Other women might crave chocolate, but she craved Chee-tos, and on the fifteen-minute drive to the ranch, she ripped open the bag and chowed down, careful not to leave cheese fingers on her steering wheel. She cranked up her iPod and filled the car with My Chemical Romance. Sadie had been a fan since their first album, and she sang “Bulletproof Heart” at the top of her lungs. Sang like her life hadn’t turned to utter crap. Sang like she was carefree.
Rocks crunched beneath her tires as she pulled to a stop in front of the dark ranch house. She hadn’t let anyone know she was coming home. She didn’t want anyone waiting for her. She just wanted to go to bed early.
Not a single light burned within the house, and Sadie walked carefully into the living room and flipped a switch. An enormous chandelier made of a tangle of antlers lit up the cowhide furniture and huge rock fireplace. Framed photographs of her with her mother and father were placed on the different tables. Those same photos hadn’t moved since her mother’s death twenty-eight years ago. Above the fireplace hung a painting of her father’s biggest accomplishment and his greatest love: Admiral, a Blue Roan Tovero. He’d been Clive’s pride and joy, but he’d died of colic after just five years. The day the horse died was the only time she’d ever seen her father visibly upset. He hadn’t shed a tear in public, but she imagined he’d cried like a baby in private.
She made her way to the kitchen, snagged a glass of ice, and continued upstairs. She moved past the ancestral portraits and into her bedroom. A lamp sat on the stand beside her bed and she turned it on. Light spilled across the bed, and she tossed the bag from the Gas and Go on the yellow and white spread.
Everything about her room was cozy in a familiar sort of way. The same clock sat on the nightstand next to the same lamp with the same floral shade. The same painting of her and her mother when she was born still sat on the dresser next to a tin holding miscellaneous perfume samples she’d collected over the years. The same volleyball and 4–H ribbons were tacked to the corkboard next to the shelf holding all the runner-up sashes and crowns she’d won.
It was familiar, but it wasn’t home. Currently, home was a townhouse in Phoenix. She’d bought the Spanish-inspired house at the bottom of the market for an insanely reduced price. Her mortgage payment wasn’t all that much, and she had enough money in her account to keep up on the payments for a while.
She was a top earner at her current brokerage and shared sixty-five-percent commissions. The agency had assured her that she always had a job with them, but she didn’t want to be gone so long that her compensation package rolled back to a fifty/fifty split. She’d worked very hard for that fifteen percent increase.
The problem was, she didn’t know when she would be able to return to Arizona. Four weeks? Six? She didn’t know if it would be as much as two months before she was able to pick up the pieces of her life. The only real thing she did know was that she would make sure her life would be waiting for her.
Intact. As much as possible.
T
he next morning, she met with the administrator of the Evangelical Samaritan Rehabilitation Center in Amarillo. They assured Sadie that they were capable of providing the proper rehabilitation and care her father needed. They also assured her they were used to difficult patients. Even ones as difficult as Clive Hollowell.
A week after she spoke to them, Clive arrived in Amarillo, fifty miles southeast of Lovett, which was sixty miles closer to home. She thought he’d be happy about the move.
“What are you doing here?”
She looked up from her magazine as a male nurse wheeled her father into his room, a tank of oxygen hooked to the back of the chair. He’d been at Evangelical Samaritan for twenty-four hours and looked more drawn than before. And clearly not happier, but he was clean-shaven and his hair was wet from his bath. “Where else would I be, Daddy?” God, why did he have to hassle her every day? For once, couldn’t he just be glad she was there? Couldn’t he just look at her and say, “I’m glad you’re here, Sadie girl.” Why did he always have to act like he couldn’t wait for her to leave?
“Wherever in the hell it is that you live these days.”
He knew where she lived. “Phoenix,” she reminded him anyway. “I brought you more socks.” She held up a bag from the Target a few miles away. “The fuzzy kind with traction on the soles.”
“You wasted your money. I don’t like fuzzy socks.” The nurse moved the footrests and he set his long, bony feet covered in the red plaid socks with the nonskid soles she’d bought him in Laredo. The nurse helped him rise from the chair. “Son of a bitch!” He sucked in a breath and sat on the edge of the bed. “Goddamn!”
When she’d been younger, the tone of his voice would have sent her from the room. Instead, she moved to the side of his bed. “What can I do for you, Daddy? Anything you need from the house? Mail? Invoices? Reports?”
“Dickie Briscoe is on his way,” he answered, referring to the ranch manager. “Snooks is coming with him.
She was dismissed. “Isn’t there something
I
can do for you?”
His blue eyes cut into hers. “Get me out of here. I wanna go home.”
He needed too much care to go home just yet. Too much for her to return to Arizona, too. “I can’t.”
“Then there is nothing you can do for me.” He looked behind her and smiled. “Snooks, it’s about goddamn time.”
Sadie turned and looked at her father’s foreman. She’d known him all her life, and like her father, he was a real cowboy. Work shirt with pearl snaps, Wranglers, and boots covered in cow shit and dust. He was hard and grizzled from the Texas wind and sun and a pack-a-day habit.
“Hey, Snooks.” Sadie opened her arms as she moved toward him.
“There’s my girl.” He was the father of six boys, in his mid to late sixties, and like Clive, was showing his age. But unlike Clive, Snooks had a belly and a sense of humor.
“You look as handsome as ever,” she lied. Even on a good day, Snooks had never been handsome, mostly because he was allergic to ragweed and dust. As a result, his eyes glowed an eerie red. “How’re your boys?”
“Good. I got eight grandkids.”
“Good Lord!” She really was the last person in Lovett over the age of twenty-five who was childless. Her and Sarah Louise Baynard-Conseco, but that was only because Mr. Conseco was a guest of San Quentin.
“And I don’t have a single one,” grumbled Clive from behind Sadie.
Was that why her father was crabby all the time? Because she hadn’t spanked out six grandchildren? What had been his excuse when she’d been twelve? “You’ve never mentioned grandkids before.”
“Didn’t think I had to.”
“Well, I’ll let you two catch up,” she said, and made her escape.
She spent the afternoon tending to exciting details like having her car serviced. She was lucky enough to find a hair salon that looked halfway decent, and she made an appointment to come back and have her roots touched up. She returned to the hospital to check in on Clive, then drove home. She ate dinner with the ranch hands and filled them in on her father’s progress.
She watched television in bed. Mindless reality shows with people whose lives sucked worse than hers. So she didn’t have to think of the reality of her own sucky life.
T
he whir of a ceiling fan stirred the cool night air across Vince’s bare chest. Slow, even breaths filled his lungs. Within the guest room of Luraleen’s seventies ranch-style house, he slept in the frilly twin bed, but behind his closed eyes, Vince was back in Iraq. Back in the huge cavity of the C–130 Hercules, stowing the last of the team’s essential gear. Dressed in light combat gear, desert khakis, and Oakley assault boots, he stowed his tired body in a thick mesh hammock. Several hours before he’d been ordered to join Team Five at the U.S. air base in Bahrain, he’d been knocking in doors and rounding up terrorist leaders in Baghdad. The more they rounded up, the more seemed to pop up in their place. Al Qaeda, Taliban, Sunni, Shiite, or a half dozen other insurgent groups filled with hate and fanaticism and hell-bent on killing American soldiers, no matter how many innocent civilians got in the way.
“Haven, you ugly son of a bitch. What are you doing up there? Jerkin’ off?”
Vince recognized that voice and cracked open his eyes. He turned his head toward the bald SEAL cramming his body into a mesh seat across from him. “Sorry to disappoint you, you dirty hooker, but I already took care of my business.”
Wilson shook his head. “Yeah, I heard about that ammo dump business this morning.”
Vince winced. He’d been sent out with three other SEALs to secure an insurgent ammo dump and blow it the fuck up. There hadn’t been time to wait for an explosive ordnance disposal tech, and the dump was small, or so they’d thought. They’d planted their own explosives and lit that building up and up and up. Concrete and dust and debris had rained down for several minutes. “We may have underestimated the English we put on it.” Actually they hadn’t known about a hidden room under the mud and concrete building, filled with grenades and bombs, until they’d lit it up and the explosion grew bigger and bigger and they’d dived for cover. No one wanted to talk about the oversight though. It was just a damn good thing they’d moved way back and no one got hurt.
Wilson laughed. “ ‘There’s enough bang in there to blow us to Jesus.’ ” He was a lieutenant, smart as hell, and the king of movie quotes. Vince hadn’t seen Pete for a while, and it was good to see his buddy.
“
Hooyah!
” The two had gone through BUD/S together, almost drowned in the surf, and had their asses chewed by Instructor Dougherty. He’d stood next to Wilson as they’d both had their Tridents pinned on their dress uniforms, and he’d stood up with Pete when Pete married his high school sweetheart. The marriage hadn’t lasted past the five-year anniversary, and Vince had been there to help his buddy drown his sorrows. Divorce was a reality of military life, and operational SEALs were no exception to that reality.
The loading ramp rose, and the pilot fired up the huge turbo-prop freighter, filling the cavity with the rattle of steel and horsepower and ending any further conversation.
He fell asleep somewhere over the Gulf of Oman. The last untroubled slumber he would have for several years. Once the Hercules touched down in Bagram, his life would change forever in varied and unforeseeable ways.
His life was different now, but the dream was always the same. It started in the mountains in the Hindu Kush with him and the guys on a routine mission. Then the dream changed, with him scrambling for cover, loaded down with enough firepower to fight his way out of any Taliban fight. It ended with him kneeling over Wilson, his head spinning and ringing, nausea turning his stomach and the dark corners of his vision closing in on him as he thumped his best friend’s chest and forced his own breath into Pete’s lungs. The unmistakable beat of howling U.S. airpower, rotors screaming, thundering and whipping the dust into sandstorms. The ground shuddered as the military blew the hell out of slopes and crevasses of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Blood stained his hands as Vince thumped and breathed and watched the light fade from Pete’s eyes.
Vince woke, his heartbeat pounding in his head as it had that day in the hell of the Hindu Kush. He stood somewhere, disoriented, his eyes wide, lungs pulling air like bellows. Where was he?
In a room. A soft streetlamp burned in the distance and lacy curtains were wrapped about his fist.
“You okay, Vince? I heard thumpin’.”
He opened his mouth but a gaspy wheeze came out. He swallowed. “Yeah.” He purposefully opened his shaking hands and the curtain fell to the floor, the thin rod a tinny clang.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Everything is okay.”
“Is someone climbing in your window? If so, have her use the front door.”
Which would explain why she wasn’t busting down his door.
“No one’s in here but me. Good night, Aunt Luraleen.”
“Well, night then.”
Vince scrubbed his face with his hands and sat on the too small, too frilly bed. He hadn’t had that dream in a while. Not for a few years now. A Navy shrink had once told him that certain things could trigger posttraumatic stress. Change and uncertainty were two of the big ones.
Vince was a SEAL. He did not have PTSD. He wasn’t jumpy or nervous or depressed. He had a recurring nightmare.
One. That was it.
That shrink had also told him that he’d shut down his feelings. And that as soon as he started to feel, he would heal. “Feel to heal” had been that shrink’s favorite catchphrase.
Well fuck that. He didn’t need to heal from anything. He was fine.
E
very year on the second Saturday in April, the Lovett Founder’s Day kicked off at nine
A.M.
with the Founder’s Day parade. Ever year, the reigning Diamondback Queen rode a huge rattlesnake made of tissue and toilet paper. Its big head and bejeweled eyes looked out at the crowd while its forked tongue flicked the morning air. The queen sat atop the coiled body, waving for all she was worth, like she was the Rose Queen making her way down Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena.
This year, the float was hauled down Main by a classic 1960 Chevy F–10 furnished by Parrish American Classics car restorers. A second restored car followed behind the float. Twenty-three-year-old Nathan Parrish drove the completely restored 1973 Camaro; its big V–8, 383 engine pounded the morning air and vibrated the Diamondback so bad the tongue fell out around Twelfth Street. Marching closely behind and sucking up fumes, the Lovett High School band played the “Yellow Rose of Texas” while the dance team shimmied in their sequins and fringe.
After the parade, Main Street was closed off to cars. Vendors’ booths ran up and down both sides of the street selling everything from jewelry and hair bows to pepper jelly and knitted cozies. The beer court and food vendors were set up a block off Main on Wilson and were crammed with people from as far away as Odessa.