Run To You

feelings, though. She remembered the fun and excitement and the comforting touch of her mother’s hand. She remembered the anxiety and fear. Wanting to do well. Wanting to please, but never quite pulling it off. She remembered the disappointment her mother tried and failed to hide each time her daughter won best “pet photo” or “best dress” but failed to win the big crown. And with each pageant, Sadie tried harder. She sang a little louder, shook her hips a little faster, or put an extra kick into her routine, and the more she tried, the more she went off key, off step, or off the stage. Her pageant teacher always told her to stick to the routine they’d practice. Go with the script, but of course she never did. She’d always had a hard time doing and saying what she’d been told.
    She had a wispy memory of her mother’s funeral. The organ music bouncing off the wooden church walls, the hard white pews. The gathering after the funeral at the JH, and the lavender-scented bosoms of her aunts. “Poor orphaned child,” they’d cooed between bites of cheese biscuits. “What’s going to happen to my sister’s poor orphaned baby?” She hadn’t been a baby or an orphan.
    The memories of her father were more vivid and defined. His harsh profile against the endless blue of the summer sky. His big hands throwing her into a saddle and her hanging on as she raced to keep up with him. The weight of his palm on top of her head, his rough skin catching in her hair as she stood in front of her mother’s white casket. His footsteps walking past her bedroom door as she cried herself to sleep.
    Her relationship with her father had always been confusing and difficult. A push and pull. An emotional tug of war that she always lost. The more emotion she showed, the more she tried to cling to him, and the more he pushed her away until she gave up.
    For years she’d tried to live up to anyone’s expectations of her. Her mother’s. Her father’s. Those of a town filled with people who had always expected her to be a nice, well-behaved girl with charm. A beauty queen. Someone to make them proud like her mother or someone to look up to like her father, but by middle school she’d tired of that heavy task. She’d laid down that burden, and just started being Sadie. Looking back, she could admit that she was sometimes outrageous. Sometimes on purpose. Like the pink hair and black lipstick. It wasn’t a fashion statement. She hadn’t been trying to find herself. It was a desperate bid for attention from the one person on the planet who looked at her across the dinner table night after night but never seemed to notice her.
    The shocking hair hadn’t worked, nor the string of bad boyfriends. Mostly, her father had just ignored her.
    It had been fifteen years since she’d packed her car and left her hometown of Lovett far behind. She’d been back as often as she could. Christmases here and there. A few Thanksgivings, and once for her aunt Ginger’s funeral. That had been five years ago.
    Her finger pushed the button and the window slid all the way down. Guilt pressed the back of her neck and wind whipped her hair as she recalled the last time she’d seen her father. It had been about three years ago, when she’d lived in Denver. He’d driven up for the National Western Stock Show.
    She pushed the button again and the window slid up. It didn’t seem like that long since she’d seen him, but it had to have been because she’d moved to Phoenix shortly after that visit.
    It might seem to some as if she was a rolling stone. She’d lived in seven different cities in the past fifteen years. Her father liked to say she never stayed in one place long because she tried to put down roots in hard soil. What he didn’t know was that she never tried to put down roots at all. She liked not having roots. She liked the freedom of packing up and moving whenever she felt like it. Her latest career allowed her to do that. After years of higher education, moving from one university to another and never earning a degree in anything, she’d stumbled into real estate on a whim. Now she had her license in three states and loved every minute of selling homes. Well, not every moment. Dealing with lending institutions sometimes drove her nutty.
    A sign on the side of the road ticked down the miles to Lovett and she pushed the window button. There was just something about being home that made her feel restless and antsy and anxious to