Next of Kin #3

When they returned home Texan had begun to weep silently, whenever his and Shayne’s eye met he would look through him as though he was embarrassed to feel this way. Shayne knew that he wanted his Pop to hold him and his little brother and tell them that their mother was going to come back; he wanted desperately for Texan to do something, to try to pull his family back through the sandstorm of the last hour. But he didn’t, Texan was still enraged- he had the look of a man who had lost the final bet; when he had nothing left to gamble with, only his sanity.

The rifle rested between his lap like a new born child. Yet he could not bring himself to look at his children, Shayne was scared now, would he always be the bargaining tool which reaped no reward, but had managed to wage a war of instead? He looked down and unwrapped Johnny from the turquoise angel wings surrounding him, which was the last blessing their mother had left them both. He tried hard to hate his mother for leaving them but he found that he couldn’t. His idealised affection for his father though was crashing down around him. He could see now that his father could leave them too, because he always had the highway and his truck, the philosophy for his existence, tearing away at the tarmac and forging his own pathways.

“Dad?”

Texan looked up briefly he was exhausted and horrified.

“Please put the gun down now.” Shayne knelt beside his father and prized the instrument from his shaky hands.

“Brass…” His face was streaky, his sapphire eyes and opaque skin glistened like the shine shining through the blue shutter behind.
“I’d never hurt you.” He set the rifle down onto the wooden flooring, opened the breach, they spilled out across the ground, spinning like nuggets of gold amidst the heat wave.

Shayne was astonished. His father’s tidal wave pride had submerged him under currents of misguided emotion, the love that he had once held dear for Ana and his children, was momentarily replaced with desperation; a savageness which Texan never knew he had. Thinking back, Shayne remembered his mother words of advice, maybe they were not a scorning. But a longing to protect the man that she loved from the very thing that he was always running from, himself.

If She hadn’t of left that morning, maybe things would have been different. But she did and life does not stop for anybody so Shayne got up, he placed Johnny on his bed where he fell gently into sleep. He dragged the chair from the corner of his bedroom, climbed on top of it, grabbed his school uniform and folded it. He pressed it onto the back of the chair, it would be four years of getting himself ready each morning and walking himself and Johnny to the school bus station, packing their food, sometimes in the mornings Texan would leave a couple of dollars under a fridge magnet, with the words “I love you boys” or “Have a good day.”

He had been working more and more over the four years since Ana's departure and Texan would wake up early and leave before they left for school.
He would return at ten or eleven pm, Shayne would have put Johnny to bed, got his dinner and desperatly try to stay awake to see his father. Sometimes he would fall asleep on the sofa and unknowingly Texan would carry him upstairs and fall asleep next to him. But he was always gone the next morning so Shayne was only left with the ghost of his father’s company and the shadow of his affection.