Chapter Nine
SAWYER
The morning after my therapy appointment, I woke up early to go to Pete’s. It was natural for me to rise early. In boot camp, we’d gotten up too early to fathom, and it carried over overseas. Now, without setting an alarm, I woke up at five or six in the morning, regardless of when I’d gone to bed the night before.
When I went out to the kitchen, I saw my father sitting there. Same chair at the table, different newspaper in his hand, same scowl on his face. I didn’t say anything to him, just poured myself a travel mug of coffee and made my way out. He didn’t say anything to me, either. I didn’t bother thinking about what it meant that he still wasn’t talking to me. I couldn’t make him care about me if he wasn’t going to care after my being gone for six years. If being in the SEALs didn’t make him care, nothing would. I couldn’t waste my time with it.
I drank my coffee on the way to Pete’s with the morning news playing on the radio. The world hadn’t blown up while I was gone, despite the government’s assurance that they’d see it happen if they had any say. While I was overseas, the message was always doomsday. It motivated soldiers to action if we thought the world was in jeopardy. Here, though, the woman on the speaker was talking about seasonal allergies like they were the only thing anyone had to worry about.
When I pulled into the driveway, I could see Pete sitting on the porch and smoking a cigarette. He put it out when I got there like I was a cop come to bust him for drugs, and when I walked up to him, I was already grinning.
“I don’t care if you smoke, Pete,” I reminded him.
“Shoot, I just don’t want you smokin’,” Pete returned. “Hell, I tried dip, but that stuff gets stuck up in your teeth and makes a nasty mess of everything.”
“Worse things than nicotine,” I reasoned, and he pulled a different cigarette out of his shirt pocket. “You got those things floating in your pockets?”
“I roll ‘em myself,” Pete said. “I grow my own tobacco out here.”
That was like Pete. I imagined he probably didn’t want to give any of his money to any of the big cigarette companies. He thrived on self-sustenance and even had a few cows out in his barn that he got dairy from. It was ridiculous, to some extent; I appreciated knowing that I could go to the store and buy the food I needed. But for Pete, the beauty of his way of life was that if the power went out and the government shut down, he’d be sitting on his hill, happy as a clam.
I’d gotten to his house a little early for work, so I sat down on a chair next to Pete.
“Did you go to the therapist yesterday?” he asked, annunciating ‘therapist’ like it was the hardest word he’d ever had to learn.
“Sure did,” I said. “You remember Quinn, from the party?”
“Jesus, yes.”
“Her last name is Rodgers. Dr. Rodgers, in fact.”
“Shit!”
“Yeah.” I shook my head at my profound, horrendous luck. “Can you believe it? She’s a psychologist. I didn’t know it was her until I went in to see her yesterday, and I was hardly going to run from her office.”
Pete shook his head and tapped his cigarette on the table. “Did she say anything to you about the party? Are you still gonna try to, you know?”
I rolled my eyes at his juvenile phrasing. Even if I were still trying to pursue Quinn, my days of being interested in women for only sex were long past. I wanted someone to get to know, someone to be friends with—sex didn’t mean anything without that, at least in my mind. “Don’t believe so. I brought up her offer to go to dinner, and she shot me down.”
“Shit. Was she mean about it?”
“Nah,” I said. “She’s just a doctor, and I’m her patient. It’s not professional to be seeing me outside of her office.” I considered all of the possible therapists in Austin and figured that it had to be some kind of shit luck that I’d ended up with the one person I’d been interested in seeing outside of work. “Besides, I think it’s against the law or something. She can get her license revoked if she sees clients. I think the law says something like that.”
“Maybe on TV,” Pete said. “But I don’t know if that’s true in real life. Maybe in a firm, or something?”
“Maybe. But I don’t want to risk it, and it sounds like she doesn’t, either,” I said.
“Shoot. You know, maybe you should try seeing someone else. That way you can keep talking to Quinn outside her office.”
I frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t really like therapists that well, and she’s easy to talk to.”
“Plenty of them are easy to talk to,” Pete argued.
I sighed. “I don’t know, Pete. I’m not really keen on seeing a therapist as it is. I like her well enough, and she’s easy enough to talk to. I’d rather just bite the bullet and talk to her. I think it’d be easier to find another girl I’m interested in than to find another therapist I can tolerate.”
“I guess that makes sense. But do you really think they make ‘em like that everywhere? No sir. Didn’t you see anyone while you were overseas?”
I had to laugh at that insinuation. “No. I mean, I probably could have. Hell, maybe even should have. There were a lot of whores in some of those bars, and we had the money, and a lot of people in my team were up for it. I just didn’t. At first because of Stacy, and then because… I don’t know. Felt wrong.”
“Wouldn’t be too bad for you to meet someone,” Pete mused.
“Probably not. What about you? You been seeing anyone?”
Pete sighed. “Girls out here don’t get where I’m coming from. Too many of them come out of the city, and all they care about is money. They want a big house, expensive jewelry, stuff like that. I guess I understand why, but I want a friend out here. Someone who understands where I’m coming from.”
“Someone else to tear down corporate America?” I offered.
He shot me a glare, but he was smiling at the same time. “Yeah, something like that. A friend, really. Doesn’t help me all too much that I’m missin’ a tooth up front and don’t talk like some of those city lawyers.”
“Not everyone who works in the city is a lawyer.”
“They all talk like lawyers. Saying one thing and meaning another. Trying to trick you out of what you’ve got by weaving loopholes into well-meaning conversation.” Pete shook his head. “I get sick of it. Sometimes I think I might be happy out here by myself. Me and the cows and the chickens and the beets.”
“And the corn,” I offered. “And the wheat.”
“And the corn and the wheat,” he agreed. “And the vegetable garden, of course.”
I nodded.
“But I don’t think you’re quite like me in that regard,” Pete said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re quieter than me. A little uptight sometimes. Don’t you get defensive; you are. It isn’t altogether a bad thing. You just need someone around to prod you outside yourself a little. If you spend your whole life alone, you’ll end up a hermit. Like one of them people in Asia that go and live in the mountains alone.”
He was talking about monks, and he was wrong, but I understood his point. I tended to seclude, but I didn’t know that I necessarily needed another person for that. “I don’t think having a wife would mean that. I wouldn’t want to bother a woman with that sort of thing, anyway.”
“I think you ought to,” Pete countered. “Women are clever, Sawyer. They’re clever in ways we can’t even understand. They know what to say to draw all the shit out and make you feel better. That’s why they go right over our heads most of the time. We’re just a bunch of idiots.”
I couldn’t disagree with that too much. I thought of the men I’d met in the military and how responsive they were to their base urges. Women always seemed to operate at a more dignified level. Having that force in someone’s life could really help them.
“That’s enough yakkin’,” Pete said. “Why don’t you get on the lawn mower and take care of the back yard and that area around the vegetable garden? Don’t mow the vegetable garden, though.” He pointed to an area that was fenced off. I could make out the red in the tomatoes from here on the porch.
“Sounds good,” I said. “You know, you keep putting me to work on the easy stuff.”
“I am aware.”
I went out and got on the lawn mower without any further complaint. While I rode over the backyard, I considered what he said. It made sense, I supposed, that I might need to live with someone since I was reserved. But I didn’t think that being married was really like that. It was about finding someone that you loved. Although, I could see how people tended to fall in love with people who balanced them out.
And in any case, I was hardly looking for love. I wasn’t looking for purely sex, but I wasn’t looking for the love of my life, either. The situation I’d been in with Stacy coupled with what I’d seen overseas made me both cynical regarding love and aware of my own mortality, and it made for a bad feeling in my stomach when it came to romance and getting someone else involved in all of my shit.
How did Quinn factor into all of that? I didn’t know yet. I knew that I probably needed, on some level, to see a therapist. She was frighteningly smart. In her office, she’d honed in on me the moment I’d started to give, and I’d never had someone figure out what I was trying to get at so quickly before. She knew what I was thinking before I thought it, or at least that’s what it felt like.
So I knew that she was a good therapist. By the time I got around to turning the mower off, I’d sort of had something together in my mind. I went around to the vegetable garden and found Pete picking tomatoes off the tomato plant. My mom would have loved to see it; she always tried to grow tomatoes, always to no avail.
“I think I’m going to head out,” I said.
“Alright,” Pete said. He set his basket down and looked back over at me. “Can I count on you being back tomorrow, same time?”
I squinted and thought about my plans for the next day. “Actually, I have an appointment with Quinn in the morning. I’ll be here after, though. Probably should be here by noon. No later.”
“Sounds good,” Pete said. “You be careful with that one, now.”
He sounded like he didn’t think I could see her without making some romantic spectacle out of it. I rolled my eyes at him and got in the car. I would be perfectly fine seeing Quinn without getting into it with her. She was beautiful, no question about it, and had a way of taking me apart in that room with her eyes. What color were her eyes? Not unsettling like mine, but dark, calm like a lake.
I shoved the keys in my ignition and took a deep breath. I’d be fine.