Page 45 of Colt
“You’re not listening.”
“I have a listening problem.”
She turns away from me, and it’s like my sanity returns to me in a rush. I was just thinking about how this couldn’t happen. About how important the family is. The family. Fuck. She’s my family.
My stepsister. Maybe we’ve never been close like that, maybe our relationship was shaped by those years when we didn’t live together, but that’s the reality of it now.
We come to this house for dinner. We have holidays here. Her dad makes pie.
I want to be him after I retire. I don’t want to be my dad.
I know my mom worried a lot about that when I went into the rodeo. She thought I was chasing my dad’s shadow, in all the worst ways, but I’m not. I never have been, not that way.
I want to be Jim. He’s the man that I look up to. He’s my father.
And he’s also Allison’s father, so that makesthisimpossible.
“Here’s what I think,” she says. “I think that you’re going to heal up just fine. You’re going to go back to the rodeo, and you’regoing to feel really silly that you ever opened this door between us.”
“Door?”
“This door,” she says, whirling back around and gesturing between the two of us. “This door. I’ve kept it close. I piled all the furniture in front of it. To make sure that it stayed that way. But you don’t know that, because you didn’t notice. Now you’re noticing because you’re sitting still. But that’s the only reason. You’re going to go back to your life. You can go back to your life and–”
“It’s on Peacock.” I hear my mom’s voice growing closer, shouting toward Jim, I assume.
“I don’t think it is,” he calls back.
And then, there she is, standing in the same room as us and all of our tension, reminding me why I’m an idiot, as if I hadn’t already realized that.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I say.
“Yeah. We just finished.” Allison goes back to the sink and reaches her hand into the water, draining it aggressively. “So now will just go. We’ll just go home.” I mean… I’ll take him home.”
“Okay,” my mom says, looking between us, and if she has a question, she doesn’t ask it.
That’s one of the things I like about my mom.
“We’re just trying to find something to watch. It used to be that all the streaming services were great. Now it’s like having cable and Blockbuster rolled into one. Too much content, all divided up, and you can’t find a single thing.”
“The trials and travails of technology,” I say.
She gives me side eye, and I deserve it. But I’m ready to get out of here.
I head toward the living room as quickly as I can, which isn’t that quick. So I know that Allison is going to catch up to me. “Good night, Jim,” I say. “Thanks for the pie.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Bye, Dad,” Allison says.
“Bye, Sprite.”
“Come for dinner again in a couple of days,” Cindy calls.
“Yeah,” Allison says. “Definitely. I mean, I’m sure Colt will be driving himself soon.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
