Page 58 of Waiting in Wyoming
Sonny was going to do better than that. He hadn’t done drugs in a month. Not since Neveah had died. It was hard sometimes, but who would take care of Katie if he was stoned or something? She could die if he wasn’t careful.
The waitress hadn’t looked at him like he was a loser. That nurse hadn’t either. People in Masterson were nice. Decent.
They probably would think he was scum if they knew what he was driving around though. For the first time since taking the jobs, he felt bad. Guilty. Like maybehecould do better.
What would happen to Katie if he went to jail or something?
He’d watched the waitress. Her name was Dylan. People liked her, too. She’d held lots of kids, not just Katie. And she’d carried an order out for an elderly man who had had a walker. She’d even flirted with that guy who had to be like ninety. It had made that man smile. Everyone in the diner had seemed happy. Relaxed.Niceto each other and everything.
Like Masterson was a good place. He liked that.
His brother’s ex-wife was up here somewhere, too. In Wyoming.
This was where he wanted, Sonny decided. For sure. He wanted Katie to grow up here.
No matter what.
It was a good place.
He was googling properties on his phone after he finally got Katie back to sleep, when the phone rang.
It was them. The guys who paid the best. It was like divine intervention or something. If he could be in Pinedale in the morning by seven a.m., they would give him an extra two thousand dollars. All he had to do was take a small load to Washington state and leave it. Then head back to Texas for a while. They’d have more work for him, and it would keep him under the legal driving hours.
It was drugs, yeah—but the prices of houses was stupid. He needed more money to make it work, since he had convictions on his record and had no real credit or anyone to co-sign or anything like that. He’d probably have to rent a place at first.
How did a guy like him even buy a house anyway?
But…he was going to come back to Masterson, first chance he had. He’d go to that Tyler Trucking place. And get himself a job with them. Build a life here. The kind of life that real people had. Not losers like him.
Sonny was going to do it—for Katie. She deserved the best kind of life he could built for her. The guys who he drove for, he’d explain to him that he’d still be able to do local runs for them—not that they had many—but he wanted a better future for his daughter.
Or maybe he shouldn’t. He knew it wasn’t legal or anything—he didn’t want to go to jail again and leaving Katie out there alone or anything.
That was the responsible thing to do.
Tomorrow…was going to be his last run with the guys out of Finley Creek.
Sonny was never going back to Texas again. He and Katie—they were going to build a life together in Wyoming.
The good kind of life. The kind his baby girl deserved.
48
They spentthree days in Texas, mostly with his family. Meyra got to meet hisentirefamily, except a cousin named Trevor who was an archeologist somewhere in Brazil right now. She couldn’t wait to tell Dahlia about him—he was an archeology professor at FCU, too. Trevor’s mother Joanie had told her FCU had an entire archeology degree program that was online. Dahlia wouldn’t have to transfer or anything and there were plenty of archeology jobs that didn’t require traveling. She could even do archeological research online from home, for companies that would pay her.
Trevor’s brother Tucker, a blond version of Brandt, told her that there were lots of dinosaur fossils being discovered in Montana and Wyoming right now, too. She’d read that somewhere. Even though dinosaurs were paleontology, it was still very interesting. And she’d tell Dahlia. Dahlia was obsessed with archaeology and the past. She loved the stories of people, she said. Trevor was hunting for ancient civilizations, Brandt told her.
Brandt’s dad was going to be okay. He had always had a small heart problem, even when he was a kid. He’d had somecomplications from that while in the hospital–stress, Brandt’s mother said. From everything that had happened. Powell was resting more, too. Now that Gunnar was doing better.
They still hadn’t caught the four men who had escaped, though. That terrified Meyra, knowing the men responsible for that drug that was being found everywhere had been that close to Brandt’s family, that they were still out there. And angry. They’d even taken Brandt’s mother’s jewelry and his father’s special watch.
She would never understand how people could hurt each other like that at all.
Meyra had spent all three nights wrapped up in his arms. It justwas.Her dad had gotten used to it. Charlotte had told him to just deal, too.
Brandt was a little embarrassed, she thought, but he said he loved her. Her father would just have to get used to it.
Meyra agreed. Besides, her fatherlikedBrandt. No one doubted that.