-fifty.
Jaeger shifts in the trailer.
My hands tighten on the wheel.
I feel the last few miles in my shoulders, but then my mind drifts to something else.
Or rather, someone else. Spur.
That's what I haven't let myself think about.
I've been letting myself think about her.
About Earl.
About Presley, Pops, and Marlena, and the whole reconfigured family I have to walk back into this morning with a smile on my face.
I haven’t let myself think about him.
Actually, I haven’t let myself think about him for eight years.
I took one look at him and I knew.
I knew the way a horse knows who they can trust and who they can’t.
I knew the way my mother knew about my father, which is a sentence I don't get to say out loud ever because look how that one ended.
I didn't go for him. I don't go for them.
I have never once touched a patched Shotgun Saint.
Not a kiss.
Not a hand on a thigh.
Not a dance at a barbecue where a drunk brother got friendly and had to be politely declined.
They are my family. You don't sleep with your family.
My mother taught me that, too.
But Spur isn’t my family.
Spur is a man who looked at me like I was gravity, and my father saw it and shut it down with a look.
Spur has spent years walking past me at holidays, club functions, and more.
Hat down, boots moving, his body reporting nothing on the outside, but screaming on the inside.
I see him. I doubt he knows I see him.
Three weeks ago I got drunk with Brynn and Cassidy at a motel bar in Amarillo after a qualifier, and I was three Crowns in.
Brynn was teasing me about a bull rider named Rusty who'd been flirting with me at the concession stand, and Brynn said, “Lyle, when are you going to pick one and settle down?”, and I laughed and I said, “If I was ever going to break my rule, it'd be Spur.”
The look on both of their faces. Hell, the whole booth went quiet.
Brynn set her drink down slow. "Oh, honey. That's who you want?"
"That's who I want."
Cassidy tilted her head like the answer was obvious. "Does he know?"
"I think he knows."
Brynn leaned in, eyes sharp over the rim of her glass. "Then what's the hold-up, baby?"
"I'm done waiting for him to make the move."
Brynn lifted her Crown and grinned. "Then don't."
I didn't do anything about it that night.
But the words have been in my mouth for three weeks.
I cross the gate at the top of the hill at seven-fifty-nine.
I lay on the horn.
Three honks. Short. Clean.
The compound opens up in front of me.
The main barn. The clubhouse. The bunkhouse. The round pen beyond the barn where the mustang's been for six weeks.
And him.
On the bunkhouse porch.
Hat down. Cut on. Coffee in his hand.
Spur.
He looks up.
Our eyes meet across forty feet of Texas dirt at two minutes till eight in the morning.
He doesn't smile. Neither do I.
He looks at me the way he did eight years ago in the clubhouse doorway.
A moment too long, then he turns and walks inside.
I sit in my truck, both hands on the wheel.
The engine is ticking as it cools.
"I'm done waiting, Spur," I say.