Page 16 of Silver-Tongued Devil
He glanced at her, then back at the road. “I am. I’m still the same guy. Exact same guy.”
She considered that. It was true, pretty much. She tugged the elastic off the bottom of her braid, undid her hair, finger-combed through it, and did her best to squeeze it dry with the towel. She hadn’t bothered with her clothes, and she was dripping wet again. “Except that you’re a dad. You don’t think that’s changed you?”
“Yeah. Made me less likely to waste my time.” He turned onto Seventh. Smoothly and quietly, the way Evan did everything. But that didn’t mean there was nothing happening underneath.
“I should probably have been more sensitive back then,” she said. “When all that happened. Sorry about that.”
“What, probed my feelings some more? No, you shouldn’t have. I felt crappy. There you go. Saved you the trouble. Besides, you had other things to think about.”
“Yeah.” She looked out the window at a sprinkler watering a front lawn, with a couple of shrieking kids running through it. Big brother, little sister. “I’ve been thinking about Riley a lot lately. It’s being back here, because he’s everywhere I look in this town. Every memory I have. Do you ever get that?”
“I told you, I don’t think about sad stuff when there’s no point.”
“I do. All the time.”
“I noticed.”
Dakota looked out the window some more. Kids on bikes, kids sitting on front porch steps eating popsicles with their friends. Wild Horse in the summer.
It had never been her town, and never Riley’s, either. All Riley had done was make it bearable. Her first memory and her fallback position, always, until he wasn’t. Through everything that had happened to them, every single time their world had been uprooted, Riley had been there, telling her, “It’s OK. We’ll stick together, and it’ll be OK.”
“But what if we can’t stay together?” she’d asked him once. That last, scariest time after Grandma had died, when they’d come to Wild Horse. Riley had been coming home— sort of—and she’d been coming nowhere close.
The two of them had stood on the sidewalk outside Russell’s house with their backpacks and a garbage bag full of clothes, watching their mother’s red taillights disappearing into the darkness. They’d stared at the closed door of an unfamiliar house where a man lived who was Riley’s father, but not hers. She’d known she couldn’t ring that doorbell, but she wouldn’t have to. Riley would do it.
“Of course we’re going to stick together,” he’d said, sounding absolutely sure. “Of course we can.”
“He’s not going to want me. I’m going to foster care. You know I am.” It was the dark cloud that had hung over their heads so many times, the storm that had always threatened but never broken.
“If you do,” Riley had said, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, tension in every line of his wiry seventeen-year-old frame, “I’ll run away and come get you out. No matter what.” He’d held up his fist until she’d raised her own. Then he’d bumped fists with her and said it. “This bud’s for you.”
She hadn’t been able to stop the tears from welling in her eyes, but she’d repeated the silly phrase just as she always had, even though her voice had wobbled. “This bud’s for you.”
She’d gotten the call from Russell on a day like today. A warm summer Saturday. She’d been twenty-one and independent, a free spirit in a city full of free spirits, where nobody had known her name. Where “Dakota” sounded cool, and “Dakota Savage” sounded awesome.
She’d taken her bike up to Seaside, on the Oregon coast, and she was riding on the Lewis & Clark Mainline, almost at the steel bridge, when her phone rang in her pocket with the distinctive piano notes of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” Russell. She’d hopped off her bike, grabbed her phone from her pocket, and said, “Hey, Dad. How’re you doing? I was just thinking about you.”
“Dakota.”
That one word, and the darkness had come. The cloud that had threatened for so long had broken, and she’d stood there in the sun, staring at the hand holding her bike, at the worn blue paint and the electrical tape coming loose on the grip, listened to Russell talk, and gotten colder and colder. Until she was shivering. Until she was frozen.
Evan had come to drive her home. He hadn’t said much. He’d just been there, exactly as he’d been with her, and with Russell, during the terrible visit to the funeral home, and then all the way until they were standing at the gravesite. On Russell’s other side when the honor guard had taken the flag off Riley’s coffin and folded it into that perfect triangle, then handed it to Riley’s father, the gift nobody wanted. When the bugler had played “Taps,” the last mournful note had died, and Dakota had thought her heart would die along with it. When they’d put her big brother in the ground, and for the last time, she’d whispered, “This bud’s for you.” When she’d known that from now on, she had to be her own hero.
She’d probably leaned on Evan too much that summer Riley had died—for herself, but especially for Russell. However bad her brother’s death had been for her, it had been worse for Russell. Dakota had still been around, but she wasn’t Russell’s. She didn’t have his name, and she didn’t have his blood. She was just Riley’s half-sister, the girl who’d showed up at fifteen and had no place else to go. Part of the package deal.
As much as she’d loved Russell, her love hadn’t come close to making up for the hole Riley had left in his life. Fortunately, there’d been Evan. Riley’s best friend had been able to do what Dakota hadn’t. Because after the funeral, when other people had said their “Sorrys” and gone back to their lives, when Dakota had had to go back to Portland, and to work—Evan hadn’t. He’d kept coming over for dinner after work, staying to watch baseball with Russell, going out fishing and hunting with him as he always had. He’d been more than Russell’s business partner. He’d been a friend. They’d needed him, and he’d stepped up, just like he’d been stepping up ever since. He was right. He was still the same guy.
Sometime during that terrible summer, though, Beth and Evan had broken up, and Dakota hadn’t even known anything about it for weeks. He’d never said. She still didn’t know what had happened, or why.
They were almost home. If she were going to say this, she needed to say it now, so she did. “Beth came to see me, you know. Right before she went back to Seattle to start law school.”
“You think that’s going to matter to me. I don’t care. It was a long time ago.” For once, Evan’s movementsweren’tsmooth. He pulled in to the curb in front of the house—and hit it with a hard jolt.“Damn.”
“Da da da,” Gracie sang from the back seat, and Dakota could swear Evan flinched.
“She’s not a parrot,” Dakota said. “You’re unlikely to have a one-year-old who curses like a sailor just because you slipped up once.”
“Want to bet?” He had his hand on the door handle like he couldn’t be in here another minute.
