Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,70

all that great. The night before he left for Paraguay, they’d made love, or tried to. It was awkward, and bad. Well, had it ever been good? She and Greg didn’t work. Was it really that, though? Or was it the fact that every time she tried to talk to him about what had happened to her four years ago in Acker’s Gap he just said, “Thank God you’re out of there now,” or asked her if she’d been in love with Lonnie Prince, which wasn’t the point. Of anything. Not even close.

“What is it?” New Guy said.

“It’s pretty cold out here.”

“Can’t argue the point.”

She had spotted her keys on a snow mound next to her left front tire. She bent down and retrieved them. When she stood back up again, she took a deep breath. She felt like she was on a high dive, her toes curled around the front edge of the board. She was spreading out her arms on either side of her body. Looking way, way down at a blue expanse of pure possibility.

“Want to sit in my car and, like, talk?” she said. “Just for a couple of minutes?”

A beat. “Okay.”

She put out her hand. “Carla Elkins.”

“Travis Womack.”

She started the engine to get the heat going. The first thing he told her was his age. She’d been right; he was old. Forty-eight. Jesus, she told herself. That’s not just old. That’s old.

Older even than her mom. But—okay.

They were several minutes into their conversation when Travis made a confession: He had feared her motives when she asked him to chat in her car. He fully expected her to try to buy or sell drugs. “And I was going to tell you,” he said, “not to be an idiot.”

“Great. Another authority figure. I don’t have enough of those in my life.” She made a scoffing noise in the back of her throat.

“Hey. I’ve seen what that shit can do.”

She had a fleeting urge to tell him about her mother, the Raythune County prosecutor who had made it her one-woman mission to stop the drug trade in these mountains. But, no. She did not want to talk about her mother.

“You’re not the only one,” Carla said, “who guessed wrong. I thought maybe you said yes because you were going to—well, you know.”

“Take up where that fat asshole in the Tony Lamas left off.”

“Yeah.”

He smiled. The smile creased his face but did not reach his eyes. “You’re a nice kid. And I can tell you need somebody to talk to. Somebody who’ll just listen. Do I have that about right?”

She started to cry. Just a bit. She did not sob, the way she’d been doing lately, at the drop of a hat. Two teardrops slid down her face. She wiped them off quickly.

He did not react to her tears, which pleased her; instead he let a little time go by. And then he spoke, temporarily relieving her of the responsibility to keep up her end of the conversation. She was absurdly grateful for that.

“Been there,” he said. “When I was your age, and going through a rough patch, I didn’t know how to handle myself. Didn’t know what to do with the things I was feeling—a lot of anger and hate, mostly. All I wanted was to find somebody to talk to. Somebody I’d never met before.”

“And did you?”

“Nope.” Not a trace of self-pity in his tone. He was dispensing information, not asking for sympathy. “There was a family member who wanted to help, who would have done anything in the world for me, but that’s not the same. Family’s too close. Too much shared history. I wanted what you want—a neutral observer. I think it would have made a hell of a difference.” He paused. “So whatever you want to say—say it. Or not. Don’t say it. Either way’s okay with me.”

And so, with the pressure off, she talked. She talked about how, when anybody asked, she said everything was fine—really, really fine—but it wasn’t fine, not at all, and about how, as a consequence of all those things she had stuffed in the back of her mind, like junk you cram in your closet until one day you try to get out your tennis racket and everything falls out on top of your head, she did something bad.

“How bad?” Travis said.

“Bad.”

She told him about how the memories now came back to her at periodic intervals, and how she could not control them, and how they sort of