14. Grant
FOURTEEN
GRANT
I was in love with her. Completely, hopelessly in love with her.
There would never be another woman who could rope my heart the way she had. I’d spent years running from things, chasing things, trying to fill holes inside me with drugs, bad decisions, and excuses. None of it worked. None of it lasted.
But Jessika did.
She made me want to be better.
Not because she asked me to. Not because she gave me an ultimatum. She simply believed I could be more than the man I used to be.
For the first time, I believed it too.
I knew recovery wasn't as simple as loving someone. There would be hard days ahead. Days when the past tried to drag me backward. Days when temptation whispered in my ear. But when I thought about Jessika, about the life we could build together, I found strength I didn't know I had.
She wasn't my drug.
She was my future.
She was the reason I wanted to wake up every morning and keep fighting for the man I was becoming.
As I brushed a strand of hair from her face, I smiled to myself.
For years, I thought I'd never find my way home.
Then Jessika walked into my life and showed me I'd been looking in the wrong places all along.
There is a thing that happens in recovery.
They tell you about it, the sponsors, the literature, the people with years of sobriety who come and speak at meetings with the particular steady grace of the long-term survivor.
They tell you that you will be revisited.
Not necessarily by the drugs themselves, though that's always a risk, but by the feelings that the drugs were covering. The things you used to avoid.
They surface.
You wake up one morning and you feel them. All of them. The losses and the shames and the things you never processed because you were busy managing your own destruction instead of living through what was happening to you.
I'm seventeen in this particular memory.
The town is doing what it does to people it's decided about, quietly, systematically, the way that small places are cruel when they're cruel.
The school called my foster parents. To their credit, hadn't thrown me out, but the situation was complicated, and I was already the kind of kid who could feel complications the way horses feel storms, before anyone's said anything, before anything's official.
I'm seventeen and Morgan is fifteen and we're at the back fence of the rodeo grounds, our place then.
"What are you going to do?" Morgan asks.
"About what?"
"About everything." He looks at me with those dark eyes, the family eyes, the ones that can actually see you. "You're going to bolt. I can tell."
"I'm not bolting."
"You're thinking about it."
I was thinking about it. I was thinking about the particular door that drugs kept offering, not heroin yet, I hadn't reached heroin yet, but other things.
The way certain chemicals smoothed out the sharp edges of being a Briar County kid without a family and a reputation I didn't choose and a future that didn't seem to be accumulating toward anything good.
"You can't fix everything by running," Morgan said. He was fifteen, lecturing me like he was forty, with the specific authority of someone who is right and knows it.
"I know."
"You're smart," he said. "You're the smartest person at that school who isn't going to college because the school doesn't know you're smart, because you keep blowing things up before they can see it."
"Morgan—"
"I'm serious." He took the cigarette back. "You need someone to tell you the truth or you're going to waste all of it."
I look at him. "You're fifteen."
"I'm am fifteen and I'm telling you the truth and you should listen to me."
He was right. I didn't listen. Not for years. I wasted a lot of it.
But I think about that moment sometimes, Morgan at fifteen with his serious eyes and his absolute conviction that I was worth something, and I think it kept me alive in a specific way during the worst of it.
The flashback comes during an oil change at the garage, unbidden, the way they do.
I set down the wrench and breathe.
This is the other thing they tell you in recovery: memories are just weather. They come in, they feel overwhelming, they pass. You don't have to act on them.
Eli calls me at noon and tells me that Ricky Hale cornered him at the gas station on Fifth and told him he still owed from something six months ago, a debt Eli thought was cleared, and that he needed to work it off or face consequences that Eli described with the particular terrified vagueness of someone who has seen the consequences and doesn't want to say them out loud.
Ricky Hale who has been selling to teenagers in Briar County for four years.
This is not a secret. It's the kind of thing everyone knows and nobody successfully addresses, the particular permeable quality of small-county enforcement that means the same dealer can operate in the same three locations for years because the right conversations haven't been had with the right judges.
Or because the dealer has the right relationships.
Ricky Hale has a relationship with a deputy I've been trying to figure out for months.
I drive to the gas station.
Ricky Hale is still there, leaning against the building with his phone out, a man who has gotten very comfortable being in public because comfortable is how he keeps operating.
I walk up.
He sees me coming and smiles. People who don't know me, who have only heard the story rather than seen the actual thing, sometimes make the mistake of smiling.
"Grant Vance," he says. "What are?—"
"You're done with Eli," I say. My voice is very quiet. This is the thing about the way I was made by everything that made me: I don't get louder when I'm serious. I get quieter. "Whatever he owes, it's finished. He's done."
Hale's smile adjusts. "That's not how debt works."
"My nephew is seventeen years old."
"Then he should have been smarter."
I look at him for a moment.
He sees something in my face and the smile goes away.
"Eli walks away clean," I say. "You don't approach him again. You don't send anyone to approach him. If you have a problem with this arrangement, you tell me right now."
He doesn't say anything.
I wait.
"Sure," he says finally. Flat, careful. "Whatever."
I walk back to my truck.
I've gone two blocks when the anger hits me.
Not at Hale, I expected Hale, I've dealt with Hales my whole life.
At myself. At the specific way that being in proximity to dealers, even to tell them to back off, fires up the old chemistry.
Not craving, exactly. Something more like the memory of craving, the ghost of it, pressed flat under everything I've built.
I grip the wheel.
I don't think about using. I don't.
But the echo of the thought is there, and it makes everything feel very thin and precarious.
I pull over at the park on Walnut and sit in the truck for a while.
My phone buzzes. Jessika.
I don't answer.
My phone buzzes again.
I answer.
"Where are you?" she says.
"Parked at the Walnut Street park."
A pause. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah."
Another pause. "You don't sound like yeah."
"I had a situation. With Eli. It's handled."
"What kind of situation?"
"Dealer. He's been pressuring Eli." I breathe. "I went to sort it out."
Silence on the line.
"Grant." Her voice is very careful. "Are you—is this—do you need to call someone? Dave or?—"
"I'm not going to use," I say. "I just need a minute."
"Okay." She doesn't make it into a thing. "I'll be here. Take your minute."
I sit in the park.
The afternoon light comes through the trees in long angles. A woman walks a dog past the bench near the lot. Two kids on bikes.
Ordinary afternoon. Ordinary world.
I'm still in it.
"Jessika," I say.
"Here."
"Eli is—I need to—" I stop. "I'm scared for him. Because I know what comes next if he stays on this path. I know exactly what comes next."
"I know," she says softly.
"And I can't make him choose. I know you can't make people choose. I know that. But?—"
"You want him to see what you saw before you hit the worst of it."
"Yeah."
"Maybe he does," she says. "Maybe that's exactly why he called you when Hale cornered him. You."
I sit with that.
"Go to a meeting tonight," she says.
"Yeah."
"And then, come to the ranch after. If you want."
"Okay."
"Grant."
"Yeah."
"You handled Eli today," she says. "That matters."
I don't say anything.
"Take your minute," she says. "I'll be here."
I sit in the park until the light changes, and then I start the truck and go.