Page 47 of Forever Finds Us (Wisper Dreams #7)

Four Years Ago, Redding, California

Dixon

“D, why don’t you start us off today?” Mo said.

It looked like he’d showered and combed his hair, brushed his teeth, but he was probably three cups of coffee deep this morning, so there was a discolored tinge to them.

Drugs and drinking hadn’t left them pearly white anyway.

His button down was rumpled, as usual, and his khakis weren’t the wrinkle-free kind by any stretch of the imagination.

I asked, “We’re tellin’ memories? Good or bad?”

“What comes to mind?”

But Mo was a good guy. Maybe the nicest person I’d met since I got clean. He always had a kind word, even if his day had gone to shit. He had real, true belief in his fellow man, and if you needed it, he’d give you the shirt off his back even though he didn’t have a pot to piss in.

A memory? I had to think about it. I had lots of those.

The therapist told me to let the bad ones come, that I couldn’t avoid them forever if I wanted to stay clean, but today had been good one up till now, and as far as memories went, and I didn’t want the bad ones to sour my stomach quite yet.

I’d just eaten shitty diner bacon and eggs, and if I let the bad memories flow, I’d chuck.

If I thought about Candy and my brother’s baby, what I’d done to them, what I didn’t do.

No, today, I wanted to think about something good. Something sweet.

Memories of my brothers and sister from when we were kids hit me like a bullet train.

My oldest brother, Bax, was off limits, though, because he was attached to the memories of Candy and the baby.

He wasn’t safe. My other brother, Brand, was a good man.

Maybe a little self-centered, but I loved him.

I always had. And I wouldn’t be clean if he hadn’t flown down and paid up front for rehab.

I loved all my siblings, and maybe Brand had his own demons to wrangle and that was why he’d always been a little standoffish and stiff.

My sister, the youngest in our family, Abey… What a beautiful soul.

I ached for her. She’d gotten the worst of our dad. He’d made her feel like she didn’t even deserve to live?—

No. My brothers and sisters were out of bounds this morning if I wanted to keep my day on track, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to give myself permission to remember Kel, the dead mother of my kid.

Stay positive.

“There was a girl.”

The tired, beat-down group of men around me mumbled their agreement. Didn’t it always start with a girl?

“Yeah,” I said, “but this girl was a kid. I was a kid. She didn’t have anything to do with why things got dark for me. She was a light. Her granddaddy lived near our family farm, and she used to come out to his place during the summers.

“Her hair was the color of cornsilk. The sun made it that way. And she had this tinkling laugh. Her name was… I don’t remember. It won’t come to me. There’s too much bad and hurt between now and then.” The hurt made the good memories blurry and out of reach. “But I remember that laugh.

“She loved flowers, was always picking the wild ones, even picked ’em from her grandma’s prized garden, and she’d make these bouquets for the squirrels and birds, deer and elk.

Now, I knew they didn’t give a shit about the flowers, but she insisted on leavin’ ’em for the animals.

She made beds of flowers and strung the stems together to make strands we’d hang from tree limbs.

She said when the wind blew through the trees, she thought her flowers made the animals happy… ”

Nesty next to me chuckled. He thought shortening his real name, Ernesto, to Nesty sounded like Postie.

He was always doing that, comparing himself to celebrities, even though he was the scrawniest, least-famous dude I’d ever met.

He was strong though; he punched me once when we were high after I called him Ernie.

Most guys didn’t, but I hoped if he stayed clean this time, he’d rethink the nickname.

“Don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile like that,” he said.

I elbowed him. “Shut up. Mo said good or bad memories. This is my good one.

“I think about that girl when I can’t sleep. I always told her she should open a flower shop. I wonder if she did. I wonder if she’s happy. If she still laughs like that, like a wind chime.”

Or was she like me, broken and sorry and scarred?

I prayed like crazy I’d stay clean, like it wasn’t up to me.

But it was. And this time, I had the best reason to beat my dragon into submission.

I had a son.

A beautiful, soft, perfect son.

He had a family, people better than me to look up to. My brother and his girls were raising my Stuey. He had love around him. Before my car died, I’d driven up to check on him, to make sure my family had come through for me this time.

They had. Stuey was happy and healthy. He was up on my family’s land right this very minute, and when he grew big enough, he’d run free like I had when I was his age, laughing and learning, maybe picking flowers with his own memory girl.

But he needed his daddy in his life. Even if my brother would always be Stuey’s dad , his father figure, and I could only be his friend, if it was all I could give my son, I would.

I’d be his best friend if that was what was healthiest for him.

I loved him enough to do that for him, no matter that just thinking about him never knowing me as his dad made me ache like I’d never ached before.

And I’d had plenty of fucking ache in my life.

But my baby boy didn’t need to know anything about that.

He needed smiles and tinkling laughs, mountain air, dirt to dig in, grass to roll in. He needed birds singing to him from the trees and evenings spent around a happy dinner table. Nights filled with stories from books with silly cartoons on the front and bubble baths.

My son deserved good dreams and good memories, and I intended someday to give those to him.

But I still had to make it through these first thirty days. And after that?

Well, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have a pot to piss in either, or any kind of direction about the path my sober life would take.

But I was goddamned determined to figure it out.

Preorder Dixon Lee’s redemption story, coming 2026.

Scars Forget Us