Anywhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories, #3)

by Susan Fanetti

  She’d thought she was looking for something, chasing something she needed but couldn’t define. But she’d hadn’t been chasing anything.

  She’d been chased.

  *****

  The same little bell over the door made the same slightly flat jingle when Gigi went into the trading post. As it had been in the first days of the reservation, the trading post was a little bit of everything: mail center, convenience store, coffee shop, bank. In the Seventies, they’d added a couple of pumps for gas, too. Some of the really big reservations had what amounted to small towns within their borders, but Sawtooth Jasper wasn’t nearly big enough to sustain more than the post. They also weren’t big enough, or accessible enough, to support a casino, which was basically the only chance Indigenous communities had to achieve financial security—though casinos brought problems of their own.

  Same shop, same layout. The stock barely looked any different. A heavyset guy her age, with short, shaggy hair, sat behind the counter, reading a comic book. Right where he’d been since he’d started working here sixteen years ago. Though his hair had been long then.

  He stood up when he saw her, and Gigi smiled. “Hey, Roger.”

  “Geeeeej!” He said the first syllable of her name—the one her dad had given her and everybody but her mom and one other person called her—with a miles-long vowel in the middle and held out his hand over the counter. “Heard you were back!”

  She and Roger had been born two weeks apart. They’d very literally grown up together. She clasped hands with him. “Yep. Yesterday.”

  “You cut your hair,” he pointed out, approximately the fiftieth person so far to do so.

  “I did. So did you.”

  He ruffled his hand over his shaggy head. “Yeah. Last year, when Pop died. Mouth cancer.”

  Like a lot of Native men, Shoshone men took great stock in their hair. Women, too. Not as a vanity but as a symbol of their strong spirit. Aside from those who had work that required short hair, most men in the tribe kept it long unless they had a powerful calling to cut it, such as deep grief. Some kept it short during their mourning, and then grew it again. Others kept it short thereafter. If his dad died last year, Roger seemed to be the latter.

  “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  Roger shrugged. “It’s okay. I’m sorry about your grandma.”

  “Thanks. Is your mom okay?”

  “She’s doin’ better, yeah. It’s just her and me now. Tracy moved out to California.”

  His little sister, two years younger than they. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. She was workin’ at the Moondancer and met a guy there.”

  The Moondancer was a dude ranch not far from the reservation. The guests there were usually stupidly rich and entitled white men, and the girls who worked there got fucked and chucked on a regular basis. It paid pretty well, and local girls, from town and the reservation, could get on year-round, but you knew you were going to get hit on, and hard, and there was hardly ever a Cinderella story in the works if you went along for the ride.

  “Is that good?”

  Again, Roger shrugged. “Maybe. She says it’s goin’ good. But she’s not in touch much, so it’s hard to be sure. She left kinda like you, in the middle of the night, not long after Pop died. I mean, she didn’t run out on her wedding—” he cut off, blushing. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. That’s what I did.” Strictly speaking, she didn’t leave her groom at the altar. She’d told him she was going. She loved him and wanted him to understand. He’d even driven her to Boise. He’d loved her and tried to understand. But it had happened the night before their wedding, with the Apple Jack Saloon festooned with teal and violet decorations, sitting ready for their reception.

  They’d planned a wedding on the reservation, with the mountains as their backdrop. She’d planned to wear Maw’s traditional wedding dress. Shoshone wedding, townie reception. Both their worlds united. That had been their plan.

  “What’s it like out there?” Roger asked, and Gigi’s painful memories scattered.

  Last night, Gigi had sat in the yard with an ever-growing cluster of neighbors. They’d grilled meat and potatoes and had fry bread and corn on the cob. They’d drunk beer and whiskey and water and soda, and they’d pelted her with questions until she’d woven a story, one Maw might have been proud of.

  But today, while she wrestled with doubts and regrets and realities, she didn’t have the energy to weave a tale. “Just like anywhere, I guess. Wherever you go, to the people who live there, it’s home, and to everybody else, it’s not.” And that was both good and bad, whether you lived there or not. That was the one thing she’d truly learned: you only had one home, no matter where you went, how many places, how far away, how long you were gone, your home was your home. You couldn’t lose it.

  Or escape it.

  “What’s it like to be back? I’ve never been off the rez more than two days in a row in my life. You were gone, what, ten years?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn, girl.”

  “I don’t know what it’s like to be back yet. It’s the same as always. And it’s weird, too. Like a mirror image, or something. I don’t know.”

  He laughed. “You got deep while you were walking the world.”

  Gigi joined his chuckle. “I don’t know about that. Mostly, I’m just on eggshells. You’re about the only person who hasn’t made me bend in supplication before you’d talk to me.”

  “Have you seen him yet?”

  The question surprised her, coming from Roger, and it took her a second to connect the dots. “Who, Reese?”

  He nodded.

  “Not yet. I came straight home. I haven’t seen anybody off the rez yet.” The direction of their chat had dulled her enthusiasm for this reunion, so she heaved in a mood-clearing breath and said, “I came in for some fresh milk, and to see if there’s mail.”

  He turned to the back wall, where the mail was still sorted into rows of hundred-year-old wood cubbies. Over his shoulder he said, “You want store milk, or natural? We keep natural stuff in bottles now. John Wells added in a few dairy cows to his herd. There’s goat’s milk, too. You gotta bring the bottles back, though.”

  Raw milk was a trendy, bougie thing in New York. People in Brooklyn drove out to dairy farms to buy it. She’d come in just hoping to have something tastier than powdered milk for her cereal, and didn’t really like the taste of raw milk, either. But she liked buying from a neighbor, so she picked up a quart, in an old-fashioned glass bottle with a flip-top seal.

  Roger had her family’s mail—a quick glance showed a couple sales circulars and some official-looking envelope addressed to her mother—stacked neatly on the counter when she set the bottle down. “Do you want some beer, too?”

  “No, thanks. Just the milk and the mail.” She didn’t think she had the strength, or the balls, to get in the way of the rolling downhill boulder that was her family’s devotion to drink, but that didn’t mean she was going to give it a push, either. If her mother wanted more beer, she’d have to walk her skinny ass down here to get it.

  Roger handed over her change, and she dropped it into the SJS Reservation Youth Fund box in front of the register.

  “It’s great to see you, Geej. We should hang out.”

  “I’d like that. It’s really good to see you, too. You look good, Rog.”

  He grinned. “Not as good as you.”

  *****

  Gigi sat on her bike, the engine still running, and reconsidered. There were better times to be here. Just about every time on the clock was a better time to be here than now. For sure, midday yesterday had been a dramatically better time to be here. Then, there’d been hardly anybody in the parking lot, and the saloon would have been likewise empty.

  But she hadn’t been ready yesterday.

  Now, it was dusk on a Friday night. The Moondancer was in the final weeks of its season, still feeding rich men playing dress-up cowboys into town on their first n
ight. And locals after work, in town or on ranches and farms, came in for some cold ones in good company, some pool or poker, some honkytonk tunes on the juke. Which was currently blaring Merle Haggard into the nearly full lot.

  The Apple Jack Saloon would be wall-to-wall people, which she’d certainly known before she’d left the reservation. And yet here she was.

  Maybe this was actually better. Yeah, most of the populations of Jasper Ridge and the reservation both would see whatever scene was about to play out, but it wasn’t like they all didn’t already know she was in town. They were probably casing the Jack in shifts, making sure they’d see her go in and alert everyone and anyone, whatever time it was.

  And he’d be busy. Swamped. Slammed. Too busy to make time for a scene.

  She hadn’t run out on him. She’d talked to him. Tried to make him understand. He’d told her to use the honeymoon money. He’d driven her to the airport. He’d tried to understand.

  But he’d thought she’d get it out of her system and come home. A few months in, when she was ready to move on again and she’d realized she was likely gone for good, she’d stopped returning his emails. That was when she’d truly abandoned him.

  So she had no idea how he’d react to her now.

  But he owned the town gossip pit. Of course he knew she was back. He was probably the first person off the rez to know. The longer she put this off, the weirder it would be.

  Maybe a crowd was best. Yank off the Band-Aid. Let everybody see her shame, feed on it all at once, at a trough, digest it, and shit it out.

  She killed the engine, dismounted, and took off her helmet.

  “Gigi? Oh my God, Gigi Mackenzie! I heard you were back, but I didn’t believe it!”

  Gigi cringed and set her helmet on the seat of her bike. She knew the voice and formed her mouth into a smile before she turned around and faced Pearl Wilkes.

  “Hi, Pearl.”

  Pearl was about Gigi’s age, a year or so younger. She’d worked up at the Moondancer since right after high school, and Gigi could just tell she still did. Pearl stood with two other women—younger women, about mid-twenties—who also had the prettied-up look of Moondancer meat.

  “Well, hi!” Pearl lunged in for a hug, which Gigi attempted to accept with good grace. She was not a hugger or particularly effusive, period, but Pearl sure was.

  “Hey. How’ve you been?”

  “Me? I’ve been same’s ever. Just like this old place. Nothin’ ever changes!” She perked every word like a cheerleader, but she wasn’t wrong. “You’re the one with the good story. I heard you were in China!”

  “I was. A few years ago. Went all over Asia for about a year or so.” She heard the boast in her tone but couldn’t control it. Pearl wasn’t a bad person, but she made everything feel like a competition, whether you wanted it to be or not.

  Pearl’s eyes literally goggled. “Oh, my. That’s ... well, I can’t even imagine.” Then she got a sly look, and her smile took on an edge. “Have you seen him yet?”

  This time, Gigi knew exactly whom Pearl was talking about. “That’s why I’m here.”

  That edge in Pearl’s smile sharpened, and Gigi prepared herself to get cut. “You know he’s with somebody now. I think it’s pretty serious.”

  She had not seen Reese in more than ten years, or had any word of him in nearly that long. Her mom had shared reservation news, and sometimes stuff about town, but she’d never mentioned Reese, and Gigi had never asked after him. She had left him on the night before their wedding, and then she’d ghosted him when he began to ask if she meant ever to come back to him. If Maw hadn’t died, she still wouldn’t be home even now.

  There was no earthly reason she had any cause, or any right, to think he’d spent the past decade waiting for her. And she didn’t think he had been. She’d never been in love with anyone but him, and she’d never had any kind of sustained relationship since she’d left home, but she’d hardly been celibate. In fact, she and Darwin had messed around while she was staying with him. They’d had sex the night before she’d left Brooklyn.

  But Pearl’s jab hit its mark. Somewhere deep down inside, in that place she never wanted to look, she’d sort of been hoping Reese had kept his torch burning. Like she had. Just in case. It was stupid, and selfish. It was even mean, to wish loneliness on him for all this time. No—she hadn’t been wishing it. She wanted him to be happy. She’d just held onto a kernel of hope that if she ever did go home, she’d still have the one thing she’d truly missed in all her time away: his love. Him.

  And here she was, back home.

  Finding out he’d moved on? Yeah, that wound bled a little.

  But she kept her smile in place. “I’m just here to say hi, Pearl.”

  “Sure you are!” Pearl hooked her skinny arm around Gigi’s. “Well, come on then, let’s go say hi!”

  She just about dragged Gigi across Ridge Road and over the parking lot to the Jack. Her little duet of a posse, still nameless, followed. When they got to the front door, Pearl yanked it open, and old-time country music blasted through the doorway—it was Dolly Parton now. Gigi stepped into the Apple Jack Saloon.

  Ironic that a woman with a family history of rampant alcoholism, who was a teetotaler herself, had fallen in love with a man with a family history of owning the town saloon. But Reese wasn’t a drunk, or an especially heavy drinker, and it had never been an issue between them. He wasn’t the one who’d served her father the night he’d wrecked his bike. But he was the one serving her sister on the nights she drove home drunk.

  That wasn’t something between them now, though. There wasn’t a ‘between them’ anymore. He had someone else to have things between now.

  The bar was exactly like she remembered it. The tables and chairs, the neon beer signs, the jukebox, the pool tables. Everything the same. The Jack had been standing here since before there was a town, and it had probably looked pretty much like this in the 1870s, too.

  The place was too crowded for her to recognize specific faces right away. She was recognized first, and what happened was like it had been rehearsed for the stage: the people closest to her went quiet, and it waved out from there. People who knew her clammed up and stared, and people who didn’t know her caught the virus and did the same, until the entire room had stopped talking, and the only sound was Dolly begging Jolene not to take her man.

  Oh look, more irony.

  And then the crowd parted, right down the middle. All those staring heads stayed turned her way while the bodies they were perched on stepped back and cleared a path straight to the bar. Reese stood there, behind the bar, frozen, facing her.

  He had changed.

  He had a beard now, a dark scruff that was either intentionally fashionable or, more likely, charmingly careless, and there was a faint sprinkle of grey in it. New lines crinkled at his eyes. Oh, those eyes. The color of stiff denim. They always showed every emotion he felt, even when the rest of his face was still. His golden brown hair was the same—shortish and disheveled. He had a habit of raking his hands through it when he was stressed or tired.

  He’d aged. But he was still gorgeous. Still Reese.

  She knew then for a fact what she’d always felt to be true: she still loved him. That feeling had been tucked away for safekeeping, but it hadn’t faded. At all.

  And she had no choice but to walk down the aisle the people of Jasper Ridge had made. Walk down an aisle to the man she’d left hours before she was meant to walk down another aisle toward him.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Five

  Jesus.

  He’d known she was in town, there’d practically been a line of people who couldn’t wait to tell him she was back in town, and he’d been working all day on getting things right in his head. He’d thought he was prepared. He wasn’t.

  Look at her.

  She walked to him, down what could for all the world have been a wedding aisle, with all their neighbors lined up on either side, staring at her.


  Pearl was right behind her, grinning, trailed by a couple seasonal girls from the Moondancer whose names Reese hadn’t bothered to learn. To see her with Pearl was fairly surprising; they hadn’t been close. She thought Pearl was vapid and grasping, which was an astute assessment. But Pearl loved gossip, and right now, there was no tastier gossip in Jasper Ridge than the woman walking through the saloon toward him now.

  Georgia Mackenzie.

  Jesus, look at her.

  Those goddamn gorgeous dark eyes, circled with thick black lashes. That amazing mouth. That slender body, that long neck, those endless legs. She wore a scuffed and cracked brown leather jacket over a plain t-shirt and ripped jeans faded sky blue. They could have been the exact same clothes she’d been wearing when he’d left her at the Boise airport and come home alone to take apart the wedding that never was.

  When he’d last seen her, more than ten years earlier, she’d been twenty-two years old. Too young for him—a notion he’d had plenty of time to examine and really comprehend, though back then he’d been too bullheaded and besotted to see why it could be trouble. To see her now, though, he felt like he’d fallen into some kind of time warp. He felt every day of those ten years, but she hadn’t aged a single one. She didn’t look any different at all.

  Except ... “You cut your hair.”

  Reaching the bar, she laughed a little and ran her fingers through the shiny black strands that just skimmed her shoulders. She still wore the silver cuff bracelet her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday, with the big turquoise stone at the center.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “It looks good. You look good.”

  “Thank you. You look great. I like the beard.”