Equals 02 - Partners by Brigham Vaughn

Author:Brigham Vaughn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Stephen stared at his father’s body, trying to reconcile the still, waxy figure of the man in the casket with the angry, hateful one he’d last seen. Or the proud farmer and hard-working man he’d idolized as a child. Neither seemed to fit.

He knew he was supposed to feel grief or loss, but he felt nothing. Not even anger at the man for the way he’d tossed Stephen out of his life. Instead, he felt numb. He was vaguely aware of Russ standing beside him, and the gentle pressure of their upper arms pressed together, but it seemed distant. All he could see was his own body in the satin-lined, cherry wood casket. He wasn’t his father, he knew that, but the image was impossible to shake. He pictured Russ, twenty, thirty years older, standing in front of the casket, grieving for him. His heart clenched at the thought. How could he ask someone like Russ, with so much ahead of him in life, to tie his future to an old man like him? And yet, the thought of being without Russ was unfathomable now. This trip to Putnam, these past few days, they would have been intolerable without him. Because, without a doubt, Russ had proven himself to be the partner Stephen had always longed for.

For years after Jeremy’s accident, he’d told himself he deserved to be alone, deserved to be punished for not doing more to take care of Jeremy. In his mind, making his way through life without the partner he’d wanted so desperately was a fair punishment.

But against all odds, Russ had found him, and if Stephen didn’t believe in God in the strictest Christian sense, he believed in something. And that something had brought him Russ. His chest ached with the gratitude he felt, the utter relief at having Russ there.

Stephen felt Russ step closer, slide a hand across his lower back, and the pressure made tears prick his eyes. Not the death of his father, but the fact he wasn’t doing this alone. He wasn’t going to have to face this without support.

Now if only he knew how to say goodbye to the man in the casket. His feelings for his father were too complicated to distill into a few words, his emotions too scattered to grasp and make sense of. He looked down at his father’s hands clasped against his stomach—hard, calloused hands, scarred from heavy labor. He remembered those hands peeling back the green husk of a pecan shell, instructing Stephen how to tell when it was ripe and ready for harvest. He remembered them cradling a soft, gray-striped kitten, just a few weeks old, that had been born in the barn. His father said he only kept them to keep down the mice, but when Stephen watched his father working, the gray cat—by then an adult—wound around his ankles, purring. Sometimes—when no one was looking—Stephen saw the man reach down and scratch behind its ears. A rare moment of softness in a man who prided himself on being hard and unyielding.

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