Page 40 of Never Stay Gone
His father had opened the screen door and stared at him, mouth turned down like a bass’s, shoulders stooped, weatherworn hand trembling where it gripped the doorframe.
“Dad…”
“Well, come in,” his father had finally said. “Guess we gotta figure something else out for your life.”
Shane had moped for three months, sleeping in his old bedroom with the door open and not listening to music with headphones. He drove ten thousand miles in those three months, up and down every highway and byway and ranch road and dirt path and lost trail there was in the Big Bend. His knee rehab consisted of wandering, limping along trails he and Dakota had memorized years before.
Memories haunted him, those summer days looping in his mind so vividly it seemed like Dakota was right there. Sometimes Shane collapsed right there on the trail, his knee or his heart giving out so he fell to his ass and cried.
He drove out to Dakota’s parents’ house again. Like the time he had driven out before—after—it was empty, abandoned, the door banging open and shut in the wind. The old trailer’s roof had caved in since the last time he’d been there, and whatever hope he’d ever carried thatmaybe he’ll come backhad withered and blown away. Dakota was gone, and his parents were gone, and everything they’d ever had was gone. Only Shane was left, with his failure and his dread and his moments at midnight when he could finally admit to himself that he’d made a horrible mistake.
He and his father lived in a house of silence, whole weeks passing where they didn’t say a word. They were strangers to each other, caricatures of roles they didn’t know how to fill. Father, son. Shane had no idea who his father was inside. What made him keep the room his mother died in exactly the same for a decade, what made him dig her grave by hand under the moonlight. Why he cooked dinner for Shane every night and never ate out, or why he looked at Shane sometimes like he was trying to understand a puzzle, work through some complex math equation that had stumped him for life.
One evening, when they sat down across from each other to eat dinner like Shane was still a boy, his dad told him, “I spoke to the sheriff. You’re going to be a deputy.”
So the rest of his life was decided. The sheriff was an old friend of his father’s. He’d been sheriff for thirty years or more. Shane remembered him being old when he was a kid, and he was still old now.
Shane started training with Chief Deputy Heath Reed a week later, learning the ropes of the Big Bend Sheriff’s Department. Heath was kind to him, gentle when he didn’t need to be and when no one else was. Shane had been the town’s biggest hope in a hundred years.
He’d let everyone down. His jersey number had been scrubbed from the windows on Main Street. No one had pictures of him up anymore. No one talked about renaming the high school stadium Carson Stadium anymore. Once again, the Carson name was synonymous with a slow slide into loss and obscurity.
Maybe it was Shane’s failure that slowly poisoned his dad. Something turned him sour inside, and for ten years he rotted, growing more and more frail in a lingering death that stole every ounce of vitality he’d ever had. Maybe it was how he chewed over all those lost dreams he’d had for Shane, sometimes talking about how he used to imagine Shane’s name in lights and how proud he’d be to tell everyone “That’s my boy” when Shane won the Super Bowl.
He never told anyone he was proud of Deputy Carson. Never once told Shane he was proud of him for anything. Maybe Shane would have heard those words if he’d taken that NFL team all the way. Or maybe there would always have been another Super Bowl to win, and his father would always have needed more from Shane before he could say, “Good job, son.”
Shane stayed in that house until the day his father finally died, a spider of a man clinging to his son as he struggled to breathe. “Never gave me my grandchildren,” he said, six minutes before he died. “You better marry that Shelly Atchinson. You’ll never find anyone else,” he wheezed three minutes later.
Well, the man was right about that. Shane had already found and lost the love of his life.
There’d been no one since Dakota. He’d tried to sleep with a few girls in college, drunken fumblings at fall frat parties where some of the sorority girls had taken a shine to him, the wide-eyed, neon-green quarterback. A dark room, hands everywhere, nothing at all familiar about their bodies. He’d disappointed them in every way possible, and they’d politely made excuses for him and his limp penis. Nerves, too much to drink, maybe he was just tired.
Maybe he just didn’t want them.
He could hide at college, like he used to in Rustler, behind excuses that he was focusing on his grades and his game. There was alwayslaterwhen he was younger, always some unspecified future time to find a wife and start a family.
Until he was back and the years ticked on, and the gossip that Shane Carson wasn’t finding himself a woman to settle down with grew louder. That he was a loner, worse than Heath Reed ever was, because at least Heath finagled his way into being the sheriff after a spell. What had Shane ever done, other than be a disappointment?
He’d tried so hard, early on, to make things good with Shelly. She was fun, and sweet, and kind, and she had a smile that reminded him of Dakota’s, and she was a good woman. Far too good for him.
He wanted to love her. He wanted to achieve that future his dad dreamed of for him. He wanted to be excited about building a life with Shelly, having kids, growing old together.
He just couldn’t.
The last thing his father ever said to him, clutching Shane’s hand desperately in his clawlike grasp, was, “Son, don’t—”
And then he’d died, and Shane never heard what he wasn't supposed to do. ProbablyDon’t be a disappointment again.But the light rolled out of his dad’s eyes like a fire being banked, and then he was gone.
MaybeDon’t sell the house. Everyone had expected Shane to move Shelly, who he’d been seeing for about a year and a half by then, into that giant, groaning house, get married in the backyard beneath the fruit trees, and start working on their three to four kids. “Big Bend High needs a new quarterback,” he heard a hundred times if he heard it once.
Shane put the house on the market and sold it within a week, then moved across town to the cottage Shelly picked. Okay, folks in town said, once they got over their shock. Maybe no backyard wedding, but they’re living together. That new quarterback is on the way.
Four years on, Shane was wading chest-deep through the town’s disappointed confusion. He’d gone from favorite son to failure son. And his father’s long shadow was still hovering over him, still digging those spider’s legs into his soul.You better marry that Shelly Atchinson. Don’t—
Don’t fuck up.
Don’t be a failure.
Don’t be a disappointment.
