Page 60 of Unruly

I look at my hands, tears forming, but I push them back. “Dawson found him,” I say. “He went in after breakfast—figured it was nothing. And Dawson found him slumped over the kitchen table at noon.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“We let him go,” I say again. “We didn’t check on him sooner …”

“There’s nothing you could have done,” Halle says.

I know that. But knowing it doesn’t help. “I know that, I just—I keep thinking about all the times … All the times I figured there was more time.”

I tell her all about Grandpa and his life on this ranch and his purpose. I stumble over many of the details and words as I fight back the tears.

“—And I have his name.” I laugh. It comes out all wrong. “I have his name and I don’t even know what to do with my life.”

“Cash—”

“No.” I pull my hand back. “I’m the family joke—that’s what I am. Rhett runs the ranch, Dawson runs the horses, and I’m the one everybody loves because they don’t have to expect anything from me. I’ve been fine with that. I’ve been more than fine with that my whole life.”

“You’re grieving. You don’t have to figure out your whole life tonight.”

That pisses me off. I know she means well—it’s the right thing to say—but it pisses me off anyway.

“I’m not talking about tonight,” I say. “I’m talking about every night. Every morning. Twenty-two years of deciding nothing and being fine with it because being fine with it is easy and I like easy and now he’s gone and I’m looking at the next fifty years and I don’t know what the fuck I’m building. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know who I am without someone who thought I was worth something.”

My voice cracks on that last part and I take a drink to cover it.

“Cash, Ben loved you; he saw something in you. That didn’t go away because he did.”

I stand up.

“Be with me.”

It comes out before I’ve decided to say it, slurred at the edges. All of it, right there on the surface, with nowhere left to hide.

She blinks. “What?”

“Be with me, for real. Not just—not the thing we’ve been doing. Actually be with me. Let me be something to someone. Give me a reason to live.” I look at her and I know I’m a mess, and I know this is too much but I can’t stop. “If you can’t do that, then I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do with any of this.”

“Cash …” She stands, reaching for me.

I step back. “Forget it.”

“I didn’t say⁠—”

“If you can’t make me an honest man then no one can, and I’ve just been out here drinking and being dramatic and you should go back inside.”

I turn toward the dark of the fields.

“Cash.” Her voice is sharp now. “Don’t walk away from me.”

“Go away, Halle.” I keep walking. “I’m sorry you saw that.”

She calls my name again—maybe twice, but I keep walking.

The dark opens up and I go into it, walking until the light from the main house is just a glow at the edge of the field.

Then I sit down in the grass and sit there until the bottle is empty and the cold gets into my shirt, watching the lights in the main house starting to go out one by one.

HALLE