She huffed and walked away. For a few steps, Reese thought she meant to cut and run again, but she stopped and spun back to face him. “I don’t know. Okay? I don’t know. Nothing makes any more sense to me now than it did when I left.”
“I told you it wouldn’t.”
Her chuckle had no humor at all. “You think this is a good time to say ‘I told you so’?”
“As good a time as any. I told you back then you wouldn’t find what you needed out there.”
“How could you know what I need when I can’t even figure it out?”
“What I know is nobody ever figured anything out by running away.”
“That’s crap. Sometimes running away is the thing that saves your life.”
“Is that what you were doing? Saving your life?”
She turned away again, and walked to the fire pit. They’d had a fire earlier, when the guys had been there, but Reese had smothered the embers completely before he’d turned in. She kicked at one of the big stones of the ring. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Those words cut deep. Reese went to her and stood at her side. “Then why’d you come home now?”
“Maw died.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But her funeral was almost three weeks ago. I was there. You didn’t come back for that. Why did you come now?”
He’d struck a sore spot; she gave him a furious squint and kicked the stone hard enough to make it rock in place. Finally, she muttered, “I don’t know.”
All her answers were nothing more than bigger questions. “Let’s try something easier. Why are you here right now? Why’d you come looking for me?”
“I wanted to talk.”
“Okay. About what? You don’t seem to have any answers for the things I need to know.”
“I just ... I wanted you to know ... I didn’t leave you. It wasn’t you I had to get away from.”
He would have said he believed that. Until two days ago—maybe until ten minutes ago—he would have said he knew that she’d loved him when she left, and it was the grief of losing her dad, and the trauma her family was always drowning in, her fear of falling into her family’s bad patterns and her guilt for having a chance to make a better life for herself with him, all of that and her young age, only twenty-two, had boiled into a toxic fog she’d been desperate to escape.
He’d believed she loved him and wanted him. She’d said it back then, that night.
But she’d still run, on the eve of their wedding. It had been that event causing the crisis that broke her. The thought of marrying him had been the last straw. And then it had been him, alone and heartbroken, telling their friends, his mother, her family, the caterer, the band, telling them all that there would be no wedding because his bride had fled the scene. It had been him waiting all summer for her to get her head screwed on straight, him checking his messages fifty times a day, waiting to hear back from her, him languishing for months between worry and betrayal, him who’d finally hired a private investigator and discovered that she was fine and leaving a trail all across the goddamn globe, that she’d simply decided to cut ties with him.
Now that she was back, after all this time, without any answers or explanations, one thing was becoming painfully clear: she had indeed been running from him. From all the other shit, too, but also from him.
Suddenly, Reese was completely exhausted. “Okay, well, you’ve told me.”
“Reese ...” She reached out, but he took a step back.
“You should probably get going. We’re supposed to get a light frost tonight. It’ll be a cold ride back to the rez.”
Her shoulders sagged, and her hair fell forward. Reese caught himself before his hand brushed it back from her face.
“Okay,” she said, almost too softly to be heard. “Okay.”
She walked away, back to her bike.
He stood where he was until he couldn’t hear the engine any longer.
Chapter Seven
Reese poured a glass of club soda and added a twist of lime. He set the glass on a bar napkin in front of Heath and poured Logan’s bourbon. Heath had given up booze a couple years back, and it was a good thing. Heath was happy now, married and in love, with two little kids, living his best life, but he had a lot of very dark pain in his past, and he was an angry and violent drunk. Reese had spent years breaking up his friend’s fights inside the Jack or in the parking lot. Among other places.
A lot of people in Jasper Ridge were heavy drinkers, and almost all of them did a good portion of their heavy drinking in Reese’s bar. He did what he could to draw a line and make sure they were still on their feet when they left his watch, and that they didn’t drive if they were too far gone, but he wasn’t the town’s babysitter. He and Mac had come together over an argument on just that point, and it wasn’t the only time they’d fought it out. It had been a recurring topic, seeing as he owned a bar and her family was full of drunks.
His feelings on the matter were simple: his customers were grownups. If they had troubles big enough to need drowning and could pay for the drink to do it, that was their prerogative. He tried to keep them from hurting other people; they could do what they wanted to themselves.
For his part, growing up in the Jack, he’d seen every sort of drunkenness, and he hadn’t been a fan. In high school, booze hadn’t had the allure for him that it had had for his buddies. He’d partaken, because peer pressure, and he’d hosted, but he’d been more likely to nurse a couple bottles all night than line up for a go at a beer bong. Even owning a bar, he hadn’t sampled the wares too much. Before the wedding-that-wasn’t, when he was thirty-one, he could have counted on his hands the number of times he’d been truly drunk.
The weeks after Mac left, however, were mostly blur and blackness, and he’d been a regular drinker since. Sometimes troubles needed drowning.
It was a Tuesday evening in October, and the Jack was quiet. Mondays and Tuesdays were the quietest nights of the week. People were still recovering from the weekend, and the new week hadn’t usually gone totally to shit yet. Tonight, besides Heath and Logan, who were waiting on the rest of the crew, there was Old Man Allen, holding up the far end of the bar, as usual, Cass Donner and a couple of his farmhand buddies, and a table of four guys he vaguely recognized but didn’t know. They came in sometimes but weren’t Jasper Ridge locals.
The only women in the Jack at this time were Kelly, the one waitress on shift, and Natalie Thomas, who’d been working for him for almost two weeks now. Alf, his cook, was alone in the kitchen, probably playing on his phone. Nobody was ordering food yet.
Reese twisted open a fresh beer and leaned on the bar by his friends. Logan was talking about a case his wife, Honor, was working on that was keeping her away from home more than he liked.
“Where is she now?” Reese asked. It was good to be talking about other people’s love lives again.
More than two weeks had passed since he’d been face to face with Mac, and the town seemed to be losing their interest in the drama between them. Because there wasn’t any drama, or anything else, between them. He saw her around town occasionally, but they hadn’t spoken since that night at the cabin. She’d taken a job as a clerk at Idahoan Outfitters. It appeared that she meant to stay.
He thought about her every day, all damn day, but she hadn’t made another move toward him, and he had no intention of moving toward her. If she wanted something from him, she’d have to come to him. She’d run, so she’d have to come back on her own.
“Wyoming,” Logan answered, “not far out of Cheyenne. There’s another Pastora ranch crowding out a bunch of small farmers there, and she’s talking to them, too.” Pastora Farms was a huge international corporation that got a lot of press for the way it was buying up family farms and ranches and merging them into factory-style operations. That kind of agriculture changed everything about a country community and made most of the people, and the livestock, worse off. Honor had her teeth in the idea that Pastora’s business practices were mor
e than merely amoral and unkind. She thought they were unethical and illegal as well, and she’d been building the case for months.
“Is she thinking about one of those class-action suits?”
“We’re not supposed to be talking about this, Loge,” Heath warned, casting a glance around the nearly empty saloon. There wasn’t anyone within earshot.
“Hey, Reese asked. I didn’t answer.” Logan nodded an answer at Reese and finished his bourbon. “I just wish I could go with her on more of these trips. I don’t like her scrounging around by herself in these places.”
“What do you think is gonna happen?” Reese refilled Logan’s bourbon. “It’s not like she’s doing some kind of covert ops. She’s just talkin’ to people.”
“Pastora is a multi-billion-dollar company, and they already have an image problem. They could make things hard on her. I don’t like it. But she gets her back up if I bring up my worries.”
Heath laughed. “You need to work on your delivery, brother. You try to argue her into doing what you want. Has that ever worked?”
“Sometimes.” Logan’s chuckle was sheepish. “I’m a work in progress, what can I say. Anyway, she’s home tomorrow.”
Natalie came up from the back and leaned on the edge of the bar. She was a pretty girl, with long black hair worn back in a ponytail. In Reese’s estimation, she wore her t-shirts too tight and her jeans too low, but if she weren’t Victor’s baby sister, he’d probably think she was hot. She was Victor’s baby sister, however, so his primary impulse was to want to tell her to cover up. She had a belly-button piercing, with a little dangling sparkly thing, for fuck’s sake.
“I finished wrapping the silverware, and I cleaned the bathrooms. Does anything need doing up here?”
They weren’t busy enough to need bussing or a mid-shift bar clean. Reese shook his head. “Why don’t you take a break. Go back and ask Alf to make you a cheeseburger or somethin’.”
She grinned, and looked like a little girl. “Thanks. Can I have cheese fries?”
“Knock yourself out, dumplin’.”
They watched her go. Kelly came up at the middle of the bar and said, “I need two Coors, two shots of Jack, and a Sea Breeze.”
“Sea Breeze?” He looked out over the bar to see when a chick had come in. Pearl Wilkes had taken a table near the door, with a couple men Reese didn’t recognize. They looked like dude ranch types, though—styled hair and shiny boots.
“She’s takin’ ‘em on two at a time now?” Heath rolled his eyes. “I guess it doubles her odds.”
“Easy, bro,” Logan retorted.
“Don’t take up for that bitch,” Heath lashed back.
None of their crew liked Pearl much. She was a local girl, younger than they, who’d been working at the Moondancer for years. She was on the hunt for a billionaire to carry her away from all this, but in the meantime, she’d been jerking their friend Victor back and forth. For years. The dumb fuck always came when she called, cleaned up her broken heart and got one of his own for his trouble when she landed on the next rich playboy to target.
She’d also turned on Heath’s wife, Gabe, during some trouble, so no, they didn’t like her much. Mac didn’t like her, either. She called her a ‘frenemy,’ which apparently meant someone who was generally nice but stabbed you in the back if doing so helped her out. Which summed Pearl up pretty well.
“Hey, you seen much of Ellen?” Heath asked. Ellen and Pearl had been pretty good friends most of their lives—Ellen had a high tolerance for other people’s bullshit—and they’d lived together in an apartment in Old Town for a few years, until Ellen had gotten promoted at the Moondancer, and then promoted again. Once she was Pearl’s boss, the friendship had soured.
Reese shook his head and finished off his beer. “Nah. I think that ran its course.” He’d seen her a few times, actually. She checked in on him every few days, but she was keeping her distance, romantically speaking. And who could blame her? The town was losing interest in the Reese & Gigi Show, but Reese himself was still mired in it. Ellen was well within her rights—and damn smart—to stay clear.
“Was goin’ good, I thought, until Geej rolled back into town.”
“Not talkin’ about it, Heath. Back off.” He swiped Heath’s empty glass off the bar and refilled it. Just then, Victor and Emmett came in. They both worked for a road construction company, and by the rumpled, grimy look of them, they’d come straight from a job. Victor caught sight of Pearl sitting with two dudes, and frowned.
Reese drew two pints of Coors and had them sitting on the bar when the guys sat down.
“Thanks, man. Nat’s workin’ tonight, right?” Victor asked as he put the glass to his mouth and took a long, long drink.
“Yeah. She’s on break now, getting dinner in back. Y’all wanna order up?” He pulled an order pad from under the bar. They all ordered the same as always—bison burgers for Logan and Heath, bacon cheeseburger for Victor and himself, and chicken nuggets for Emmett, who had eaten like a nine-year-old since he’d been one. Steak fries all around. He sent Kelly back with the ticket.
“How’s she doin’?” Victor asked, still talking of his sister.
“She’s good, Vic. The work’s not hard, or interesting, but she’s here and doing her job.”
“She’s actin’ normal? Hall ain’t been around, has he?”
Evan Hall was the leader of the Jasper Warriors, the reservation gang that cooked and sold meth. Natalie had gotten into her trouble when Hall had gotten into her. Reese didn’t know all the details of how Honor had gotten her off a federal drug charge with probation, but Victor had been on his baby sister like glue since her arrest.
“Evan Hall’s never stepped foot in the Jack. You know that.”
The Sawtooth Jasper Reservation had two factions: those who integrated with Jasper Ridge, going to school in town, working in town, making friends, and love, in town; and those who turned their back and kept all their lives within the reservation boundaries. Those factions were strongly, and sometimes violently, at odds, but the former made up a significantly larger part of the population. The Shoshone and the white settlers had forged an unusually friendly and supportive relationship in the beginning, and that amity had carried through the generations. It was why there was a Sawtooth Jasper Reservation at all.
Hall was an isolationist—in fact, now that his father was dead, he was the lead isolationist, as well as probably the most violent man on the reservation. He wanted nothing to do with Jasper Ridge, and he was hostile to those of his people who did. He didn’t even sell his little packets in town. Townies who wanted to get high had to go out to him, which was a dangerous proposition. He did all his trafficking to the west, from Boise into Oregon.
“I know. But Nat’s here, and he’s still tryin’ to get with her. Just ... just be careful, okay? Keep your eyes peeled.”
Heath dropped a hand on Victor’s shoulder. “We all have our eyes peeled, man. Nat’s not gonna get hurt on our watch. We got her back, and yours.”
That was the thing about these men: they had each other’s backs, and none of them ever questioned that truth. Whether it was gathering up and riding into the woods to drag his depressed ass out for a hunt, or keeping Heath from killing a man in a drunken rage, or watching out for Victor’s baby sister, these men were his family. They held each other up in their defeats, and they hoisted each other onto their shoulders in their victories.
This was the life he needed, and the life he loved. Though he wasn’t so lucky in romance, he’d hit the fucking jackpot in friendship. He’d leaned on that truth while Mac was away, and it wasn’t any less true now that she was back, no matter what she was in his life, if she was in it at all.
*****
Wednesday night was, as usual, the first busy night of the week. By Wednesday, people were starting to get harried. Even in dinky Jasper Ridge, work got stressful. None of Reese’s buddies came in, so he focused on his work, making the usual small talk and banter with hi
s regulars.
Around eleven, a wave caught the corner of his eye and he looked down the bar to see Frannie Lincoln. Mac’s sister. She was a pretty regular patron of the Jack, but Reese hadn’t seen her leaning on his bar since her sister had come back to town.
He went down the bar. “Hey, Frannie. How ya been?”
“Tired. Worked full shifts both jobs today.”
“You want a pint?”
She nodded and pushed a crumpled twenty to his side of the bar. “And start me off with a shot of JD, too. I need a head start.”
He poured her a shot. While she slugged it down, he tapped a pint of Coors Light. “You got trouble?” That family always had trouble.
With a shrug of her round shoulders, she pushed the shot glass to him. “Again.”
She really was starting fast tonight. He poured her another shot of Jack—and then went to take a couple orders elsewhere at the bar.
When he could, he scooped ice into a pint glass and filled it with water. He sat that glass next to Frannie’s beer. “What’s the trouble, dumplin’?”
“I’m a shit mom.”
“Don’t say that. Ty’s a great kid.” He’d met the boy only a couple times, and not for long, but he seemed sweet. Quiet, but sweet. Kids weren’t a thing Reese knew much about.
“He is a great kid. He’s happy, too. But he’s got ‘developmental delays.’” She said those two words like they were in a different language. “Clinic had a specialist in last week. Gigi made me take him. Meddling little bitch. Rolls into town after all this time, barely meets her nephew before she decides he’s retarded and blames me.”
Deciding not to dive into the snake pit of talking about Mac with her sister, he focused on the boy. “If he’s got some trouble, it doesn’t make you a bad mom. It’s not your fault.”
She looked up at him—same eyes as her sister, deep-set and nearly black, rimmed with supernaturally thick lashes. With a plain, blunt-edged fingernail, she tapped the pint glass of Coors Light. “It’s this. ‘Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.’” Her fingers curled into quotation-mark claws. “Drinkin’ while he was in me made him slow. So I guess that makes me a shit mom.”
Anywhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories, #3) Page 8
