Unbreak My Heart (Rough Riders Legacy #1)(97)

“It went on until I was twelve. Over the last couple of years as I’ve started to deal with this, I tried to pinpoint why that’s when it ended. Had my mother found out? Had I stopped looking like a child? I do know that’s when my folks became born-again Christians. Was it the cause? Was it the effect? But it just stopped.”

I waited and watched him working through this in silence.

“This is where it’s f*cked up, son. So f*cked up I don’t wanna admit it, but you need to hear all of it.” He fiddled with his beer bottle. “After the abuse ended, I should’ve been relieved. But not only did the…physical contact end, all contact ended. For my dad it was like I ceased to exist. He ignored me. He wouldn’t even look at me. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. No idea how to deal with such complete rejection. So I followed him out to the garage where all the stuff happened and I tried…”

My father seemed to shrink before my very eyes.

I felt so goddamned helpless. I reached out and put my hand on his arm and wasn’t surprised when he flinched away from me. “It’s okay. Take your time.”

He nodded. Keeping his eyes closed he drained his beer.

I signaled the waitress for two more.

Finally he leaned forward again. “I followed him out to the garage and tried to do what he’d always made me do before. He…hauled me up off my knees and backhanded me. He beat the hell out of me, calling me a sick little pervert, claiming I’d been possessed by evil and he wasn’t letting me lead him astray from the righteous path ever again.”

Rage immediately supplanted that sick feeling.

“He sexually abused me and then shunned me. We didn’t have a normal conversation after that until I turned fifteen. Now I can guess it was because I didn’t look like a boy and the temptation was gone.”

“And so did you just…block all of this out?”

“Yeah, for a few years. Especially those years I lived at home. I left as soon as I graduated. In those days if you passed the test for the Commercial Driver’s License then you could be trained on the road by a company that hired you and not have to go to vocational school. I started out a secondary driver for long haul. I intended to get a fresh start someplace else.” He looked me in the eyes for the first time since he’d started talking. “Then I found out about you.”

What to say to that? My birth had forced him to keep a residence in Wyoming. So he couldn’t cut ties with his family.

“I’m a shitty dad, Boone, I know that. I’ve always known that. I took one look at you when you were a baby and I felt sorry for you. You had a f*cked-up mom and dad. I suggested adoption because you deserved better than you were gonna get, but your mom… She had visions of us bein’ a family. Which I promptly crushed when I accepted jobs for logging hauls in Canada and didn’t return to Wyoming until you were seven months old.

“At first I sent money because I promised I’d support you. But I heard she’d started doing drugs again, so I stopped paying and let her take me to court. At least with wage garnishment there’d be a paper trail of the support I’d paid instead of it going up in smoke.” He sipped his beer. “During that time she left you with her sister for a few months…”

I frowned. “I don’t remember that.”

“That’s because you were only two or something. One promise I had her make from the start was she was never, ever, under any circumstances to leave you with my parents.”

“Did she ask why?”

“Not that I remember, but I wouldn’t have told her the real reason even if she had. As far as I know, she didn’t take you over there.”

“But you didn’t keep Chet and Remy from getting to know me. So I’ll just ask this straight out; do you think they were abused?”

He didn’t answer immediately. “My gut feeling is no. They were born so close together and they’ve always been inseparable, so it would’ve been harder for him to get one of them alone. I was the rule follower. Especially when it came to positions of authority, so I didn’t ever question any of the stuff he did to me. I just did it or let him do it.”

“Do you have any idea whether your brothers knew what was going on?”

“Nope. They had their own room, I had mine. They wouldn’t have thought anything of Dad taking me out to the garage, because he always did.”

The sick feeling returned.

“I definitely think they’d be shocked if I told them now.” He stared at a spot across the room. “But there’s always that part of me that isn’t sure if they’d believe me, so…”

“What about your mother? How much of this did she know?”

“No idea. Could be when she found out, she stopped it. Could be she knew from the start and ignored it. Could be she’d sacrificed me, knowing he had those…tendencies and then he wouldn’t go out into the community to pick a random kid and end up in jail.”

“Did she treat you differently after your dad stopped…?”

He shook his head. “When I looked back at some of this stuff and tried to, I don’t know, break it down, it becomes obvious. She was always about pleasing her husband. Everything she did was for him. I overheard her talking one time, about how she hadn’t wanted more kids after me, that’s why there’s a gap between me’n Chet. Makes me think she knew what he was doing to me. And after an accidental second pregnancy she got knocked up again a third time with Remy—to protect them both.”