1001 Dark Nights: Bundle Nine

by Carrie Ann Ryan

  “Didn’t say you said that, sis.”

  “Please don’t call me that!”

  The words slip out before she can stop them, words she’s stopped herself from saying again and again over the years whenever Caleb referred to her as his sister or called Abel his dad. They sound as dismissive and possessive as she feared they would. Like she’s just some spoiled only child who doesn’t want to share her father.

  Explaining the far more complicated truth of the matter would fill her with shame. And besides, part of him must know.

  Is that why he’s staring at her now with the same intense gaze she used to dream about when they were teenagers?

  He’s certainly not doing that thing he usually does when he’s hurt and trying to hide it; he doesn’t cast his eyes to one side while he puckers his lips and looks for a task to distract himself with. Instead, he stares at her as if he’s waiting for her to explain, waiting for her to take them back to the night on the boat dock before everything changed.

  She can’t look into those blue eyes for very long without the world feeling like it doesn’t have an up or a down anymore. So she takes a sip of beer instead.

  “I already called the bank while you were in the bathroom,” he says. “No more automatic deposits into the operating fund. Not until we get this cleaned up. And I’m sorry to lay this on you this hard, Amber, but Joel won’t give two shits about this place if there’s nothing in that operating fund for him to spend on his band.”

  She doesn’t need him to say the rest, that Joel doesn’t care about her either. The only thing that makes this easier to accept is the dawning realization that Joel isn’t really capable of caring about anyone except himself.

  Good luck, Mary. Hope you used protection!

  “So that’s it?” she asks. “One call and the deposits stop?”

  “They’re not stopping. They’re going into my checking account. I’ll pay the bills myself until we kick Joel out of the LLC.”

  “You can do that? I mean, is that really how Dad set up the trust?”

  “Yep,” he answers.

  “So this whole time you could have raided that trust fund with a phone call and instead you were driving trucks and working oil fields?”

  “Not the whole time. A few years back I was a hand on a big spread outside Surrender, Montana. Didn’t you get my postcards?”

  Yeah, and who sends postcards anymore? she almost says. But she answers her own question instantly—people who are afraid of e-mail because it gives them too much space to talk about forbidden feelings.

  “Still,” she says.

  “Abel trusted me to make the right call. The right call was giving you and Joel a shot. And giving you and Joel a shot meant giving Joel a shot at running this place. Also, it seemed like you loved him.”

  “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?” she says.

  “I’ve never thought anything of the kind, Amber.”

  “You, Dad. You both knew. That’s why you set up the trust like that. You both knew Joel was awful and you were just too afraid to say—”

  “That’s not true, Amber. We would’ve had doubts about anybody, anybody you were going to marry, especially someone who thought he was good enough to run the family business. If we’d had any idea what a shit Joel was going to turn out to be, we wouldn’t have let him within ten feet of the house. Or you.”

  “I still feel like an idiot,” she whispers.

  “Well, that’s a bunch of bull. You have to try for stuff, especially when it comes to marriage.”

  “Got a lot of experience in the marriage area, huh?”

  Now Caleb does look away quickly.

  When he turns his back to her and opens the nearest register, she realizes he’s not hurt. He’s hiding something.

  “Wait a minute,” she says. “Wait just a minute. You got married?”

  She looks to the hands he’s suddenly counting bills with. No ring.

  “Did you really get married without telling us?” she asks.

  “It was a spur of the moment thing.”

  “Like a Vegas spur of the moment thing?”

  “No!”

  “Are you still married?”

  “No!”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  He shakes his head at the register, but he doesn’t say anything.

  She remembers the way he acted at her own wedding, how uncomfortable he looked inside the suit her father had bought for him just a few weeks before. He’d never been a big drinker, probably because of what alcohol had done to his father, but he’d shotgunned so many Coronas during the first twenty minutes of the reception, she’d been afraid he was going to embarrass himself. Instead, he ended up silent and sullen and rooted to a far corner of the reception hall where he ignored the flirtations of a dozen different women. Every few minutes, she’d caught him staring at her. And then there’d been his curt good-bye—a brief peck on the cheek for her, and for Joel, a hard clap on the back followed by the words, “You break her heart and I’ll rip you to fucking shreds, dude.” And then he was gone before either she or her new husband could remark that his parting words were the kind of thing an ex-boyfriend might say, not an adopted brother.

  Maybe Caleb had wanted to spare her the same discomfort, the same storm of conflicted feelings, by not telling her about his spur of the moment wedding.

  Maybe he was trying to spare her now by not giving her the details.

  “I want details,” Amber says.

  “It was lonely work I was doing. She was transitioning away from someone else.”

  “You mean rebounding.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Rebounding. Whatever. We parted as friends. Maybe because we didn’t have a bar to fight over.”

  “How’d you meet her?”

  “I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair,” she mumbles, sipping her beer.

  “What doesn’t seem fair?” he says, cocking one eyebrow and giving her a sidelong look while he counts bills.

  “I don’t know. Having the end of my whole marriage laid out on the sidewalk outside for you like road kill, and I just ask for a few details and suddenly you’re like—”

  “That is so like you, Amber.”

  “What? What’s so like me?”

  “That’s what people call a false equivalency.”

  “False equivalency? That’s not a Caleb expression. Where’d you learn that one? Your ex-wife? What was she? A college professor?”

  “She was a scheduler I worked with up in North Dakota. They’ve barely got any pipeline up there so I was doing truck pickups from fracking platforms all day long. It started with radio talk and then moved on to dinner.”

  And then all those hard muscles of yours flexing as you bring yourself down onto the body of some strange woman and—

  “And then marriage,” she adds to distract herself from this image.

  “Uh huh. But no baby carriage. And no white wedding I didn’t invite you to either. So stop acting all butthurt and drink your beer. I’m here to save the day, remember?”

  “Butthurt. Now there’s a Caleb expression.”

  “Glad to see you haven’t lost your mouth, sis,” he says.

  Done counting the money, he bumps the register drawer shut with one hip.

  This time she doesn’t ask him not to call her sis again. But she can see the challenge in his eyes. Did he use the term again on purpose? Does he want her to snap at him again for using it so that he can finally, after all these years, come right out and ask her why she really hates it when he refers to her as his sister?

  “So here we are,” Caleb finally says. “Pushing thirty and both divorced. Abel Watson was a helluva man but he sure didn’t teach us how to stay married, did he?”

  She knows he’s kidding, but his words cut deep. The cocky grins fades from his expression as soon as he sees the look on her face.

  “Hey,” he says quietly. “That— Shit, that came out w
rong. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” she whispers.

  Amber allowed herself a few minutes of tears after they all filed back into the bar. But she’d been in the bathroom alone. Not sitting at the bar in front of Caleb.

  He's resting one hand on top of hers, so gently she almost didn't notice at first. She stares at it. Tells herself to look up into his eyes because his eyes will tell her what this sudden touch actually means. But she can't. She just stares at his powerful, veined hand, hears her next words as if some other version of her has spoken them.

  “When a man won’t sleep with his wife, that’s a problem, right? I mean, she should know something’s wrong… Right?”

  He removes his hand so quickly, she’s left to wonder if he thinks that touching her in any way when she simply mentions sex might seal them together in some awkward or painful way.

  “Maybe,” Caleb says.

  His Adam’s apple bobs. He sucks in a quick breath through his nose and grips the counter on either side of him.

  “We don’t usually talk about sex stuff,” he finally says with a startling blend of tension and hunger in his voice, the same way he’d tell a woman she was wearing a pretty dress even though he was really thinking of what she’d look like once he’d pulled her out of it.

  “It’s a simple question, Caleb.”

  “You’re asking the wrong one.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’re asking if it’s your fault. You’re asking if you should take on the burden of a man like Joel. The answer’s no. Scratch that. The answer’s hell no. Kick his ass to the curb and get the hell out. But don’t take responsibility for his failings. Not now, not ever. Feelings aren’t a choice. Cheating is. If he was half a man, he would have come to you about the stuff that was making him want to cheat six months before he ever did it. If he were a real man, he would have copped to the fact that the stuff that was making him want to cheat probably didn’t have a damn thing to do with you.”

  For the first time in years, she allows herself to gaze into Caleb’s eyes, those beautiful, dazzling blue eyes. Her brother’s blue eyes. And for the first time in a while, this knowledge doesn’t dim her fantasies of what it would be like to taste his lips again, to rock forward into his powerful embrace.

  She allows her mind to swim in the memory of that long ago night before everything changed, when the two of them were brought together by the promise of becoming something altogether different than what they are today.

  Caleb stares right back. Has he gone back to the boat dock of her father’s lake house?

  Is he remembering what it felt like to gather her T-shirt into his fists in those last blissful moments before her father’s cry pierced the dark?

  It’s no matter. Her father’s voice returns just as it always does in moments like these, with the exact same tone he’d used with her that one time they were hiking and he overturned a log with a snake coiled under it.

  Back away, girl, he’d say. Back away, right now.

  Caleb’s had his moments of aggression over the years, but he’s no snake.

  Still, the ghost of her father stands between them now. Her father’s wishes. Her father’s plans.

  Her phone vibrates on the bar in front of her.

  It’s a text from Belinda asking if she’s okay.

  “I need to get back to work,” she says.

  “Not sure you should be driving right now,” Caleb says.

  “I bet. You’re the one who just served me a beer even though I told you I had a martini at work.”

  “Is that why you want to get back? Your boss has better well drinks?”

  “My boss doesn’t serve well drinks.”

  “I forget. She’s a fancy lady.”

  “She’s got a fancy house. She’s practically a cowgirl at heart. Kinda like your ex-wife, it sounds like.”

  “Uh huh. Julio’ll get someone to drive you. Or I could drive you.”

  Alone in the car with Caleb. The thought makes her head spin. Amazing how many times in her life she’s avoided being alone with him for more than ten or fifteen minutes. The effort became so commonplace when they were younger that it took Caleb leaving town for her to realize how much it had exhausted her.

  “Belinda’s got a driver,” she says too quickly, like she’s trying to protect herself from the fact that Caleb is just being a good guy.

  “Suit yourself,” he says.

  “Thank you. For everything.”

  “Sure thing,” he says.

  “I’d give you a hug, but…”

  “I’m behind the bar. Right. Don’t worry about it.”

  She picks up her phone in one hand and gives him a weak wave with the other. A few paces from the bar, she turns. He hasn’t moved an inch. He’s staring at her with one hand resting on the counter next to the register.

  “Where are you staying?” she asks.

  “Old friend’s letting me crash with him for a while.”

  “Where?”

  “Denton.”

  “Denton? That’s far!”

  “Yeah, well, looks like I’ll be looking for a place closer in now. Closer to this place, anyway.”

  “Keep me posted,” she says.

  “Sure thing, sis.”

  She steps through the entrance. On the sidewalk, she sucks in a deep, hungry breath of humid air.

  She’s not drunk. But Caleb’s right. She shouldn’t drive. And she wonders now if the real reason he put that beer in front of her was because he didn’t want her to leave at all.

  Then

  Standing on the tip of the dock, Amber watches Caleb race up the cedar steps toward her dad. They’re about to smack into each other when her dad seizes Caleb by his shoulders, halting him mid-stride.

  Maybe she was wrong about the sadness in her father’s voice a few seconds before.

  Maybe he really is about to whoop Caleb within an inch of his life for giving her a kiss that made her forget her name. But violence isn’t her father’s style. At least not when she’s around. But it is her father’s style to pull the Band-Aid off in one swift motion. That’s why it takes him a few seconds to deliver the awful news.

  After promising to stay sober thirty days, Caleb’s father snuck out to his local watering hole where his mom found him on his favorite barstool and literally dragged him out into the parking lot. The tussle that ensued might have ended uneventfully in any other environment, but on the side of a busy freeway it sent them both into the path of an eighteen-wheeler, killing them instantly.

  She has never seen her father deliver news this terrible before. She’s got no sense of what he’s going to do now that the words are out.

  A wail of pure anguish rips from Caleb, filled with more pain than any fifteen-year-old should be allowed to feel. Her father throws his arms around the boy, so tightly it looks as if he’s afraid the news will literally drive Caleb apart. In that moment, her love for her dad grows roots nothing will be able to dig up.

  She joins them, holding up the right side of Caleb’s suddenly boneless body while her father holds up the left. The three of them struggle up the steps as Caleb’s sobs rend her soul. But a part of her knows the crying is good and healthy, even if the cause is horrible. Caleb’s releasing all the pain and anger he’s kept bottled up for years now, and Amber and her father are right there to help him through it.

  “Get him to bed,” her dad whispers as soon as they’re inside.

  In the guest room, Caleb collapses onto the mussed comforter, curls into a fetal position, and starts to cry harder when she curls up behind him and drapes one arm over his side. She keeps her own tears as quiet as possible. That only seems right.

  In the living room her father makes a frantic-sounding series of phone calls. She can only make out every few words. He’s booking flights, it sounds like, or maybe he’s just breaking the news to people. She’s not sure.

  Because they’re spooning, she doesn’t see him reach up to where her hand is resting against h
is chest. Instead, she feels his fingers close around hers and she returns his grip.

  She has no words for him as powerful as simply being there with him, beside him in the dark. When staying silent becomes too much for her, she gently kisses the back of his neck. He gives her fingers a little squeeze in response.

  The house is silent. She’s not sure how much time has passed.

  Suddenly her dad’s silhouette blocks the light from the hallway. With careful steps he moves into the darkened bedroom. He sets a glass of water on Caleb’s nightstand, grips the boy’s shoulder, studies him through the shadows.

  “Making arrangements to get you home, son,” her dad says. “I’m going to go with you, get you through everything you need to do, ’kay?”

  “Yes, sir,” Caleb croaks.

  “I need Amber for a minute. You going to be okay in here for a few?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She follows her father downstairs to the living room.

  On the muted television, Dave Letterman cracks a joke and a faraway audience of people laugh silently. The sight seems obscene given what’s happening, so she looks away from it quickly as if it’s burned her eyes.

  In a hushed whisper, her father says, “My buddy Dale Parsons is at his place on the other side of the lake and he flew his Cessna up. He’ll fly us back to Dallas.”

  She’s not surprised that her father is all business in this moment. Her mother has explained it to her countless times—this is how her father loves people. He organizes; he manages. She figures he’s avoiding eye contact because he doesn’t want her to see that he’s been crying.

  “Okay,” she whispers. “Should I get my things?”

  “No, you’re staying,” he says quickly, as if this were an obvious fact she’d simply overlooked. “I know you hate being here alone so Miss Lita, Dale’s wife, she’s coming over to stay with you. You remember her, right? You met her at Fourth of July last year. Remember?”

  “I remember,” she says. But her own voice sounds far away suddenly. Something else is happening here, and she’s not sure what. “Who’s going to bring me back to Dallas?”

  “I just spoke to your momma and she’s going to cut her visit to her sister short and take Southwest in tomorrow. She'll probably be here by the afternoon. I’ll leave the SUV up at the airport so y’all can drive it back to Dallas. No need for you to rush either. There’s gonna be a lot he and I are going to have to deal with as soon as we get back. A whole helluvalot.”