The Lonesome Young (28 page)

“I’d like that. And maybe you could come for a sleepover or something,” I said hesitantly, before I immediately felt like a fool. “Do we still do that? Sleepovers at our age?”

She whistled. “You really are a special, sheltered snowflake, aren’t you?”

I hung my head. “Two years of boarding school in Connecticut. I can teach you how to make a school uniform look slutty, but I can’t figure out the social norms of conventional high schools just yet.”

Denise burst out laughing, but I could feel that it wasn’t directed
at
me. It was more just
near
me. “You? Slutty? I doubt it. Also, ‘social norms of conventional high schools’? Oh, honey. You are flying your nerd flag high.”

My cheeks heated up a little and I sighed. “Yes, I confess. I’m a closet nerd. Geek. Whatever you want to call it. I can tell you the details of every show that’s been on the Syfy channel for the past four years, and I read Jane Austen for fun.”

She was gasping for air now. “Syfy? I knew it! Those hot alien dudes just get you, don’t they?” We both cracked up simultaneously.

“I can tell this is going to be a wonderful friendship,” Denise said. “I have to go now, or I’ll get stuck digging out the balls under the Sleepytime Palace.”

I blinked. “I’m sure that makes sense in your world, but—”

“Mini golf, remember? Someday I’ll write a book about the seamy underbelly of mini golf,” she said darkly, and then she waved and climbed out of my truck.

I watched her bounce over to a smallish green Chevy (bumper sticker: A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE—AND THE SENATE) and a tiny tendril of warmth unfurled inside me. I’d just made my first real friend in Clark, Kentucky.

Maybe friendship would help me get over the dangerous boy I couldn’t stop thinking about, no matter that I was so angry with him and almost his entire family. Friendship and Dairy Queen.

All this ice cream and I was going to need some bigger jeans.

Chapter 42

Mickey

B
y mid-afternoon, the scent of cleaning liquid and Windex was gradually winning over the smell of dust, grime, and my own sweat, and the place was looking more like a garage and less like the setting for a horror story about chainsaw-wielding psychopaths.

Derek, my spy at school, had been texting me periodic updates.

Victoria showed up but then she and Denise ditched.

They’re still not back.

They’re still not back.

Quit nagging me, they’re still not back.

And, finally:

They’re back, but only in the parking lot. Denise looks hot today.

I rolled my eyes at the corkboard I’d just finished installing on one wall of the garage and then texted him back.

Just ask her out already. Quit being a pussy.

Seconds later, I had a response.

Why would I ask Victoria out?

Denise, idiot.

Yeah, like I’m taking love life advice from you, loser.

I turned off my phone after that, because he was right. I
was
a loser. Victoria had dumped me, Coach had kicked me off the team, the principal had suspended me, my brother had committed attempted murder, and I was one step away from a life of crime. I already had the gun to go with my future mug shot.

College, hell. I’d be lucky to get into the prison library and learn how to make license plates. Did prisoners still make license plates? I didn’t even know—more evidence of my headlong rush toward mediocrity.

Mom called my name, and I left the garage, blinking at the bright sunlight like Edmond Dantès emerging from the Château d’If. Maybe that was the trick. I’d vanish for a few years and then return to Whitfield County triumphant and with a different name, like some kind of redneck Count of Monte Cristo.

“I brought you some lemonade,” Mom said, holding out a tall glass that sparkled from the crystalline drops of condensation running down the sides.

I drank most of it in one long swallow. “Thanks. I needed it. I’m beginning to have hallucinations about Dumas novels.”

Mom, who’d read
The Count of Monte Cristo
and
The Three Musketeers
to me when I’d been around five, when most moms were reading picture books to their kids, laughed. Tales of sword fights, corruption, and revenge had been the lyrics to the melodies of my childhood, and I’d loved every bit of it. I remembered how I’d talked Ethan and Jeb into playing musketeers instead of cowboys and Indians sometimes, and Jeb had always run around the neighborhood brandishing his plastic sword and yelling “On garden!” instead of
en garde
.

I grinned at the memory. “On garden, Mom.”

She laughed again. “Poor Jeb. He was always a brick shy of a full wheelbarrow, wasn’t he? Bless his heart.”

“Any news?”

She sobered and shook her head. “No word of Ethan, but he could be sitting pretty in the middle of Anna Mae’s kitchen and we’d never know. Last I heard, Pete is still recuperating slowly but steadily, and Mr. and Mrs. Whitfield will be bringing Buddy home from the hospital in Louisville in a few days.”

“Leaving Victoria to deal with the mess they left here. Typical,” I said, kicking the riding lawn mower. Hard.

Ouch.

“That’ll teach that mower a lesson,” Mom said.

“She hates me, Mom,” I said quietly. “She never wants to see me again.”

My mom sighed and then hugged me. “Are you sure? Right now, she might be hating herself.”

She stepped back and looked up at me. Then she flinched, so evidently the raw pain that was ripping through me must be clear in my expression.

“I need a better poker face.”

“You already have a pretty good poker face, Mickey. But I’m your mother. Mothers know these things. That’s why I want to tell you to stay away from her.”

“That’s what she wants, too,” I said bleakly, and then I drained the glass. “Thanks, Mom. I’d better get back to it.”

“Dinner’s on your own tonight, kid. I’m forcing your father to take me to see a movie over at the mall. I need a little escapism, and if he spends another evening staring at his phone, waiting for word about Ethan, I’m going to go mad.”

“Wouldn’t be a long trip,” I told her, grinning a little.

She shot me a mock glare, but then she sighed. “I said I
want
to tell you to stay away from her, not that I will. Try again with Victoria, Mickey. I saw the way that girl looked at you. The last thing in the world she wants is to push you away, no matter what she thinks.”

Hope blazed through me. “I love you, Mom.”

She walked off, nodding. “I know, I know. I
am
very lovable.”

Maybe it was true—maybe I did have another chance.

But did I deserve one?

I thought back to the way Victoria had responded to my kisses on our picnic with such innocent eagerness that I’d had a hard time putting the brakes on, and the sound of her voice in the dark, telling me about her dreams of being a vet. The look in her brilliantly green eyes when I’d told her she was beautiful.

The way she kept standing up for me, over and over.

Please, let it be the truth.

Chapter 43

Victoria

I
arrived home after school to a flurry of movement. Gran was stuffing things in an oversized tote bag, and Melinda was carrying a suitcase down the stairs.

“What’s going on?” I dropped my backpack and tried not to freak out. “Is it Pete? Is he worse?”

“Calm down, everything’s fine,” Melinda said, and I realized that she sounded almost like her old self. Calm, confident—I hadn’t heard this Melinda in a couple of years.

“Are you drinking again?” I stepped closer and sniffed, but I didn’t smell any alcohol.

She rolled her eyes. “No. I’m not drinking, Inspector Whitfield, but thanks for asking. In fact, I hope never to drink again. That’s what this trip is about.”

“Trip? What trip?”

Gran walked in from the direction of the kitchen. “We’re going to check out that rehab facility you found before Richard changes his mind or Priscilla tries to stop us.”

I looked from one to the other, but they both appeared to be completely serious. “I’ll run and throw some stuff in a bag. Give me five minutes.”

“No,” Gran said. “You’ve got school and, with Pete gone, there has to be at least one Whitfield here on the property. What if the new staff has questions?”

“We both know that I’m not the person to answer any staff questions, and that Pete’s second-in-charge will be on top of everything,” I said impatiently. “I’ve lived here for five minutes, in relative terms, anyway, and I don’t know anything. Why don’t you stay, and I’ll drive Melinda to rehab?”

“I want Gran,” Melinda said, and her voice held a trace of shakiness—just enough for me to back down, fast. “I’m sorry, Victoria, but I’ll feel a little better about this if Gran goes with me to hold my hand.”

“And you have to learn this stuff, anyway. Who do you think is going to run this place after I’m gone?” Gran picked up the enormous saddle-brown leather purse that she still insisted on calling her “pocketbook” and started rummaging through it, completely unaware that she’d just knocked me on my figurative butt with that statement. “Also, I trust you to block any inquiries from the Louisville contingent until I can get back.”

Melinda took a deep breath. “If I like this facility, I’m going to check in. Today. There’s no time like the present, right?”

I hugged her. “I’m so proud of you, Mel. So proud. I hope it’s a great place.”

“I’m so sorry about leaving Buddy,” she said, meeting my gaze for the first time all weekend. Her eyes were tormented. “He fell asleep, so I was sure it would be fine. Well—just another example of my screwed-up addiction thinking. It needs to end. I finally figured that out. I have to fix this before someone else gets hurt.”

“You need to get better,” I said, and I hugged her again. “Buddy’s going to be fine. It’s time to take care of you.”

After they left in Gran’s little sedan, I wandered around the empty house for a while, too restless to settle down anywhere. I wanted something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on; a formless feeling of anxiety pushed and pulled at my insides, dragging me here and there. After a half hour or so, I found myself in Gran’s study, contemplating the bookshelves.

Maybe I could read. Something like
The Complete Book of Equine Anatomy
might help me avoid yet another sleepless night spent thinking about Mickey. I slowly walked over to look at the book titles, trying to avoid thinking about Rhodales. Any Rhodales.

Denise had made a very good point just before we’d left Dairy Queen to head back to school. If Mickey really cared about me, he wouldn’t have given up so easily. He would have tried to fight for me.

A wave of bleakness swept over me, and I shoved it all away, concentrating on the books. Maybe
Techniques for Success in the Kentucky Derby and Other Races.
That ought to be a nail-biter.

A large, cloth-covered binder wedged in between a couple of equine medicine texts up on the top shelf caught my attention, and I worked it out from where it had been jammed in pretty tightly. When I got it down, I realized it was a photo album, and it was really old.

I flipped it open, and my dad, at around age ten or eleven, smiled out at me from a horse that was way too big for him.

I took the book with me out to the kitchen and made a sandwich. Mrs. Kennedy wouldn’t be back for another week, so I was on my own for meals, pretty much as I had been for most of my life. I enjoyed the sound of perfect silence in the kitchen—nobody talking or working; the phone wasn’t even ringing—so I sat right there with my food and a glass of milk and started to walk down memory lane, feeling vaguely like a trespasser or a thief. Stealing somebody else’s memories, trespassing on somebody else’s lane.

My grandfather was in a lot of the photos. He was almost always smiling when Gran was in the shot with him, but in the other photos he had a hard-edged wariness, as if he’d been waiting for an unknown opponent to try to take what was his. Or maybe I was reading far too much into an unsmiling face in an old photo album. I turned the pages, watching the years go by, watching my dad grow from boy to teen. Wondering when the obvious joy he had for riding and the ranch had turned to disdain.

When I got to the final page, I saw that someone had tucked a loose photo into the corner of the binding, and I stopped and stared at it, feeling like I was going to throw up.

She’d been so much younger and thinner and prettier, but her identity was unmistakable. It was a prom photo of my dad with his arm around Anna Mae Rhodale.

Chapter 44

Mickey

A
fter I demolished the pizza, I flipped through channels until I couldn’t stand it any longer.

I had to see her. Not being near her was torture, and I couldn’t take it anymore.

I was on the road five minutes later, calling myself a fool the entire ride to her place. Hoping that she wouldn’t turn me down.

I didn’t call until I’d parked my bike in a stand of trees next to the main road near her driveway, because I didn’t want to be discouraged. She had to talk to me this time—especially if I showed up on her doorstep. I knew her parents were still in the city, and her grandmother probably went to bed ridiculously early, like most old people, so hopefully Melinda was occupied, and Victoria and I could have this out.

Whatever
this
was.

If she told me to leave, I’d never bother her again, but I needed to hear the words. Needed to see her face.

Before I could change my mind, I called her. She answered on the second ring.

“Mickey?”

“I need to see you,” I said, digging my fingers into the fence rail so hard it hurt. “I have to apologize. Beg. Grovel. Whatever you want me to do that might make this right, but I need to see your face and convince myself that us being apart is really the best thing. Because it doesn’t feel like it.”