his direction.
That was how he found himself digging weeds out of flower beds and turning the soil, trying to get rid of the nasty plants that had taken hold and lain dormant since the previous spring. It seemed like a metaphor.
He’d never liked poetry or anything of the sort, so he chose not to dwell on it too much.
There were no answers in a flower bed. At least...none that West was interested in.
Though he cast a sidelong glance at his sidekick, who was named for a flower, and decided this was a hell of a strange situation.
“When you were in school did the other kids tease you for your name?” he asked.
She looked over at him, some strands of hair from her ponytail falling in her face. She blew them away, and shook her head, digging the shovel down deep. “Of course,” she responded, looking at him like he was an idiot. “What don’t you get teased for in school?”
“Good point,” he said. And it was.
“Yes. I got teased for my name. No, it’s not why I became a police officer. But yes, it is kind of a handy thing to always be packing heat when your name is Pansy.”
He laughed. “I bet. I mean, I’m a cowboy named West. Insert your joke here.”
“But you haven’t always been a cowboy,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, I basically have been,” he said. “I might have worked in an office for a while, but it didn’t change what I was.”
Saying that seemed weird. He could see that man clearly in his mind, but it was hard for him to accept that the man was him.
That man who had left rodeo dirt and arenas behind and had gone into an office five days a week, worked on a computer at home more days than that.
For a long time he’d thought that prison was a weird time-out in his life. A moment when he had stopped being him.
But, truth was, he’d stopped being him a long time before that.
“I made money that way,” he said. “I thought that’s what I had to do to be happy.”
“And did it make you happy?”
He chuckled and stabbed the end of the shovel into the dirt. “You know how it ends, so...no.”
“What if it hadn’t ended that way? Would you have kept on doing it?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I would have. I had pretty much made the choice to make that my life. I mean, I married a woman who would have... She never would have accepted anything else. Still, on the weekends I was a cowboy. Not really the life I dreamed of in every way. But I had a big house. I fit in.”
“What’s that like?” she asked. And he saw that she was looking at him with no small amount of sincerity in her eyes.
“Terrible,” he said. “If it’s not the space you were meant to fit in to.”
She nodded slowly. She pushed the head of her shovel down into the dirt and lifted out a weed, the roots all splayed out and crooked. Detached. Another damned metaphor.
“I’ve never fit,” she said. “I’ve never fit here in my hometown. I didn’t have a ton of friends in school after my parents died because I was too serious. Because no one wanted their kids to come to our house—who wants their kid going to a place where kids are raising kids? Even now, I’m trying to fill a uniform that came before me. I’m not him.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe you don’t have to be?”
She said nothing, the two of them just kept on digging.
They worked until the sun was high in the sky and they were all sweating, and to West’s surprise, Barbara bought Emmett lunch.
“If you want to we can be finished. Or, you can go on to Carl’s place and work a shift.”
Emmett squared his shoulders. “I’m not tired.”
West wasn’t quite sure where the bakery was, so Pansy walked with him and Emmett down the street toward the place.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
She flashed him a suspicious look. “I don’t know.”
“You’re off duty,” he said.
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“Have a drink,” he said.
They walked back toward Main Street, and he could feel the tension radiating off of her in waves. He wasn’t sure what the deciding factor had been that made her stay with him, since she was clearly uncomfortable.
He wondered if it had more to do with the challenge of the whole thing than anything else.
That she couldn’t show him she