LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FIVE

      IT WAS JUST about noon by the time Ace got himself out of the house and to the grocery store. He had a few hours before he was going to check in at the bar and he needed to get some things for his house that extended beyond beer and ranch dip. Like, chips for the ranch dip.

      He walked slowly through the store aisles, basket in hand as he perused the shelves. He stopped, turning toward the produce, toward the heads of lettuce stacked all bright green and pointless. He supposed he should probably eat vegetables. Going to the store was always weird. Because he saw things in it that were reflective of a life he could hardly remember anymore.

      Liar. You remember it perfectly.

      For a while, he’d lived in a house that was well stocked with this kind of healthy stuff. Salad and tomatoes, and all manner of stuff that was good for you but tasted like dirt. He supposed that had also been true of his childhood home. His mom had always had things like that around the house, but he’d figured when he grew up he wouldn’t have to eat it anymore.

      At that stage of his life, he hadn’t factored a wife into the equation.

      He turned away from the lettuce. He didn’t have a wife anymore. Therefore, he didn’t have salad.

      “Ace?”

      He turned around, the impact of recognition hitting him like a punch to the gut when he saw the person behind him. “Hayley,” he said, shock being worn away by a rush of guilt the moment he spoke his little sister’s name.

      “I haven’t seen you in... It’s been way too long.”

      “You know where I work,” he said.

      She smiled. “You know where I work, too.”

      “Not really interested in paying the church a visit,” he said, shoving one hand into his pocket, tightening his grip on his basket with the other.

      “Well, I don’t drink.”

      “We serve hamburgers.”

      “I know. We should get together, is my point. And not to fight about places neither of us really want to go.”

      Hayley was nine years younger than he was, a late-in-life surprise for his parents who had long given up hope on ever having another child. She had been nine when he’d left Copper Ridge for Texas, seventeen when he’d come back.

      He had been distant from his family all those years he’d spent away, sporadic phone calls his only real contact. He had always stopped in to visit when the rodeo had passed nearby, but when he’d settled in Austin with Denise his life had just wrapped itself around her, and it had become impossible to do anything but pour himself into that relationship.

      “How have you been?” he asked.

      She lifted her shoulder, a half smile curving her lips. In some ways, she looked sixteen, instead of twenty-six. Either that or she looked closer to sixty-five. Her dark hair lay flat and limp against her head, restrained by a headband. She was wearing a dark blue sweater set and a long skirt. She was every church secretary stereotype imaginable. Though he supposed he was every stereotype of a pastor’s son.

      “Fine,” she said, “nothing really new.”

      “Mom and Dad?” That stab of guilt went deeper, drawing blood inside.

      “Also fine.” She looked down. “Well, Dad had a bit of a health scare. A little chest pain. But everything was okay. They’re just having him monitor his cholesterol, and all that.”

      He thought about his dad, tall, lean. He had a hard time imagining the older man might have issues with his heart. It worried him. It also made him think twice about the lettuce.

      “He didn’t have a heart attack?”

      Hayley shook her head. “No. Like I said, he’s fine. Ace, if anything serious happened, you know I would call you.”

      And he knew that he should call them and try to get updates more often. He should go over for dinner more often than every few months. But what was he supposed to tell them about his life? His father wouldn’t even go into the bar because of appearances in the small town. Hayley and his mother basically had the same policy. And he couldn’t even get upset about that because he had been well aware of how they would feel about him running a bar before he had ever done it. To their credit, no one ever made him feel guilty about his choice; they asked him about how things were going, expressed interest in the place. They just didn’t come in.

      There were no relationships for him to tell them about. He was hardly going to confess to the endless array of women whose names he couldn’t even remember that passed through his bed on any given weekend.

      That was the real problem. Sometimes it was just hard to sit across from his father and look him in the eye.

      “Good to see you,” he said, reaching out and pulling his sister in for a hug. He should have done that right at the first. There was something wrong with him that he hadn’t thought to hug her until now.

      But that was hardly a revelation.

      “Good to see you, too,” she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder.

      He released his hold on her. “Tell Mom and Dad I said hi. If anything... If they need help with anything around the house, see that you give me a call.”

      “Usually, the youth group takes care of any work that Dad needs around the house. They do a good job of saying thank you for everything he does.”

      Hayley was too sweet to imply that they had to do it because Ace didn’t, but it hit him that way anyway. And fair enough.

      “Still. He can call me.”

      “I’ll tell him.” She rocked back on her heels, holding onto her basket with both hands, awkwardness that should never exist between siblings settling between them. “Well, I have to go. I’m just on lunch break.”

      “See you around, kiddo.” The old nickname didn’t help ease any of the weirdness between them.

      She ducked her head, turning away and walking over towards the checkout lines, and Ace continued to stroll down the aisles. He did not get lettuce. He waited to pay for his various assortment of frozen dinners until he was sure that Hayley was gone, which was a jackass move, but he was kind of a jackass.

      He walked out of the grocery store, loading up his truck and pausing for a moment, looking across the cracked, mostly empty parking lot and toward the mountain view beyond. It was a strange thing, realizing that the near decade spent away, and the decade he’d been back home had changed him into the kind of person who would never fit into his own family. It was his own decisions that had done that. That had reshaped him in such a way that sitting down at the dinner table he’d grown up eating around now felt nearly impossible.

      Of course, the fact that he lived in Copper Ridge meant that he had to contend with running into his family at the grocery store. It meant that he felt guilty for not coming over more often, even if coming over only resulted in him sitting there feeling too large in his seat. As though he were being held beneath the magnifying glass, his every sin conspicuous in the eyes of his parents.

      He could have stayed away. When he had left Austin, there had been no real reason to come back to Copper Ridge. Except that it was home. Home in a way no other place ever had been.

      It was the kind of place that got underneath your skin. He hadn’t truly noticed it until he left. Until he’d spent years traveling across the country on the rodeo circuit, until he had settled in Texas, making plans on the Lone Star State being his permanent home.

      But the need for mountains was in his blood. Pine trees and sharp salt air that burrowed beneath your skin. That made every breath taken in any other place taste

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