The day scraped to a close, as frayed as the flakes of white paint on the shingles behind me. My home, cracking to settle. I squinted up at the barn’s weather vane as it pointed to me and then away. I wished I would dissolve in a whisper, passing like Texas dust in the sky.
Fallow ground is hard to break.
CADE
It seemed like God never let me catch a break.
In all of the papers in that envelope, there was one word that stuck out clear as day. It might as well have been painted in the sky.
Foreclosure.
I couldn’t find my father. I looked for him passed out in his bedroom, checked the backyard, even the basement. Since when did he go anywhere?
I sat waiting, numb, on the couch in the living room. He stumbled home around noon.
“Why didn’t you say something about this before?”
The question exploded out of me. I didn’t mean to be loud. I didn’t want him to know I was mad. That meant letting him have control over my emotions. And he didn’t deserve that.
It took my father a minute to focus on what I was holding. I shoved the papers against his chest.
“Got nuthin’ to do with you,” he said after a heavy silence. “Choice already been made.”
“Yeah, you chose to give up.”
“Cade, there’s nothing here.” My father spoke like his tongue was too big for his mouth. The whiskey on his breath was so strong it was like I was smelling it straight from the bottle.
“This farm’s dead. Been dead for a long time now. You know that.”
“Well, what do we do then?” I demanded.
“We let things take their course with the legal stuff, and when we gotta move, we move into an apartment in town or something.”
“You don’t know how to do anything but be a farmer.”
“I’ll work on someone else’s farm.” My father shrugged like he didn’t hate what he was saying with every fiber of his being.
“That’ll last,” I mumbled.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“No, say it.”
“You know you can’t drink on the job when someone else is paying you, right?”
My father let out a snort of disgust. “I don’t need my son lecturing me. First your mother, now you . . . Christ, this week.”
“Wait, what? You saw Mom?”
“Well, shit, son, we had to sign the damn papers at the courthouse. Course she was here.”
Sometimes words can hit you. I mean physically slap you in the face. My mother was here. And I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me. My dad didn’t tell me. No one thought I needed to know anything about anything.
“Why the hell didn’t you say so?”
My father stood up and placed his hands hard on the table. “She didn’t want to see you.”
“That’s not true.”
My dad gave me a nasty smirk. “Guess you don’t really know your mother.”
“You’re the one who made her leave. Not me.”
“Think what you want, son. She left us both . . . for a good-for-nothing cartel rat.”
Disgust filled my throat. “Like you’re any better? You’re a good-for-nothing alcoholic. You’re lucky I don’t leave too—”
Before I could even finish the sentence, his fist slammed into the side of my face. I wasn’t ready for it. I mean, I should have been, but I wasn’t. I was too caught up in all the stuff I was saying, so the force made me lose my balance, and I stumbled backward.
“You want to leave me?” He was huffing. “You wanna be like her?”
I managed to scramble up. I snaked my foot out against his ankles and kicked like I was punting a football. My dad went down like a bear hit with a tranquilizer dart. He let out a grunt but rolled right over and tackled me hard, pinning me down. He started slapping me lightly on the face, over and over.
“Oh, you wanna fight? Come on, show me what you got.”
I wound up and swung my fist against the side of his head. My father crumpled. He looked small. Drunk and sloppy.
Shaking, I felt for a pulse. There it was. There I was. I bolted out the door before he could get up.
For the first time ever, I’d hit him back hard. And now I couldn’t even bear to see what I’d done. Who beats up their own dad? Who leaves their own kid? How could my mother have come back to Tanner and not have seen me? How are we all so messed up?
Jane. I wanted to be with Jane.
JANE
I still couldn’t make myself pack up what little I had. I’d finally gotten around to at least dumping some clothes onto my sleeping bag. I kneeled down to start folding when I heard the tap-tap at the barn door that let me know not to worry—it was only Cade.
“Hi,” I said without turning around as I smoothed out one of my shirts.
“Hi.” His hello was cracked and raw. I looked over my shoulder with a start to see what was wrong.
“Oh my God. Cade, what happened to you?”
“I hit him. This time . . . I . . .”
The side of Cade’s head was smeared in blood. He was holding his ribs. He didn’t finish his sentence, just walked over and dropped to his knees in front of me so that we were the same level, half our height, kneeling there, staring at each other. I reached out and tentatively took his hands, and he melted right into me.
“What did he do? What did he do to you?” I repeated softly. I cradled my arms around him, and he let his head sink onto my shoulder, his face hidden in my neck.
“She was here,” he whispered.
“What . . . who?”
“My mother.”
“At the house? Now?”
“No. In Tanner. My dad . . . needed her to sign some papers about the farm. He’s foreclosing on the place. Bankrupt.”
“Oh no. Cade . . .”
“I couldn’t give two shits about the farm.”
“Then why—”
“She was here! Don’t you get it? I haven’t heard so much as a happy birthday from her. I don’t even know if I still have a working phone number for her, because she never answers. She left me. And she comes back, signs some papers, and leaves again.”
I shifted off of my knees to sit back on the ground. Of course I understood.
“I hate that when I look at myself, I can see my mom . . . more and more the older I get,” I started slowly and softly. “She had hair the same as mine. Well, mine the color it normally is. And my eyes when I see them in the mirror remind me of hers every day. I remember she met this guy, and they started going out and leaving me home alone, leaving me for so long it would be night and day and then night again, and I would get so hungry but there’d be nothing in the fridge. One day I ate toothpaste just to have something in my stomach.”
Cade’s ragged breathing evened up a bit as he listened to me.
“And then . . . one weekend,” I continued, “I was so excited because she said I was going on a trip. I remember her putting me in the car, and off I went with my aunt Nikki. And . . . she never came for me. So, yeah, I get it.”
“How old were you?” Cade asked.
“Almost five, maybe? I wasn’t in school yet,” I answered.
“So, that’s how it ended . . .”
“Are you kidding? That’s how it started. Aunt Nikki never left me at home. She brought me everywhere with her, and then . . . left me in the car. In the cold. In the heat. And then one night when she left me outside a bar, someone called the police, and then it was foster care.”
Cade’s eyes were fixed on mine.
“Every family I thought would be my ‘forever family’ . . . my aunt, every foster parent I dreamed was ‘the one’ . . . I was wrong,” I continued. “Something would happen. It always fell apart. My mother was only the first person to leave. E
verybody leaves me.”
“I didn’t,” Cade interrupted.
“No.” I looked back into Cade’s eyes and couldn’t break away. “No, you didn’t.”
I reached up with one of the towels from my laundry and went to dab off his head, but he caught my hand and wrapped it around the back of his neck instead.
Cade climbed toward me, still on his knees, leaning me gently back onto the pile of clean clothes. They smelled fresh, like the color green, like curtains blowing in an open window. I got lost in the piles, the clothes a cushion against my back, as Cade lowered himself gently down over me, brushing my hair away from my face.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“Nothing,” he whispered back.
“No, really.”
“Really.”
“Really?”
“Stop talking,” Cade murmured against my mouth.
Nothing, he’d said.
Nothing in the way of our lips, the warm air we breathed, heavier and faster. Nothing but this kiss, the way his mouth felt, hungry on mine. Nothing but each other. Or we were nothing.
CADE
“Let’s get out of here,” I said against Jane’s mouth. I couldn’t stop kissing her, not even to talk. If I didn’t stand up right now, we would never leave the barn. And I didn’t want it to be like that here. On the farm. In Tanner. She was better than that. We were better than that.
“Where do you want to go?” Jane asked, the words more breath than voice, and the heat against my mouth made me grab her that much harder. I raked my hands through her hair and kissed down her neck like I was never going to get the chance to again. I picked her right up with me and moved us against the wall, kissing her all the way to the door. The night air was so different than it had been all these months. It was thin and crisp. It was new. Get in the truck, it said. Roll down the windows. Drive away, fast.
“Grab your bathing suit and some clothes. Meet me at the fork in the road.”
It was so hard to let go of her even for a second. I sprinted back to my house, but when I got to the front yard I dropped low. I went in through the bulkhead, down to the basement, and up the back staircase. I went up to my room like I was special ops in my own house. I heard the hiss of the shower. My dad had come to. I had to get in and out quickly. I crawled under the bed and grabbed the stacks of money and shoved them into my backpack and bolted.
I jumped in my truck, heart pounding, and waited till I got around the bend to turn on the headlights. They lit up Jane standing there with her bag, hair all tangled around her flushed face, and she smiled the biggest, most real smile I’d ever seen on her. She threw open the door and jumped in before I’d even come to a complete stop.
“Before we hit the road, I gotta call Mattey.”
I hadn’t really even thought about what time it was. He answered all sleepy and fuddled-sounding.
“What’s wrong?”
“Listen, buddy, my dad flipped out on me.”
“Again?”
“Yeah, again. But bad. Real bad.”
“What do you need?”
“Can you feed Hunter for a couple of days? And have your pops call school and tell ’em Jane and I got the flu?”
“Where are you going?”
“I have no idea.”
“What do you mean? Did you talk to Sheriff Healey? What happened with the police?”
“We haven’t gone yet.”
“What? Cade . . . what the hell? You promised!”
“We’ll talk to Gunner’s mom when she’s recovered from surgery. Right now, I have to get away from this. Just for a bit.”
JANE
We drove in the dark. I fell asleep for a while and woke up and couldn’t remember where I was, and then when I did, I scrambled up and kissed Cade to make sure I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. The sun was rising, and we were going over a long bridge so narrow and low it looked like we were driving right on the water.
“Where are we going?”
“South Padre Island.”
“Really?”
“I think so?”
“You’re not sure?”
“Not entirely. But almost.” He grabbed my hand. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You okay?”
“Yes. You?”
“Yes.”
“You look like you killed someone,” I informed him. It was the truth.
“Thanks.”
“You need to wash the blood off.”
“I will.”
“Also, I need to pee.”
“Okay, let’s stop.”
Cade pulled over at a fast-food restaurant. When he came out of the restroom, his hair was wet and the crusted blood was gone. He still had a pale purple ring under his eye from the other day, along with the stitches on his forehead. And now there was a weird scrape down the other side of his face, and I noticed in the harsh light of the rest stop that his lip was kind of puffy. He was a total mess. And he still looked hot. His T-shirt clung right. His wet hair stuck up in this perfect way. Even though he’d driven all night, his gray eyes had a little spark in them I’d never seen before. I grabbed his belt buckle and pulled him toward me. He looked around kind of self-consciously for a second but then gave in. I wrapped my arms around him, and he kissed my forehead, my nose, then my mouth. And then we couldn’t stop. Again.
“Get a room,” someone said.
“Oh, we will,” Cade fired back.
“We will?” I asked.
“Of course we will,” he joked. Or wait—was he serious? My palms got tingly, and so did my face.
“Want some breakfast?”
“Um. Yeah.” I stepped back to breathe a second.
Back in the truck we chugged our coffees and wolfed down the food. How long had it been since we last ate? I could actually feel the food translate to energy. I rolled down the window and stuck my face out into the salty air.
“God, I needed this,” Cade said.
“The egg sandwich?”
“No, dummy. This.”
He reached over for my hand. We had crossed the last bridge to South Padre. The sky was shifting from pink to orange to real daytime.
“Me too.”
CADE
I drove the truck right up to the seawall. The ocean was the color of a tornado sky, corroded-penny green.
“Wanna jump in?”
“Obviously.”
Jane grabbed her bathing suit out of her bag and started shimmying out of her underwear under her dress and putting on her bikini.
“Wait . . .”
I grabbed her face in my hands and kissed her, probably too hard, probably too messy, but she answered it the same way. We were all over the place, all over each other, and I ran my hands all the way down her body, with only that sundress between me and her skin. Jane moved closer to me, leaning against her door as I pressed back.
“I think,” Jane said breathlessly, “I think we should go swimming.”
“Okay.”
“Like, right now.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re probably right. There are, uh, people around.”
Jane fumbled with the handle behind her and practically fell out of my truck.
“Race you to the water,” Jane said and took off.
I caught up easily and grabbed her. She screamed as I picked her up over my shoulder, and we tumbled into the water.
“Let’s never go back,” she said. “Let’s live in your truck and swim in the ocean every day.”
“We—”
“I know, I know. Don’t say it. Let’s pretend for as long as we’re here . . . that this is the only place we will ever be.”
Jane wrapped her legs around me in the water, and I cupped my hands under her like a seat as we bobbed up and down together with the
waves.
“I can do that,” I said. “I can definitely do that.”
We swam. We lay in the sun. We swam some more.
“What do you want to do next?” Jane asked as we sat on the sand drying off.
“Anything you want,” I answered.
“Let’s find somewhere to dance,” she said.
“That’s anywhere on South Padre,” I said. “Let’s go find a party.”
Jane threw on her dress, I grabbed my shirt, and we trekked toward the sound of music down at the far end of the beach. It was only noon, but the music was already bumping from a big stage on the sand. We worked our way up close, Jane expertly guiding us past guys showing off their six-packs and girls in tiny string bikinis. She seemed in her element—the sand, the music—nothing like the quiet, uncertain girl in the halls of Tanner High. Was this her scene? This is what made her happy?
“You like it here.”
“I do,” Jane said.
“Is this the kind of stuff you liked to do in Mexico?”
Jane gave me a suspicious look.
“I like it here. With you. What are you getting at, Cade?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
Jane grabbed the back of my neck and pulled me down to kiss her.
“Everything stops this weekend. No thinking about anything except right now.”
Her warm tongue flicked over mine, and I wanted to feel it everywhere. I hooked my fingers with hers, and even our palms pressing together made me all crazy, like it was somehow our bodies up against each other, not just our hands.
The beach got more packed as the afternoon went on. Everyone around us was watching Jane dance, but she had no idea. When Jane got to dancing, she was in her own world, so when the DJ pointed at her and a couple other girls to go up on the stage, she looked surprised.
Hide with Me Page 18
