“I saw them briefly before I left and they’re exactly the same. Mom said she was glad I was going to be around you, that you probably needed me. I have no idea where she got that idea. I told her not to tell anyone but Sedona and Dakota where I was. I don’t know who would ask but I want to cut ties with that old life. I mean, I still have my Des Moines support, but we don’t give out information on each other. Mom was fine, Dad was getting ready for a big security briefing of some kind. In other words, he’s in Jed’s world. You call them, don’t you?”
“I haven’t talked to them in a couple of weeks—I’ve been busy with the barn. I’ll check in. Sierra, are there debts to clear or something?”
“No,” she assured him. “I just don’t need anyone from rehab or my old party days tracking me down. I’m good.”
“If you have issues like that, tell me. Better to straighten it out than ignore it.”
“I don’t have those kinds of issues, Cal.”
“Okay. But if I can help... Just get settled.”
“I worry about them, too, Cal,” she said.
“But there’s nothing we can do,” he reminded her. “Let’s go find Maggie. She’s dying to meet you in person.”
Sierra drove the pumpkin, following Cal’s directions to Sullivan’s Crossing. As she oohed and aahed at the scenery, she thought one of the great things about rehab had been learning she was not the only person with a totally screwed-up family. Given the fact that her sister Sedona and brother Dakota were living functional and what appeared to be normal, conventional lives, it seemed to boil down to her parents, and all because Jed didn’t want to be treated for his schizophrenia and Marissa, her mother, didn’t push him. Crazy parents weren’t unusual in rehab. In fact the number of people who had been drinking or drugging their way through delusions was astonishing.
She had told a small lie. She’d told it cheerfully and with good intentions. Truthfully, she wished she could have children. But there were multiple problems with that idea. First, she had a very bad history with men—she chose the worst ones imaginable. And second, not only did she have to deal with schizophrenia in the family tree but also addiction, which also tended to run in families. How could she risk cursing a child with such afflictions? Add to that, you’d have to trust yourself a great deal to be a good parent and she wasn’t even close. Self-doubt was her constant companion.
“You get to see this scenery every day,” she said to her brother. “I was mainly coming here because you and Maggie are here but it’s an amazingly beautiful place.”
“I wonder if you ever get used to it,” he said. “I still can’t believe I’m lucky enough to live here.”
“How’d you end up here?” she asked.
“You know,” he said. “Wandering. Trying to find myself, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I was roaming. It’s in our genes. Plus...” He hesitated. “I was looking for a place for Lynne. A place for her ashes. I gave her my word—I’d leave her in a beautiful place and then I’d let her go.”
“And did you?” Sierra asked.
He was quiet for a moment. “I found a beautiful place. By that time I’d met Maggie. And my life started over.” He reached over and touched her knee. “Your turn to start over, kid.”
“Yeah,” she said, suddenly feeling tired. Scared. It came upon her at the weirdest times, that fear she’d turn out to be a failure. Again. “Right. And looks like a great place to do that.”
“I think of this as home,” Cal said. “We never really had a home.”
“We had the farm,” she said. “Sort of.”
“You had more of that than I did,” he said.
Their parents, who described themselves as free spirits, hippies, freethinkers and nonconformists, raised their family on the road, living in a bus converted into an RV, but it was really just a disguise. Jed was sick and Marissa was his enabler and keeper. Marissa’s parents had a farm in Iowa and they landed there quite often, all of them helping on the farm and going to school in Pratt, Iowa, a small farming community. Then they’d take off again, on the road. By the time Sierra was eight they’d settled on the farm full-time, taking care of the land for Grandma after Grandpa passed away. Cal finished high school there.
Then he left to seek his fortune, to go to college with the help of scholarships and loans. She had been only ten. He passed responsibility for her on to Sedona, next oldest. When Sierra was twelve, Sedona left for college. She got herself a full ride and went to a hoity-toity women’s university back East and though she called, she rarely visited. When Sierra was fifteen, Dakota left, enlisting in the Army at the first opportunity. Then it was just Sierra. Sierra with Jed and Marissa. Counting the minutes until she could get away, too.