by Alison Ryan
Hayes laughed. “I fell asleep in that tree. I’d slept in enough trees before, out hunting, so it wasn’t that bad. Commonly, I’d be in a tree stand, but it wasn’t the first time I’d spent the night in a tree. Maybe the first time without a rifle, but, yeah, I slept in the tree and when your rooster woke me up I went out to the road and started walking the way I figured was the right way. Before long Pat Alderson’s dad drove by in his truck and he recognized me. You remember Pat, he was in Hunt’s class, stocky guy who played catcher on the baseball team? He had blonde hair.”
“Oh yeah, of course. Pat.” I nodded, but I had no idea who Hayes was talking about. Small as Whitmer was, at some point the jeans, lifted trucks, and baseball caps all started to blend together. Boys always used sports as an anchor to which they could tether their memories. For me it was more music or when I’d discovered a book, or what boy I had a crush on. And since it was never Pat Alderson, he’d become a faceless camo jacket walking the halls of Whitmer High as so many others like him.
“Mr. Alderson drove me home. Hunt and I fought that morning. He was still pissed about his stupid ball and he said Uncle Rick had been worried sick about me. I never did find that damn football.”
Hayes looked pensive. He was in that moment, and he even subconsciously rubbed his jaw, the pain of Hunt’s right hook flooding back to him.
“My momma says you and your brothers help out a lot around here. I want to thank y’all for that,” I said, surprising myself with how easily the “y’alls” were slipping back into my speech. I’d worked hard once I arrived in California to eliminate any trace of the country, the mountains, and Montana from my verbal repertoire. But it felt good to let my guard down, to be home again. The people here were impressed by me just for being an Acres. For being Kevin’s sister. For being a daughter of Whitmer. I could drop all the polish I’d cultivated to survive in Hollywood, my whole Sarah Acres, unstoppable super-agent persona. Like shrugging off a bulky winter coat when stepping inside the house, I could hang it up and stay plenty warm just by getting cozy on the couch in front of the fire. The flames of familiarity instantly cut through the better-part-of-a-decade I’d been away.
Neither of us looked quite the same; Hayes had filled out through his chest and shoulders in a very aesthetically pleasing way, although he’d lost none of his boyish charm. At the very least, I’d significantly upgraded my wardrobe, although I was in my most casual farm-comfortable jeans and hoodie now.
“Did she tell you I shot a grizzly here last year? I mean right out there, just past the tree. She’d knocked down the clothesline the day before. I don’t even want to think about if your momma had been out here with some laundry.”
“Yeah, I caught wind of that. But, as you know, hunting stories are a lot like fishing stories. By the time it got to me, that bear was the size of King Kong and was sitting on the roof,” I laughed.
“King Kong? Heck no. She had two cubs with her that were the size of King Kong!” Hayes corrected me.
“You didn’t shoot a mother with cubs, Hayes!” I hissed at him.
“Heck no, Sarah!” He laughed heartily. “I’d only do that in self-defense or to directly save somebody else. No, she was alone. And she turned out to be delicious. Well, thanks to your momma, anyway.”
“I have missed her cooking,” I confessed.
“She’s one of the best,” Hayes agreed.
The conversation stalled, me not wanting to show my cards or answer tough questions about my father, and Hayes not knowing exactly how to talk to me after revealing so much of himself and the way he felt about me, now knowing if I shared any of those feelings anymore.
“It’s really good seeing you again, Sarah. We have a delivery coming in a little while, so I have to get over to the bar. Think you’ll have time to come by tonight? We still have lots of catching up to do.”
“I just got home. I can’t promise tonight. But I’ll get over there at some point,” I offered.
“It’ll be fun having you in there, legal, for a change,” Hayes said, giving me a wink.
We walked together the short distance to the steps, when he stopped in his tracks, squatting to look at the floor. He scanned it as if looking for something. I thought maybe he’d lost a contact or dropped his keys. He stood back up with a satisfied grin. “Stand right here, no, over to the left a little. Perfect.” His gentle hand on my shoulder guided me to a specific spot. I scrunched my face up and cocked my head to the side, awaiting an explanation.
“You have a boyfriend out there in California?”
“Not presently, no.” I thought about telling a little lie, insurance against reigniting an old Whitmer flame, but instead, I told the depressing truth.
“Good. That way I don’t have to feel guilty,” he said, before doing the last thing in the world I expected.
He bent down and kissed me.
I stumbled back half a step, ruining the moment, but what was he doing?
He shrugged his shoulders at my bewilderment. “Sarah, this exact spot is the last place we kissed. I’ve thought about it every dang day since then. I’m sorry I sprung that on you. I feel like a horse’s ass now.”
I twisted up my mouth and gave him a look. His words put a lump in my throat. I recalled my own wistful memories of Hayes. Of kissing him. And more. Sitting on the Santa Monica Pier wishing he was right there among the fishermen, and wondering how much fun it would be to point out the Hollywood sign to him. To take him to a game at Dodger Stadium.
So, I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him back. A kiss years in the making, a kiss unmistakable in its passion and intent. We kissed deeply, and I may or may not have let one of my feet kick up into the air behind me, just like in the movies.
When we finished, I countered Hayes’s question with my own. “There’s not a girl over at The Side Pocket who’s going to have a problem with what we just did, is there?”
“A few jealous ones, sure, but none with a righteous claim,” Hayes laughed.
“Good. Because I’m from Whitmer, Montana. And I won’t hesitate to break a bottle.”
Hayes pulled me into a hug, lifting me off my feet and spinning me around.
“Of that, I have no doubt.”
He walked down the steps to his truck, with that same sexy swagger I knew so well. When he reached his truck, he turned and smiled. “Good to have you home.”
“You’re quite a one man welcoming committee, Hayes. The chamber of commerce invested their money wisely.”
I watched him drive away and kept staring out at the road until the last wisps of dust kicked up by his tires disappeared.
I walked back to the front door, using my index finger to spin the wind chimes that had hung there since I was a little girl, since when I was too short to reach them.
“Oh, Sarah, what in the world have you gotten yourself into?” I said the words out loud, watching the chimes dance. And licking my lips for one last taste of Hayes.
7
I had a restless sleep that night. There was so much on my mind; Kevin. Momma. Daddy. And Hayes.
I woke up early that morning, his name on my lips. I’d been calling out for him in my sleep.
Momma had left me a note on the fridge. She’d be gone all morning, but she’d made me and Daddy pancakes and sausage.
My father was now awake, after sleeping all the way through dinner and the entire night. He was sitting at the end of our wooden dining room table, guzzling coffee and inhaling pancakes as he read the local paper. It took him a moment to notice I was even in the room. As soon as he did, he dropped his fork and stood.
“My girl!” he said, a smile spreading across his weathered face. “I’m so sorry I missed you yesterday. I was worn out.”
“I heard,” I said, my voice flat.
He hugged me tight, not noticing the irritation in my voice. Or, at best, just ignoring it.
“What brings you back anyway?” he asked, as we both sat down. “You don’t ever come home. It�
�s been… hell, a decade? Right? I know we’d planned to come out to you in the fall once the cold snap hits. There ain’t much I like about California, but I sure do love that perfect weather y’all always have.”
I nodded as I sipped my coffee. “Momma asked me to come home. Said she’s been sick. She told me, Daddy. About the MS.”
He put his fork down and looked up at me. “Well. She really didn’t want anyone to know about. I guess I hadn’t realized how bad it was getting. I’ve been so busy…”
“Yep,” I said. “I’ve heard that too.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. Just slowly ate the food my poor mother had probably been up at dawn fixing for us. Like Kevin, Momma didn’t think about herself, even when she was struggling.
And it suddenly made me really pissed off. Daddy was letting her down.
After we were done, I cleaned up while Daddy laid down on the couch, his feet up on pillows. A glass of water sat on the coffee table.
“Hungover?” I asked as I sat in a chair across from him.
He gave me a look. “Don’t start with me. I hear enough from your Momma.”
“I don’t think you hear nearly enough,” I replied. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
He was quiet after that. Just the sound of a morning talk show filling the silence around us.
“Daddy, will you take a walk with me?”
Since I’d been home, the news of my mother’s illness and my own reconnection with Hayes had left me scant emotional capital to invest in the original reason for my visit – my father’s out of control drinking and resultant neglect of my mother and her suffering. But I was here for a reason. And it was clear Daddy wasn’t going to talk about it unless I made him.
“It’s too damn hot to go outside. I’m comfortable in here, Sarah. You go ahead, I’ll hold down the fort here,” he replied.
A member of the congregation at our local church had passed away recently according to the note she’d left me on the fridge, so Momma had gone to meet with some friends to make sure the newly-minted widower stayed fed during his period of mourning. Momma would undoubtedly handle the baking, and no weight would be lost by the bereaved.
My dad was staring at his thousand-pound, old tube-style television, not really watching it, just passing the time. He’d switched the channel from Dr. Phil to a colorized old black and white John Wayne movie which was now being acted out on the screen.
“It’s hardly hot, it’s in the low 70’s,” was my retort. “It’s a beautiful day. I had my bedroom window open, there’s even a breeze. Please, Daddy.”
He gave me a serious side eye, trying to figure out my angle.
“Compromise. I’ll sit out on the porch and watch you take your walk. How’s that?”
“We could go for a ride,” I offered. “I’ll saddle up those two mares out in the barn.”
“I ain’t been on a horse in years, darlin’. My ridin’ days are behind me. You’re just as stubborn as your Momma. Fetch my boots and I’ll walk with you a little while. You Acres women will be the death of me.”
I gathered his boots from the end of the couch where they’d been when I first arrived home the day before, and I brought them over and waited as he pulled them on and then put on his white “summer” cowboy hat.
We followed the fence behind the house, making small talk about the weather and the current crop of horses, things like that. Eventually, when we were far enough from the house that I didn’t fear he’d immediately make a beeline for his truck, I broached the subject I’d been dreading.
“Hayes tells me you’ve been spending a lot of time over at The Side Pocket.”
“That boy talks too much,” he answered. “He ought to try to be more like his brothers. Huck and Hunt are respectful. They know how to be quiet. More like their old man used to be. Hayes takes after that Rick. Too chatty.”
“This is coming from the president of The Liars’ Club?”
“We’ve actually got important things to talk about! Not whether an old man hangs around the bar too much,” he said.
“Daddy, you aren’t an old man. But, I’m worried you might not ever get to be an old man if you don’t change some things.”
He stopped in his tracks and gave me that withering stare I’d seen so many times growing up. It was usually reserved for Kevin, but if either one of us messed up at school or raised a little too much hell, he’d look right through us like he was doing now.
“Your mother put you up to this, right?” he asked. “A man can’t even have a drink with his friends without his old lady trying to spoil his fun. I’m not hurting anybody! To hell with this. I love you, Sarah, I do, and I’m happy to see you, but I’m not going to be lectured by my own daughter.”
He raised both his hands and waved them downwards at me before turning and walking back toward the house.
“Daddy,” I called to him, to no avail.
“Daddy!” I yelled, the first time I could ever recall raising my voice to my father.
He stopped in his tracks and stood that way for a good ten seconds, back to me, balling and unclenching the fists hanging at his sides.
“Daddy. Come back and talk to me. Please.” I softened my tone, and he turned his head far enough to see me out of the corner of his eye.
“Let’s go sit in the shade by the barn. It’ll be cooler there. I love you, Daddy.”
He still hadn’t turned his body back in my direction, but he slowly nodded his head before trudging across the pasture to the barn. I followed in his wake, and we sat down opposite each another in the shade, he on a bench, me on a large stump he’d fashioned into a chair.
“I want to say my peace and to know that you’re not going to walk away. I need you to hear me. Can you do that?” I asked.
He removed his hat and scratched the back of his head before setting it on the bench next to him.
“It doesn’t seem like I have a choice. I can’t have you out here screaming and yelling like a damn fool and scaring all the horses,” he replied, giving me a thin smile.
I rolled my eyes at him and took a deep breath. The whole conversation had such an odd role reversal vibe to it that all I wanted to do was apologize for yelling, hug him, and forget the entire thing.
Thoughts of my mother struggling to climb the three steps to our front porch filled me with the confidence required to confront my father.
“You’re right. Momma did ask me to talk to you. In fact, she asked me to come home so I could talk to you in person. And get you some help. It’s your drinking. Out in L.A., I’ve had so many clients who’ve had drug problems and alcohol problems. I’ve seen what it does to people; to their families. I’ve watched careers get thrown away and lives ruined. Sometimes lost.
But, I’ve also seen people you’d think were too far gone, way past salvation, straighten themselves out again and beat their demons. There are people, and places, who can help.”
My father covered his face in his hands, massaging his scalp with his fingertips. When he removed his hands, and I could see his eyes again, they were glistening.
“Sarah, I don’t know anything about what goes on out there in Hollywood or what sorts of problems those people have, but there’s no place I could go and no people who can help me.”
I’d never heard despondency in my father’s voice. But there was genuine, deep pain there. Pain, I suspected, he was trying to escape from at the bottom of a bottle.
“Daddy, I promise you, I can find a great place you can go! It’s turned out to be a bigger part of my job than I ever expected it to, sad as that sounds. I can get help for you, but only if you meet me halfway and want to be helped. Nobody can help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.”
He looked down at the dirt and kicked at a root. He picked up a small stone and flung it past me, into the grass.
“Do you know somebody who can bring Kevin back?” he asked, his voice cracking when he said my late brother’s name.
“I...” Wor
ds jumbled around in my throat, but none of them could find their way out of my mouth.
“Sarah, I taught Kevin to throw a football. I put him on the back of a horse the first time. When he was a baby and fell asleep on my chest I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I taught him to shoot. To hunt, to fish, everything I knew about being a man.
“I poured myself into him. He meant everything to me.”
My father was sobbing now, harder even than at Kevin’s funeral. From a secret place inside, a place he kept locked away. A place he drank to forget was there.
“And he went halfway around the world and he came back in a bag. The parts of him they could find and identify as human.
“Oh, God help me...”
I knelt beside him and hugged his neck as we wept. The sounds he made terrified me. I was a little girl again, scared of the thunder outside, the tree branch scraping my window in the wind, but rather than having my father’s arms to run to for safety, I was holding him, trying to comfort him.
He seemed so small to me. Physically small, I mean. My arms wrapped around his shoulders as he shook with grief. I wiped tears from my cheeks with the backs of my hands.
“Daddy, I’m here. I’m right here.”
He clutched at my arm as he struggled to compose himself. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket – all the old men in Whitmer carried them, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone in California use one – and he blew his nose into it. His shirtsleeve collected the tears from his cheeks.
“I’m sorry, baby. I don’t want you to see me like this,” he said to me in a small voice.
“It’s okay, Daddy. I love you so much.” I loosened my grip on him and squeezed in beside him on the bench, holding his hands.
“I put so much of myself into your brother…and that part of me is gone. It’s gone forever. I’ve got a great big hole inside me. A great big hole that that nothing can fill. I’m walking around with a hole in me you could drive a truck through.”