One Ex, Over Easy
Dawson
Sadie Shepard was back, and she’d only gotten more beautiful.
I hadn’t slept a single minute last night, and honestly, who could blame me? Some news deserved to keep a man awake: a barn fire, a hard frost in May, a bear in the chicken coop. Sadie Shepard walking back into my life after twelve years? That wasn’t just news. That was the universe’s mic drop.
It was difficult enough to try and wrap my head around her return, but then there was the reason she was here.
Buddy Shepard—the man who’d once dragged himself to a calving cow with a shattered collarbone and then showed up to the Annual Police and Fireman’s Fundraiser pancake breakfast the next morning, arm in a sling, acting as if nothing happened—was lying in the ICU hooked up to machines that beeped and breathed for him.
The man who cut firewood for every widow in the ZIP code each winter without fail.
The man who built wheelchair ramps for veterans on weekends.
Who always, always paid his bar tab in cash.
Men like Buddy Shepard weren’t fragile, they were cut from a different cloth. He reminded me of a combination of the Dos Equis and Marlboro Man. Tough. Indomitable. Indestructible. They didn’t make men like him anymore.
I knew the kind of cloth Buddy was cut from because I’d grown up idolizing it.
My dad travelled a lot for business when I was growing up, and Buddy had been like a surrogate father to me for two decades, teaching me everything there was to know about horses, respect, and the proper way to shake a man’s hand.
He’d shown me how to change the oil in a ‘69 Chevelle, how to throw a perfect spiral, how to tie a fishing knot and cast a line without tangling it, and how to stand up to a bully without ever raising my voice.
He taught by example. He was tough, solid, and impossible to knock off his axis.
Once, when I broke my wrist riding broncs, Buddy told me not to let anyone see me cry.
He didn’t say it to be cruel, it was a lesson in composure, in dignity, in holding a little bit of yourself back from the world.
I took the lesson to heart, maybe too much.
And now he was lying in the ICU, after a heart attack and stroke, most likely wired to more machines than the NASA control room.
I loved that man. Hell, everyone did. But when he lost his daughter, Sadie’s mom, he shrunk a little.
He wasn’t the same after Rosie died. He was a shadow of a man.
And from what people said, even that version was a shell of himself.
He never recovered fully from losing his wife to cancer.
I didn’t remember Mrs. Shepard because I was only two when she passed away.
But my parents talked about what a lovely woman she was and how Buddy lit up every time she walked in a room, or even if her name was mentioned.
Sadie was all he had left, and I ruined that for him too. I should’ve been the one to keep her close. Instead, I did the one thing she couldn’t forgive. The one thing no one could forgive. My own mother couldn’t look me in the eye for weeks after Sadie left.
Graduation night, I went with my classmates to celebrate at Bluewater Inn, which was a senior rite of passage.
We had four rooms booked and everyone was staying the night, except Sadie.
Buddy was very strict and even on graduation she had a curfew of midnight.
I almost went home with her, but it was grad night, and I justified staying to let off steam.
The truth was, I knew if I went home, I’d be expected to get up early for chores, that’s what ranch life was, and I didn’t want to do that hungover. So I stayed.
All I remember is drinking beers with Donovan Valentine, Gio and a few other guys from the football team in one of the rooms, and the next memory I have is waking up in bed with Vicki Blair in nothing but my boxer-briefs.
I scrambled out of that bed, horrified, but it was too late.
Sadie had come by with coffee and donuts, and she saw us through the window.
I was so hungover, my head was killing me as I clumsily tried to get dressed and go after her.
I did manage to catch up with her at Buddy’s, but her mind was already made up, she was leaving.
She’d already packed her bags and had a flight leaving SeaTac that night.
She wouldn’t tell me where she was going or how long she’d be gone.
She just handed her promise ring back to me and told me goodbye.
The finality in her farewell still broke my heart to this day.
There was no screaming, no arguing, no fighting, just tears silently sliding down her face as she handed me the promise ring I’d bought her for her sixteenth birthday.
I begged her to say something, anything, to yell at me, call me names, because I deserved it, but she wouldn’t do any of that.
I could see the heartbreak in her eyes, feel the betrayal radiating off of her and it didn’t just break my heart, it annihilated it.
She simply told me that there was nothing left to say, kissed me on my cheek, and climbed into Herbie, with Buddy in the driver’s seat, and drove away.
That was the last time I saw or spoke to her before yesterday.
It’s not like I’d just let Sadie slip away.
I’d tried, fuck, I’d tried to make it right.
In the months after she left, I bombarded every possible avenue in attempts to contact her, text, phone, DMs, email, every social media account, desperate for a single word from her.
But she went dark. It was like she’d been vaporized from the earth.
She blocked me on every platform, so I got creative and went old school.
I wrote her actual letters. I gave them to Buddy, and he assured me that he’d make sure she got them, but she never responded. Not once.
I understood. She deserved so much better than I’d given her. After what happened, how could I expect her to even read my name without her stomach turning? I tried to put myself in her shoes. I’d imagine her as the one who’d done what I’d done.
Would I have forgiven her?
The answer was always immediate and the same…
of course, I would have. All it would have taken was seeing her or hearing her voice, just knowing she was sorry and that she still loved me.
I could never throw away what we had on a stupid mistake.
But I wasn’t Sadie. She had every right to set her boundaries, and she had.
I had no one to blame for losing her and the future we’d planned but myself.
The first few weeks after she left, I tried to stay busy.
I went on a trip to Vegas with my friends and tried to drink my heartache away.
Then when we got back to town, I threw myself into work on the ranch.
But even when I was covered in mud and sweat, cleaning stalls or doing repairs, my mind would worm its way right back to Sadie.
I’d see her everywhere: in the way a horse flicked its ears, in the sunrise over the eastern hills, in the wildflowers she used to stick behind her ear every May.
Night was always the worst. At night I’d lie on my back, staring up at the ceiling, and try to remember the exact pitch of her laugh, or how her hair smelled after a day on the water.
I’d count the hours since she’d left and try to convince myself I was getting over her, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw her walking away from me, head held high, shoulders set like steel.
I’d imagine her in some city a thousand miles away, drinking artisanal coffee or reading on a subway, and wonder if she ever thought of me at all.
Then days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, months turned into years and at some point I looked back and realized that the pain wasn’t any better, but at least it was behind me. But now she was back. And the pain was still there, like it just happened yesterday.
No matter how hard I’d tried to rest, my mind wouldn’t shut off, which is why I hadn’t been able to sleep at all.
Even with the windows open, the air inside my bedroom had felt suffocating.
I’d tossed and turned in my own sleepless sweat.
By 4:00 a.m. I’d given up and just gone into the ranch for the day.
I told myself that the animals always needed feeding, and moving, and medicating, and unlike people, they didn’t expect explanations for silence.
The forty-degree dawn burned off the last of my mental fog.
I’d parked my truck behind the main barn and started in on the horses, letting the repetition of the chores drown out the mess in my head.
It worked right up until my walkie buzzed with a call from the main house.
Mom’s voice came through loud and clear, “Dawson, sweetie, I need your help in the kitchen.”
It wasn’t uncommon for me to get called up to the house.
All three of my brothers worked at the ranch, but as the oldest Lockhart, I was still the first on the list for anything my mom needed.
I let Fernando, the barn manager, know where I was at with the stalls and headed up the gravel path toward the main house, past the admin offices and maintenance building.
I took the back porch steps two at a time.
As I approached the sunroom, I could hear voices and laughter.
One laugh in particular stopped me in my tracks.
It had been so long since I heard it that it struck me square in the gut.
I was sucker punched with a bowling ball.
The sound danced through me like wind chimes in a warm breeze, light and musical, curling around my ribs and settling near my heart.
It was sunshine in sound form. I stood, paralyzed, and waited for the world to stop tilting.