“Good.”
After their agreement, the silence went on longer than either expected. Finally, Journey spoke up. “I just had a terrible thought. What if you go back – and neither of us remember any of this?”
The thought pained him, but… “Well, at least we would have peace.” Even as he formulated the thought, his mind rebelled against it. “I didn’t mean that. I’d rather remember than forget.” Even if remembering would be the most painful of all.
Journey kept her eyes on the road and the passing scenery. “When I made this trip to come housesit for Aunt Myra…” She scoffed and tightened her hands on the wheel. “I would look out at the hills, rocks, and canyons – imagining you riding through them. Life is hard for you, isn’t it?”
“You mean without all the conveniences you have now?”
“Yea, I guess. You have to work so much harder for everything. There’s danger on every hand.”
He shrugged, reaching over to touch her arm, letting his fingers linger on her skin. “Well, we don’t know anything else.” He laughed ruefully. “Or I didn’t until now. And as for as danger is concerned – even after half listening to that news broadcast telling about landslides, earthquakes, mass shootings, and war in faraway lands – I don’t think you could say there is less danger now than in my time.”
“I guess you’re right about that.” She noticed a hawk flying high in the sky, swooping down to sit on a fence post. “Tell me your dreams. What do you want out of life?”
Reno cupped his chin, rubbing at the rough scruff he’d accumulated in the last few days. “That’s tough.” After meeting her, he found his dreams were changing. He’d always wanted a family someday – but now, he could see the face of the girl in his dreams. There was no way he could mention that, however. Hurting her any more than he already had – that was the last thing he wanted to do. “I want to build a cabin and have the Stanton kids move in with me. Ela Blue too, if she will. But first…I have to save my brother’s life.” When he saw her startled expression, he realized she didn’t know what he meant. Given everything she seemed to know, this surprised him. “Saul didn’t write about Cole in his journal?”
“Well, I know he mentioned your brother by name. He also said he was in prison, but he didn’t say why. There might be more information. We’ll have to go and take a look to be sure.” Should she say this? Journey didn’t know what else to do. “I didn’t read the whole journal as closely or as many times as I read the parts that talked about you. Saul made many entries about his life through the years but once you disappeared, I wasn’t as interested in the rest.”
Reno sat still, absorbing what she’d told him. “So, I guess I don’t go back.”
“I don’t know how much is set in stone.” She sought to pacify him. As much as she wanted him to stay, to see his dismay was disheartening. “Everyone there believed…and anyone who read the journal believed that you’d been killed by the Indians. Your body was never found, but –”
“Because I didn’t die,” he whispered. “I came here.”
She glanced at him. “Like I said, we don’t know if the past can be changed. Maybe you can go back.”
And maybe he couldn’t. Reno rubbed an ache in his chest. He felt so helpless. Completely at the mercy of forces he couldn’t understand. “Maybe.” He knew he had to try. “About my brother. Do you want to know the whole story?”
“You know I do.”
For the next thirty miles, Reno told Journey about his brother. His childhood. About his parents. “What gets me is that I worshiped my father. And I loved Cole. My anger wasn’t at Cole because my old man chose him over me, it was because Silas didn’t want me too. He let his family dictate to him that my mother and I weren’t good enough. He wanted their money more than he wanted us.”
Journey felt so bad for Reno. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. Wasted sympathy. Those days are long gone.” This truer than true statement made him laugh wryly. “Clay came into the picture and I love him as dearly as I do Cole. He is a genuinely good man and I don’t know how he turned out so well. His homelife was hell. There might’ve been days my mother and I didn’t have enough to eat, but I was never beat within an inch of my life like Clay. He suffered unmercifully at the hand of his piss poor excuse of a father.” He stopped to take a breath as Journey waited at a red light. “Old Revered Bennett was a holier-than-thou circuit riding preacher. The best days Clay experienced were when his father was off holding week-long revivals at one of the little churches deep in the hills. Believe me, we took advantage of those reprieves. Clay had an uncle on his mother’s side who lived about a mile away. Reverend Bennett wouldn’t let him visit the uncle when he was home, but when he was away, there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. The uncle was a widower with a son about
