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“Eh, read your own magazine.” With that, Redbull went off to greet a group of hunters he was booked to guide into elk territory.
Galen didn’t give a shit if he was too easy to get. He didn’t even know what that meant. If you liked someone, and enjoyed being with them, why wouldn’t you take every opportunity to do it? Life was short. Things could change at any moment. A father could be dragged away at knifepoint. A mother could fall off the wagon. Enjoy the good things while you can, in other words.
“I’ve been thinking about my father a lot,” he told his therapist in his next session. “I don’t know why. I wish I could just think about Brenda. She’s amazing and she seems to like me.”
“You can think about more than one thing, can’t you?”
“I don’t want to think about him.”
She tapped her pen on the arm of her chair in that now-familiar habit. “Why not? Does thinking about him make you feel a certain way?”
“Yeah. Like shit.”
“Can you say more about that?”
He’d heard that line over and over again. Could he say more about that? He forced himself to focus. “It makes me anxious when I think about him. And…angry.”
“Can you say more about that?”
“I just did!” he protested.
She smiled wryly. “I know it’s hard. If this kind of work was easy, there wouldn’t be such a need for it.”
He pondered that for a moment, then went back to the original question. “It’s like a blank spot. Like a blurry place that I can’t really look at. I can’t remember much about my dad except that night. So when I think about him I just get panicky. It’s always been that way. I’m used to it. I just don’t talk about him.”
“But you said you’re thinking about him more these days.”
“Yes, and I’m fucking pissed about that. I have better things to think about.”
“Like Brenda.”
“Yes, like Brenda! I’ve been pining after her for so long, and now she’s in my bed almost every night and—” He broke off, embarrassed. “Sorry. Probably not supposed to talk about that.”
“You can talk about anything here.”
“Yeah well, I don’t want to talk about that.” At this point, his relationship with Brenda was as fragile as a soap bubble. He didn’t want to talk about it with anyone.
“Fair enough. One question, though. Do you think there’s some reason being with Brenda makes you think about your father?”
“No. No. No no no. I don’t know. No.” Apparently that question had put a wrench into his mental gears. What connection could there possibly be between the gorgeous and kind teacher slash sex goddess Brenda, and his fuckup of a father? It didn’t compute.
“Can you say more about that?”
This time she was joking, and they both laughed, and that was the end of that session.
That night he made a picnic for Brenda out by his firepit so they could watch a meteor shower. He grilled a trout he’d caught that morning and roasted some potatoes in foil in the coals. Brenda brought a bag of salad greens from her garden. After they’d feasted, they stretched out on one blanket, pulled another one over them and counted falling stars.
“Do you wish on them?” Brenda whispered, as if it was a movie that required hushed voices.
“You can. Doesn’t mean it’ll come true.”
“Have you ever wished on a falling star?” She tilted her head so it rested against his shoulder. His heart ached as her light scent drifted into his nostrils. It was the best smell in the world to him now. Better than pine trees and rotting logs, and that was saying something.
“Sure. The first year I came here, I saw my first meteor shower. I wished on every one I spotted. Four wishes.”
“What were they?”
“That I could stay in Lake Bittersweet and never go home.”
