Chapter Five
SAWYER
“Sawyer, honey, breakfast is ready.”
I squinted up at the ceiling and, for a moment, hadn’t a damn clue where I was. I wasn’t in the barracks, I wasn’t at my station overseas, and those were the only two places I’m come to know. My mother’s voice reminded me I was home; I saw the baseball poster on my wall and sighed.
“Be there in a minute,” I grumbled, and began to sit up. Just as I’d done so, Mom came and sat down at the foot of my bed.
I loved her, very dearly, but apparently she still saw me as fourteen and in need of a little talking-to in the morning to get out of bed. I smiled at her, perhaps a little bit impatiently in my tiredness. “Good morning, Mom.”
“Sawyer, I’m worried about you,” she said. Her eyebrows were knitted together, pressing firmer the lines in her forehead. I’d noticed by now that her face had aged over the last six years. She hadn’t become an old hag by any means, but she’d gotten older, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d contributed to this process with my being gone and in danger for so long.
“You know, you used to be all over the place.” Mom had her hands wrapped around an old mug, one that I’d bought her as a child. Or, rather, that I’d painted at a ceramics shop for art class in middle school. One or the other. “You might not have talked much, but you were always out and about. You spent just about all day in your room yesterday. I’ll admit, it probably wasn’t a great idea to throw a party the first day you came back. But the whole day, Sawyer, and we couldn’t get you to come out.”
That was strange. No one had tried to get me. “I was tired, Mom,” I explained. I didn’t want to have this conversation with her, and I also didn’t want to hurt her. If she was going to be wondering about my seclusion, the possibility existed that I needed to go somewhere else.
“Well, maybe so,” she said. I could tell she didn’t believe me. “But you’ve had a good long day in your room, and a long night, so I expect you to get outside a little today. Get back into the groove of things. It’s no good to knock around inside your own head too long.”
I understood now that my mother worried that I was obsessing over my time overseas. The problem, though, was that going outside made it impossible not to think about my time overseas, and I still felt duty-bound to remember. The worst thing, possibly, would be to forget. “I understand, Mom. I’ll try to get out.”
“I want to hear your plan.” This was something she’d always done. She asked me for my specific plan so that I couldn’t leave any wiggle room for lying or sneaking out later than intended.
I smiled. “I’ll go visit Pete up on his farm; how about that?”
“That sounds good.” Mom stood up, content to leave with that answer.
I took a moment to get up and ready. I’d wanted time to myself the day before and didn’t know how to make that clear without being an ass. The party was fine, kind of everyone to think of me, but the only thing I wanted was to be alone. Starting over fresh in the place I’d grown up might have been a bad idea from the start, but the least that I could ask for, I thought, was a little bit of quiet time.
Still, I didn’t want to worry my mother in exchange for it. I took a quick shower, almost forgetting that the water wasn’t going to shut off on its own, but still taking under five minutes to get through. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and left my baseball cap sitting in my room.
In the kitchen, I could see the back of my father’s head. He sat at the table, hunched over a newspaper, reading glasses bent over his tiny ears only made to look normal by his bald head. Eugene Gains was a quiet man overall—most of my family said that he was where my quietness came from. But he wasn’t a passive man. When he had a grievance, he made it known.
When I sat down at the kitchen table, he looked down his glasses at me. While Mom had aged a bit, he’d remained the same, though to be fair he’d looked sixty since he was thirty.
“Morning,” I said. I drummed my fingers on the table and looked up. “Mom, you need any help back there?”
“She’s got it,” Dad said. “You in a rush to leave?”
Such was his way. I stopped drumming my fingers and looked at him. He didn’t meet my gaze, rather remained fixated on the paper. I couldn’t tell which it was. The news I got mostly came from a small TV in the recreation room in my barracks overseas.
“No,” I said.
“Good.”
Silence. I raised my eyebrows slightly and glanced at Mom, who conveniently had her back turned to the conversation, as though the feet between her and us made for an impenetrable barrier to any and all hearing. She’d always chosen to go deaf when it came to my father’s faults. I supposed I couldn’t expect her to change that.
“What are you reading?” I asked, in a stupid attempt to make conversation.
He frowned. “Never seen a newspaper before?”
I wondered, for a moment, if he’d even noticed that I was gone. Six years I’d been gone, and now he acted like I’d bothered him, like this was six years ago and I was still twenty-two, and he still wished I’d go make something of myself. Only now, at twenty-eight, I had made something of myself, and I was still somehow a nuisance for that.
“I told Pete I’d help him on the farm,” I said, mostly to myself. “I’d better head out before traffic gets too bad on thirty-five.”
“Your mother made breakfast,” Dad said, his voice a warning.
“Oh, it can certainly wait. I’m glad you’re going out to see a friend, Sawyer. I’ll see you when you get home,” Mom said. Quick to gloss over Dad, quick to cover his ass. I nodded to them both and ducked out of the house after grabbing the keys to my old truck. They were just where I’d left them on the key ring.
My truck was just where I’d left it, too. I’d gotten something of a replacement for it by the barracks, but this one was my favorite: an old red pickup. It wasn’t flashy or too big to drive around Austin. It was a respectable car that could get me around the city and handle just about any disaster I could throw at it. I hopped in and made my way to Pete’s farm.
The moment I reached the outskirts of Austin, where the country rolled on and on for endless miles, I felt a little better. Pete’s property started sooner than I was used to with his extra acres of crops, but his home was just where I remembered, perched at the top of a hill.
“Sawyer! What the hell you doin’ all the way out here?” Pete shouted at me from down his driveway. I saw a tractor parked not far; he must have been in the middle of something or another.
“You working on something?” I could still hear the tractor’s motor running.
“Nah, just going for a ride.” Pete flashed me a missing-tooth grin. “Did you come out here to help?”
“If you’ll let me.”
“I ain’t have anything to pay you.”
“Don’t need money. Just some quiet.” I offered him a smile and began to wish I’d grabbed my baseball cap. At least the sun wasn’t coming down too hard; in the summer, it would beat down mercilessly in Texas, and even the strongest soldiers would choose death over a day in the field in that heat.
“Well, I don’t have any work for you,” Pete said. “And I hate to send you away after you drove all the way out here n’ all.” He put his hands on his hips and looked out on the open field. “Tell you what, why don’t you park the tractor and I’ll fix lunch?”
It was a fair enough deal. I’d only driven the tractor once before, but parking it was easy. When I went back up to the house, Pete was wandering around the kitchen like he’d never seen a kitchen before.
“Sandwiches alright with you?”
“Sure,” I said.
We set our sandwiches on paper plates and grabbed a beer out of his refrigerator before walking onto the back porch. The occasional fly buzzed by, but besides that, there wasn’t a disturbance in the world.
“What’s got you runnin’ out here lookin’ for work?” Pete asked. “Your old man giving you trouble?”
I nodded, taking a drink of my beer. “Little. Nothing new.”
“I’d think he’d be mighty grateful for your service.”
I made a face. I preferred Dad’s distaste towards me to any kind of worship. “I’m just a person, Pete. I’m not farming for gratitude.”
“Come back tomorrow and you’ll be farming for beets,” Pete said, pointing at the acre in front of us with a laugh. When it subsided, he sat back in his chair. “Shit, man, what was it like? Out there, overseas. You were, what, in Syria?”
“Afghanistan,” I corrected. “And Iraq, and Syria. Middle East. Hopped around.” That was about the most that I was allowed to tell people, really, and it was the most I felt comfortable sharing.
“Shoot. Did you get any terrorists?”
I rubbed my nose and took a drink of my beer. “Nah, they all went home. We’re fighting circus clowns now, Pete. Didn’t anyone tell you?”
“Shoot.” Pete shook his head and rolled his eyes at me. “It was, what, you and a team? Were you on some kind of special forces team?”
I didn’t appreciate the onslaught of questions from Pete. “Yeah, and what did you do, go to law school?”
“What?”
“I feel like I’m getting cross-examined.” I shook my head and sat forward in my seat, looking out on the landscape.
“Ah.” Pete spat off to the side. “You can’t expect to be gone for six years and not have me ask you a single damn question when you get back. Especially when you didn’t tell me shit over the phone, neither.”
“That was by design.”
“Shoot.”
A moment of silence passed between us, and I started wondering if I ought to ask Pete about renting some space out here. He didn’t have a shed, and knowing him he didn’t have a permit to build anything either, but the police wouldn’t care if I built something to live in. It would give me a place to be where I wouldn’t be bothered.
“You know, your mom talked to me yesterday. At the get-together.” Pete pushed his cap down onto his forehead.
I looked back at him. “Yeah?”
“Awful concerned about you bein’ gone so long. And I told her, ‘Kimberly, you shouldn’t be all worried. Sawyer’s a grown man now.’ But she thinks you seen somethin’ out there you can’t shake.”
I started to open my mouth, and Pete waved his beer as means of cutting me off.
“I’m not askin’. But she’s worried, Sawyer. Wants you to see one of them shrinks in the city.”
“I’m not seeing a shrink.” I set my empty beer bottle down on the counter. A fly buzzed up to the rim and sat, gorging itself on whatever sugary remnant was on that little lip. “I don’t need some asshole pushing pills at me for his own profit.”
“I wholeheartedly agree with that, now.” Pete made a small sound of agreement, too. He was exaggerated in his speech and his movements. I appreciated that I never felt the need to decode him. “But you know, with your mom so worried, you might just stop by. Just to make her life a little easier. God knows she’s had a rough six years.”
I winced. The worst part of this was knowing I’d done anything to add to Mom’s troubles. The whole point of me going over was to remove myself from her life, and at that point, my subtracted presence was better than my being there. Now, it seemed, times were different. I’d been gone long enough, and now that I was back, she needed to know I wasn’t going to be the way I was before I left.
“I’ll go to set her at ease,” I agreed. “I need to look around the city for a job anyhow.”
“No big-dollar corporation is gonna have the labor of a United States hero under my watch,” Pete declared. “You can work for me, at least for a little while.”
“You said an hour ago you didn’t have anything to pay me.”
“I’ll have something by the end of the week,” Pete said. “Won’t be much, but it’s honest work. Better than pushing papers or scanning groceries or workin’ for the media.”
I had to agree with him there. The idea of an office job didn’t sit well with me, and if I could work out here, I’d be able to spend hours in the silence doing something productive. “I believe you’ve got yourself an employee, Pete.”