Lost Along the Way by Marie Sexton Read Free Book Online

lids. “I was a fool.”
    “She didn’t think so.”
    “I should have called.”
    “Maybe. But the blame goes both ways.” We were silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was soft and gentle. “Danny, I want you to know, talking to you on the phone those last few months meant everything to her. I know it was only a handful of conversations, but she knew you’d forgiven her.”
    “There was nothing to forgive.”
    “There was, Danny. On both sides. Don’t belittle what they did to you because they’re dead. They hurt you, and they knew it, and they wanted to make amends. The fact that you wanted the same thing was the greatest gift you could have given them. It’s a tragedy they died before you got to see them again, but they didn’t die wondering, or feeling guilty or resentful. They loved you, and they knew you loved them. Please believe me, Danny. That was the only thing that mattered.”
    I had to turn away, to duck my head and hide my face, and Landon gracefully chose that moment to go check the mail. He took a long time doing it, too. He gave me plenty of time to dry my eyes before he came back in, and we went back to work without saying another word.

Chapter 4
     
    T HE NEXT three weeks marched by. Every Friday afternoon I drove to Laramie where I worked on clearing my parents’ home. Sometimes I worked alone, but more and more often, Landon worked at my side. We finished the living room and started on the guest bedroom, which proved more time consuming. The boxes in the living room had been carefully packed, their contents consistent. In the bedroom we found boxes full of odds and ends. Insurance paperwork stuffed in alongside a collection of potholders. A photo album of my kindergarten year boxed with a first aid kit and thirteen skeins of yellow yarn. The deeper into the mess we went, the stranger things became.
    I spent my weekdays at home in Westminster. My job at Channel 9 seemed more tedious by the day. The head meteorologist had never liked me. I knew he feared I’d eventually replace him. Once upon a time, that had been my dream. Now I began to wonder about searching elsewhere for a job. Maybe working at a smaller network would grant me more leeway.
    Or maybe it’d only mean losing a third of my pay.
    In theory, being back in Denver also meant spending time with Chase, but the truth was, we barely saw each other. By the time I arrived home from work, he’d left for his shift at the restaurant. By the time he got home, I was asleep. When I rose for work in the wee hours of the morning, he slept on. I spent my evenings cleaning up after him, trying to tell myself this was temporary. Trying to convince myself my relationship of fifteen years wasn’t dying a slow, painful death. On the occasional evenings he had off, our conversations seemed even more stilted than normal. Was it my imagination that he seemed to become more buoyant as the week drew to a close? Was he beginning to look forward to me leaving?
    Was he wondering the same thing about me?
    Regardless of whether we both secretly longed for it or not, Friday afternoon inevitably arrived, and I’d toss my duffel into my car and head north. As Denver fell away and the clear, broad landscape of southern Wyoming opened up before me, I found myself questioning everything. I found myself wanting more, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on what that meant. I watched the falcons soaring over the windblown road and longed for their perspective. “Big sky country,” my mother used to say, staring into the blue depths above us. Returning to it now, I longed for change. I watched the clouds march across the plains, rolling toward the distant eastern horizon as if they had a purpose, and I waited for a sign.
    Any sign at all.
    And then one dry, hot Sunday evening toward the end of June, when it felt like the entire front range was holding its breath, waiting for a bit of rain to take the edge off the heat, I came home from