Sweet

by Tammara Webber

  “You were in the Marines?” she asked, all offhand like she thought I’d start spilling war stories if she was sneaky enough. Since I’d rolled the sleeves of my T-shirt to my shoulders, she had stolen several veiled peeks at my tat, not near as wily as she thought she was.

  “No. My brother was.” I didn’t elaborate and didn’t intend to.

  She was quiet for a minute, taking in that word—was. When I spoke of Brent to someone unfamiliar with his story, which was rare because I didn’t speak of him at all if I could help it, a strained moment always passed during which I hoped they’d heard everything that word implied. People could express sympathies all day long and I would nod and accept them, but I didn’t want to discuss the loss of him.

  “My mama was too.”

  I glanced at her downturned face and wondered if Silva had known this. Of course he had, that sly bastard.

  “I got the tattoo on the third anniversary of 9/11, three months after he was killed in action,” I said. “He had the same one.”

  “Did you mean to join up too?”

  “No. Brent—” Damn if his name spoken aloud didn’t still lance through me. “Brent was the Marine. I was always the grease monkey.”

  She smiled faintly. “That’s what my dad calls me. His grease monkey.”

  “You’re a monkey all right. A damned ornery monkey.” I was sure she’d have some comeback at the ready—likely one that proved my point—and we’d leave the grim discussion of dead brothers and mothers behind.

  “Dad says he’d rather I be cranky all the time than pretend to be happy when I’m not.”

  Not exactly the retort I’d expected. I handed her a wrench and pointed to the bolt she needed to tighten.

  As she turned it, she said, “My mama got out when she got pregnant with me. Dad’s never told me if she meant to stay out or go back. I think she meant to go back. But then, you know, me. With all this.” She pounded a fist on the arm of the wheelchair and stared at her lap. “She killed herself when I was three. I don’t remember her. But in every picture we have of her, she’s smiling.”

  I didn’t know how the hell to respond to that, so I didn’t. I was at a loss for what Silva was thinking, sending this kid to me. I couldn’t fix her. All I could do was give her a job, though working had been a savior of sorts to me once I allowed it to be.

  “Congrats, monkey—you just replaced brake pads all by yourself.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’ve never done it before.”

  “Ever gotten paid to do it?” I shot back.

  She blinked and her mouth quirked a little on one side.

  “Don’t waste time being smug. Get to work on the next one.”

  • • • • • • • • • •

  The mattress delivery was scheduled for Wednesday, so I slapped a coat of paint on the walls of Pearl’s bedroom Tuesday evening while she was at work. That room hadn’t been painted since ever. When she came home, I heard her rummaging for something to eat in the kitchen, washing up in the bathroom, and finally opening the creaky door to that bedroom across the trailer. I’d left a window up for ventilation, but the searing fumes had snuck under the door anyhow.

  “You painted the bedroom?” she asked the next morning when I came in from lifting. She hadn’t yet moved from her spot on the sofa. She usually got up about the time I grabbed a final cup of coffee before heading out to the garage. In her little sleep-rumpled T-shirt and shorts—with nothing, I knew now, underneath—she’d stand there folding the sheets and stacking them on the end of the sofa while I fought the urge to cross the room, pull her to my lap and kiss her until she begged me to lay her down.

  I stopped halfway to the bathroom, fists clenched tight. “Reckon it needed it.” I’d driven my muscles to fatigue not ten minutes ago, and it had done nothing to stem the want of her. “The mattress should be delivered later today. I forgot to buy sheets, but I have an extra set you can use.”

  Just when I was calling myself ten kinds of dumbass for setting her up with a bedroom when I wanted her back in my bed, she said, “Thank you, Boyce.”

  “Yep.”

  I was a patient man. I’d survived being beat and cussed and outlived the asshole who did his damnedest to make every day of my life a living hell. I’d withstood being branded a troublemaker when all I wanted was to be invisible. I’d done what I had to do and refused to sweat the nuts and bolts or suffer remorse over what couldn’t be changed. My life was simple. I fished a little and drank a little. I worked hard and I fucked hard. I’d outgrown fighting, but if the situation called for it, I could put a boot in someone’s ass they’d never forget.

  I was a man who’d loved this girl from the moment she’d come back to life and saw no one but me. Now she was closer than she’d ever been, right when I was on the verge of losing everything I’d spent years building and becoming. It was the cruelest switch life had ever thrown at me.

  • • • • • • • • • •

  Just after the delivery truck showed up, I got a call from Barney Amos, who didn’t beat around the bush this time. “Boyce, I traced your mama to Amarillo, where she’s been living for the past twelve years. I got ahold of her an hour ago. She asserts that she and your dad never divorced. Will or no will, disputing her claim wouldn’t be something I’d advise, though you’re welcome to seek other legal counsel.” He sighed heavily. “You’d best start setting up a plan B.”

  I pointed the delivery guys to the bedroom and waited until they carried the mattress set inside and out of earshot. “Did she already know about Dad? And Brent?”

  “She knew about your brother’s passing, but not Bud.”

  I walked out onto the stoop, lit a cigarette, and took a long drag. The sky was too bright and blue for my world to crash and burn today. “Did she ask about me?”

  “I told her what a fine young man you’ve become. That you’d been running Wynn’s ever since your dad got sick.” He hadn’t answered the question—not directly, at any rate.

  “When’ll she be here?”

  “I’m not sure what her circumstances are, and it’s near seven hundred miles there to here. At the soonest, it’ll be a couple days. More’n likely three or four.”

  My life was set to blow to hell in somewhere between forty-eight and ninety-six hours. I could almost hear the tick tick tick counting down. This whole shitty scenario hadn’t been real before. Now it was.

  By the time I lost Brent, I hadn’t expected to ever see her again. I hadn’t presumed her dead. I’d just presumed her gone, as if she’d vanished into thin air the night she left. I’d spent a year or two pining for her to come back, crying myself to sleep face-first in my pillow so Brent wouldn’t hear. When he left for boot camp, I couldn’t handle the double loss. To survive his absence, I let her go.

  Then Brent died, and I knew neither of them was ever coming back. No one came back. Not for me.

  Pearl was off tonight, so we’d planned to fry up the drum I’d caught Sunday along with a bagful of fresh okra Sam brought me from her dad’s garden yesterday. Sam wasn’t fond of okra, so she was happy to get rid of it and Pearl was happy to take it. I was less sure. It was free okra, not free beer.

  “I straight-up dropped a hundred-dollar beaker in the lab today,” Pearl said, plopping a pat of butter and a pinch of salt into the rice. “I was so mortified—I must’ve turned ten shades of red. Everybody froze, including me, until Dr. Kent said, ‘Well it ain’t gonna sweep itself up. Broom’s in the broom closet.’”

  I chuckled at her vocal imitation. “He sounds like a good ol’ boy.”

  “Yeah, but he’s such an actual genius I think regular people exasperate the hell out of him. He’s usually cantankerous. I thought for sure he’d make some sort of example out of me for being clumsy with the lab equipment. I’d have deserved it.”

  I watched her soak okra slices in buttermilk and coat them with cornmeal and spice. I’d grown adept at cooking fish a hundred ways, but vegetables w
ere always raw or microwaved. I had no patience with anything that required a recipe. She’d made fresh iced tea too, in a pitcher I didn’t know I had.

  “Maybe he thinks you’re hot,” I said, turning the fish in the frying pan.

  Her laughter tumbled out like a song I wanted to replay over and over. “Boyce, jeez! He’s old enough to be my grandpa.” Her dark eyes glinted as she slid the okra into the pan alongside the fish.

  “Baby, if he ain’t dead yet, you’re hot enough to wake him right up.” I winked, nudging her from prim and proper to hot and bothered. She wouldn’t look at me, and her cheeks shaded pink. When she added salt and butter to the rice like that task demanded her full concentration, I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d just done that two minutes ago. I’d always loved getting her flustered and unbalanced with a bit of flirting and then catching her and setting her upright before she knew what was what.

  That thought brought to mind the thing that would unbalance her in a way I didn’t want. Once we sat down to eat, I said, “I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay.” She waited, wide-eyed. I wasn’t sure what she thought I was about to tell her, but whatever it was, she was off the mark.

  “My mother is coming back to town in the next few days. Seems she and my dad never got divorced. They did make wills—leaving everything to each other. But that doesn’t matter as much as the fact that he died still married to her.”

  Her lips fell apart. “So she’ll get everything. Including the garage?”

  I nodded, unsurprised that she’d caught on faster than I had.

  “That rotten bastard. How dare he have you running his damned business and taking care of his sorry ass and never tell you this?”

  Pearl rarely cussed. She had to get pretty pissed to let loose like that. I bit back a grin at how cute she was when she was spitting mad.

  “After the first year or so he never brought her up, drunk or sober.” I shrugged. “I’d always assumed they’d divorced somewhere along the way. I assumed I was his sole heir. Mr. Amos says I could fight it, but this is a community property state and they were still legally married. I’d lose. And I need my savings to do whatever the hell I’m doing next.”

  She laid her hand on mine, and I knew right then there was nothing I wouldn’t do to make her mine, short of dragging her down with me.

  “What will you do next?”

  “No idea,” I said, which wasn’t the whole truth. I had one short-term plan—a proposition I intended to make. I wouldn’t share it with her, though. If she knew the details, she’d never let me go through with it.

  Pearl

  I’d never wanted to give somebody a piece of my mind like I wanted to give it to Bud Wynn in that moment. Too bad he was dead. All I could do was hope hell was real and he was in it.

  My sorority’s social director, Jen, had been pre-law, and her parents were both attorneys. She’d explained the basics of trust funds and inheritance transfers and prenups to any of us who weren’t familiar with the legal pitfalls of saying I do and later saying I sure as hell don’t. I’d assumed that if Mitchell and I got married, we’d be doing so as doctors—equals. If it didn’t work out we’d arrange a reasonable, equitable split.

  I’d never considered what happened in a situation like this—where a divorce should have happened but hadn’t. Boyce’s mother had run from an abusive husband, leaving her share of marital property behind. I couldn’t justly fault her for wanting her share—I just hated what she might take from Boyce. He wouldn’t know what she intended until she showed up, but I’d learned two things from Jen’s warnings and a bit of Internet research: she was probably entitled to everything, and when it came to money and inheritance, people lost their damned minds.

  “You have a personal account in your name, right? Separate from the business and your dad’s accounts?”

  He nodded, staring at his plate. “There’s not a whole lot in it. I’ve been channeling most of the garage income back into the business, replacing crap diagnostic equipment, buying new tools. I got advice from Maxfield’s dad when I first took over, and he told me to keep the business money completely separate and pay myself a salary. I wish I’d given myself a fucking raise a year ago.” He chuckled. “But thank Christ I listened to him or I’d have lumped it all together like a dumbass.”

  “Boyce, there’s no way you could have seen this coming,” I said—his words to me when Mama had told me I couldn’t live at home and pursue the life I wanted. Little did I know I’d be echoing them back to him about his own mother. I took a bite of rice and nearly spit it right back out. “Aauugh! How much salt did I put in this?”

  He laughed and arched a brow. “You were a tad distracted.”

  Lord, was I ever. I downed half my iced tea in an attempt to dilute the salt and battled the urge to fan myself like a swooning twit. “Maybe you shouldn’t distract me while I’m cooking.”

  He leapt from playful to predatory in two seconds flat. “But I like distracting you.”

  His mouth curved into the lazy half smirk I knew so well, and his gaze dropped to my lips. When I licked them (combination nervous habit and enough salt on that rice to choke a horse), our eyes connected. There was nothing guarded in the deep green of his.

  It was official: when it came to Boyce Wynn, I was the quintessential swooning twit.

  • • • • • • • • • •

  The inn was over a century old but had been reincarnated multiple times. In one form or another, it had survived a fire, a tidal wave, and a lengthy economic downturn. My semi-official title was Front Desk Person, but that hardly covered the responsibilities of the position. By my third shift, I’d unclogged the ice machine with a screwdriver and a couple of swift kicks, placated a returning guest when another guest refused to vacate the room they’d reserved, and set mousetraps in a storage closet after a guest freaked out that the scratching noises she heard in her room overnight were evidence of a haunting—part of the inn’s folklore.

  Minnie assured her that the inn’s resident spirit meant no harm. “Alyce was a former tenant who’d lived a happy life here and didn’t want to leave. She had a touch of the OCD—not diagnosed back in those days, y’know. She’s been known to sweep the floors at night. Maybe that’s what you heard?”

  “It did sound like sweeping!” The woman agreed while I fought to maintain a straight face and worried whether my boss actually believed what she was saying.

  When the door shut behind the guest, Minnie reached beneath the counter and pulled out a box of mousetraps and a jar of peanut butter. “Ghosts they’ll stay for, rodents they won’t.”

  The room (and storage closet next to it) was upstairs, and Minnie was under strict orders not to climb the creaky staircase with her cast and cane. “Don’t let it snap on your finger,” she said. “It’ll take your nail clean off.”

  I was less worried about trap springs and more worried about squeezing into a narrow closet with a territorial horde of mice.

  In my last hour of the night, I’d been summoned three times to a room shared by three college boys—first to deliver fresh towels, then extra pillows, and then to change a lightbulb in the ceiling—which I accomplished standing on a chair while they stood around watching. Their last call was an invitation to join them in some whiskey-shot pregaming before they went out. I declined.

  As I locked up the office and drove home, I thought about Boyce’s mother. Specifically, where would she stay when she arrived? I’d spent one night in the new bed, but I could be back on the sofa in a day or two. Or sleeping in my car.

  chapter

  Nineteen

  Boyce

  I had a picture in my mind of my mother’s face, but it was fifteen years old now and had been stored there by a kid. The night she left, she was in her early thirties—skin unlined, hair a darker copper than mine and taller than me, though not by much. Next to my father, she’d been pretty and small and fragile.

  I knew Brent had taken hi
s disappointment in her to his grave, though he hadn’t been given to resentment toward anyone but our father. He’d never said a bad word about her to me, but I would never forget the look on his face the night she left. Once she was gone, it was clear as day he hadn’t hoped or planned for her to return. That faith had been mine. He’d known better.

  The woman standing on the top step when I opened the door Sunday evening was a faded version of my memory. Her hair was carrot-red with an inch of dark and gray roots, her face lined from years of smoking and sun and God only knew what else. Only her hazel eyes were untouched by the years.

  “Boyce—my God, you’re bigger than your daddy was,” she said. “Bigger than Brent too.”

  Brent, standing in this very doorway, begging you to take me with you. “He was fifteen the last time you saw him,” I said. “I’ll be twenty-three—”

  “Next month. I know.”

  I inclined my head once, at a loss for what was supposed to happen next.

  “Can I come in?” she asked.

  I stood back and she walked into her former home, glancing one way and then the other. “It looks just the same,” she said, as though she’d expected Dad might’ve redecorated in her absence. The only modifications he’d made were installing the flat-screen and replacing a lamp that broke years ago when he punched me and I landed against the table it sat on.

  Trailing her fingers over the sofa, she stared at the square of less-soiled carpet where Dad’s chair had been before I lit it on fire in the yard. Mrs. Echols, watching from her corner window, had called the volunteer fire department on my mini-inferno, but by the time the first truck pulled up that chair was a smoldering bunch of coils and charred wood. I hosed it down with the extinguisher I kept on hand in the garage and the first responder called off the emergency, noticeably disappointed.

  I followed her into the kitchen, where Pearl’s laptop, notebook, and a couple of textbooks covered half the tabletop. She pointed to one. “Dynamics of Marine Ecosystems? Are you—”