“But your dad didn’t pick them up? Did he go home early?” Avery guessed.
Walker shook his head. “He was late. Dad found a girl. She took him home. Spent the night with her. Overslept. By the time he made it back to where they were supposed to meet up, Worth was furious. He’d been calling friends, trying to find out where Dad was. Those people Worth called said later they’d never heard him so angry.”
Avery waited.
“Guess Dad was angry, too. People saw them at a gas station, filling up the car. Worth and Tricia in the back seat. Dad pumping gas. He got into it with some local guy who’d stopped to fill up, too. The guy had seen Dad at the protest. He wanted the project to go through. Nearly came to blows, but other people intervened. They testified that Dad was really furious—both of them were. He got back in his car. Took off. The other guy followed them.” He swallowed, and Avery felt his pain in her own body, an ache in her throat, emptiness in her heart. “They were playing chicken on the highway until the other guy hit them and ran them right off the road. He kept going. By the time help came, it was too late; Worth and Tricia were gone.”
Avery couldn’t imagine how bad the crash must have been for the people in the back seat to have died. “I’m so sorry, Walker.”
“When my dad woke up in the hospital and heard what happened, he took off and didn’t come home for weeks. Sue said when he did, it was to tell her he’d enlisted with the Army and would never be back again. She said he’d lost thirty pounds, looked like a ghost. Like he was dead already.”
Avery covered her mouth with her hand.
“A week after he was gone, my mom came around looking for him. She was from town. A White girl,” he spelled out, although Avery already knew that. “Her parents marched her over to the reservation to demand that my dad do the right thing and marry her. Sue was glad Dad was gone then. They weren’t doing it to get him to take responsibility for me; they were doing it to punish their daughter.” His bitterness was clear. “Later, they were sorry for that. My grandparents did their best by me after they lost Grace.”
“Grace was your mom? Is she—?”
“Dead, yeah. But she took off right after I was born. I never knew her. She lived a rough life. Had an aneurysm in her thirties.”
Avery let out a breath. He’d never once mentioned a mother. Not once. Now she understood why. Grace had abandoned him. And then his father had died.
“I don’t hate my mother, Avery,” he added quietly, and maybe it was true, but he hadn’t forgiven her either, Avery thought. One thing you could say about Walker: he was loyal to a fault. Grace’s deliberate absence from his life must have hurt him to the core.
“So Sue brought you up,” Avery said.
“She did. When Mom took off, Sue heard about it. Grandma Diane told me she showed up a couple of days later. ‘He belongs with us,’ she said. Grandma Diane went along with it.”
Avery tried to take it all in. “How can you possibly be as together as you are after all that?”
“Sue,” he said simply. “And Netta. And the others. Despite his threat, my father came home now and then on leave until I was seven. His father, my grandpa, lived until I was fifteen. Netta’s husband passed a year later. That gave me four stand-in parents on the reservation through half of my teenage years and Elizabeth as a very annoying sister. And Grandma Diane and Grandpa Paul in town. Grandpa Paul might not have been the friendliest guy, but he was there, always working, always doing good in the world. Diane and Paul really regretted their earlier behavior. They tried to make up for it.”
“That’s good.” But it wasn’t enough. Walker deserved so much more.
“When I got to school age, I spent the weekdays with them. Diane passed away only last year.”
“How old was Elizabeth when Worth and Tricia died?”
“Four months. Netta and Sue saved both our lives. Made sure we grew up surrounded by love and family. Made sure we knew our heritage and honored our parents, no matter what they did. I have to hand it to Netta for never making Sue feel bad for what my dad did. She was a friend to Sue until the end, and Sue worshipped her.”
“All your dad did was be a stupid teenager,” Avery pointed out. “I ran off to Vegas and married a stranger when I was his age. If you blame Joe for Worth’s and Tricia’s deaths, you should hold me accountable for what I did, too.”
Walker stared at her. Blinked. For one moment, anguish creased his face before he got control of his emotions again. “He got in that fight. He was driving erratically on the highway. He should have pulled over.”
“What if he had? What if that other man pulled over, too, and pulled out a gun—or came back and ran them over.” Avery stepped closer to him. “Walker, sometimes people make mistakes. Big, messy ones, but they’re still mistakes.” She tried to see it from his point of view. “I understand that’s why it was so important to you not to break your promise to Netta that you’d marry Elizabeth. You wanted to right your father’s wrongs. Or at least let Elizabeth be the one to break it off. But, Walker, remember that Netta never blamed Sue. She didn’t hold on to resentment or anger. She just kept loving everyone.”
Walker turned away. Avery put a hand on his back, waiting. She knew better than to think Walker would cry; that wasn’t his way, but she felt the tension of his pain in every muscle in his body—and then, some time later, its
