‘You can’t stay here,’ I say. ‘It’s filthy.’
Hale smiles, warm but sad. ‘It ain’t so bad, Carrie. It was worse when I lived here. If anything, Pop’s a lot more houseproud now he’s dead. I figure someone came in and tidied the place after he died, looking for anything worth taking, and he wasn’t around to muss it up afterwards.’ I can’t wrap my head around how blasé he is about the whole thing; in Hale’s world, of course people would go through a dead man’s trailer looking for what they could steal. ‘Besides, it’s just for a couple of nights. No big thing.’
‘But –’ I start… but what’s the use? Hale won’t change his mind. He’s never been one for acts of charity. It was hard enough getting him to take a bowl of soup without being offended. If I offered him my couch, there’s no way he’d accept it, just on the principle of the thing.
If you offered him your bed he might, that spiteful, hateful little voice in my ear chimes up again. Your bed and everything that’s in it. Maybe part of him came back to get a taste of what you held out on him all those years ago. And the worst part is, I don’t think you’d mind that. Not one little bit. After all, how long has it been now?
Too long – far too long – but I refuse to let myself think like that. The situation is confusing enough as it is.
‘So what are you going to do with it?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know. Sell it? Give it away? Let them tear it to the ground for all I care. I spent most of the last ten years thinking I’d never set foot in this goddamn shack for all the money in the world. That was all I wanted, to never see it again.’
I can’t say that I blame him.
‘Are you glad you did?’ I ask. ‘Come back again, I mean.’
‘I don’t know. It’s all still a bit… new. Seems a lot smaller than it did when I was a kid. Back then, it was all I knew.’
‘Are you still talking about the trailer?’
He cracks a smile, but barely. ‘I don’t know. Eden too, I guess. God, I used to think that this was the whole world. I figured I’d end up living and dying here. Didn’t even cross my mind that there was anything else. Even when I used to talk about us…’ He pauses. ‘I mean, about getting away. I don’t know how much I ever thought that was possible. Crazy, right? How things can change?’
Sure. Crazy. Heartbreaking. Call it what you like.
On the one hand, I’m happy for him – really, I am. He’s Hale 2.0, more than he ever was when knew him. But on the other… what? Jealousy? A realisation that I’ve missed out?
‘But why now?’ I ask. ‘I mean, your Dad died last year. If you didn’t come back then, why are you here now?’
Hale shrugs. ‘No real reason. It felt like time. Time to put it all to rest, I guess. I’ve been putting it off and putting it off, but… well, I figured I needed to see it one last time. Clear out the ghosts. Move on. Is that stupid?’
I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I get it. I don’t think it’s stupid at all.’
‘It’s my last tie to Eden. To Texas, even. I belong in New York now. Once this whole mess is dealt with, I can put my old life behind me, completely.’ He sounds almost happy about that. I wonder if he can tell that it’s a knife in my heart.
The thing is, I don’t think I ever expected Hale to come back – at least, not really. Maybe a little, in the first couple of weeks after he left. I was sad that he was gone, of course, but I viewed it as… a break? I don’t know. I guess I thought that he’d spend a few days away, realise that he couldn’t survive out there in the big, wide world, and then come back to me – to us – and we’d work through it together. I was sad that he wasn’t there, but I knew he’d be back. Then, when he didn’t come back, it ruined me. When weeks and months passed by without any word from him, any phone call, any email or letter, I realised that he was really gone, and for good. I’d never see him again. What we had was over.
I got better, obviously; no one can stay a pining teenager forever. But it took time, and effort, and a whole lot of tears. It’s not a time I like the idea of going back to. Whatever happened, happened – and the same is true of what didn’t. Hale’s joy at the idea of going back to New York is enough to make that clear to me. I’m a fragment of his past, and nothing more.
Best off forgotten, if he hasn’t already.
‘So why did you come to the diner?’ I ask. ‘Was that just you clearing out some old ghosts too?’
Hale pauses as the realisation hits him, and I can see him treading carefully. ‘Carrie, I didn’t mean –’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ I snap. I hate how childish my voice sounds, but I can’t help it. One afternoon with Hale, and I can feel myself reverting back to sixteen years old, with everything that entails. If you ever really left, an unpleasant voice says in my ear. After all, Hale made a new life for himself. He grew up. Why didn’t you?
Why didn’t you, Carrie?
Hmm?
Hale fiddles with the tab on his beer can, bending it back and forward over and over again. I recognise the motion. It’s something he used to do in the old days, a way of calming himself down when he got stressed. When Aaron and his little troop of trained monkeys started riding his ass, trying to get a rise out of him. When his dad was in one of his black moods. Whenever he felt his adrenaline pumping, and he had to consciously try to suppress that fight-or-flight reflex.
I’d seen it before, but I’d never been the cause of it until now.
‘Jesus Christ, Carrie,’ he says. ‘Do you really want to do this now? Really?’
I snort. ‘No, no, you’re right,’ I reply. ‘Let’s wait another ten years to get it all out in the open. After all, what’s a decade between friends?’
He doesn’t answer, but I’m surprised to see a faint wounded look on his face. I run back through what I just said, wondering what I said to cause him discomfort – perhaps even wondering if I can use it again, if I need to protect myself from the memories of him – and then I realise. Friends. We were never friends, Hale and I – not before we started dating, and not afterwards. We went from strangers to a couple to nothing at all, all in the space of a few hot summer months.
Perhaps he’s a little hurt by the implication that friends is all we were back them. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a warm, vindictive feeling in my chest at that. Good, I think. Maybe it’s your turn to have no idea where you stand. How do you like that, you son of a bitch?
‘You know what? This was a stupid idea. I shouldn’t have come here.’ I stand up and make for the exit, but I’m stopped in my tracks.
‘Carrie, wait.’
Jesus, for a man as physically imposing as he is, Hale can move fast. He’s standing between me and the door in an instant, one of his perfect hands holding it closed. I can see it close up, immaculately clean up to the palm and the fingers, and then the calloused tips from his guitar, just like I remembered. He used to play his fingers raw. I wonder if he still does.
No, I tell myself. You’ve got to stop thinking like that.
‘Let me go.’
‘Not until I’ve said what I have to say. I reckon I’ve waited long enough.’
You’ve waited? I think. What the hell do you know about waiting?
‘You want to know why I came to the diner?’ he asks. ‘No bullshit? Fine. I know you want to hear that I went to see you, but I didn’t. Not at all. I didn’t go to see if you were there so we could catch up and shoot the shit like old times, and I sure as hell didn’t go just because I wanted a plate of fries either.’ He pauses, as though he’s not sure how I’m going to react to what he says next, as though he’s reluctant to uncork the bottle and let the genie loose. ‘I went there to check to make sure you weren’t there. That’s why.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’
Hale looks at me like I’ve gone nuts, as though he shouldn’t need to explain it. ‘You had all these big dreams, Carrie. You were always the smart one. You were always the one w
ith a plan. You were going places when you got old enough. That was what was supposed to happen, not…’
‘Not what?’
He sighs. ‘Not you working in your folks’ diner, still. Not a life spent pouring coffee and bussing tables. You were better than that.’
Were. Not are. But then again, can I blame him? Hale’s probably the worst person to be any judge of what or who I am right now.
‘What was I supposed to do, go with you?’ I hiss at him. ‘You were seventeen, Hale. You didn’t know where the hell you were going. You just upped and ran, and…’ I feel the pinch of my fingernails in my palm again. Calm down, I tell myself, but I can feel that familiar hotness growing in my chest. There’s a fight brewing.
It will be our second, ever.
‘I wanted to know that you’d managed to get out too,’ Hale says softly. ‘It was… important to me, I guess. It was just about all I thought about on the drive down here. All I had playing through my mind, the entire time. I wanted to rock up at the diner and to have your Mom or Dad tell me that no, you’d gone years ago. That you’d gone to college. That you’d settled down out west and you had… shit, I don’t know. A family of your own or something. Just something more than this.’
‘So what? I’m a disappointment now, is that it?’
He shrugs, and I could slap him. ‘Everyone makes mistakes, Carrie,’ he says again.
‘You keep saying that,’ I say. ‘But don’t you get it? It’s nothing. It means nothing. And I sure as shit don’t need your judgement on whether or not my life is a mistake. You ran away and did your own thing? Well, great. Good for you. I’m happy for you, Hale, I really am. But some of us have families back here who needed us. Some of us have lives and people we couldn’t just walk away from. I did what I had to do to keep my family going, and that meant sacrificing some things. So don’t you dare tell me that staying was a mistake. Don’t you dare. Do you understand me?’
I’ve never yelled at Hale like that before. I didn’t know I had it in me, but ten years is a long time for rage to fester. It’s been building up inside me for so long that I didn’t even notice it was there – but it’s never gone. No matter how over the indignity of it all I thought I was, I plainly wasn’t.
But now the boil has been lanced. I wish I could say I felt better for letting all of that poison out, but I can’t. The look on his face is blank, expressionless. Unreadable. He’s giving me nothing.
Typical Hale.
‘I think you got the wrong end of the stick, Carrie,’ he says quietly.
‘Oh yeah? Well how about you set me straight? Or if you don’t have the decency to do that, at least get the hell out of my way.’
‘I wasn’t talking about you,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean you made a mistake by staying. I was talking about me. I wanted you to understand that when I left that night, I didn’t mean for things to go down the way they did.’ He pauses. ‘That was my mistake. Not leaving; I had to leave. I couldn’t have stayed even if I wanted to, or me and Pop would have ended up killing each other. But leaving you behind? Not getting in touch after the fact? Yeah. That was my mistake. The biggest one I ever made.’
I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that, and so I say nothing. His enormous hand lifts off the door, releasing me after he’s said his piece, but I can’t give him any sort of a response. Too many things are swirling around in my head for me to be able to think straight.
And so, this time, I’m the one that leaves him.
Chapter Six
My apartment feels empty. Hell, I feel empty. None of today has gone the way I expected it to.
To recap: my first love rolls back into town without warning, looking hot as hell and apparently just as successful in New York City, of all places. And apparently he considers leaving me to be one of the biggest mistakes of his life.
It’s kind of a lot to take in.
I’d done my best to get a grip on things by walking home after I’d left Hale’s trailer. I figured that the walk might do me good, to let me get a little perspective on things; more than that, I just didn’t want to wait around near The Grove for longer than I had to. Part of me thought Hale might have come after me, but he didn’t. I was all on my own. There was nothing but the five or so miles of road between me and Eden, and no one seemed to be driving by.
I ended up calling Pete to see if he could come and give me a ride; I didn’t have the money for a cab, and by the time I’d walked a mile or so in the summer heat I was starting to regret storming off. The two sips of beer I’d had at Hale’s trailer hadn’t done much to keep me hydrated. Even though it was just after his shift had finished and I was sure he had better things to do, twenty minutes later there he was, rolling up beside me in a truck that looked like it was held together with baling-wire and wishes.
‘Looking for a ride, honey?’ he asked as he leaned across to pop the door open for me; the handle, much like most of the other things on the truck, didn’t work from the outside. I was reliably informed that was all part of its charm, but I was so relieved to not have to walk back home he could have strapped me to the roof rack and I would have been happy with the arrangement.
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
He took a hand off the steering wheel and tapped a bony finger against the glove compartment. ‘Should be a water bottle in there. It ain’t cold, but it’s wet. Looks like you could use it.’
He wasn’t wrong there. It was practically steam by the time I got it to my lips, but I’ve never had a drink taste sweeter in my life. Two-thirds of the bottle was down my throat before I offered the rest of it to Pete.
‘S’all yours,’ he said.
‘Thanks.’
‘Were you out there long?’
I shrugged. ‘About an hour.’
‘In this heat?’
‘I know, I know. Stupid.’
Pete had the good grace not to push it.
‘So,’ he said as he pulled into the space outside my apartment. ‘Want to tell me what’s going on?’
‘Not really.’
‘Boy trouble?’
‘Sort of.’
He smiled. ‘Yeah, that’ll happen. Never figured you for the sort, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know. How long have I known you now? Four years? Five?’
‘About that, yeah.’
‘I’ve never once known you mixed up with a boy – and I’ve sure as hell never seen you this distracted. I’m guessing there’s a story there?’
Boy, is there ever, I thought. I could have explained it all to him right there: every last bit of it, going right back to that summer where we’d first met. I didn’t know what the hell he’d make of it, but it might be good to get it off my chest – and besides, who else was I going to tell? I didn’t have much in the way of friends. Over time, most people my age had drifted out of Eden and into the Big Wide World, even if that only meant a couple of towns away. They had settled down with husbands, children, loved ones. They wouldn’t have time for me to be so…
Childish.
That was the word, wasn’t it? That’s what you call it when you go nuts over your teenage boyfriend, when you forget all of the brakes that you’re supposed to put on your heart when you hit adulthood?
Maybe Pete would understand. After all, to Pete I was a child, practically. Just as I was about to launch into it all, he put out a hand to stop me. ‘Save it, kiddo,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t want to tell me, and I don’t want to pry. Just… look after yourself, alright?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Atta girl. And I’m guessing if your mother asks, none of this happened?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Whatever makes things easier for you.’ He paused. ‘Just… well, she’s not a stupid woman, your mother. If an old fool like me can tell there’s something wrong, how long do you think it’s going to be
before she notices it?’
I don’t know, I thought. Knowing her, it could be years. Since Dad died, Mom hasn’t been what you could call the observant type. I didn’t say any of this to Pete, of course.
I thanked Pete for the ride and the water, and he waited until I was safely back inside my apartment and had flashed my lights at him before he drove away around the corner.
~~~
That was four hours ago, and it’s taken me just about that long to realise that Pete was right. I never have been like this over a guy. Not since I was sixteen, back when getting distracted to the point of madness is just about what’s expected of you. Certainly not after Hale, that’s for sure. And that’s not to say there weren’t guys since him – although, you know, probably less than there should have been. What with being all cut up over Hale leaving, and then Dad getting sick, I didn’t have much time for romance. The dating pool in a town like Eden is pretty much non-existent to begin with, and it’s not made any better when you’ve got anything approaching standards. Sure, I could have put on a low-cut top, rolled up at Ronnie’s Bar on a Friday night and tried to catch the eye of someone roughly my age, but the pickings were slim and my appetite was never that intense – plus, word gets around a place like this. There aren’t many people from Away who come here to spend their drinking money, and the idea of being grist for the gossip mill never appealed.
Well… never enough to actually do anything about it, anyway. I had learned that lesson well enough once.
Stop it, I tell myself. You’re only going to get hurt again.
But saying to stop it is like asking the tide not to rise: there’s nothing I can do about it, not knowing that he’s only a few short miles away from me. Not knowing that he’s so close now. The life I could have had, but for one decision way back when.
It’s funny how things change. I wonder how many of my decisions in life stem from that one summer. If things had gone differently, if Hale had stuck around…
No. What’s the point in wondering? They are what they are. Hale has his life, I have mine. In a couple of days he’ll be gone, and I can start that old familiar process of forgetting him. It should be easier this time. I’m used to it by now.
Reckless: A Bad Boy Musicians Romance Page 6