Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
He was meeting Christy today down at Eat & Run, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.
His father’s daughter felt like an easier task than his mother’s daughter.
The baggage he had with his father was a black hole.
The issues he had with his mother were painfully specific.
Real memories rather than just feelings.
It made a difference. He didn’t take what his father had done personally in the same bone-deep way.
He had abandoned the concept of a child, rather than the actual child.
And that felt painful, but not pointed.
He had nearly asked Lila to come with him today.
It wasn’t like he needed Lila to do everything.
But as he pulled up to the parking spot out in front of Eat & Run, he felt a question settle over his skin that he couldn’t quite put words to. So he didn’t try. Instead, he turned the engine off, got out of his truck, and walked into the cozy diner.
And he knew exactly who his sister was, right away, seated at one of the Formica tables in one of the bright red chairs, menu propped up in front of her.
She had dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.
There was something about the determined look on her face that felt familiar.
Likely because he saw it looking back at him from the mirror all the time.
She stood up, her expression as guarded as he knew that his was, and shoved her hands in her back pockets, her posture yet again eerily similar to his own.
“Hi,” he said.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought you were going to come in for a hug.”
“Not unless you want one.”
“No. I’m not big on hugging people I’ve never met. Even if they are my brother.” She winced. “That’s weird.”
“Weird,” he said.
“Well, have a seat,” she said. “Figured we ought to meet on neutral ground before you came up to the resort.”
“I’m not going to say no to a free vacation. Even if you might be a serial killer.”
“Promise I’m not a serial killer. I lack the obsessive nature.”
“Somehow I doubt that,” she said.
He shrugged. Then he took a seat across from her.
“My friend Gage is with me,” she said. “Obviously not right now, but I just mean in general, he’s here. He’s going to be staying with me. Just in case you get any funny ideas.”
“I’ve got no funny ideas to do anything to hurt you. Promise. But I take it being raised by our dad gave you a collection of interesting trust issues.”
“Raised by?” she said, laughing. “I don’t know that son of a bitch. He done R-U-N-N-O-F-T.”
“When?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really remember him.
I mean, I do, but vaguely. He was in and out of my life until I was about seven, and then he just never bothered to come back one day.
I put myself up on the website because I figured I might find more kids that he’d abandoned.
I didn’t expect that I would find one older than me. ”
He nodded slowly. He would have been surprised to find out he had an older sibling too, so he could understand it. Understand why it felt natural to assume that you were the first one.
“No, he practiced his familial abandonment on me first.”
“Well. Sorry about that. How’s the burger here?”
“Just fine.”
When the waitress came to take their order, they both went with the cheeseburger and she got onion rings while he got sweet potato fries. They both got Coke.
“So what do you do?”
“I manage a feed store.” She pulled her straw out of her soda and licked the bottom before putting it back down in the glass. “The whole thing. It’s actually a pretty big job.”
“I bet so.”
“Yeah. My mom... Well, I don’t see her all that often.
It’s not a total abandonment situation, and at the very least she waited until I was an adult, but she’s got an RV, and she’s on her fourth husband, and they like to spend their time driving around the country.
Mainly they visit casinos and gamble all their money away, not that there’s much of it. ”
“I think my mom is rich,” he said.
“Well. Hell.” She blinked. “That’s kind of interesting.”
“Not really. I won’t bore you with that story.”
“But it’s part of your story.” For a moment, Christy looked sincere.
She had been guarded, and had that smart-ass twinkle in her eye from the moment that they had first seen each other, but now, there was some graveness there.
“I didn’t expect that I would ever find anybody, not really.
I’ve been waiting. And now that I have, I want to know about you.
Because I know about me. It’s boring. I’m tired of my same trauma.
I’m tired of... Kinda tired of my life, if I’m honest.”
“Well, I’m not tired of it yet,” he said. “I haven’t ever heard your story.”
“Same goes. So, if you want to hear mine, you’ve got to share yours with me.”
“Sounds fair,” he said.
So they shared their stories, over burgers and fries, and it felt like about the most natural thing he could have hoped for.
He wouldn’t say that it was magic or like he instantly felt that they were family, but he recognized something. Something that felt like family. Something that felt so much more familiar than he’d anticipated.
“So then you went to the rodeo,” she said.
He nodded. “Yeah, I went and made some cash there. I was successful. And lucky, because after that I had a business that I could invest in thanks to my friend Cody.”
“Cody is the one that you basically grew up with.”
“The very same.”
“Alright. Well, I’ll be happy to come out and see the ranch tonight.”
“I’ll be happy to show you.” He looked around. “Where’s your friend?”
“Oh, he’s hanging around. Armed for sure.”
“Good to know. How long has he been your... Friend?”
She laughed. “Oh, he’s not my friend like that. He’s really my friend. The boy next door.”
“Ah,” Nolan said, but what he didn’t say was that a man who was willing to travel to be protection for a woman may not see himself as only a friend.
Now, it was possible that he really did see himself as a protector.
He could understand that. But he also knew that his feelings for Lila had been there under the surface for a long time, and it was probably what underpinned everything, as much as he hadn’t liked thinking so.
“I’m going to walk around town,” she said. “Get the lay of the land. But I’ll let you know when I’m settled in at the resort.”
“Good. Sounds great.”
He paid for lunch, and then he headed back toward the ranch, feeling a strange sense of completeness.
He had met her.
It had been good.
He could see her being somebody that he could have a relationship with.
She was suspicious and determined, interesting, and self-sufficient. He wasn’t going to have to worry about her being a level-five clinger or anything like that.
As for the rest of the weekend, it went well. They had dinner at the Painted Ridge dining room, he met her friend Gage, and he introduced her around to the Grayson clan.
There was a family barbecue that included both her and Gage.
And it was strange to feel caught in this middle ground with Lila.
Because he felt like he wanted to introduce her as someone, or something kind of special. And yet, what was she?
She was...
As he stood there, about to introduce his half-sister to the woman he’d been sleeping with for weeks now, he realized he didn’t have a neat thing to call her. No fancy label. But even if he tried to introduce her as a friend, as family, it wouldn’t cover it.
She was his person.
Someone that he had confided in for a long time.
After all, Lila was the one who had known about his half-sister in advance. Lila was the one who knew about his upcoming visit with his other sisters.
And that was something he had told her long before they’d ever touched.
He’d also told her about the benchmark that he felt he needed to pass in order to contact his family.
She knew more about him than anybody else.
And that had been true before they’d started sleeping together.
It wasn’t sex that had brought about that intimacy.
Though sex had increased it, changed it.
He had told her all those deep, unformed, unspoken things about his artwork.
She had helped him figure out why it was important to actually meet his family, how it matched up with who he was.
“This is Lila,” he said, his voice sounding rough. “She’s... The youngest Grayson.”
“Nice to meet you,” Lila said, sticking her hand out toward Christy.
She didn’t seem put out by the way he introduced her, but he felt like it was wrong somehow.
Even if he couldn’t fully explain it.
As for Gage, Christy’s boy next door, he was a big hulking cowboy with tattoos on his forearms, and very few words to say.
He wondered how he would feel about Christy’s characterization of him. And then he figured nothing would surprise the man, who seemed to know her well.
But that didn’t mean that he agreed with her assessment of the situation. Of course, it wasn’t like Nolan had any kind of special insight into it. The guy was impossible to read.
One of the things he and Christy talked about quite a bit over the course of the weekend was his other family. Which he felt bad about.
But she was fascinated. She said it was like peeking over somebody’s fence. Because it didn’t really have anything to do with her, and yet, he was sort of a bridge between her and this other family, and it made her feel nosy.
“Have you told anybody else about them?” she asked, as they were sitting out back behind the resort the night before she left.
“No. Well, Lila. She knows about them. She was pushing me to go and do that.”
“She’s your girlfriend, right?”
He froze. He had never once touched Lila in an intimate fashion in front of her, and he had introduced her in a completely neutral way. And yet.
“No,” he said.
“Really?”
“Why?” he asked.
“She’s very... she watches you all the time. I thought it seemed like there was something between the two of you.”
“I didn’t say there was nothing between us,” he said. “I just said she wasn’t my girlfriend.”
He didn’t know why he chose to exhibit that brand of honesty with his sister.
Except... Right then, that blew his mind.
She was his sister. They were connected by blood.
And while that had never meant a whole hell of a lot to anybody else in his life, he and Christy were choosing to let that mean something.
She leaned forward, hands on her thighs. “I know all this kind of stuff, the family stuff... It really fucks you up,” she said.
“You can say that again.”
“But I suppose... I suppose it’s a good thing if you can let it go and try to find your own happiness.”
“Do you feel like you’ve done that?”
She shook her head. “No. I feel like I’m a work in progress, but I have no idea what the progress is.
I need something new in my life, I need to stop living in the same house that I grew up in.
Stop walking the same steps every day. Stop...
I don’t know. I just feel like I’m living in the trenches of my childhood trauma and I want to stop.
You seem to have figured out how to stop. ”
“I...” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that.
I would say that I’ve gone a long way in fixing the poverty aspect.
I’ve found success financially. Maybe even in a career sense.
Like I did well in the rodeo, and I could ramp up my art business at any time.
That’s good. I recognize that. I know that.
But I’m looking for something, and I don’t quite know what it is.
I feel like I don’t quite fit anywhere. I fit in part of your story.
And then there’s my other sisters... I guess I’ll fit into part of theirs.
But with the Graysons, I’m sort of the one that fits in there too and I haven’t yet figured out where my home is. It’s hard to be the extra.”
“I always felt that way growing up,” she said.
“I mean it’s not like my mom was terrible.
She wasn’t. But I did feel a little bit like an extra piece of her life that she was always trying to juggle and manage.
A little bit of an inconvenience. Which isn’t fair, because she wasn’t mean to me, it’s just I was so aware of how hard she was working to try to get any food on the table.
She worked all the time, she barely had any time off.
When she would date a guy, I was always one of the logistical things she had to manage in that relationship.
When she got married, if the guy wasn’t nice to me, then that would be the thing that broke the marriage up.
And she didn’t act like she resented me for it, not really, but I could feel it.
You know? You just know that you’re the one that’s kind of dragging everything down.
Making everything harder. I’ve never liked that feeling. I don’t want to be a burden.”
“You’re not a burden to me,” he said. “I went looking for you.”
She wrinkled her nose, rolled her shoulders back and let out a long sigh. “Goddamn it. Why do you have to go being emotional like that? I thought you were like me.”
“Dead inside?”
“There you go,” she said, reclining back in her chair and looking out at the view. “Thanks for coming and finding me.”
“You know, if you’re looking for a different sort of future, maybe it’s here. Maybe you can find something that you want in Mustang River.”
She shrugged. “That would be nice. But I have no idea what it would be. Also, it’s not exactly world travel, I’m just a few towns away.”
“Yeah, I hear you. But sometimes a change of scenery is all you need. And we’ve got pretty good scenery.”
After that, they just sat there in silence. Because there wasn’t a whole lot more to say.