Chapter 15
Sawyer
“Virtue is its own punishment.”
~ Grant Turner
My feet pounded on the dirt path that ran parallel to the river as I took out my aggression through exercise instead of homicide. I wanted to kill Cooper. It wasn’t the first time that I’d had lethal thoughts when it came to one of my brothers, but it was the only time that I’d imagined the ways I could do it. And the worst part about it was, he hadn’t done anything wrong and he certainly didn’t deserve my murderous impulses.
I’d known exactly how he was going to behave and what he was going to be like when I’d texted him. And he’d lived up to my expectations.
As much as I knew that it was my doing, it still hadn’t been easy to endure. It was like amputating an infected limb or open-heart surgery; you know that it’s necessary for survival, but that doesn’t make the pain easier.
He’d shown up and it had become The Cooper Show. He’d flirted relentlessly with Delilah. He’d dominated the conversation. He’d made jokes that had her bending over in hysterics. I hadn’t liked it but knew it was a necessary evil. Until he’d asked her if he could buy her a beer. At that point all rational thought flew out of my head.
I knew I was being ridiculous. My brother didn’t know how I felt about her. He might have suspicions, but he didn’t know. No one did. Including her.
My phone rang and after checking to see who it was, I hit the answer button on my earphones. “Hey,” I answered, not breaking my stride.
“Hey, firstborn, where are you?”
“On a run. By the river.”
“I’m at your house. Your mother sent me.”
Great. She was sending in more reinforcements. After I’d left the fundraiser with Delilah, my mom had been extremely curious about how the rest of that night turned out.
What happened?
Where did we go?
Why did Delilah bid five thousand dollars?
When the answers I gave her didn’t satisfy her curiosity, she’d recruited backup. My brothers and their wives. My sister. Even Mrs. Higgins had asked me about Delilah after she’d come back from a lunch with my mom.
Now my dad was at my house.
“How long until you’ll be back?” he asked.
“About five minutes.”
“It’s hotter than blue blazes. You mind if I let myself in?”
“Go ahead.”
“Alright, see ya soon.”
I turned my music back on and ran even faster. Not because I was eager to talk to my Dad. I did want to get it over with, but I’d hit the turbo boost because I needed to burn off some of my frustration.
Chewy barked beside me, and I thought it was because I’d picked up the pace. He loved to let loose and go full speed. When he barked again I noticed that it wasn’t the acceleration that had caused his excitement, it was the family of ducks up ahead that were peacefully wading into the river. He shifted, positioning himself to run over and jump in.
“No” I clipped.
He whined as he fell back in step with me. I knew it was hard for him to go against his animal urges, but it would be bad for the ducks if I let that happen. At the very least, he would scare the poor things. At the worst, he would catch one and then it would be bye, bye birdies.
I could relate. It was a lot like what would happen if I gave into my instincts with Delilah. Someone would get hurt. I’d been in love three times and each time it had ended in disaster.
In fairness, my first love was doomed from the start. I was sixteen and what started as innocent, unrequited love ended in prison and death.
I still remember the first time I saw her. It was the first day back from winter break my junior year. I was sitting in the back of Algebra II, and she walked in.
She had strawberry blonde hair, huge green eyes, and a smile that spread from ear to ear. The first thing that I thought when I saw her was holy shit. The next thing I thought was that she looked young for an upperclassman, which she had to be in order to be in the class. Then I thought that I’d never seen her before. I figured that she was a new student and was already planning what I would say to her after class. I was going to introduce myself, ask her what her classes were, and offer to show her around school.
I didn’t know her name, didn’t know where she was from, didn’t know if she would give me the time of day, but I knew that I’d never felt the way I felt when I looked at her. It was like lightning struck me. An electrical charge buzzed through my entire body. My eyes never left her as she glanced around the class looking for a chair. There was one beside me, and I would’ve made a deal with the devil for her to choose it.
It turned out a negotiation with Lucifer would’ve been futile. She didn’t pick any seat. Instead, she walked to the front of the room and wrote her name on the blackboard.
Mrs. McKinney.
At first, I was in denial. I thought it might be a practical joke. I’d sure as hell never seen a teacher that looked like she did.
But it wasn’t a joke.
She turned to the class and explained that she was our substitute teacher. Our regular teacher, Mr. Atkins, had slipped on an ice patch and broken his hip. She placed her left hand on her own hip as she described his injury and that’s when I saw the ring on her finger.
She was a teacher and she was married. Double whammy.
Those two facts should’ve made my heart hit the brakes, but if anything it pressed the accelerator. As the school year progressed, my feelings for her grew instead of diminished. Every day that I spent in the back row of room 35A, I fell a little more in love with her.
Over time I learned that it was her first year teaching. She was twenty-two years old and her first name was Laura. She was born and raised in Houston. She loved tacos and chocolate. Her favorite movie was Sixteen Candles. She didn’t tell me any of those things directly, it was just information that she mentioned during lessons and while talking to other students.
We didn’t have many interactions, but every time she spoke, I listened. When it came to her, I paid attention to everything. Which was how I learned something that would change my life forever. Her husband was abusive.
I’d seen him pick her up after school once and hadn’t liked the way he grabbed her arm and jerked her into the car. Then, towards the end of the year, I started noticing that she was wearing long sleeve shirts and turtlenecks even though the temperature was in the nineties. That had made me suspicious. But then, the Tuesday after Memorial Day, she showed up with a black eye that was visible despite the makeup she’d covered it with. She had attributed it to a boating accident. The next Monday she showed up with a fat lip that she claimed happened when she had tripped and fallen on the sidewalk, but by then I knew what was going on.
After asking around, I found out that her husband was a cop. They’d moved to Wishing Well for a fresh start after he was suspended for using excessive force.
That’s when I knew I had to do something, but I wasn’t sure what. I thought about telling someone but wasn’t sure what could be done if he had ties to law enforcement.
Then one night, as I was driving by The Tipsy Cow, I saw him go in. I flipped a U-turn and walked in with so much rage I could barely see straight. I spotted him right away at a booth with a few friends. Without any hesitation, I crossed the bar, pulled him out of the booth by the back of his shirt and pushed him up against the wall by the throat. Since I was the same size I am now and worked the farm every day, and he barely reached six foot and had the beginnings of a beer belly, I had the upper hand.
I told him that if he ever touched his wife again, I’d kill him, and unlike my homicidal thoughts about my brother, I’d meant it. I tightened my grip and didn’t let him go until he told me he understood. When he did, I let him go and he crumbled to the floor, sputtering and coughing.
That was on Friday. Sunday at church, news spread that he’d been arrested for battery and false imprisonment. Apparently, he’d gone home from the bar and held his wife, the woman I was in love with, at gunpoint for twenty-one hours before she managed to escape. He beat her to the point that her neighbors didn’t recognize her when she crawled up on their porch.
I’d left church and sped all the way to the hospital in Parrish Creek. It was a thirty-minute drive, and I made it in ten. When I got there, a couple that I assumed were her parents were crying outside the door of her room. I stood in the hallway paralyzed with fear, tears falling down my cheeks, thinking that she was gone and that it was my fault.
They noticed me and asked if I was there to see Laura. I managed to say that I was her student. They told me that she’d just gotten out of surgery for a punctured lung and that the doctors expected her to make a full recovery. They’d been crying from relief.
I didn’t see her that day or ever again. She moved back home with her parents and filed for divorce. Her piece of shit husband went to prison where he was stabbed to death in his cell six months into his sentence.
A few weeks after he was arrested, I was walking behind The Tipsy Cow and saw his friends come out. They recognized me and one of them walked up and sucker punched me. It took me by surprise and knocked the wind out of me. But after I recovered from the momentary shock, I took all three of them on. They got a few hits in, but I walked away from that fight and they were all on the ground.
That was the first time I was in love.
The next time was slightly less dramatic, but it still ended in scandal and a suicide attempt. I met Erika freshman year of college. She’d just broken up with her high school boyfriend and wasn’t looking for anything serious. I was still devastated over my first brush with love so I wasn’t either.
What started as casual turned serious. By winter break we were officially a couple, and she spent more time at my apartment off campus than she did in her dorm room.
When she went home for the holidays, her boyfriend tried to get her back. She refused. She returned to school, and things were good for a while. Then her ex transferred to our school in an effort to win her back. When that didn’t happen, he posted flyers all over campus that had naked pictures and her performing sex acts on him that he’d taken without her knowledge when they’d dated.
She was humiliated but handled it with class and grace. We went to the police, but they weren’t able to make a case. Then, back in her hometown, the pictures showed up on the church bulletin board where her father was a pastor.
A week later, I went to pick her up to try and get her out of her dorm room, where she’d been holed up since her mom had called to tell her what happened, and I found her in bed. I tried to wake her up but couldn’t, and that’s when I saw the empty bottles of sleeping pills next to her. She was rushed to the hospital and had her stomach pumped, and, luckily, recovered. But soon after she left school and went to study abroad.
The regret of not confronting her ex when he’d pulled that stunt still haunted me, and I ran faster, at a punishing speed. Chewy barked happily and kept my pace.
I hadn’t done anything because I was scared by what had happened with Mrs. McKinney. I thought it would be best if the police handled things. But to this day, I couldn’t help thinking that Erika might not have ended up with a tube down her throat gasping for air if I had done something.
My last relationship was my longest, but still ended in heartbreak and a horrible accident. I met Kenna Porter when I was twenty. She came from a wealthy family. Old money. A dynasty, really. We dated for two years. Her parents never approved of our relationship because I didn’t come from money. My parents didn’t have enough zeros in their bank account.
After graduation, her parents gave her an ultimatum. Either give me up or give up her monthly allowance. She wanted to have her cake and me too, so she asked if we could keep our relationship secret. I was okay with it at first, because I loved her and would do anything for her. But when she started “dating” guys that her parents set her up with, I told her I couldn’t do it anymore. She’d cried and said that she loved me and if I loved her I wouldn’t give up on us. She begged me not to leave her, but I just couldn’t be a dirty secret.
She’d run out of my apartment sobbing and inconsolable. I tried to stop her and offered to drive her, but she refused, even kicking me in the groin when I tried to take her keys. She got in her car and peeled out. Three blocks from my apartment she ran a red light and got sideswiped by a big rig. She’d spent two weeks in the hospital and had to have reconstructive surgery. She also blamed me for her accident.
So after three massive strikeouts, I’d benched myself. The people I loved got badly hurt, even if I wasn’t the direct cause. I knew that I couldn’t go through that again, feeling helpless and guilty for the suffering that I couldn’t save the women I loved from.
Which was why it was good that Delilah had accepted Coop’s offer to go to the bar. When I’d heard her say sure, it had felt like my heart was just hit with a sledgehammer. But I knew that was nothing compared to what I would feel if I ever hurt her, if she ever suffered because of her involvement with me. And with my track record, that wasn’t something I could risk.
As I came to the end of the riverside path, I slowed my pace to start my cool down. Chewy jumped into the river to cool off like he always did on our runs. When he got out, he shook and water flew everywhere. Usually I made sure I wasn’t in the splash zone, but I was so distracted I didn’t get out of the way in time.
“Stop!” I instructed in vain as I lifted my arms, shielding my face from the spray of river water.
He barked happily, not the least bit concerned about my command. I had to admit that as bad as I must smell now between the wet dog and sweat, it was actually pretty refreshing.
I wiped off my arms as we cut through the back of my property. Once we passed the fence, Chewy took off. He knew that when we were home, he didn’t have to stay beside me.
My dad’s truck was parked beside mine in the driveway, and I saw him coming out of the side door off the kitchen when I was still a few yards away. He looked like he was leaving. Maybe I’d taken longer than he wanted to wait.
“Dad!” I called out.
He looked over his shoulder and seemed surprised to see me. “Oh, hey there’s my firstborn! Your mama had me drop off some dinner for ya. I left it on the table.”
When I got closer to him, I saw that he looked…different. His coloring was a little gray there were bags under his eyes. My dad had worked every day of his life without complaint. He raised nine kids. I’d seen him worn out. Exhausted, even. But this was different.
“You feeling alright?” I asked as I stopped in front of him. Chewy had beat me to him and was happily seated in front of him getting head pets. “You look…tired.”
“I’m doin’ just fine.” My dad puffed out his chest as he stood taller, straightening his shoulders. He looked me up and down. “You’re not lookin’ so hot yourself there, son.”
Walker Briggs was a proud man. He didn’t like people “fussin’” over him. I wanted to ask him to come in and sit for a minute, but I knew that I couldn’t just come out and say that. “You wanna a beer?”
“Nah, I gotta head out.” He put his hat back on before climbing into his truck. “You better get inside, now. Before it gets cold.”
Gets cold? Since when did my mom make me anything that I didn’t put in the freezer to have later? And since when did my dad turn down a beer? I was wondering why he was acting so oddly when Chewy started crying and scratching the back door.
I didn’t know if he smelled my mom’s cooking or if she’d had my dad drop off a special non-rawhide treat for him that he was tracking. I opened the door, and his nails clicked on the kitchen tile as he ran straight to the dining room. As soon as I stepped in, I knew why he was so excited. The very distinct scent of my mom’s famous fried chicken was wafting through the air.
Now, I was really confused. As I followed Chewy, I thought that my dad dropping off this particular dinner was even stranger than the way he was acting. My mom made that chicken once a year for my dad’s birthday and the only other occasion I knew of was when she was playing matchmaker…
When I turned the corner, the mystery was solved.
Sitting at my dining room table, petting Chewy, was the person that the dinner that was laid out on the table was really for.
Delilah Turner.
Now, everything made sense. My dad’s call to find out how long I’d be. His leaving so abruptly. Dolly Briggs famous fried chicken.
The girl that had my world spinning off its axis stood and lifted her hand in a small wave. “Hi.”
My mouth went dry, and it had nothing to do with the fact that I’d just ran five miles. Delilah’s long blonde hair was falling in loose waves, framing her face. She was wearing a baby blue sundress that had thin straps that I wanted to slide off her smooth shoulders. And she was smiling, the smile that somehow simultaneously started and stopped my heart.
“Why aren’t you at the bar with Cooper?” I knew that my tone was harsh, and I sounded like an asshole, but seeing Delilah here, in my house, hit me way too close to home.