But a dog would sure be nice.
By the time they were motoring back again, past two in the afternoon, Russell had a twenty-pound salmon in the fish locker. Blake had nothing, but that was how it went. You didn’t get your way in fishing. You gave it your best shot, and you got what you got. Kind of like football.
When they pulled up again outside the little frame house in a part of town that would never get fashionable, Blake peeled off ten twenties, and Russell stuck them into a battered leather wallet with a nod and said, “Come on in and have an iced tea. Stick around for supper if you want. I’m going to be firing up the barbecue, and that’s way too much salmon for two.”
“I don’t mind if I do.” Blake had no place to go, he was tired of his own company, and anyway—he liked Russell. “You married, then?”
“Nope. Never did get married. I’m dumb, but I’m not stupid. Got my stepdaughter living with me, though.”
He swung on down from the SUV, another painful affair, and Bella jumped down after him. Blake hauled out the cooler with the fish, already cleaned at the marina’s station, and said, “Wait, though. If you weren’t married, how do you have a stepdaughter? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Ex-girlfriend’s daughter,” Russell said. “My son’s sister. Half-sister. Same mom, different dads.”
“Oh. Gotcha.” Blake followed Russell and Bella up the concrete walk and said, “Your boy’s not around here, I guess, or he’d be fishing with you.”
“He’s gone,” Russell said. “Iraq. Eight years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Blake said, because what else did you say?
It was like his mom was right there in his ear. Of course it’s hard on you, sweetie. Of course it is, losing football, losing your knee, and both of them so sudden. You need to let yourself feel it. There’s no weakness in that. Go on and grieve it. Go on and let go. Just remember not to lose sight of where you are in the scheme of things. Other people have it hard, too. Everybody you’ll ever meet is fighting a battle you can’t see.
And some of them were a whole lot worse than a busted knee, a vanished girlfriend, and a career change.
Dakota held the curved segment of pink glass against the wheel of the grinder, working patiently until the piece she’d cut matched the overlaid paper template perfectly. Then she turned to set the finished piece on her worktable, and a muscle spasmed in her neck. She stifled an exclamation, set the glass down—slicing her finger in the process— and rubbed her neck and shoulder with one hand while she sucked on her sore finger until that got boring.
It was probably time for a break. She checked her phone and blinked. Well, yeah. Two-thirty, and she’d been at her table for seven hours. She was starving, and she needed to pee. Time alone meant time in the zone, but it could also lead to what some people called “excess.”
The conch tugged at her, but the fatigue and stiffness did, too. Plus, she really did have to pee. All of a sudden, that was an emergency. Her obsession screamed, “No!” But her body told her that a snack, a bike ride, and a swim to loosen everything up would make her more productive. Her conch would still be here when she got back. Ready and waiting.
Tearing herself away was always the hard part, but by the time she’d biked to City Beach and swum for twenty minutes along the farthest edge of the floating-log barrier, she felt refreshed and ready to go again. She maneuvered around a group of noisy, rambunctious boys, waded up to the beach, and did her usual squint-and-stumble effort to find her towel and bag.
Somebody said, “Dakota. Over here.” Evan’s voice.
She navigated by sound and fuzzy sight over to where he was sitting with Gracie and said, “Can’t find my stuff.”
“I figured,” he said. “Come on.” He guided her to her red bag, and she reached for her glasses and, as always, felt more secure when she had them on.
“Why don’t you just wear your contacts when you swim?” he asked.
“Not worth it.” She grabbed her towel and wrapped it around her waist. “I save them for when it matters how I look, and as contact-worthy occasions are sadly rare in my life, I still have plenty of pairs left. But if I’m wearing this suit, contacts wouldn’t help. I know you were going to say it.”
“Nah, I wasn’t. Haven’t said anything yet, have I?”
“Not that much. But you tend to be fairly restrained in general.”
“Why’d you buy that, anyway? Since you brought it up.”
“It was cheap.”
“Well, yeah,” he said doubtfully. Then he shut up, because somebody else was walking over to join them.
Beth Schaefer, who didn’t have an ugly bathing suit. She was wearing a conservative but beautifully designed aqua bikini that showed off her slim figure and pale skin, and her blonde hair was in a French braid. She looked like what she was. Rich, classy, and poised, exactly the same way she’d looked last night when she’d been out with Blake Orbison.
“Hey, Beth,” Dakota said. Jealousy was ugly, and she had nothing against Beth. Not really. Not anymore. “How’re you doing?”
“Oh, I’m good,” she said. “Really good. Fine. Just home to see my parents for a few days. Visit, you know. How are you?” She glanced at Evan and Gracie, and Gracie did one of her big smiles, which made Beth smile back. Evan didn’t smile, and he still wasn’t saying anything, either.
“Great,” Dakota said, then couldn’t think of anything else.
“I need to get going,” Evan said. “The baby.”
“Oh,” Dakota said. Clearly, they were done. “Hey, if you’ve got the van, can I shove my bike in the back and get a ride to my place with you? Maybe you’d help with that storage unit.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Well,” Beth said, “nice to see you, anyway.”
Dakota waited until she and Evan had left the beach and she was unlocking her bike to say, “So that wasn’t awkward much.”
Evan didn’t answer, just went ahead to the van and opened it up, then started to buckle Gracie into her car seat. “If you hang on a minute,” he said while Dakota wheeled her bike around to the back, “I’ll put that inside for you.”
“Nope.” Dakota wedged it into the back of the van, careful to position it so it wouldn’t fall on Gracie. When Evan finally shifted the big old Ford Econoline into gear and eased carefully out into the crowded parking lot, she said, “You know, when you didn’t say anything last night about Beth being out with Blake, I thought you were being careful of my delicate sensibilities after my unfortunate encounter on the rocks. Guess not.”
A muscle ticked in his hard jaw, and there was a long pause before he said, “No.”
She sighed. “That’s communicative. ‘No’ what? No, you weren’t being careful? No, you don’t want to talk about it?”
“No both.”
“You know, many experts recommend talking out one’s issues with a trusted friend. It’s a concept.”
Evan made the turn onto Cedar. “What’s the point? It’s not going to change how I feel. It’s not going to change what I do.”
Dakota hesitated, then probed the tender spot anyway. “It was a long time ago. None of us is the person we were then.”
He glanced at her, then back at the road. “I am. I’m still the same guy. Exact same guy.”
She considered that. It was true, pretty much. She tugged the elastic off the bottom of her braid, undid her hair, finger-combed through it, and did her best to squeeze it dry with the towel. She hadn’t bothered with her clothes, and she was dripping wet again. “Except that you’re a dad. You don’t think that’s changed you?”
“Yeah. Made me less likely to waste my time.” He turned onto Seventh. Smoothly and quietly, the way Evan did everything. But that didn’t mean there was nothing happening underneath.
“I should probably have been more sensitive back then,” she said. “When all that happened. Sorry about that.”
“What, probed my feelings some more? No, you shouldn’t have. I felt crappy
. There you go. Saved you the trouble. Besides, you had other things to think about.”
“Yeah.” She looked out the window at a sprinkler watering a front lawn, with a couple of shrieking kids running through it. Big brother, little sister. “I’ve been thinking about Riley a lot lately. It’s being back here, because he’s everywhere I look in this town. Every memory I have. Do you ever get that?”
“I told you, I don’t think about sad stuff when there’s no point.”
“I do. All the time.”
“I noticed.”
Dakota looked out the window some more. Kids on bikes, kids sitting on front porch steps eating popsicles with their friends. Wild Horse in the summer.
It had never been her town, and never Riley’s, either. All Riley had done was make it bearable. Her first memory and her fallback position, always, until he wasn’t. Through everything that had happened to them, every single time their world had been uprooted, Riley had been there, telling her, “It’s OK. We’ll stick together, and it’ll be OK.”
“But what if we can’t stay together?” she’d asked him once. That last, scariest time after Grandma had died, when they’d come to Wild Horse. Riley had been coming home—sort of—and she’d been coming nowhere close.
The two of them had stood on the sidewalk outside Russell’s house with their backpacks and a garbage bag full of clothes, watching their mother’s red taillights disappearing into the darkness. They’d stared at the closed door of an unfamiliar house where a man lived who was Riley’s father, but not hers. She’d known she couldn’t ring that doorbell, but she wouldn’t have to. Riley would do it.
“Of course we’re going to stick together,” he’d said, sounding absolutely sure. “Of course we can.”
“He’s not going to want me. I’m going to foster care. You know I am.” It was the dark cloud that had hung over their heads so many times, the storm that had always threatened but never broken.
“If you do,” Riley had said, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, tension in every line of his wiry seventeen-year-old frame, “I’ll run away and come get you out. No matter what.” He’d held up his fist until she’d raised her own. Then he’d bumped fists with her and said it. “This bud’s for you.”
She hadn’t been able to stop the tears from welling in her eyes, but she’d repeated the silly phrase just as she always had, even though her voice had wobbled. “This bud’s for you.”
She’d gotten the call from Russell on a day like today. A warm summer Saturday. She’d been twenty-one and independent, a free spirit in a city full of free spirits, where nobody had known her name. Where “Dakota” sounded cool, and “Dakota Savage” sounded awesome.
She’d taken her bike up to Seaside, on the Oregon coast, and she was riding on the Lewis & Clark Mainline, almost at the steel bridge, when her phone rang in her pocket with the distinctive piano notes of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” Russell. She’d hopped off her bike, grabbed her phone from her pocket, and said, “Hey, Dad. How’re you doing? I was just thinking about you.”
“Dakota.”
That one word, and the darkness had come. The cloud that had threatened for so long had broken, and she’d stood there in the sun, staring at the hand holding her bike, at the worn blue paint and the electrical tape coming loose on the grip, listened to Russell talk, and gotten colder and colder. Until she was shivering. Until she was frozen.
Evan had come to drive her home. He hadn’t said much. He’d just been there, exactly as he’d been with her, and with Russell, during the terrible visit to the funeral home, and then all the way until they were standing at the gravesite. On Russell’s other side when the honor guard had taken the flag off Riley’s coffin and folded it into that perfect triangle, then handed it to Riley’s father, the gift nobody wanted. When the bugler had played “Taps,” the last mournful note had died, and Dakota had thought her heart would die along with it. When they’d put her big brother in the ground, and for the last time, she’d whispered, “This bud’s for you.” When she’d known that from now on, she had to be her own hero.
She’d probably leaned on Evan too much that summer Riley had died—for herself, but especially for Russell. However bad her brother’s death had been for her, it had been worse for Russell. Dakota had still been around, but she wasn’t Russell’s. She didn’t have his name, and she didn’t have his blood. She was just Riley’s half-sister, the girl who’d showed up at fifteen and had no place else to go. Part of the package deal.
As much as she’d loved Russell, her love hadn’t come close to making up for the hole Riley had left in his life. Fortunately, there’d been Evan. Riley’s best friend had been able to do what Dakota hadn’t. Because after the funeral, when other people had said their “Sorrys” and gone back to their lives, when Dakota had had to go back to Portland, and to work—Evan hadn’t. He’d kept coming over for dinner after work, staying to watch baseball with Russell, going out fishing and hunting with him as he always had. He’d been more than Russell’s business partner. He’d been a friend. They’d needed him, and he’d stepped up, just like he’d been stepping up ever since. He was right. He was still the same guy.
Sometime during that terrible summer, though, Beth and Evan had broken up, and Dakota hadn’t even known anything about it for weeks. He’d never said. She still didn’t know what had happened, or why.
They were almost home. If she were going to say this, she needed to say it now, so she did. “Beth came to see me, you know. Right before she went back to Seattle to start law school.”
“You think that’s going to matter to me. I don’t care. It was a long time ago.” For once, Evan’s movements weren’t smooth. He pulled in to the curb in front of the house—and hit it with a hard jolt. “Damn.”
“Da da da,” Gracie sang from the back seat, and Dakota could swear Evan flinched.
“She’s not a parrot,” Dakota said. “You’re unlikely to have a one-year-old who curses like a sailor just because you slipped up once.”
“Want to bet?” He had his hand on the door handle like he couldn’t be in here another minute.
“For Pete’s sake.” Dakota would have sworn she knew guys, but they could still baffle and exasperate her like nothing else. “Just wait a second.”
“Nothing to wait for. I’m fine.” Evan climbed out of the van and slammed the door, then came around to her side for Gracie.
He was fine? Swearing in front of his daughter and slamming the door? Yeah, right.
It was a long time ago. They’d both looked so sad, though. She’d seen it in Beth, and she’d felt it in Evan. Well, she’d felt his mad. But “mad” was just a guy’s version of “sad.”
She gave it up and went to the rear of the van to get her bike. Her own love life wasn’t setting any heat records, after all. She sure wasn’t qualified to judge anybody else’s.
She rolled her bike into the backyard and put it away. Bella tore out to meet her, which meant Russ was home from his fishing trip. Good. She’d started to wonder about him when he hadn’t showed up by the time she’d left for the lake. She didn’t even know who he’d gone with.
Gracie was starting to fuss a little in Evan’s arms. “She needs her bottle,” he said. “But I’ll give her a quick bath first, if that’s OK, get the sand off.”
“Sure,” Dakota said absently, going up the stairs to the back door. Now that she was here, her glass was pulling at her again. She’d hang the storage unit with Evan, and then she’d get back to her piece, and by the end of tomorrow, if she had another day like today, she’d be done with everything but the soldering.
She was opening the door from the back-porch laundry area on the thought, going on through into the kitchen, and hearing the voices. Russ’s. And somebody else’s. Somebody saying something, low and slow, in a voice like warm molasses.
No. Not possible.
She was hustling now, around the corner and to her workroom. Her space. Where Bella was sitting on one side
of the gate with her tongue out, and Russell was inside, showing off the finished pieces in the corner.
Showing her best pieces, her private pieces. To Blake Orbison.
“Sorry I can’t offer you a beer,” Russell told Blake when they got inside the little house, which was neater and cleaner than Blake had imagined it would be.
“No problem,” Blake said, accepting the glass of iced tea. “This is the taste of home to a Southern boy.” He leaned against the kitchen counter to watch as Russell put cedar planks into a roasting pan to soak and begun to cut the fish into fillets. The cleanliness would be the stepdaughter, probably. Russell didn’t seem like the homemaker type. Grilling the fish didn’t count. Every guy could barbecue.
Blake didn’t think much of adults who lived at home, even if they traded off doing the housework in exchange. Arrested development was what it always looked like to him.
Right. So he’d judged. He wouldn’t be sharing his opinion with Russell. And sure, somebody could say that when you left college for the NFL, you weren’t exactly in a normal young-adult situation, and you didn’t have room to judge. He knew that no matter how much he loved his parents, he wouldn’t have moved back in with them. He’d have slept in his car before he’d done that. He’d wanted to be on his own—he’d longed to be on his own—and he didn’t get why anybody else wouldn’t. Especially a guy. Maybe women were different, although his older sister hadn’t moved back home, either.
He sipped at his iced tea and looked around. There was a stained-glass piece hanging in the window that he liked a lot better than his trout. Three scarlet flowers—poppies, he thought—in extreme close-up, glowing vibrant in the light, as cheerful as sunshine. That one wouldn’t even have been a sacrifice to buy. He’d have to ask Russell where he’d gotten it. It was a surprise, though. Russell didn’t seem like a man who’d be interested in art. Must be the stepdaughter’s.
There was something else on the wall opposite, though, above the table—a couple framed photos that took his mind off the poppies. A man in a desert camo uniform and boots, crouching in the sand beside a vehicle and holding a map, with two other guys crouching beside him as he pointed something out to them. Another strangely compelling shot of the same guy lying on his bunk in a sand-colored T-shirt and camo pants, one hand behind his head, looking at the camera without a smile.
Silver-Tongued Devil (Portland Devils Book 1) Page 6