The Sweet Dead Life (26 page)

I avoided my brother's eyes. We hadn't told her that part of Renfroe's confession. Nor had the police. Casey had convinced them that if Mom knew Dad had been so close, it would only make things worse.

Of course, it turned out I wasn't the only one who'd saved one of Dad's sports columns. Casey had one, too: the one he'd loaned Bryce to show to Zeke, the second photo, just to be sure.

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Before Mom could add any more, Casey ran to his room to get the article.

Together, the four of us read it and re-read it as we prepared to bring this thing to an end. And as we did, I knew they were all wondering the same thing I was: How clues to a person could sit there in plain sight without ever being seen.

THE COLUMN WENT on, but we stopped reading here. I think we all figured we'd learned as much as we were going to.

230

THE NEXT MORNING we headed out in Amber's Camaro, before five to beat the traffic. The Merc was at Lonnie's Body Shop. If we were going to keep it, we needed it worked on. I had no idea how we were going to pay for this. Not that the Merc was a particularly high priority.

Mom agreed to stay home, although she didn't want to. Her new doctor--who was hopefully not a crazy whack job--insisted. Dr. Kara Chang wanted Mom's system and chemical balance back in order.
Period
. She was totally humorless, like a cyborg. She wanted no trauma. She wanted no travel.

Recovery might happen quickly; it might take a while. So Mom needed to stay put. Renfroe had confessed a lot, but as yet, he'd refused to divulge exactly what he'd mixed together in those fake vitamins. We were lucky that Amber's lab friend Terry had done his testing. Otherwise everyone might be even more flummoxed.

Secretly, I agreed Mom's staying put was for the best. I knew what it was like to get your hopes up about things that never happened. Mom wasn't strong enough for that yet. Still, I hated the way her eyes spilled over with tears when she waved good-bye to us. It was still dark out. It took all I had not to just drag her into the Camaro.

We stayed strong and stuck with the plan.

WE HIT AUSTIN a little before eight in the morning. I was starving.

"Are you serious?" My brother leaned forward from the back seat and poked at me. Amber had let me ride shotgun. "You know, just because you're hungry again doesn't mean you have to eat every five minutes."

"Making up for lost time," I told him. "Come on, let's just stop at that taco place up there." The sign read TACO TACO TACO. I guess they didn't want any confusion.

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(Note to self: If I ever owned a taco place I would come up with a more
creative name.)

ANYWAY, I NEEDED to fortify. We had a long day ahead of us. The lead Amber's cop friends had provided hadn't included an address. Our plan was to walk the campus at UT and any other place that Dad used to go. We would talk to people. Show them his picture. It was a long shot, but it was the best we could do. After that we'd head over to Round Rock. Baseball season was over, but we'd show his picture around. See what turned up. Mom's cell phone record had shown one call from an unknown number a few weeks back. She swore to us that it had been Dad.

Here is what I didn't say to Casey and definitely not to Amber:
What if Dr. Renfroe was telling the truth? Had Dad recovered his memories
of us and still not come home? Things happen that we don't expect and don't
understand. Like why people watch
Dancing with the Stars,
or why my
brother is now my guardian angel. I can accept that. I didn't know if I could
accept a man who had remembered his life but not gone back to it
.

I will always believe that those thoughts were what caused what happened next. I had come to accept Maggie's philosophy of life. Things happen for a reason.

I shoved open the door to Taco Taco Taco, Amber and Casey walking behind me.

His back was to us at one of the little tables. He was eating something from a basket and sipping a mug of what smelled like really strong coffee.
Potato
and egg
, I decided, still thinking about my breakfast.
Definitely guac on the
side
.

When he turned around, time stood still. Just like it had

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for a few crazy seconds in our squashed Prius when everything in my world went to hell and then to another place and then back to me. Just like it had when I'd tumbled through the open air of the Galleria atrium. My heart flew from my chest, whisked away in the morning breeze.

The man at the table was older than I remembered. His face had more lines.

I had expected him to be thinner, but he was thicker, in all ways. Like everything that had happened had settled its weight on him.

I heard Amber clear her throat. She nudged me in the back.

"Go on," she said. "It's time."

Casey took my hand.

"Hey," said the man at the table. It was as though he was expecting us.

Maybe in some way he was.

"Hey Dad," Casey and I said together. We crossed the space between us.

233

I wish I could write in this journal that after we found Dad in Taco Taco Taco (really, where else
could
we find him?) he came home with Casey and me and we all lived happily ever after. But our car accident had made that impossible, even if everything else had gone right. Which it did not.

"Did you leave us the Manny's gift certificate as a clue?" Casey asked him.

Dad looked at him blankly. He had no memory of it, and only the vaguest phantom sense of writing that final note to us, something he thought he had done while still in Houston. Just flashes were left: His hand holding a pen. A piece of paper. Someone (Dr. Renfroe he thought) telling him what to write.

Maybe even saying "Good job," after he finished. Eventually we figured that Renfroe had left the Manny's gift certificate, either by accident or on purpose.

He was after all, a conflicted crazy man with access to Dad's house keys.

Note to self: When we get home, we need to change the locks
.

234

"I started remembering about six months ago," Dad explained.

He was holding his coffee mug real tightly, almost like keeping a barrier in front of him. Finally we were getting to the truth, even though we'd been talking for over two hours. There'd been some brief hugging, too, at first. Brief and intense. I had never forgotten the feel of Dad's arms around me. That part was the same. He had a strong grip, like Casey's but different. And even though I knew that things might not work out in the ways I'd dreamed of, I knew when my father hugged me tight that he meant it. That he loved me. I just didn't know if that alone would be enough.

"I think once I knew how long I'd been gone," Dad said slowly, "it made it that much harder to come back. I don't expect you kids to understand. I just don't want you to hate me for it. I had no idea that I was that kind of man."

But it was more than that, I knew. It was the stuff he'd written about in those sports columns. The words that hinted that even if Renfroe hadn't screwed with our lives, being Mike Samuels might not have been enough. That was the part I couldn't accept quite yet. I knew that both Casey and I wanted him to say something in particular. Or a few things. That we were all he thought about. That Renfroe's scheme was so ass-backward that it
kept
him from coming home. That he didn't want to jeopardize our safety by showing his face. But he never did.

"I thought I was this big shot investigative reporter," Dad told us. "I'd hit it big for all of us if I tracked down this story. I didn't last five minutes. I put everyone in danger. I don't know how I could have been so stupid."

Amber stayed mostly quiet. She brought us our tacos

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when they called our number. Then she said she had to duck outside to make a phone call. I'm sure she was just giving us our privacy.

My pulse started dancing when I took a bite of my potato and egg breakfast taco--extra guac, no cheese. It tasted like sawdust. I eyed my new Ariats suspiciously. Was this damn thing starting over again? Only this time with an EMT angel poisoning my boots? I nipped another tiny bite. Chewed carefully. Swallowed. Nope. Not poison. Just old-fashioned nerves. I blinked. Chomped a huge bite. This wasn't going to turn out good, but I was damned if I would let it ruin my love of breakfast tacos.

Once Amber was gone, Dad turned to Casey. "You look good, son. Real good. So, um, tell me about football. Bet you're still a superstar, huh?"

My heart jolted.

But Dad smiled. I realized he thought he was being nice. I blinked a few times, not wanting to cry again.

Casey met his gaze. "Had to quit," he said. He reached over his back and rubbed his shoulder blades, right where one of those wing nubs sat, hidden under shirt: the wings he'd spread wide when he flew to save me.

Dad looked surprised. Like he had not understood until just that moment that his absence meant anything more than lost years. Truth? He looked at Casey like he was seeing him for the first time.

"I took care of things while you were gone," Casey added. "I did the best I could."

I leaned across the table, eyeball to eyeball with our father. "Casey's been the man of the family. He's done a damn fine job."

236

OUR FATHER CAME back with us to Houston. But by then we were all clear that he wasn't coming home for good. Maybe things would work out one day, maybe not. He rode up front next to Casey. I was surprised that Amber let Casey drive, but she said that Casey and Dad needed father-son time. So Amber and I lounged in the back.

We only stopped once, at a kolache place on 290 that Amber knew. For someone who didn't have to eat, she had definitely kept up specific gastronomic habits.

"What is it with those things?" I asked as we waited to be rung up. "They're like crack to you or something."

Amber paid the checkout lady and peered outside to the parking lot, where Dad and Casey were huddled in intense conversation. "Sometimes. I just like to remember who I used to be," she said. "It isn't the big things you miss.

It's the little ones. Red hawthorn berries that grew outside my house every fall. Bluebonnets in the spring. The smell of fresh kolaches hot from the oven."

I swallowed, wanting to make her feel better. "But you're still eating them.

And you can still see the other stuff. It's not like they all disappeared."

"I know." Her eyes shimmered with a brief golden glow. "That's the point. As long as I'm here, like this, I get to have it. So I aim to have as much of it as I possibly can."

The white waxy sack of pastries sat between us the rest of the ride home.

MOM WAS AT the front door when we pulled up to our house. Her face lit up in the glow of the Gilroy's decorations. It was after nine and dark outside. For the first time it occurred to me that it was almost Christmas and we had done nothing about a tree.

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My heart was pounding and my throat dried up. I was glad I hadn't snuck one of Amber's kolaches.

Dad climbed out of the car first. He stood there for a few long seconds. I could see Mom rocking back and forth like she was being torn between