“So you said yes?”
“No, no. I told him I’d talk to Duncan and to you. If all three of us are comfortable with the idea, we’ll consider him.”
“I don’t think I’d mind,” she said, mulling. “It might be awkward, is all.” But probably not terribly. James wasn’t possessive or jealous. Not once an affair was over. You were either all in with him, or else you got the typical frosty reception he reserved for strangers and acquaintances. Only if you were his lover—or his enemy, or indeed his child, she imagined—did he bother getting wound up about you.
“It wouldn’t be for a few weeks still,” Casey said, “if it did even happen. Plenty of time to see how the two of you are getting along.”
She nodded. “It’s good to hear he’s looking for legal work, at any rate.” He seemed to be respecting her rule.
“I’ll talk to Duncan then, see what he thinks.” He rubbed his thighs, then met her eyes with caution in his own. “So, what are you doing this afternoon?”
“Just this,” she said, nodding to the baby.
His lips thinned to a pensive line. “Hang on a sec.” He stood and strode off in the direction of the office, and Abilene heard knocking, then faint talking. He was back inside a minute and lifting the rocker.
“What are you up to?”
“Christine’s going to watch Mercy for an hour or two. You and I have something we need to do.”
If not for last night’s talk, she’d have assumed he meant sex—men rarely moved with such purpose if they weren’t about to get lucky. “What?”
“We need to talk,” he said simply, disappearing down the hall with the baby.
“About?”
Casey either didn’t hear or didn’t care to reply. When he returned he was patting his pockets, pulling out his keys. He eyed her clothes. “Grab a sweater and jacket and your mittens. We’re going for a little ride.”
She was tempted to resist, but in the end, the baby was fed and in good hands, and she was more curious about what he needed to say than she was stubborn about last night.
Once she’d changed, she met him by the front door and they got their shoes on.
“Safety first,” Casey said, and handed her Raina’s helmet. She strapped it on as they headed for his bike.
“Where are we going?”
“To the place I always went to when I needed to get my head on straight about shit.”
“Which is?”
“You’ll see.” He mounted the Harley and she got on behind him.
He rode them west, toward town, and then straight through it—all the way down Station Street, across the train tracks. He took a left on Railroad Avenue, passing the motel, then onto the quiet route that ran beside the foothills. Maybe a mile out of town, he eased them to a stop on the shoulder and climbed off.
Abilene did the same, unsure why this spot was significant to him. All she saw was a load of scrub brush and sage, a whole lot of desolate badlands to the east, and rising red rock to the west.
“Follow me.” Casey headed toward the hills.
“This is where you come to think?” she asked, following his path between the boulders and brush.
“Just trust me.”
She did, even as this mystery excursion had her scratching her head. They hiked for five or ten minutes up into the hills, until she was short of breath and warm enough to unzip her jacket and fist her mittens.
“Just about there,” he said, kicking his way through a tangle of brush.
At long last, they stopped, and she followed his lead when he turned and sat on a flat outcropping, facing east.
“Okay. I see it now.” She took it in—the whole of Fortuity was laid out before them, all the way out to Three C and the open range beyond. She oriented herself by the church in the center of town, finding Benji’s and the diner, even the house she’d rented a room at, a little ways south.
“I haven’t been up here in over ten years,” Casey said, squinting against the sun, studying the landscape. “This is where I’d go in high school to smoke weed and think deep, philosophical thoughts. It’s where I was sitting when I decided to leave town.”
“Oh.”
“It’s funny . . . When I made that decision, a decade ago, now, this view seemed like everything I needed to know. Like I was looking at the future—at my hometown, the place I’d get stuck in forever if I didn’t escape. It looks different now.”
“How?”
“Lots of ways. I think before, I looked at this place and I thought about what kind of a life I could have, and all I saw was my dad’s legacy. Or lack thereof. I think I thought, if I don’t get out of here, I’m gonna be nothing. I’m gonna wind up working at the quarry, like every other nobody.” He waved his arm south. “I’m gonna live in some little house, a few blocks from where I grew up, and in fifty years I’m gonna die and wind up in that graveyard.” He flicked a hand to the northeast.
“And what do you see now?”
“I see memories now. I see the garage, and all the streets I drove down, the creek where we used to swim. I see Big Rock, where I kissed a girl for the first time when I was fourteen. And the train tracks that I followed when I tried to run away and find my dad when I was six. And I see the future, too. I see the bar I was barely old enough to drink at when I left town, and now it’s mine.”
She nodded. “That’s all very nice, but what did you bring me here to talk about?”
He took a deep breath, let it out slow, and laced his fingers between his knees. When he turned, she did the same.
What precisely was charging those blue eyes, she wondered? Something beyond nerves. Waiting as he assembled his thoughts was torture, the longest half a minute in her life. “Casey?”
He huffed a heavy breath.
“I messed up last night. You told me you were starting to feel something, starting to wonder if we might be something serious, maybe, someday. And I let you think I didn’t want that.”
“Oh.” Her chest felt funny and she resisted an urge to rub at her heart.
“I got scared, and that was lame.”
“Scared of what?”
“Of coming clean, partly. About my past. And scared of what it all meant—commitment, stepping up. Like, all the fucking way up, when a part of me is terrified if I tried, I’d only find out I was just like my dad. Like I’d let you guys down in the end. Like I’d realize I couldn’t cut it, and run out on you and the baby, and on my family and on Duncan.”
“I can’t imagine you doing that.”
“Well, you haven’t known me all that long. I’m a better man now, since I’ve come home, a better man than I have been for a long, long time. Maybe ever.”
She could say the same about herself, she realized. It had taken Mercy for her to get her act together. Now a year clean, she could look back and realize that the reason she’d gotten addicted to heroin was that she’d woken up each morning and felt nothing. She’d had no reason to get up, nothing in her life worth being awake for. The chemical blank had felt better than all those waking hours of pointlessness. But Mercy had changed all that. There was a focus to her life, a reason to do better, to be better.
“You remember when you asked me what it is I want most?” Casey murmured. “And how I said I didn’t really know yet? Well, I still don’t, but I’m starting to. And it’s because of everything that’s come into my life these past few months. All the responsibilities, even the ones that scare me. It’s feeling like I’m finally becoming a man, and you guys are no small part of that. I want whatever this feeling is that it’s been giving me. Worthiness, maybe.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“I want to be worthy of people’s respect, and faith, and love, maybe. That’s what I want most now.”
“Those are wonderful things to want.”
“Way fucking better than money—that’s for sure . . . I don’t have everything all figured out,” he said softly, his breath finally coming smooth and even. “And I’m still scared. Fucking petrified. But I knew the second I shut your door behind me last night, I’d made a mistake. I’m so scared of becoming my dad, but that’s exactly what I did. I left the second you asked something of me that I was afraid I couldn’t give. But I want to take that back, if you’ll let me.”