8. Grant
EIGHT
GRANT
I find Nova on a Tuesday evening, behind the rodeo grounds at the edge of town.
I find Nova there by accident.
I'm cutting through the back of the property to reach the road on the far side, a time-saving shortcut I've used since high school, and she's sitting on the top bleacher rail with a cigarette, which she drops immediately when she hears my boots on the gravel.
"I'm not?—"
"I know what you were doing," I say.
She stares at me. Waiting for the lecture. Prepped for the adult response she's used to: the disappointment, the warning, the appeal to her health.
I sit down on the bleacher below her.
"How long?" I ask.
"Like a month." She's still wary. "I only do it when things are bad."
"When things are bad how."
She picks at the edge of the bleacher board. "When I'm—when everything feels like too much. Like the ranch and school and Mom worrying and Grandpa being sick and missing Atlanta and—" She stops. "It's not a big deal. It just helps."
"I know," I say.
She looks at me.
"I know how that feels," I say. "Finding something that turns the volume down." I look at the empty arena below us. "I found a lot of those things. Most of them were worse than cigarettes." I pause. "Eventually I found the ones that actually helped."
"Like what?"
"Meetings. Sponsoring. Working with my hands." I pause. "Running, for a while. Cold water. Turns out your brain chemistry is actually trying to reach equilibrium and there are ways to help it get there that don't cost you the next ten years."
She considers this.
"Does it ever stop?" she asks. “The too much feeling."
"It gets quieter," I say. "And you get better at finding the things that help. So the episodes are shorter and you recover faster." I look at her. "I'm not going to tell your mother about this."
She blinks.
"But I'm also not going to pretend I didn't see it," I say. "Which means this is your one."
"My one what?"
"Your one free pass where I keep the secret.
After this, if I see it again, we talk to your mother.
Not because I want to get you in trouble.
Because when I was your age, the person who let me keep my secrets instead of helping me figure out what was actually wrong, that wasn't kindness. It just gave me time to make it worse."
She's quiet.
"That's weirdly fair," she says finally.
"It's the deal."
She looks at the empty arena for a moment.
"Okay," she says. "Deal."
I stand up.
“Did you mess up my uncle’s life?”
"People in town say you did."
"People in town say a lot of things about me."
"I know. But some of them might be true."
"Some of them are," I say. "I was an addict for a long time. I went to prison. I did things I'm not proud of." I pause. "I did not ruin your uncle's life."
She looks at me steadily. "Then who did?"
Smart kid. The question goes right to it.
"Someone who needed him to stay compromised," I say. "I'm still figuring out exactly who."
"Are you figuring it out with my mom?"
“We're talking about it."
"She doesn't talk to me about serious stuff," she says. "She handles it. That's what she does. She handles things and then she tells me what the outcome was."
"Probably thinks she's protecting you."
"Probably." Nova's voice is careful. "But it makes me feel like—" she pauses. "Like I'm cargo. Like I'm something being managed."
I think about Jessika at the ranch, moving through her days with that controlled efficiency, the attorney's processing, nothing wasted, everything channeled into action.
I think about how that must look from the outside if you're thirteen and scared and already convinced nobody's going to treat you like a person who matters.
"For what it's worth," I say, "she's scared."
Nova looks at me sharply. "Of what?"
"Same thing you are, I think. Of failing the people she loves."
A pause.
"She thinks she's already failed me," Nova says. Her voice is very quiet. "Because of the divorce. Because we had to move."
"Did she?"
Nova's jaw works. "I don't—" She stops. "I was really angry. I'm still angry. It wasn’t the life I had didn't get to keep existing just because they figured out they couldn't be married anymore." She picks at the hem of her sleeve. "Like, my life got canceled. And nobody asked me."
"No," I agree. "They didn't."
"Aren't you supposed to say something about how adults have reasons?"
"Adults have reasons," I say. "That doesn't mean it doesn't suck for you."
She blinks.
"Both things can be true," I say. "Their reasons can be valid and your feelings can also be valid. It doesn't have to resolve."
She stares at me like I've said something in a foreign language.
"My therapist says stuff like that," she mutters. "But when she says it it sounds like a pamphlet."
I almost smile. "Therapy's useful when you get a good one."
"Did you go?"
"Yeah. In prison and after." I pause. "Still see someone occasionally."
She seems to be recalculating something.
"People always say addicts have to want to get better," she says carefully. "Like it's a character thing."
"It's a disease thing," I say. "Character comes into the management. The disease isn't a choice."
She's quiet for a moment.
"My uncle," she says finally. "Did he want to get better?"
The question is so much older than she is.
"Yeah," I say. "More than almost anything. He just had a hard time being bigger than it."
Nova nods slowly. Like she's storing that somewhere careful.
"My mom was really affected by it," she says. "When he disappeared. She doesn't say it but I can tell."
"She loves him."
"She blames herself. Even though I don't know what for." She looks at me. "Do you know what for?"
"Some of it," I say carefully. "It's not my story to tell."
She considers this. Accepts it. The acceptance of someone who has had to learn that not everything will be explained immediately, and that some things are actually worth waiting for.
"You should come to the ranch more," she says abruptly. "The horses like you. Callie especially."
"I like Callie."
"She's picky about people. She only let two people pet her yesterday and one of them was me." She pauses. "You should come help with evening rounds. My grandfather is too slow with the heavy stuff right now and my mom does too much alone."
She says it casually. Like she's solving a logistics problem, not extending something much more significant.
"I'll think about it," I say.
"Okay." She hops off the bleacher and pulls her headphones over her ears and looks at me one more time with those assessing eyes. "She's going to tell you the wrong thing eventually," she says. "About herself. She does that, makes herself sound harder than she is."
Then she walks off around the corner of the building with the particular studied casualness of someone who wants to seem like they don't care about the outcome of the thing they just said.
I sit against the fence in the quiet of the rodeo grounds for a while.
My nephew Eli is seventeen and I can barely get him to make eye contact most days.
And Nova Mills has just told me something true about her mother in the most deliberately offhand way possible.
Kids, I think.
They're something else.
"You know the creek behind the south pasture?" I yell before she gets too far.
"Yeah."
"Early in the morning it does something. The light off the water. It's—" I stop. "Come see it sometime. Before school."
She looks at me with the considering expression she has when she's deciding whether something is worth letting in.
"Okay," she says again.
She comes to see the creek the next morning.
She stands there for ten minutes without saying anything.
Then she goes to school.
I don't tell her mother that either. Some things don't need mediation.