behind her, feeling like I was back in middle school again, the dirty son of a coal miner, a no good kid from my no good home. I knew June Barton owned this place now, and June's family wasn't like that. I didn't know her, but I knew that much.
She didn't know me, either. Not personally. That's what I was counting on here. The last thing I wanted, with River standing right here, was for June to realize who I was.
A woman came to the door, wearing an apron over her T-shirt and jeans. The apron didn't do much to hide her pregnancy; in fact, it seemed to accentuate her growing belly. "Hi there," she said. "I'm June. Are you the Robinsons? I wasn't expecting you- I thought you'd cancelled your reservation." She looked back and forth between River and me.
"No," River said and she looked at me for a moment and I thought she was about to turn around and bail. What the hell was she going to do here in West Bend anyway? But then she answered. "We're not the Robinsons. Actually, I just wanted to see if you had any availability."
June looked back and forth between the two of us again. She paused for a moment, her eyes narrowing, and for a second I had the irrational fear that she recognized me.
But the moment passed, and June held open the screen door, beckoning us inside. Inside, the ranch house was painted in white and blue, the hardwood floors gleaming. It was a nice place, and I was glad that this was the place where June lived now. I was glad that my family wasn't responsible for destroying her entire life.
I was happy she had this, even though I didn't know her. I was too young back then, back when it all happened.
A kid, I wasn't sure how old, a couple years maybe, came toddling across the room on unsteady feet and June scooped him up in her arms. "What are you doing, little Stan?" She asked. "Did your daddy lose track of you?"
"Nope, I'm right behind him," a voice called out, and a man rounded the corner, dressed in faded blue jeans and a T-shirt, his arms covered in tattoos. I immediately recognized one of the tattoos as the identifying mark of a Marine Corps sniper. I was pretty sure that was Cade. I was young when all the shit happened, just a toddler, but I knew of Cade from later on, by reputation. I knew he'd been injured in the Marines, gotten a Silver Star.
I hoped he didn't know who the hell I was.
“Afternoon,” Cade said. “You all visiting West Bend?”
“I am,” River said. “He’s come h-”
I interrupted her. “Just visiting.”
River gave me a weird look.
“You know, you look so familiar,” June said. “I bet you get this all the time, but you look like that girl from the movies, the one in all those romantic comedies, you know who I’m talking about, Cade?”
Cade rolled his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m real big on the romantic comedies.”
“She’s married to that rock star, Viper Gabriel. Or getting married or something,” June said. “River - that’s it. River Something. It's on the tip of my tongue. The pregnancy is making me stupid lately, can't remember anything.”
River laughed. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.
June leaned forward. “Of course.”
“I totally met her once,” she said.
“Did you?” June asked. “Are you from California or something?”
River shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “But I traveled out there.” She handed June a credit card and ID. I wondered if they had her real name on them, or if they were fakes.
June took her card to her laptop, talking the whole time. “Was she nice? She seems like she’d be nice."
River smiled. "I thought she was nice," she said. "Although some people seem to have mixed feelings about her."
I cleared my throat to cover my laugh, and River glanced at me. June didn't seem to notice.
"I have king size beds and a smaller room with just a twin," June said. "Is king size okay?"
"If it's open, I'd like to rent the house."
June paused, River's card in her hand, mid-movement. "The whole house?"
"If you have other guests, of course I understand," River said. "I don't want you to move anything. But if not, I'd like to just rent all the rooms you'd otherwise rent out."
June's brow furrowed, and I could feel Cade's eyes burrowing into the back of my head. They had to be thinking we had just stolen a credit card or something.
June looked at River for a long minute. "That's five bedrooms," she said.
River nodded, seeming completely at ease under the scrutiny. "That's perfect," she said.
June finally broke her gaze and nodded. "I think the next whole week was free except for the Robinson's," she said. "Tourist season is winter here, so things are slow right now. How long are you staying?"
“I’ll probably be here a few days, depending on things."
June clicked a few things on her laptop, and then looked up at us. "I guess the whole house would be fine then."
"Good," River said. "That's settled. Is there someplace I can rent a car?”
“Didn’t you two drive up in -” June asked, then stopped, distracted. “I forgot to even ask your name.”
River’s mouth opened, and I jumped in before she could say anything. “E,” I said. “Friends just call me E.”
It wasn’t true. Nobody fucking called me E.
“Well, let me give you a tour of the place - and Cade here can help you with your bags if you need help,” June said.
“No bags,” River said. June started ahead, and I followed down the hallway.
After June had given us the tour and left us in one of the larger bedrooms, River turned to me. “Well, E,” she said, smiling, “thanks for the ride.”
She stood there, inches away from me, and it took all I had not to kiss her. I told myself she was a complication I didn't need. Her situation wasn't simple, and neither was mine. I had enough complications to deal with - complications I was on my way to face.
So I turned in the other direction, away from those bright eyes and gorgeous lips.
“See ya, River.” I looked over my shoulder as I left, and she was grinning at me.
She winked. “See ya, Elias.”
12
River
“Feel free to wander around,” June said. “Do you ride at all?”
I nodded. “A little bit." I'd had to learn to ride, just basic stuff, for a role I'd had, but I didn't want to explain that to June.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” June asked, watching me sip my tea on the front porch.
I nodded. Nice wasn’t even the word for it. The whole thing - the bed and breakfast, the house next door, the log barn for the horses that looked simultaneously new and rustic- and all of it surrounded by the meadows and rolling hills covered in sagebrush and aspen trees. It was all like something out of a book.
Growing up, we lived in the country, but not this kind of county, the kind where the landscape spread out in rolling hills, mesas, and mountain peaks in the distance. Our kind of country involved trailers and broken down pickups clustered together, kids running naked in the front yard and old men leering at you while you walked by as they sat outside drinking from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.
It was about as far away from this kind of country as you could get.
This kind of country I just wanted to breathe in.
Out here, surrounded by this, I couldn’t help but feel calm. Peaceful.
“Being out here in the country grows on you,” June said. “Especially when you’ve got stuff you’re running from.”
I looked at her, but she just blinked innocently, and took another sip from her coffee cup.
I changed the subject. "How long have you lived here?" I asked.
"Oh, I grew up here," she said. "Moved away when I was seventeen, but couldn't quite ever shake this place. Came back here after I left the Navy. There are just some places that stick with you, you know? Places that have a way of embedding themselves deep in your soul."
"I guess I haven't ever really had a place I felt th
at way about," I said. That wasn't true exactly. Golden Willow had stuck with me, taken up residence in my soul, but not in the way that she was talking about. It was like some kind of parasite that wouldn't let go, leeching away any happiness I dared to have.
"I think this place was my first love," June said. "And then when Cade came back here too, I guess it was just meant to be."
As if on cue, her husband joined us on the porch. He walked up behind her, slid his arms around her belly, and kissed her on the side of her temple. June closed her eyes and leaned back against him. It was such an intimate gesture, I felt almost like I was intruding on a private moment.
"Hey babe," Cade said. "I'm going to head over to the shop for a little while. Little Stan is asleep in one of the guest rooms."
"Okay," June said. "I'll see you later."
"My shop in town," he said to me, by way of explanation. "If you need anything picked up, I can bring something back with me."
"Thanks," I said. "I think I'll need a car rental or something, but that can wait till tomorrow."
"All right," he said. "But if you need anything, don't hesitate."
"Thanks."
I averted my eyes, giving the couple a moment of privacy as he leaned in to kiss June on the lips.
"I won't be home too late, June bug," he said.
She laughed. "Stay there as long as you like," she said. "Stan has been good about sleeping through the night the past few days and I'm going to be out like a light in an hour. Paint to your heart's content."
"I'll try not to be there all night." He grinned. "See you later."
I watched as he crossed the meadow to the other house and got on a motorcycle, the chrome glinting bright even in the early evening light. The rumble of the engine cut through the stillness of the air, and my eyes followed him as he drove away.
I felt a rush of fear in the pit of my stomach, looking at him, hearing the rumble of the bike's engine. It brought back memories, too many, of living in the Golden Sunset Mobile Home Park, in the small southern town that had nothing going for it but the paper mill and a couple of strip clubs. The bikers would roll through town, filling up the only hotel nearby, a seedy decrepit place with a neon motel sign hanging by the road, missing two letters: TOWN M - T- L. The light worked intermittently, buzzing on and off and giving the place an even more disreputable flavor.
I hated those times, when the bikers blew through town. They always spelled bad news for my sisters and I. Bikers in town meant that my mother would be gone for days while we fended for ourselves, only returning to pass out in her room and come down from whatever the hell she had taken.
"Cade has a shop in town," June said, her voice cutting through my thoughts. "Just opened it not too long ago. Does custom paint jobs on bikes."
"It's nice to have something like that," I said. "I've always thought it would be nice to be able to create something from nothing, you know?"
"I admire that about creative types," June said. She looked at me, her expression searching, but she didn't say anything else. "We stay in the house right there. If you don't need anything else tonight, I'm going to head over there with little Stan. I'll be back in the morning, bright and early. I usually bring by breakfast around nine, just muffins and things like that, but if you want something later than that just let me know. The kitchen's all stocked up, too, so you should be set."
"Nine sounds just fine," I said. "And June?"
"Yeah?" She asked, turning and stopping before she walked back inside.
"Thanks," I said. "All of this is wonderful."
"You're more than welcome to stay here as long as you like. This is the kind of place where you can keep a low profile." She paused. "I love romantic comedies, by the way."
She knew who I was.
If anyone else had said something like that, it would feel threatening, dangerous. But when June said it, it felt comforting, like a promise that this was a safe place.
It was a strange feeling.
13
Elias
I drove through town on the way to my house, down along Main Street, passing the little coffee shop, and the ice cream parlor, and the stores that sold all kinds of country knickknacks. West Bend was the kind of small town you see in movies, with a downtown that looked like it had been transplanted straight out of the fifties. By all appearances, it was a quaint little place, the kind of place where nothing bad happened. If you were just visiting West Bend, one of the tourists who came through during winter ski season, that's definitely the impression you would get.
That's what River thought, I knew that much. I could see the expression on her face, when we were driving out here, and then pulling up to the bed and breakfast.
Of course, a visitor didn't know West Bend like I did. A visitor had no history here, the kind of history that comes from growing up in a place where your brother did what mine did. A place where your parents were who mine were.
A place where you were a fucking pariah.
Memory never fades, not in a small town like this. Your sins only become more amplified, cautionary tales passed down from generation to generation.
We lived on the outskirts of town, on a couple of acres my father had purchased before the town was the size it was now. Size it is now was really an exaggeration. There were maybe a couple thousand people in West Bend. But when I was younger, it was even smaller. Even more closed off and closed-minded.
There were some more stores and more rich people with second homes here, and more tourists coming down here during ski season, but the town hadn't changed all that much. At least not out where my family's house was. Out there, out on the edges of town, it was still folks eking out whatever kind of existence they could. Out there, it was people like my father, who owned a tiny patch of dirt and worked the land for whatever they could get from it. It was the way he had done with the coal mine on our property.
People think of coal mines as these big places run by mining companies. But the truth is, there's people who, at least when I was a kid, got away with mining on their own property. It was kind of like bootlegging, almost – except legal. My father had the permit he needed when we were kids, and it wasn't some complicated operation. It was pretty straightforward – him putting blasting caps on the side of the mountain on our property, blasting away a little bit at a time. He sold coal the way that people sell firewood, this business that provided us just barely enough to scratch out an existence.
And then he drank away most of what he earned, came home angry, ready to lay into whoever crossed him.
Then the shit happened with Silas - the trouble with the explosives, when he set them off unauthorized and my father lost that mining permit - and there was no more mining. My father became a janitor in our high school.
Then we were the kids of the drunk high school janitor.
To say I was happy to leave West Bend was a fucking understatement.
I was running from West Bend full throttle as soon as I could get gone.
It’s funny the way life works. Things always come round full circle when you least expect them to. I swore to everything I believed in that I’d never come back here again. The one time I returned, to make sure my brother Silas wasn't fucking dead, only confirmed that I needed to stay the hell away from this place.