Diane glared at me. Then she opened her mouth like she wanted to argue. Then she snapped it shut and pointed her attention out the passenger side window.
We stayed like that for a while, and I was grateful. It gave my heart a chance to stop beating like an angry drum and reason to return.
This was the problem. This. Right now, right here.
This was why I needed to tell her the truth about following her last year. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to sneak around and undermine her wishes. She needed to know who I was, what I was like, what she’d signed up for.
Am I ready to walk away?
Swallowing around a painful tightness, I gave my head a shake. It didn’t matter if I was ready. Life and truth don’t wait until you’re ready. She needed to know, and I needed to tell her.
“Well, I suppose I should send you a gift basket then.”
I narrowed my eyes in confusion, her statement nonsensical. I wondered if she’d been talking for a while and I’d been too inside my head to notice.
“What?”
“For rescuing me,” she spat, clearly still mad as hell. Turning back to me in a huff, she crossed her arms. “I am grateful. I am. But I’m also angry. He doesn’t listen to me. He’s been after me about those cows for months. I can’t get him to leave me alone.”
“You should’ve come to me.”
“No. No!” Diane gave her head several quick, frenzied shakes. “I shouldn’t have to and that is exactly why I’m angry. Thank you for helping me, really. Thank you. I don’t know if I approve of the manner in which you helped. But thank you anyway. I was scared. But what makes me so angry I can barely breathe is that I say no, and he doesn’t listen. I say no, and I’m not believed. It makes me want to learn karate or some other martial art so I can kick butt, and I hate it. I don’t want to have to know how to kick butt. I want people to listen to me, to my words, I want them to mean something. Why can’t a woman’s words count for more than a man’s violence?”
“Diane.” I tried to soften my voice because I was about to point out the obvious. “That is not the world we live in.”
It certainly wasn’t the world I lived in. Might made right. I understood that; I relied on it. There was a simplicity, an order to it, for men like me.
But I was coming to see, for a woman like her, there was no order to it. Only the chaos of powerlessness, uncertainty, and fear.
“I hate it,” she repeated on a murmur, turning her eyes to the forest beyond the road. “I do. I hate it so much.”
And that’s all she said for the remainder of the drive, leaving me to wonder whether at the end of the day, when I’d told her the truth about what I’d done, she’d hate me too.
Once we were inside the house, I took her jacket, knelt to take off her shoes, and walked her to the chair in front of the hearth. After tucking a blanket around her lap and shoulders, I lit a fire in the fireplace.
Diane was the silent one now, her forehead furrowed, her eyes staring forward. And I was the one who wanted her thoughts. I didn’t have a right to them, not until I told her the truth, but I wanted them anyhow.
We didn’t have much for dinner, and certainly not the feast I’d had planned to butter her up. I made do. I found all the fixins for tacos and an unopened bottle of white wine in the fridge. After I’d set the meat to cook on low, I poured her a glass and brought it to her in the family room.
“Sorry I’m so quiet,” she said, her gaze pulling at me as I handed over her drink. “I don’t like it when others do it, so I shouldn’t be doing it either.”
“No.” Sitting on the wide brick hearth a foot off the ground, I stirred the fire and added another log. “You be quiet if you need it.”
I felt her attention on my face, the intensity of it, and I struggled to tell her what needed to be said. I didn’t know how to start.
“Who are your people?” she asked out of nowhere. “I know you’re from Texas, but who are your parents?”
“I don’t have people.” I gave her my eyes and a small smile so she’d see I spoke the truth.
She tilted her head. “Are you saying a stork brought you to the Iron Wraiths, fully formed, wearing black leather and brass knuckles?”
The words and her delivery made me chuckle. She was funny, when she wanted to be. “No. I have biological parents.”
Now her stare sobered, like she absorbed the words I didn’t say. She asked gently, “Did you ever meet your parents?”
“I did.”
Diane looked a bit uncertain. “Do you not wish to discuss it?”
I didn’t wish to discuss it, but I did find I wanted her to know. “My father—my biological father—already had a family when he impregnated my mother. He didn’t want to leave his kids and wife, and my mother kept me until I was about three. She couldn’t deal with me anymore, so I went into the system.”
“You weren’t ever adopted?” Diane’s breath seemed come haltingly, like she was bracing herself for worse news than this.
“No. I was not adopted. I was raised in homes, a lot of them.” I ensured my voice held a finality, communicated that this topic was off limits. I did not wish to discuss anything related to the homes. Even with her.
She blinked, looking away from me, her eyes now glassy. “I see,” she said, and I suspected she needed another minute with her thoughts.
I stood and walked back to the kitchen, turning off the meat. Then I moved on to chopping the tomatoes, lettuce, and green onions. She joined me at the kitchen island, setting her mostly untouched glass of wine on the counter.
“Did you ever meet your father?” she asked quietly, her tone respectful.
“Yes.” I nodded, using a knife to push the green onions off the cutting board and into a waiting bowl. “When I was, oh, I guess about sixteen, I ran away from the group home where I lived and tracked him down.”
“How’d you do that?”
“Rural Texas is one little community after another, each basically the same. I knew where I was born, so I went there. Didn’t take long, with the right questions asked to the right people. Small towns have a long memory for scandal.”
“Did you . . .” Diane picked up the block of cheese I’d laid out along with the grater and got to work. “Did you confront them?”
“No. I lied about my age and got a job where my daddy—I mean, where my biological father worked, Franklin Ranch. He was a low-level ranch hand, but I watched him, studied him, and we became acquaintances. He and his wife had four sons, he had no need of another, and he retired shortly after I arrived.”
It was strange, saying these things out loud. I’d never told anyone any of this. I’d thought it might be difficult to speak the words. It wasn’t. Almost like this story belonged to someone else, someone long dead and buried along with whatever hurt and hopes they’d carried.
“What about your mother?” Diane dusted the back of the grater, the bits of the cheese there falling into the pile she’d made.
“She’d settled down a few towns over, married a lawyer, got a divorce. She had no children, but I got the sense she’d never wanted any.”