Dixie shrugs. “She’s a huge fan of his—”
“I’m not talking about that.” My jaw clenches and I have to swallow several times to get my emotions in check. “Remission. When did she have cancer? Did you know? Did Robyn tell you?”
Dixie and I have had our communication issues lately. She keeps the details of her relationship with Gavin off my radar and I haven’t exactly filled her in on what Robyn and I are up to. But if she tells me right now that she’s known all this time that Robyn’s mom had cancer and she didn’t tell me, I don’t know how I’m going to keep from losing my shit.
“She didn’t tell me, either,” Dixie informs me, choosing to answer my last question first. “Belinda seems to think we knew. I practically yelled at her on the way here. Obviously if we’d known we would’ve been there, would’ve visited her in the hospital.”
I watch the woman with stars in her eyes staring at Wade onstage. She turns to me and gives me two thumbs up and she looks so much like her daughter I’m struck with a pang of longing. I want Robyn here. Mostly so I can demand to know why she didn’t tell me her mom had cancer, but also because I want to hold her. To kiss her and tell her I’m sorry I wasn’t there for her, for both of them.
After Robyn’s dad died I made sure to cut their grass, change the oil in their cars, and take out the garbage as often as I could. I wanted to make sure they didn’t have to feel his loss in those ways as well. Belinda eventually “fired” me and told me I wasn’t the hired help before she hired actual help to take over the landscaping duties. She told me the McKinley boys at the garage could change her oil just fine.
Those Breeland women. Self-sufficient pains in my ass they are. But God help me, I fucking love them.
“How bad was it?”
Dixie’s mouth tightens at the corners. “Bad. She had to do two rounds of chemo. Had an awful reaction and didn’t respond to the first round well at all.”
“When?”
I don’t know why I’m asking. I already know.
“That summer,” Dixie says softly, almost so softly I don’t hear her over Jase’s guitar.
She doesn’t clarify which summer. She doesn’t have to. The summer before I turned twenty-one, Robyn began acting strangely. Up until then, she’d done all the social media and online outreach for the band. She’d gone overboard in her typical way, acting as our manager and our agent even though she didn’t know a whole lot about the music business. What she did know was how to reach people and to this day I’m certain she is one of the main reasons we had such a large local following.
We were planning a six-week tour between Dixie’s junior and senior year of high school. Mostly just the tristate area, but a big deal for Leaving Amarillo since it was our first time actually going on “tour.” Robyn was all set to go with us and she was so excited about being on the road. She had this whole list of places we were going to go in each city we were scheduled to play in, a road trip music mix, and enough snacks stockpiled to feed a football team.
Then she bailed. Said she had decided to take a few summer classes and she stopped answering my calls. Eventually I got frustrated and drove down to see her at school. Except she wasn’t there.
When I showed up at her house and confronted her, her eyes filled with tears and she broke down. Said she just couldn’t do it anymore. I needed to focus on the band and she had other obligations. I’d assumed she meant school obligations. She’d always been such an academic overachiever.
From that night on her porch until now I have imagined a thousand scenarios that caused Robyn to end it. I can’t even count the nights I lay awake wondering.
Was there another guy?
Did she finally decide I wasn’t worth waiting for? That I was just going to spend my life chasing a dream I’d never catch?
I’d refused to leave her porch that night until the sun peeked over the horizon.