He stiffened and a shadow of apprehension passed behind his eyes. “What happened wasn’t your fault, Cletus. You’re not responsible for the actions of our father.”
I looked beyond my brother to the window behind his desk. “He and his club brothers put you in the hospital when he found out you helped me.”
“I was older than you, and it wasn’t the first time he’d put me in the hospital, if you remember.”
“He broke your leg. You lost your football scholarship. Everyone in town might think you voluntarily turned it down, but that’s because no one knows the full story.”
“What happened is no one else’s business but ours. He broke your nose. And he killed your dog. You were only sixteen.”
A vivid flash of memory—a memory I’d stopped fixating on years ago—held my mind hostage. “I shouldn’t have tried to help her. Carla wasn’t family.”
“She was a friend.” He waved away my remorse impatiently. “Sometimes friends are family.”
“Carla wasn’t, though. She wasn’t that good of a friend and I’ve never required hindsight to figure that out.” I brought my eyes back to my brother, transposing my memory of his bloodied face over his clean features. “It was the unfairness I hated. I had no particular warmth for her. But her daddy, he was a monster.”
Carla’s father and our father were captains together in the Iron Wraiths. I didn’t add that our father was also a monster. I didn’t need to. Billy, maybe more than any of us, already knew.
“You helped her run away. That was good. You did a good thing.”
“And you paid for it.”
“Your only mistake was getting caught. Picking fights with bullies at school was one thing; calling out a captain of the Iron Wraiths is another. You should have kept your mouth shut.” Billy tried to keep his tone light, like we were talking about other people and their problems. His eyes were understanding, just like they’d been thirteen years ago.
My brother was a great man. He would achieve great things in his life, of that I had no doubt. His regard for us, for all of us, was humbling. I suspected sometimes that we didn’t deserve it.
“I’m so sorry, Billy.”
Billy stared at me for a stretch, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully, then he shrugged. “It’s in the past. As momma used to say, ‘Best to leave farts and the past behind you.’”
I chuckled at that. It was one of her more scandalous sayings.
“Tell me what happened with Jennifer.” Billy attempted to get us back on track. “You said she videotaped you, and then what happened?”
“I contacted Alex, in Chicago, and asked him to remove the video from her computer and phone.” I frowned, refocusing my thoughts outward. Sometimes it took me a bit to switch gears between the distant past and the present. “I thought he had, but re-reading his message, it looks like the video was never there.”
“What’d his message say?” Billy asked around a bite of food.
“He said, ‘I can confirm the video isn’t on the subject’s phone, computer, or saved to the cloud.’”
“So you thought he’d deleted it, but it turns out—”
“She didn’t save it on her computer, phone, or the cloud. She saved it on thumb drives.”
Billy’s smile was slow and small and appreciative, his eyes moving down and to the side, then he laughed. “She’s smart.”
“She is. But it turns out her father does random checks of her phone and computer—this is according to Jessica. I didn’t put the pieces together until last Monday.”
“What happened on Monday?” He picked up his hamburger.
“I kissed her.”
Billy paused mid-bite, removing the burger from his mouth. “Good.”
“No. That’s bad. She thinks I did it just to help her practice kissing, like you helped her practice dating.”
“Oh. Bad.”
“Yeah. And then she gave me the thumb drives and told me I was dead to her.”
“She said that?” Billy was mid-bite again, and had halted again to ask me his question.
“In so many words.” I pushed my food away. I wasn’t hungry.
“Cletus.”
“Billy.”
“Don’t embellish. What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Thanks for your help. I don’t need you anymore. Here is your video. Go away.’ More or less, that’s what she said.” Despite not being hungry, I munched on a French fry. The saltiness of the French fry distracted me from the ache in my chest.
“Hmm.” Billy finally took another bite of his burger, his eyes sliding to the left as he chewed things over. “Things could be worse.”
I picked up another fry, glanced at it, then set it back on the table. “They are worse. She’s going to Jethro’s wedding with Jackson James.”
Billy’s eyebrows jumped again. “That asshole?”
“I know,” I responded flatly, sliding my teeth to the side. “I should have given him leprosy back in September. It would’ve kept him occupied through Christmas.”
“Hmm.” Billy set his burger down, studying me and wiping his fingers with a napkin. “What are you going to do?”
“That’s why I’m here. I need you to tell me what to do.”
His eyes communicated wary disbelief. “You want me to tell you what to do?”
“Yep. Because my instinct is to go over to the bakery, toss her over my shoulder, and make her mine.”
Billy crossed his arms. “That’s a bad idea. I’ve tried that, it didn’t end well.”
“Exactly. Plus . . .” I breathed in, held the air within my lungs, and exhaled slowly, my eyes flickering to Billy, then to my burger with no top bun. “Plus there’s the small matter of her wanting to have a lot of children.”
I could feel Billy’s eyeballs on me. His eyeballs had always carried a very specific weight. Growing up, Jethro was a joker, our father a monster, and Billy was the one we looked up to. He was the one I never wanted to let down.
“Cletus—”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“Then we can skip it and you can admit you’re wrong.”
“I can’t admit I’m wrong about two things in the same day.” I brought my attention back to him, found him smirking at me. “It might bring about the apocalypse.”
“Then admit it tomorrow.”
I swallowed past the ballooning anxiety in my throat. I was never anxious, so it took me a minute to adjust to the sensation.
“You’ve seen my temper. You know what I’m like when I lose it. I blackout. I don’t remember. Do you honestly think I should have children?”
Billy’s smirk mellowed into a sad-looking smile. “We all have Darrell in us, Cletus. I look just like him, so does Ashley. You think I like what I see when I look in the mirror? I hate it. But I’m not cutting off my face because I share it with our father. Your decision to not have a family, because you’re afraid of losing your temper like he did when we were kids—it’s admirable, but it’s also stupid.”
“And if I—”
“No.” Billy brought his palm down on the table, hitting it with a forceful whack. “Stop making excuses for being a coward. You want Jennifer in your life?”
“Yes,” I responded with more than my voice, the answer shaking my very foundation, coming from deep within me, from the same place I’d buried the rage along with my passion.
“Then you reevaluate your priorities, including your fears. You be better and braver. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.”
“So what do I do?”
My brother studied me for a long moment, his brow pulled together as he stewed in my situation.
Finally, he sighed and suggested, “How about you lay it all out? Tell her everything.”
I blinked once, slowly, then glared at my brother. “I don’t like that advice. That’s seriously shitty advice.”
He lifted an eyebrow at me. “It’s your advice. It’s what you’ve been telling me to do with,” his eyes dropped and he took a breath before continuing, “with Scarlet.”
Billy stared unseeingly at his half-eaten hamburger. He hardly ever said her name: Scarlet. She’d been born Scarlet, and when they were together she was Scarlet. But when she’d returned to town at nineteen, engaged to Ben McClure, she had changed her name to Claire.
“It’s still shitty advice. I have no idea of knowing what’s in her head. What if she rejects me?” My words pulled a small smile from him. Even so, I added, “I hope you didn’t take it.”
He shook his head. “She’d have to agree to talk to me first.”
I examined my brother. “You and I might be sharing a boat.”
“Yeah, but your boat is newer.”
“This is true.” Frowning, I grabbed a cold French fry and made it bloody with ketchup. “The question is, how do I get out of this boat?”
CHAPTER 20
“. . .[N]o varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
~Jennifer~