“Come on,” she pressed, patting the top of my thigh.
She kept touching my leg. That was going to be a problem too.
“What do you want to know?” I asked, trying to figure out how much to tell her to satisfy her. My mom knew a part of this story, but even she didn’t know the whole of it.
“How did it happen? Her, I mean. You never really had a type, but if you did…she wasn’t it.”
“She wasn’t. That was the whole point, I guess.”
“Huh?”
I sighed, adjusting my position on Jimmy’s back. “I think I can pinpoint my decision-making process down to the day my dad dropped off the new truck.”
“The ‘new' truck parked in your mom’s garage that has 722 miles on it and is now almost six years old?”
“That’s the one.”
“The one you keep claiming you’re going to blow up?”
“Just as soon as I find the right landmine.”
“What do you think it’s worth now?”
I shrugged. “It’s worth the same to me now as it was back then. Nothing.”
“Why don’t you sell it, then?”
“Do you want to hear this or not, Miss Nosy?”
“Sorry.”
“About a year or so after I graduated high school, I got home one night from working at Layne’s to find two trucks in my yard. One of them was my dad’s. His rodeo buddy was sitting inside of it when I got there.”
My jaw clenched, willing myself to be calm while I told her this. But it was hard to hold back the feeling of blind rage that the thought of that night always brought me.
Him in our house.
“I told myself to try to be nice. I didn’t know why he was there. But when I walked in, they were in the middle of a fight. I got there in time to hear my dad yelling at my mom.”
My voice went on autopilot, telling the story while Shelby sat, nestled against me. It felt like a shame to ruin the feel of this with talks of Cole Evans, but like an idiot, I kept going.
“My mom was dressed for the diner, about to go to work. I learned later that she’d been blindsided by him being there. He just walked into the house like it was still his. That’s how it’salways been with him. He’d promise to be somewhere with us, at one of my rodeos, or my graduation, or a scout camp-out, but he’d never show. Then he’d walk in on a random Thursday without warning and act like he was doing us all a huge favor by being there.”
Shelby turned her face so that her cheek rested against my chest. I sucked in a breath and kept talking.
“That first year after he left, we kept waiting for him to come back. We’d watch him on TV and get all excited seeing him make a name for himself. But he never came back. For so long, we were just waiting for him to realize he had made a mistake and come home. But he never did.
“So we started moving on. Hardening up. And then pretty soon, we were better off without him. So when I walked into the house and saw him standing over her and yelling—” I broke off, willing myself to take a breath.
I kept talking, but the vision of that day emblazoned on my brain was what used to keep me up at night.
My mom had stood her ground. And I’d never been prouder. Her eyes were blazing as she defended herself, refusing to be bullied or shamed by this man who had abandoned his family for a mediocre amount of fame and fortune.
But there had been relief in her eyes when I opened the door.
Her voice had been shaking. Her hands were shaking.
And that was all I saw.