“Did you find him?” asked the petite brunette who sat on the front steps of the faded white trailer. The metal structure sat at the very end of a row of equally run-down dwellings that made up the small community known as the Happy Times Trailer Park.
A place where, contrary to its name, Tyler had had many not-so-happy times. The memories stirred but he fought them back down, determined to keep his head on straight and his focus solely on finding Cooper and talking some sense into him.
His gaze went to the girl who’d been waiting for him when he pulled up. Erin Shelton had short black hair that reached for the sky thanks to some heavy-duty hair products. A series of four piercings traced the edge of her right ear. Dark eyeliner rimmed almond-shaped eyes, making them seem wide and, oddly enough, innocent, despite her too-small T-shirt and tight black mini skirt.
Erin was the classic example that looks could be deceiving. She might look like an extra from a Sons of Anarchy rerun, but she was smart. Responsible. Driven. She’d been best friends with Cooper since the second grade, when she’d moved in next door with her mother, and his brother’s compass on more than one occasion.
Erin wanted out of the trailer park and so she’d studied hard, made straight A’s, and earned herself a scholarship, and she’d kept Cooper on track, as well.
Until a month ago when she’d gone off to work as a camp counselor with troubled teens and Tyler’s younger brother had taken up with Kenny Roy.
Erin pushed up on a pair of faded combat boots, her expression anxious. Worried.
“You did find him, right?” She glanced past Tyler at the man sitting in the passenger seat. He’d wanted to stop off at the trailer one more time before dropping Duff off at a nearby motel, to check if maybe, hopefully, Cooper had smartened up and reappeared on his own.
“Not yet.” Tyler shoved his keys into his pocket and ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “There was no one at Kenny Roy’s. I stopped off at the Bucking Horse and the Shade Tree Saloon before that. No one’s seen them.” At least not today. One of the waitresses at the Bucking Horse had mentioned that Cooper had come in last night, but Tyler wasn’t going to tell Erin that. Not when the waitress also said that Cooper had left her a whopping tip and an invitation to get together after work. Erin had a massive crush on his younger brother and while he knew his brother didn’t feel the same, he also knew Cooper would never willingly hurt her.
At least not the Cooper that Tyler remembered. But from what he was hearing around town about his brother’s recent behavior, he was starting to think that maybe the old Coop had taken a hike. Just like their deadbeat dad.
“We have to be in College Station in two weeks for freshman move-in. We were supposed to ride up together.” Cooper and Erin had studied hard, nailing the top two spots in their graduating class and snagging scholarships to one of the best schools in the state.
“He’ll turn up before then,” Tyler reassured her.
“I thought so myself, but it’s been nearly three weeks since I last saw him. He’s never been gone that long without at least a text. He even missed pizza night last week. He’s never missed pizza night.” Her eyes shone in the dim porch light. “I always let him have all the pepperoni.”
“I’m sure he just got caught up in whatever he’s doing. He’ll be home soon. Speaking of which, why don’t you head over to your place? I’ll catch up with you tomorrow after I check out a few more leads.” Namely one that had dropped into his lap thanks to the waitress. She’d mentioned Gator Hallsey, a badass bootlegger from a nearby county who’d been spending more and more time in Rebel. After pocketing the fat tip and turning his brother down on his offer, the waitress had seen Cooper leave with Gator.
Unease niggled at Tyler, making his muscles tight and his gut clench. If his brother was keeping company with Gator Hallsey, then the boy was sure as hell in over his head.
“Stop worrying,” Tyler said more for himself than Erin. “I’ll find him.”
She nodded and headed for the large pink trailer two spots down that she shared with her mother and the woman’s current flavor of the month. Not the most responsible setup in Tyler’s opinion, but who was he to cast stones? His own mother wasn’t likely to win Mom of the Year anytime soon. “Call me if you hear from him,” he called after her.
“I will.”
“I’ll be out in a second,” he called to Duff, who still sat in the passenger seat of his pickup.
He thought about inviting the man in for a nanosecond before dismissing the crazy notion.
Duff’s parents were a modern-day version of Ward and June Cleaver. His dad was an accountant for a large cattle ranch while his mother owned a small café. The two had been married over thirty years and they were still going strong. Duff had grown up in the same house with the same two parents, three square meals, and a dog named Champ.
Okay, so the dog’s name had been Bruiser, but it was the principle. Duff had a normal home life back in Odessa.
While Tyler had this.
He stared at the dented metal door, the peeling aluminum exterior, the small wooden porch that slumped on one side.
Tyler had done his best to fix the porch, but then his mother had come home drunk and rammed her ancient Caddy into the edge and the post had buckled again. Six months of weather and the exposed wood had splintered and started to waste away.
Tyler ignored the sick feeling in his gut and mounted the steps. When he reached for the door handle, the past rushed at him and he stalled the way he always had growing up. Hesitant to go in. Wary of what he might find on the other side. Or what he might not find. Namely an empty space, the fridge cleared out, the furniture gone—all telltale signs that his mother had taken off just like his dad.
Because as different as Ellen Sawyer McCall claimed to be from the worthless man she’d married, Tyler feared deep down inside she was cut from the same cloth. Birds of a feather and all that.
The knob turned, the door creaked and swung inward. True to form, she was still there, sprawled on the sofa like always, a bottle of Jack on the table next to a half-empty cup of the expensive gourmet roast coffee she always bought.
Even if there wasn’t enough leftover cash to put food on the table or pay the electric.
“Ma?”
She didn’t stir. Instead, the heavy snores of a woman who’d had way too much to drink filled the room.
Tyler closed the door behind him and moved over to the small couch. Sliding his arms under the woman, he lifted her. The scent of whiskey and cheap menthol cigarettes filled his head and made his nostrils burn.
“Hey.” His mother’s eyelids fluttered open. “What are you doing here?” She’d begged him to come home numerous times on the phone, and yet it was as if he’d just walked in off the street.
“I’m here to help with Cooper.”
“Takes after my side, ya know. So smart, that boy. And handsome. And such a gentleman.” While Tyler was the exact opposite, which Ellen never failed to rub in his face. “He’s a Sawyer through and through, that boy.”
“You need to hit the sheets.”
“But I’m not ready yet.” She twisted, reaching for the cup on the coffee table, but Tyler had already moved her out of reach. “One more drink. A nightcap.”
“You’ve already had one too many.” He expected her to argue. She always argued, giving him the lecture that she was the mother and she could do what she wanted. But then her eyes closed and he knew she had, indeed, had one too many, and the snores started again.
He fed her into bed the way he had so many times in the past, tucking the covers around her and making sure she had a trash can nearby just in case she was past the point of passing out and the spiked gourmet roast decided to come back up the way it had gone in.
“Did you find it?” her slurred voice asked him a split second before he closed the bedroom door.
“Not yet, but he’ll turn up.”
“’Cause I can’t sleep without it,” she murmured and he knew then that she wasn’t talking about Cooper. “I can’t sleep without my face mask. These damn shades aren’t worth a penny. They’re cheap. I told your daddy to buy the nice ones like I had back at home, but he said these would do just as well. Why, the man wouldn’t know quality if it jumped up and bit him…” She rambled on a few more seconds about his dad’s failure to keep her in the lifestyle she’d been accustomed to. She’d been a Sawyer. Accustomed to the finer things in life. And she’d sacrificed it all for a man. For love. And she’d never regretted it, not one single day. Or so she repeatedly told anyone who would listen.
But when the Jack started talking, the optimism that Waylon McCall would come running back and do right by his family faded, and the uncertainty leaked out. The bitterness.
“… ruined everything, he did. We had a good life.”
What they’d had was a trailer they could barely afford and two boys that they could barely feed.
Not that his mother had concerned herself with either. She’d been too busy ignoring their problems during the day, and hiding from them in her damn spiked coffee every night.
“I’ll find the mask. Just close your eyes and get some sleep right now. Everything will be okay.” He tucked the edges of the blanket around her and killed the small light that burned on the warped nightstand.
Closing the door behind him, he walked back into the living room. Picking up his mom’s discarded cell, he typed in her password—Sawyer—and scrolled through her calls, searching for any communication from Coop. There was nothing since last week when he’d left a voice mail telling her that he was fine and he would be home soon.
But soon had come and gone. He’d missed freshman orientation already. If he didn’t get his shit together, he’d be out for good. Stuck.
Tyler hit the CALL BACK button and listened as his brother’s familiar voice came over the line.
“You’ve reached Coop. I can’t take your call right now. Leave a message and I’ll call you back.” Beeep.
“This is your brother. Again. Call me. I mean it, Cooper. Time’s wasting.” He stabbed the OFF button and tossed the cell to the couch. His gaze snagged on a ragged throw pillow, the edges frayed, the expensive brocade fabric marred by several cigarette burns.
He could still remember the day his mother had bought it. She’d come home from Fancy Designs, an elite shop owned by her second cousin Liza Sawyer, with a crisp black shopping bag stuffed full of gold tissue, the store’s trademark logo embossed on the side. He’d been a gangly thirteen, his feet too big for the worn cowboy boots he’d picked out of the donation bin at the local church, the toes scuffed and the soles worn down to practically nothing. Cooper’s boots had been in the same condition, squeezing his eight-year-old feet to the point that he was nursing blisters. The fridge had been empty and the cabinets bare. But none of that had mattered when his mother had plopped down their last forty dollars for the genuine cowhide pillow.
“Liza has one just like this at her place,” his mother had declared. “She says it’s the latest.”
He hadn’t been too sure what that meant at the time. He just knew that he’d hated the crisp, ripe smell of cured hide and fancy fabric.
The thing was but a shell of itself now, pungent with the stench of cigarette smoke and spiked coffee. Just like his mother.
Like the entire trailer.
The walls seemed to close in on him in that moment. The air stalled in his lungs. He reached for the bottle of Jack and took a long swig. It did little to ease the anxiety knotting his muscles. There was only one remedy for that.
He set the bottle down and reached for the doorknob. The fresh night air hit him, pulling him out of the stench and the past, and into the present. The door slammed behind him. He breathed deep and hit the steps before crossing the distance to his truck. Climbing inside, he keyed the engine. A Luke Bryan song blasted on the radio, and the air conditioner stirred the new-car scent.
“Any word?” Duff glanced up from his own phone and the text he was reading.
“Nothing.” Tyler took one last look at the sad-looking trailer and shoved the truck he’d won six months back at a rodeo in Arizona into reverse.
A few seconds later, he hit the road that led into town. He dropped Duff off at the Rebel Quality Inn then headed for the rodeo arena and the small apartment that sat just above the foreman’s office.
The place was reserved for long nights when the events ran late and the arena boss, Jack Gallagher, needed a place to crash that was closer than his spread, which sat a good fifty miles past the county line. Since Jack and Tyler went way back, the man was more than happy to let him bunk there whenever he came to town. A habit that had started out of necessity because Tyler had been tight on funds the first few years and desperate to steer clear of the trailer and all the bad memories it held.
One that continued because the apartment had come to feel more like home than any other place in Tyler’s life.
Like hope.
It wasn’t big or fancy, but it had a double bed, a set of clean white cotton sheets, a private bathroom with a shower, a small kitchenette, and a bay window view of the arena where Tyler had first started to make something of himself.
Even more, there wasn’t a damn throw pillow in sight.