Page 39 of Never Stay Gone
Heath was quiet as he pulled back onto the road. He’d always been quiet, as if he’d been given a word budget for his entire life and was saving all those words up for some big speech someday. Dakota was fine with that. Let Heath think his thoughts. Mull over his questions. Dakota could feel a dozen of them rolling inside Heath.
As Heath drove him out to Rustler’s only motel, Dakota walked him through their case progress that day.
The motel was ten concrete-block rooms all in a row, with an empty swimming pool in a backyard court. Dakota’s truck was parked outside his room, and Heath pulled up behind it, then shifted into park. He reached into the back seat and came back with a bottle of booze in hand. “Sometimes people get it in their heads they need to thank me for doing my job.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what to do with this. But I think you might tonight.”
Dakota took the bottle—a cheap bourbon—and tried to smile. “Thanks.”
“I’ll text you if there’s anything you need to know, and I’ll leave everything else on my desk for you for tomorrow morning.”
Dakota gave Heath a two-fingered salute and then took himself and Heath’s bottle of bourbon into his motel room.
He shut the door, locked it, and sank to the floor. Bowed his head and gripped the neck of the bottle, letting the room’s darkness wrap around him and sink into him. Darkness, and loneliness, and heartbreak.Shane.
The sob broke free a moment later, cracking out of him like he’d torn open his chest. Again. Here he was, sobbing in Rustler again. Brokenhearted over Shane in Rustler again. He was a goddamn dumbass, and he always would be.
Dakota pitched sideways, curling into a ball on the shitty motel carpet, and let his tears fall as he whispered Shane’s name.
Chapter Eleven
Shane didn’t wantto do this.
He didn’t want to walk into that house. Didn’t want to have this conversation.
Some days, he didn’t want to try anymore. What was the point? His life had ended thirteen years ago on Main Street, and then the lurching, terrible way he’d tried to hold on had disintegrated when he’d gone down on the football field and his knee had shattered three different ways.
So why bother? With his job, with his relationship with Shelly, with his life? What was the point to any of it, when he was so fucking miserable all of the time?
He stopped his truck down the block from the house he was renting in Rustler’s upper-class neighborhood. It was the historic district behind Main, with picket fences and lemon-tree-shaded streets. Hummingbird feeders swung from branches, and wild roses crowded the flower beds of each gingerbread house, the whole block painted in pastel Easter egg colors. Shelly had sighed when she saw the neighborhood, called it cute and perfect, said she could imagine little kids riding bikes up and down the sidewalks. Shelly’s father, Burt, said it was good enough.
Shane’s dad hadn’t said a thing. The dead couldn’t speak.
When Shane had limped back to Rustler after his coach cut him from the football team and the college pulled his scholarship, he’d moved right back into the creaking, ancient farmhouse his father owned outside of town. The house had once been the grand jewel in a spread that dwarfed Rustler, and their family’s name had meant something to the early Rustler settlers. But two world wars and a depression had eaten into their legacy and their family name, and Shane grew up hearing stories about how his great-grandfather had sold off pastures and ranchland until all that was left was the house and an acreage that, in Texas, could only be called a halfway decent yard.
His father, James Carson, was a hard man with a hard view on life, and he wasn’t known for his mercy or his forgiveness. He was a banker, and he dealt in absolutes, and damn it, heknewhis son was going to be great.
And Shane had known, from the time he was four years old, that his father had plans for him and it was his job to make his father’s dreams come true.
To keep Shane on the path to success, his dad had set certain standards.
Every night, Shane did his homework at the kitchen table as his father watched him and read over all the work to make sure Shane hadn’t made any mistakes. If he had, his father made him redo everything. The entire assignment, not just the missed equation or the incorrect short-answer paragraph.
He wasn’t allowed to wear headphones or shut his bedroom door in his father’s house, because that was disrespectful. He had to be attentive, always, ready to answer “Yes, sir” whenever his father called his name.
It wasn’t like it was easy for his father, Shane had told himself. He was raising Shane on his own. Shane’s mom had up and died on them both when Shane was in fifth grade, going from feeling tired and weak to barely being able to get out of bed in only two months. By the time she agreed to go see a doctor, it was too late. The cancer had spread too far. She died at home, in the front sunroom, and that night, his dad carried her to the backyard and buried her by his own hand in the family plot that lay beyond the fence line.
His dad kept the sunroom exactly the same from that day forward, like it was a time machine that he could step into and relive the days when his wife was still there. Shane skirted the room, walking the long way around to get from the foyer to the kitchen, never setting foot on the sunbaked carpets or looking at the delicate floral-patterned couch with the lace throw where his mother had exhaled and never breathed in again.
Shane’s dad tried. He bought Shane a brand-new truck when he became the starting quarterback at Big Bend High, and before that, when Shane was thirteen, he took Shane on a weeklong hunting trip.
Sitting by the campfire on that trip, he told Shane the plan he’d made for Shane’s life. Straight As through high school. A football scholarship. The Heisman Trophy. A first-round draft pick. Taking an NFL team to the Super Bowl, not just once, but multiple times. He’d marry a West Texas girl, of course, and have three or four kids. They’d have a home wherever Shane was playing for the NFL, but their real home would be that old house, which would stay in the Carson family forever. Shane was going to buy up the land they’d lost too. After a respectable career playing football, he’d retire and return home to be a gentleman rancher. Run for county office and raise his kids the way all the Carson boys had been raised.
What Jim Carson said was law, and like when Shane had to redo his homework or throw away his headphones, he said, “Yes, sir.”
That was that. That was going to be his life.
So which one of them was more disappointed when he limped up the sagging front steps of that house the day he came home a broken failure?
He remembered that day so fucking clearly, the way he remembered all the worst days of his life. The Chantilly Lace house paint was chipped and dull, his dad getting too old to repaint every year. The turret that rose over the front porch looked as exhausted as Shane felt, like it wanted to fall off the side of the house and roll away.
