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Chapter Eight

Dallas

Sarah retreats to her room for the better part of the afternoon, until it’s time to go to dinner at the family house.

She emerges looking beautiful. So beautiful that for a moment I have to pause to catch my breath.

One of the first things I noticed when I saw her at the rodeo was how pretty she’s gotten.

Her dark hair curls just slightly, framing her face.

Her cheeks are round and naturally rosy.

She has a dimple on the left side of her face, and that is the part of her face now that reminds me most of her face when she was a kid.

But it’s changed along with the rest of her.

The context of where it sits now feeling less cute, and more enticing.

She is not very tall. She only comes up to my shoulder, her frame petite, her figure neat and lovely. I really shouldn’t be looking at her figure. That is the very last thing I should be looking at, and I make sure to force my eyes up to hers the moment they’re tempted to drop to examine her body.

“My mom said she made spaghetti,” I say.

“Oh. Sounds good,” she says.

Not like it’s fancy. But I’ve always loved that about Kaylee and my dad’s cooking. Neither of them are world-class chefs or anything, but it just feels like family. Family in a way I never knew before I moved in with them.

I want so badly for her to feel the same thing. For her to have the same experience. Even though it’s late for her. She’s almost twenty-one.

Life really isn’t fair.

“What?”

“What?” I respond.

“You’re scowling.”

“Oh. It’s nothing. Come on. Let’s walk over.”

“Doesn’t look like nothing,” she says, following me out.

“I was just thinking about how life’s not fair,” I say.

“We both know that,” she says. “In fact, I would say that it’s the primary drumbeat of our existence, wouldn’t you?”

I look at her, she’s smirking, her expression impish. But I know that she’s also serious enough. She’s not wrong.

“Yeah. That is true. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be mad about it sometimes. Especially not when I look at you.”

“I don’t really want you to be angry when you look at me,” she says, hopping down the last step, her yellow dress floating up, exposing her thighs. And I look away as quickly as possible. “Doesn’t seem very nice.”

“That isn’t what I mean,” I say.

I keep pace with her, as she forges ahead. I’m trying to imagine her in the way she described herself. She claims that she was mean to people. Difficult. I don’t see any of that.

“Sarah…” She looks back at me, but she doesn’t break her stride. “Sorry. I just can’t imagine you being mean to anyone. I’m not sure that you see yourself accurately.”

She laughs. “Dallas Dodge. Don’t you remember when you first met me? Don’t you remember how I bit people?”

I laugh. I didn’t remember her biting people, but now that she mentions it, I do recall there was a biting incident early on at the first house I moved into with her. But, if I also recall correctly, it’s because that kid was bothering her.

“I don’t think you did anything wrong.”

“Generally speaking, when you’re the one who bit someone, the authorities don’t take your side in the dispute.”

“You didn’t bite without just cause.”

“I don’t think it matters why you bit, it’s frowned upon to sink your teeth into others.”

“You didn’t rend any flesh.”

“Ha! Well. I might have, actually.”

“Tell me you didn’t have a good reason.”

She shrugged. “Okay. I had a decent reason. Still, I overreacted. And it isn’t that I didn’t have a reason to.

I don’t need you to validate me. Or my trauma.

I know where it comes from, and I know why I have it.

But I’m just saying, the only reason I quit being quite that feral was because of you.

I felt safe when you were around, and I didn’t feel like I had to protect myself quite that intensely.

All of that was undone when I had to go back to my mom.

I was only ten. Everything that felt safe and okay with you, it just felt broken and awful when I was with her.

I felt like I was right back where I started.

Like I had to defend myself from every unseen danger, everything that might be lurking in the shadows. Everyone felt like a threat.”

“But you seem… ”

“It’s you. It’s you. You make me feel safe. It’s amazing how things change when you feel safe.”

We don’t speak for the next few minutes, as my parents’ farmhouse comes into view. We walk up the steps to the porch together in silence, and I open the front door without knocking. The smell of garlic bread hits me right when we walk in, and my stomach growls.

Sarah is looking hungry too, and I suddenly want to learn how to cook.

I’m on the road so much that there’s no occasion for me to do it all that often, and when I’m back home, I let my mom feed me.

But I want to take care of her. That realization is deep, grabs me low in the gut.

I want to do everything that I possibly can for her.

I want to take the pain of our separation and fix it.

Make it all go away. Turn it into something glorious and golden.

If I can do that by learning how to make a meal for her, then, I will.

“Hi there,” Kaylee says, poking her head around the doorway. “Dinner is almost on the table. You can just go inside.” She gestures toward the dining area.

When we walk in there, I laugh, because Lucy and Cara are sitting there clutching one fork in each fist, their hands planted firmly on the table, toothy smiles on their faces. “What are you two doing?” I ask.

“Waiting for food,” Lucy says, her expression not changing.

“Did you see this in a cartoon?”

Cara frowns. “No.”

At the same time, Lucy, whose expression is still frozen, says, “Yes.”

Sarah looks amused if a bit uncomfortable but sits down next to me at the table .

“Do you like horses?” Lucy asks the question very seriously, her eyes trained on Sarah.

“I don’t really know any,” Sarah says.

“I’m named after a horse,” Lucy says.

I laughed. “Yeah,” I say.

“My big brother named me.”

She sounds proud of it. And that feels like an ice pick right to my heart.

In the best way. But that’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade.

Love hurts. Even if it’s in beautiful ways.

But feeling anything for people, for animals, for a community, has the potential to wound you.

Even in happy moments. For me, it’s because I’m always so aware of what I didn’t have for all those years, and about all the people who still don’t have it. Like Sarah.

Yeah. This one hurts a little bit because I’m thinking about Sarah.

Kaylee comes in a moment later, a bowl of pasta in her arms, and my dad follows with two trays of bread balanced on one arm, and a bowl of salad.

They work in tandem, setting the dinner down on the table, smiling at each other as they do, and this is another moment where all this love hurts just for a moment.

“Glad you could join us,” Bennett says.

“Yeah. No worries.”

Though, as soon as we dish up all the food, they begin interrogating Sarah. What she does for a living – which quickly turns into a discussion about her aspirations. The fact that she had success earlier with the job hunt, and for a brief moment, glances back to when she and I met in foster care.

My dad looks down, then back up, his expression grave.

“I know that we don’t know each other. But I’ve always been appreciative of you.

When Dallas told us about you… I re alize how much you took care of him for all those years when I wasn’t there.

I have a lot of guilt. A lot of guilt around the fact that I wasn’t there for him in those early years. But you were. It means a lot to me.”

Emotion rises up in my throat, tightening it, threatening to strangle me.

I feel like a basket case. I know it’s all of this with Sarah, the past being so close to the present.

It’s not a bad thing, not necessarily, but I’d kind of like a reprieve from it.

I don’t need to get emotional over everything from my wild little sisters to my dad being sentimental, and a piece of garlic bread that just tastes like home.

But I am. It’s that kind of night.

We finish up dinner, and my mom gets out dessert, a giant bowl of the richest banana pudding you’ve ever tasted.

It’s a copycat recipe from some famous bakery in New York, and she always complains about how criminally easy it is to make, particularly given how much that’s in it.

The fat in the pudding is my friend, not my enemy, and I’ve never met a dessert that I thought was too sweet, which makes it my absolute favorite thing. I know she made it for that reason.

I take a helping that’s probably too generous, and Sarah scoops herself a small amount.

“Thank you,” she says softly. “Again. I don’t know that I’ve ever really had a family dinner before.”

Her words are soft, devastating in their simplicity.

I see Kaylee’s eyes welling up, but she looks away, does her best to hide her reaction.

I look at Sarah, trying to see if she’s aware of just how horrible an admission that is.

I also get it. Because yeah, we got included sometimes in the houses that we lived in growing up.

But we always felt acutely out of place.

Either with the other kids that were sitting there at the table, with the parents, or with ourselves.

It was just a dark time all around. And then in all the years since, I know she’s felt so isolated. So Goddamned isolated.

“We’re glad you’re here,” my dad says, his words firm and definitive, glossing over the emotion of the moment, and I’m grateful for that.

She doesn’t need to be made to feel like an alien. We don’t need to have moments that highlight how different our pasts make us from other people. They are inevitable, and they happen, but it’s always weird when they do.

In this house, people at least understand that.

“Do you want to play a game?” Lucy asks.