Harder (Caroline & West #2)(21)

It sucks and sucks and sucks and sucks, and it never stops sucking. There’s no end to it. No bottom. No black curtain that falls down and makes it so you don’t have to feel it.

It’s like Caroline said. There are some things so terrible you shouldn’t have to go through them, but you do have to. They’re yours to feel, yours to put up with.

Your life to live, whether you like it or not.

I drove back to Silt and went to work.

I fed juniper into a chipper and thought about the future for the first time in months. I thought about Caroline. What she’d said. What I’d done to her. I thought about how hard I’d tried to keep her from seeing me here, seeing me struggle to keep it together.

I knew she would, if she came to Silt.

I figured I couldn’t stand it if she did, and I was right. I couldn’t stand it.

Couldn’t stand what she told me.

Couldn’t stand that she saw right through what I did to her—the shame I felt when she didn’t cry or shout and I figured out I’d been trying to trick her into changing her mind about me because I couldn’t just tell her the truth.

I loved her. Every day, every hour, every single f*cking awful minute, I loved her.

And even loving her, I hurt her, because I thought I had to. What else would have made her leave? A smart woman like Caroline, loyal, caring—she would’ve done anything for me, including stay. I guessed it, and then she told me, so, you know, gold star for me. Three cheers for West, figuring out what he has to do to drive the love of his life away. Eat Rita Tomlinson out against the side of Bo’s truck—that’s gonna get the job done. That’ll get it done every damn time.

I disgusted myself.

I hated myself.

But Jesus, I loved Caroline. She was always braver than me. Better than me, smarter, able to see her way to the heart of things. She looked at me and saw a man worth rescuing, but I’d already made up my mind not to be rescued.

I put her as far away from me as possible, because I was going to have to stay in Silt, and I couldn’t stand it but I had to stand it.

I had to.

This was my life. The script I got handed when I walked onto the set.

Only, I looked at the script again after Caroline left, with my dad’s corpse cooling in the ground in a box I bought with weed money, and I figured out I was never the f*cking sheriff.

Nobody with any goodness in them—any sense of justice or rightness—could have done that to her.

I’d done it.

So who did that make me?


I’ve got a list in my head: Shit That Has to Get Sorted.

At the top of the list is “living situation,” so on Monday of the week after the funeral, I drive by my grandma’s house after work to talk to my mom.

She’s on the couch wrapped in the afghan she’s adopted. The TV’s on, but she doesn’t look like she’s watching it.

She looks like shit, actually. Her hair is limp like she hasn’t washed it, and I notice chipped polish on her toenails.

I sit down next to her. “What’s on?”

She hands me the remote. “Garbage. You can pick if you want.”

I accept it. Flip through a few channels.

I’d asked my grandma to take Frankie out for a burger so I could hash some things out with my mom, but now that I’m sitting here I sense disaster on the way. I can read Mom’s moods like the weather, and she’s not at her most stable.

It’s not her mood that worries me, though. It’s mine. There’s a dark cloud over my head. If I thought I could put this off another week or two, I would.

“Did your girlfriend move out to Bo’s?” she asks.

“No. She went home.”

“Thought she might be sticking around, the way she looks at you.”

The way Caroline looks at me—

I throw a wall up there.

The way she touched me, the way she tried to comfort me, the way she took off her shoes and dug that grave with me—

I build the wall taller.

My voice is dry when I ask, “What’s there to stick around for?”

The pillow next to me on the couch has a deer on it. A naturalistic forest scene I remember thinking was real cool when I was a kid.

Tacky. That’s how this place looks to me now. My whole life here, shabby and low-class and tacky.

That’s one part of going to a rich-kid school in Middle America that I never knew to expect. You spend two years in classrooms with six-inch-wide heartwood pine molding stained deep, academic brown, and when you go back to where you came from it all looks a hundred times worse than you remembered.

Your default settings have shifted. Hondas and Toyotas instead of American cars. Handcrafted instead of machine made. Local and organic and artisanal whatever-the-f*ck, and you can mock it when you’re there, but that doesn’t keep Hamburger Helper from tasting like warm piss and chemicals the next time you try to eat it.

“I don’t like you staying out there with him,” my mom says.

“Bo’s all right.”

“You don’t know. You weren’t at the trailer that night.”

“How could I have been?”

“You’re never here. Even when you’re home, you’re thinking about how much you’d rather be somewhere else. With Caroline.”