Anywhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories, #3)

by Susan Fanetti

  Literally the only person in the state of Idaho who knew her and wasn’t expecting her to disappear again was Reese.

  She deserved it, but it still sucked. And she meant to prove them all wrong and make them eat their doubt with a side of shame. Which was why her weird mood and restive thoughts of that morning had her in such a snit. Thoughts like that scared her. It was too early to see cracks in this new life. She hadn’t gotten comfortable in it yet.

  “Where’s the rest of the fam today?” she asked, seeking safe territory for a conversation.

  “Gabe’s home with the baby. Matthew and I are havin’ boy time, right?” Again, Matthew nodded and grinned. Heath turned his smile on Gigi, her attack on his child forgiven. “He’s not sure yet he likes this whole baby-sister situation.”

  “How old is Maria?”

  “Two months. She’s not so much fun to play with yet.”

  “Well, as a baby sister myself, Matthew, I can say they turn out okay.”

  Matthew probably didn’t understand—or hell, maybe he did—but he smiled and nodded again.

  “Are you looking for a costume?” she asked him.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Heath set him on the floor and took his hand. “Tell Miss Gigi what you want to be.”

  “Tewbacca!”

  Gigi laughed. “Great choice! I think you’ll be a perfect Chewbacca. C’mon. I know exactly where to look.”

  *****

  Jasper Ridge was so small that everything in town, from one corner to its opposite, was within walking distance. The Outfitters was about a five-minute walk from the Jack; both were in Old Town, the part of Ridge Road that was the origin of the settlement. The white settlement, anyway—the Shoshone had roamed this land for millennia before the first hard-soled boot had made a print in the dust.

  Gigi closed the Outfitters at six that evening, with Brenda, a town girl still in high school, who had seniority and was basically Gigi’s boss for the last couple hours of their shift, after Randall went home. She was a nice kid, but it sucked to be told what to do by a seventeen-year-old. And then the totals had been off. Brenda had run them three times with three different amounts, and she got flustered and defensive and tried to blame Gigi for the drawer being off. When Gigi offered to try, and got the totals reconciled, Brenda had been doubly defensive and downright bitchy. It sucked twice as hard to get told off by a seventeen-year-old, especially when she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  It was after seven before they clocked out, more than half an hour past their scheduled shift. Randall would have a twitch about that. All in all, it hadn’t been a great day.

  She walked along Ridge Road in the dark of a late-October evening, cold and depressed. Her birthday was in two days. She’d be thirty-three. Her life here in town was hardly different than it had been when she’d left at twenty-two, except that she was a pariah now, and the experiences she’d had in the meanwhile were turning to smoke. They meant nothing.

  The lot at the Jack was about half full, normal for this time of evening, and this point in the week. Crunching over the gravel on her way around the building, she saw Frannie’s Honda. Dammit.

  She and Reese had bickered a couple times about Frannie’s drinking, spinning their wheels at an impasse. He wouldn’t stop serving her because he insisted it was safer for her to drink at the Jack, under his eye, and hers, than to refuse her and send her off to get drunk somewhere else. At least at the Jack, they could be sure she didn’t drive when she’d had too much.

  He was right, but it felt wrong. Was she supposed to just let her sister drink herself into an early grave? Was she supposed to just let Tyson get raised in that kind of house?

  Apparently so. She was helpless to stop booze from ruining her family. God, she hated booze so very much. Yet she lived above the town bar. With the town bartender.

  Reese drank more now than he used to, as well. She’d heard enough stories about how he’d been after she’d left to know it was her fault. He drank while he worked and usually had a buzz on when he came upstairs. A few times, he’d been actually drunk, though not sloppily so. She hadn’t brought that up yet, seeing as it was her fault.

  She came around the back corner of the Jack and looked up at the deck. And froze in her tracks.

  The deck lights were on, little balls strung around the railing, and a lantern-shaped sconce on the wall by the door. Reese sat on the top step. Squeezed in right beside him, her red hair shining in the light, was Ellen Emerson. While Gigi watched, Reese smiled and said something, and Ellen laughed and rocked toward him, bumping her shoulder into his arm.

  She backed up fast, around the corner, and slammed her back against the side of the building. Jesus, were they—was he—had they—

  Her thoughts were a hurricane. Her first, strongest, overwhelming impulse was to run, to run all the way, to give up and get out. She didn’t have that much stuff in his apartment, nothing she couldn’t replace or live without. Her pack was hooked on her shoulder, everything she needed, even her passport. She could disappear again right now.

  But her bike was parked under the deck; she couldn’t get to it without making herself known. There wouldn’t be a bus stopping anywhere close until sometime tomorrow.

  She stood there, horrified and heartbroken, her body like stone and her mind spinning out of control, until one thought was tossed out of the storm and landed up front: Reese was hers. He’d been hers. He was still hers. She didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t want to lose him. She wanted to fight.

  Sucking in all the courage that the air could carry, Gigi rounded the corner again. Reese and Ellen had stood and come down to the foot of the stairs. They were face to face; Ellen had a hand on his arm. While she watched, Reese bent down and kissed her cheek.

  Maybe it was too late to fight.

  She walked forward, crunching on the gravel. They both turned toward her and split guiltily apart.

  Oh, she was dying. Inside, she was dying.

  “Mac! Hey, baby,” Reese said.

  “Hi, Gigi,” Ellen said at the same time.

  Gigi said nothing. She stared at Reese and pretended Ellen wasn’t there.

  Ellen cleared her throat. “Um, okay. I’ll—okay. Good night, guys.”

  Her car was parked back here. She walked to it, but Gigi didn’t watch. She kept her eyes on Reese, and he kept his eyes on her, until they heard the car start up, back out, and pull away.

  “Mac, it’s not what you’re thinkin’.”

  Gigi walked past him and went up the stairs. He ran up after her, making the stairs shake, and followed her into the apartment.

  Once she was in there, she didn’t know what to do. The impulse to run was as strong as ever, but it warred with the impulse to have the one thing in her life that made her feel steady: Reese. She wanted to escape all this bad shit—the drunkenness, the anger, the judgment, the disappointment, and God, this horrible, jarring betrayal she felt now—but she didn’t want to lose what was good.

  Reese’s hand circled her arm. “Mac. It was nothin’.”

  She turned and found his eyes. “What was it?”

  “Ellen just ... she had some stuff to say is all.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s not important.”

  With a scoff that burned her throat, Gigi made a decision. She carried her pack to the bedroom. Reese followed. When she unzipped her pack and dropped it on the bed, then opened one of the drawers she’d put her few clothes in, he grabbed her from behind and yanked her away.

  “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” He spun her to face him. No longer was he tentative and guilty; now he was furious, his face red and his brow furrowed. “You think you’re fuckin’ leaving?”

  “Why was she here?” she shouted back at him, choking on tears. “What did you do?”

  “I talked to her! She wanted to talk! I owed her that much. But I didn’t let her in. We sat on the deck and talked because I didn’t want her to come in. We were together
for three months, she had the run of this place, and tonight I made her sit on the steps because I didn’t want her here in our space! Yours and mine! Goddammit, Mac! I don’t deserve this, you runnin’ out the second somethin’ goes a little sideways!”

  But if Reese was sideways, when everything else was upside down, she had no place to be. Gigi’s legs wouldn’t hold her much longer. She turned and plopped to the side of the bed. Reese slammed the drawer closed and stood before her, his arms crossed, his chest heaving with fury.

  “Do you love me or do you not?” he asked. The question was like a threat.

  Her throat was too full of painful tears to let words through. She dropped her head, closed her eyes, and wanted to die.

  “Mac, goddammit.”

  “I love you.” Almost no sound came out, but Reese heard. He crouched low and set his hands on her knees.

  “Baby, look at me.” She opened her eyes. He saw something in them that cooled his anger. His hand came up and slid along her cheek. “I love you. I have loved you for almost fourteen years. I don’t want anybody but you. I have you back, and I’m never going to do anything to hurt this chance. I swear.”

  His thumb brushed the track of tears from her cheek. “I need a promise from you, though. There has to be trust both ways. I need you to promise me you won’t pack up and run again. When you feel overwhelmed, talk to me. If we have to end, we talk it through and you stay put until then, at least. I need that promise. I can’t live wondering if you’re gonna bolt every time things get hard.”

  “You’re the only thing in my life here that’s not hard. If it’s hard between us, I don’t have anything.”

  He came up and sat beside her on the bed. “Are you saying you can’t make me that promise?”

  “I promise. But I’m scared.”

  He let out a long sigh and hooked his arm around her shoulders. “You know, so am I. You about gave me a heart attack just now.”

  “I’m sorry. It was a crappy day. And then I saw you and—you won’t tell me what you were talking about?”

  “It’s not fair to her to say, and I owe her that. She needed to get some things off her chest, and I owed her that, too. But what you saw was closure. Okay?”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m just overly sensitive, I guess. Everybody’s watching, waiting for me to fuck up again. It’s wearing a sore spot in my head.”

  “So prove them wrong. The gossip’ll die off, and people will warm up. If you stick it out and show them you’re really home.”

  Gigi felt raw and exhausted and not entirely comforted, but she wrapped her arms around Reese’s waist and let his embrace warm and settle her.

  “I need us to be good,” she murmured after a stretch of quiet.

  He kissed her head and rested his cheek there. “We are good, Mac. You just gotta talk to me.”

  As if it were so simple.

  Chapter Eleven

  About twice as many people called Jasper Ridge home as lived in the actual town. Those people lived on ranches and farms, or on the reservation, or just on a couple of acres, spread out from their neighbors. In consideration of the children who lived flung out like that, and their parents, who spent their money in Jasper Ridge, the town celebrated Halloween with a Harvest Festival on the last Saturday of October, and the Old Town Trick-or-Treat Party on the actual evening of Halloween.

  Both events were big nights at the Apple Jack Saloon. Reese didn’t like most of the big town events, but he was involved in all of them in some way or another. He could hardly avoid it; the Jack was the town center more than the town hall or even either of the churches in the town limits, the Jasper Ridge Assembly of God or St. Paul’s.

  For all town events, Reese offered cheap draws and shots all day. For the Harvest Festival, he let the organizers stage the Apple Cider competition in the bar. But it was Halloween night that things got really hopping at the Jack. After the costumed kids roamed Old Town collecting candy from the shops, and had their costume competition in the town hall, teens from Jasper Ridge High supervised a huge sleepover in the high school gym, with games and movies and snacks. Just about every parent in and around Jasper Ridge had a night off on October 31. And those who didn’t run home and get naked made their way to the Jack. No night of the year was busier for Reese. Not even St. Patrick’s Day. Or Founders’ Day.

  Gigi absolutely hated it. With the fire of a million suns.

  Like the other childless employees at the Outfitters, she was scheduled to work through the trick-or-treat portion of the evening. In costume. After a six-hour shift in the store already. The kids were pretty cute, in all their little costumes, with their plastic pumpkins and hand-decorated paper bags to collect their loot. Dressed like Wonder Woman, Gigi oohed and ahhed over little witches and cowboys. When a brother and sister combo, both maybe four to six years old, came up to her dressed in ‘Indian’ costumes—complete with ‘war paint’—Gigi made herself smile and speak sweetly to the kids, but gave their mother—whom she didn’t recognize—as much stinkeye as she could muster. Her culture was not a fucking Halloween costume.

  The store was, of course, a mess afterward, and it took five employees forty-five minutes to put everything to rights so they could open tomorrow.

  Gigi was refolding a table full of Wranglers that had been knocked all to hell, when Andrea, one of her fellow employees, came over with the folding board and helped. Gigi didn’t need the folding board, not for jeans like this. It was difficult not to get a sharp fold.

  “Thanks,” she said as Andrea started folding. She was dressed as Belle, in a poufy yellow ballgown, with her brown hair elaborately styled.

  “Sure.” Andrea finished a pair of jeans and added, “You look so grumpy. Don’t you like Halloween?”

  Nope. Her birthday was three days before, a date which had fallen directly on the Harvest Festival Saturday a few times, as was the case this year, but regardless, it had always seemed to diminish her day, as people were deeply immersed in their big town plans. Not that her birthdays had ever been all that spectacular, and she knew people with birthdays close to Christmas felt her irritation doubly, but she’d grown up always mildly to moderately annoyed that her day had been hijacked by Halloween.

  She would have hated her birthday in any case, wherever it had fallen on the calendar. All her birthday parties, from the time she could remember, had been little more than excuses for her parents to get wildly drunk with their friends. With the addition of a cake and candles. And sometimes a present. But mostly just drunkenness, with all the consequent puking and pissing and passing out.

  This year, Reese had taken her into Boise for a fancy steak dinner, and he’d given her a gorgeous, huge arrangement of red roses, and it was one of her best birthdays ever—the other contenders had also been shared with him. But still, she didn’t like her birthday, or the Harvest Festival, or Halloween, or, basically, the whole last week of October.

  In response to Andrea, though, Gigi shrugged and said, “It’s okay.”

  “Well, you look awesome in that costume. Are you wearing it to the Jack? You totally should. Reese will absolutely die!”

  Andrea was the first person who was kind of almost friend-like in Gigi’s new start in Jasper Ridge. She was seven years younger, but that meant she’d been too young back in the day to have paid attention to Gigi’s drama or to have formed an opinion about it. She’d heard all the renewed gossip, of course, but she took Gigi as she was now, without loading all the old baggage on her first. She was much more caught up in the idea of a love story than a redemption arc.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t like the idea of walking through the Jack like this. The place will be full of drunks.”

  “True. You think Colby will be there?”

  Colby was a ranch hand on the Twisted C, the Cahills’ place. The Cahill family were by far the richest people in Jasper Ridge, and probably way up high on the list of richest families in Idaho. They basically ran the town, but for the most part they weren
’t assholes about it. And power like theirs could be good. In the old days, that power had kept Gigi’s people from being herded away. These days, the Cahills about singlehandedly kept corporate farming out of Jasper Ridge.

  They also kept quite a few local people employed. Like Andrea’s crush.

  “No doubt he will be. I bet he’d love your costume. You look beautiful. If you want to go ahead and clock out, I’ll finish these on my own.”

  Andrea looked around at the other employees still working on the closing tasks. “You think he’ll let me clock out?”

  Randall was, overall, a pretty decent manager, but there was only so decent a retail manager ever was. “I think you’re already over your time sheet, and the rest of us are here to finish. He’ll be glad to get somebody off the clock.”

  “Okay, I’ll ask! Thanks!” She gathered up her bright yellow skirts and hoofed it to the office door. Gigi went back to the jeans and kept folding.

  *****

  The town was still busier than usual this late when Gigi walked home. Other shops—especially the really popular ones, like Peggy’s Chocolates & Candies—were still working on cleanup after the onslaught of sugar-crazed children, and a few teens roamed along the street, on the hunt for mischief.

  Gigi had opted not to stroll down Ridge Road dressed like Wonder Woman, especially since it was now below forty degrees. Hunched into her hoodie and leather jacket, she hurried along the boardwalk, drawing little notice.

  As she expected, the Jack’s lot overflowed onto and across the road. The jukebox blared over a steady drone of people talking and laughing, partying. All those parents freed up at once to do what they wanted, and all the usual people who spent so much time at the Jack they should pay rent.

  Gigi stopped at the edge of the lot and studied the building. She gnawed at her bottom lip and considered her options. She would rather be anywhere on earth than in the Jack on Halloween night. Drunks made her tense and depressed, and grossed out. Their happiness was phony. The whole party was a sham. Booze pretended things were okay, no matter how bad they sucked. And then it made things worse.