Page 57 of Sexting the Cowboy
“Sure it was.” He winks. “Means I was promising.”
“Means he’s a coward,” Cash says easily. “He should say you’re great or shut up.”
Levi nods in that small way that means he’s filing something away for later. “Okay. Plan. Kansas City next month. We’re there the second weekend. After that, it’s Amarillo if the purse hits the number Ford promised.”
“Ford always promises numbers,” Blaze says. “Ford is a walking calculator with hair gel.”
“Hey,” Cash says, “Ford’s hair gel got me a boot deal.”
Reno pokes at the onion mountain with a skewer. “I’ll be in Kansas City,” he says to the table in general, and then to the space over my shoulder where I know he wants a certain person to appear by force of will.
Annie. I can’t tell if he’s hung up on her, or if he’s just bored and wants someone to play with.
Blaze’s eyes flick to me and away, quick as a prayer you don’t want the priest to hear. Cash pretends not to notice anything that isn’t fried. Levi keeps the plan moving because that’s just him.
“Layover in Tulsa,” he continues, “so we can avoid the usual gridlock.” He points at the grandstands with the end of his sandwich. “Tonight’s pen looks good. I saw them move the third panel. It won’t pinch. Should be a good run.”
Reno mutters into his fried onion mass, “The Annie thing is stupid. She should have stuck it out with me.”
My gut sinks, and silence slides across the table like a long shadow. The lights buzz. Somewhere to our left, a carnival game rings a bell, and a teenager yells like he invented throwing. The words I could say peel back like old paint in my head and show the raw wood underneath. Some nights are like that.
“Sometimes,” I say as lightly as I can manage, “people change before we’re ready to see it.”
He laughs with his teeth. His voice is irritated grit. “Thanks for the wisdom, Dad. I’ll embroider it on a pillow.”
“All I mean is, sometimes people grow apart.”
Reno leans back with a sigh that’s memory and venom in equal parts. “We were good, though. She liked my terrible jokes. She ate cereal out of a mixing bowl. She’d let me read to her when my leg hurt and I wanted to pretend it didn’t. She loved—” He cuts off. He stares past us, past tonight. “She loved me.”
“You’ll find your way without her. It’s not easy, but with time, you figure out how to keep going.”
His scowl is powerful. “That mean I should go dance at a club to meet girls? Oh, wait. I can’t.” He gestures at his leg. “Maybe you should keep your advice to yourself.”
“It means,” Levi says, careful, “maybe you put the bottle down before you do anything else.”
The air goes still, and I’m not sure what’s coming next. A harsh word? A thrown fist?
Cash claps once, sharply, like he’s trying to train a dog. “Hey. Kansas City. Plans? Thoughts?”
The conversation clicks back into gear. We talk draw and gate and whether the DJ this week is going to go rogue and try to tug the crowd toward a line dance. Blaze announces she’s threatening the announcer with an air horn if he calls her “darlin’” on a hot mic again. Cash opines about run-out lanes, and Levi nods along, like his mind isn’t in the ring already.
But the noise sits over my shoulders like a coat I used to love and now only wear because I haven’t learned what else to do with my arms. I eat and I talk and I play my part, and under that something dull and honest gnaws.
The feeling that this is all endless.
I’ve been doing this for longer than some of the boys coming up have been alive. I’ve stood under strings of lights and learned to lose and win with a nod. Ever since Vicki, the victories have landed nothing at all but a way to pay the bills.
They keep the lights on. They bought schoolbooks and boots and properties. They gave my children ladders. If I chose not to, I’d never have to work another day in my life. But the wins are hollow victories without someone to share them with.
All my kids have found their way into the grind in one form or another—Blaze with her chaos, Cash with his glue, Levi with his metronome. Reno…hasn’t.
He’s always been the smartest of us. I think that’s why he’s so miserable. He knows too much about the angles. When they were young, Vicki homeschooled them between events with a patience that should have earned her a crown, and Reno lived for the afternoons when I’d find him under the awning with a library book and a look on his face like a boy who just discovered a better map.
I nudged him into the ring anyway. You can love words and still need to learn what your legs are for, I told him. Told myself.
I wonder now if I was wrong. Maybe he’d be happier with an overdue book fee and a quiet desk. Maybe he’d have two good knees and bad posture and a decent retirement account by now. The night he got body-slammed into the wall, the sound wentdull and wrong in a way I still hear when refrigerators kick on at midnight.
For a long wicked second, I thought we lost him. The guilt sits in me like a sinker, small and heavy. No amount of guilt will put feeling back in his leg, though.
