Page 51 of Defending Casey

His dad made a vague gesture with his hand. “Then talk.”

“Why?”

The baleful look in his father’s eyes made Hale rethink his mood. He was already starting off being more combative than he wanted. There was just something about the energy when he was near his father. They always seemed to be at loggerheads.

His dad’s head sagged forward, his chin dropping to his chest. He huffed out a breath and then looked back up. “Go ahead, son. Yell. Hell, throw something if it will make you feel better. Some would say I deserve it.”

Hale didn’t know what to think. His dad seemed almost resigned to a confrontation. “So you’re not even going to pretend you were right?” There was an anger in him that was building up like pressure in a bottle, needing somewhere to go. “You kept my daughter from me for her entire life and you just shrug it off? Tell me to throw something if it will make me feel better?” Hale lurched off the sofa. “You son of a-”

He walked the length of the room, struggling to hold himself together. The edges of his vision darkened and then eased as his mind stirred up a memory of Nora falling asleep against his chest.

“All that time.” The words tore from his throat. “All of that time… lost.”

“It was a stupid decision.”

Hale shook his head. “Really? You can just admit it now that I’m here? What is this?” He turned and pounded the side of his fist against the wall, rattling a picture frame a foot away. “When did you come to this… magical realization? Did it take me standing here for you to decide to tell me the truth? Did you just keep it a secret to punish me for leaving? Come on, dad! For once… for once in all the time since we lost mom, can you please tell me what the hell is going on inside your head?”

His dad sat forward in his armchair and leaned his elbow on the armrest. His mouth opened and closed once and then again. As he sat there, looking like he was as confused as Hale was angry, the very air in the room seemed to push back and forth as if it was looking for release as well.

If a tornado had formed in the middle of the room at that moment, Hale wouldn’t have been surprised. Everything was stirring up between them.

“When your mother passed…”

Just saying those four words seemed to take the air out of his dad. Like he’d just cut open his skin and let his life rush from his veins.

“When I lost my Addie, my world got very narrow.”

His words struck a chord in Hale. Something that felt all too familiar to him.

When he lost Casey, there were moments when all he could see was the ground in front of him. It felt like he had blinders on.

“And I focused on you, son. I stopped caring about the ranch. I stopped caring about the feed store. I just wanted to focus on you. Help you make something of yourself. Make you the best you could be. And I thought that meant football, college.

“Everyone told me that you’d be the first son of Fool’s Gold who could make it all the way to the NFL. The coach talked about trophies and contracts and how you’d be a hero. And I wanted that for you.”

“You mean you wanted it for you, dad.”

His father looked like he was going to argue. Instead, he ended up nodding. “It wasn’t that football was my dream for you, son, so much as it was giving you a life with consequence to look up to. In my head, Casey was like a millstone for you. If you’d married her like you were planning, you would have been stuck here in town forever.

“You would’ve had a half dozen babies by now and working on the ranch before the sun comes up and you’d go to sleep long after the sun set. Long. Bone breaking. Work. You would have hated it. And you would have hated her.”

Hale was sick to his stomach.

“How did you know,” he felt his voice shaking as he spoke, “that I was going to marry her?”

“Pearl, at the bank, she said you’d gone in to open your mother’s safety deposit box. I knew you kept your mama’s jewelry in that box.”

Hale turned around and leaned his back against the wall, sagging against it when his energy seemed to disappear, giving way to bone-deep anger. “So, because I went to the bank you assumed that I was going to stay here, in Fool’s Gold, for the rest of my life and end up hating it and my wife? Is that how you felt about mom?”

His dad looked stricken. “God, no! I loved your mother more than anything.”

Hale heard the words he hadn’t spoken. His father loved her more than anything, including himself. “Then why would you think-”

“No, I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Dad-”

“No,” his voice gained volume, “I said I don’t want to talk about this, son-”

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