“My ride…Destiny…didn’t show.”
“You should’ve took the Jeep.” I tap on its dashboard and calculate the three-hour round trip to UK. “We could’ve logged more hours.”
“And what? Spoil your date with Red.” She jabs, perfectly timed and straight to the breadbasket. Yeah, she cares.
“I’d say you took care of that anyway.” I spar back, a soft counter. At the split in the road between her house and mine, “Take a right,” I say.
“Why?” Her house is to the left.
“Trust me. Take a right.”
Amazingly, she does. For the shortest part of the ride, it sure feels like the longest. How am I going to tell her?
She pulls into my drive, shuts off the Jeep, releases the door handle, and says, “See you around.” Trying to beat me to the punch this time—a repeat estrangement after the kiss that never happened—she plans on walking home.
“Wait.” My hand reaches for her thigh, keeping her bound to the seat.
“I just wanna go home, Ace.” Putting this night behind her can’t come soon enough.
“The tour was that ‘good.’ That ‘great,’ huh.” Or was it finding me with Raelynn that let her down.
She pulls her door shut, the overhead light too revealing.
“You got no one to go home to, Shelby,” I begin, seeing no way to break it to her gently. “That’s what Raelynn was about to take great pleasure in telling you.”
“I know my mother isn’t there. The whole hollow knows that by now,” she snaps, assured Raelynn was going to antagonize her about the latest rehab stint.
Hollow…and all highbrow…acting like she wasn’t born and raised here. “It’s a damn holler. And I’m not talking about your mother. I’m talking about your grandpa. The Sheriff came and took him away this evening.” Her cultured facade only makes easier my unrefined delivery.
“Why? Where did they take him? Is he okay?” Her grandpa has had his bouts with illness, but usually they send an ambulance or Miss Patterson, not a squad car.
“They took him over to Liketa.” Growing up in her household, surely she knows what’s in Liketa.
“The regional jail?”
“That gun…at the river. The one Silas Haskell found.” I pause, giving her a moment to catch up. “The bullets match the one they pulled out of your father eight years ago.”
“Ugh.” She has to feel like Raelynn did punch her, right in the solar plexus, the wind knocked from it. “But why would they assume it’s Grandpa’s?” She searches for reason.
“I don’t think they assumed anything. According to Silas, his cousin-in-law…the cop…they traced the gun back to Augustus ‘Gus’ Walker.” Even telling her seems like a betrayal. Like I’m in on it. Without the amplified rumble of the Jeep, music, something, the ambiance is killing me.
She whimpers then wails, her hands shaking and clenching the steering wheel. “Does it ever stop? Does it ever stop? Does…it…ever…stop!”
I run from Ace’s Jeep and make it to the ditch in time.
Eating in Champions Kitchen, the thought had crossed my mind that I couldn’t wait to indulge in my second meal there—my first official meal as a Wildcat recruit.
Their food tastes just like any other food on the way back up and out of my mouth.
Ace runs after me. Until he sees what I am doing. He retreats, then returns, plopping a jug of water beside me.
I’m puking in front of Ace Cooper. Oh, God. I puke more.
Hunched over the ditch, I don’t see him pull off his shirt. Wishing I was deaf to the sound of my own retching, I certainly don’t hear him douse it in water and wring it out. But I feel the relief as he loops it around the back of my neck beneath my hair.
My hair! I hoped to retain the look for a few days. My makeup! It must run with the force of saltwater spurting from my eyes with every spasm of my stomach.
Destiny’s makeover, like Grandpa’s life, is destroyed in one night.
In the privacy of Ace’s bathroom, I indulge in a shower.
It takes me a minute to figure out its operation. Our tub at home doesn’t offer a shower. Secured behind a door—versus a sheet tacked up by a string—halfway through I aim the showerhead toward the back of the tub, roll up into a ball like a hedgehog seeking protection, and cry.
I cry over being a charity case at Grayson’s party. I cry over not accepting his explanation. I do need a chance. Why didn’t I take it instead of reacting like an insecure brat. I cry over trying to incite a fight with Raelynn. I cry over the fact that she was riding around with Ace to begin with. I sob over Grandpa.
I don’t care what the law says, what evidence they have, Grandpa wouldn’t hurt a fly.
He is as tenderhearted as he is loyal. Otherwise, he would have given up on my mother a long time ago. Incapable of taking a man’s life, certainly not my father’s—he would never do that to me.
I cry over my father, something I promised myself I would stop doing once I was old enough to comprehend what he had done.
And what had he done, exactly.
If the system that once thought, however never proved, my father’s death was a deal-gone-wrong homicide but now thinks it was a domestic homicide—a dispute between son-in-law and father-in-law—do drugs even remain in the equation? What “drugs.”
My father spent enough time trying to keep my mother off them; why would he deal them. If he had drugs, believing Grandpa shot him over something so immaterial is as preposterous as believing Grandpa shot him at all.
And I believed them? I eventually believed the entangled legend. Let the system tell me who my father was?
The same system that has pinned an eight-year-old murder on a frail old man.
A frail old man who adored my father. Grandpa found with my father a relationship more compatible than he ever was able to establish with my mother, his own flesh and blood.
The system could not know that. But that is the first kink in their theory.
I deadbolt the front door. It will buy me some time in case Pop comes home early from his overtime shift at the mine.
Not that he cares if I have a girl over. But this isn’t any girl.
It’s Shelby.
I could pretend that my motivation is solely to protect her, hide her away. But the Bootleg guitar—hidden away in its case—that I pull from beneath my bed needs protecting too. Pop already weighed in, warning me about running with Shelby. And Mom’s sharing of Pop’s jealousy over her friendship with Mason has yet to leave my consciousness.
Pop, jealous? I can’t imagine it. Mom had the run of the place and him. He lived for her. He still does. Holding on to a shred of hope that one day she’ll come back. Unless he had reason to be jealous.
Precisely why I have stashed away this guitar that once belonged to Mason, ever since Mom tracked it down after our pawnshop day trip.
I think about setting the guitar up on the bed before rethinking that plan. Another thing Mom said that I can’t seem to shake…this room used to be a nursery. Not just mine, but Shelby’s, for a few months anyway.
How am I ever supposed to bring a girl in here again knowing that I first shared this room with Shelby.
And I can’t bring Shelby in here. Not now. She’ll think I’m doing it for all the wrong reasons. Later I can bring her in here. But not the two of us together. She can sleep in my room tonight, alone.
Fuck!
Getting girls into my room has never been a problem. Now I’m trying to figure out ways to keep them out.
“Ace…” I hear her voice call from the bathroom hallway.
“In the living room,” I call back, darting from my bedroom to it, quickly reclining the Bootleg guitar on the Ottoman and myself on the couch.
Her face—free of makeup—peeks around the wall. The glow of her features illuminated by the end table lamp is reminiscent of the dashboard light. The first driving lesson in my Jeep, the first time I saw her in that light.
“Just Shelby,”
I say while gazing at the refreshing image, better than any makeover.
She half smiles, wadding her wet hair into a knot at the nape of her neck and rounding the corner in my t-shirt and sweats. My Adam’s apple thrusts upward like an old car jack—ringed and rigged—swallowing hard. Clothes aren’t anything to idolize, but I can’t help wondering what it would be like to be them right now.
She eases into the seat on the other end of the couch from me, as if neither trying to be seen nor heard, hugging her knees to her chest. “Are you sure your father won’t mind?”
“You’re fine,” I say, instead of pointing out what Pop doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I wonder if my mother thought that, too.
“That’s your guitar?” She points out the obviously placed item.
“As of a few weeks ago. But, really it’s yours, if you want it.” I start to doubt the significance of the Bootleg guitar. Maybe we should’ve focused on the Ibanez. She might recognize it.
“Mine?” she says. As if I forgot—she is not that into music.
How could I forget. I still haven’t gotten over it!
“Unless you want it hocked, don’t send it home with me. My father had one. It went everywhere he did. Until the day he died. My mother couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. There one day, gone the next,” she says of her perpetually rehabbing mother and any item of value.
She didn’t hock that one. He did. And not for drugs, but to take care of you. I want to tell her how much he loved her, how much he invested in her. But it would only make her feel worse than she already does.
So I settle on, “That one was his, too. He handmade it,” I emphasize, wondering if the impressive fact is wasted on the non-music lover. The perfect segue, I lay the evidence out on the couch between us.
“Ohmygosh…look at them…OMG.” She caresses the Bootleg album, the faces and bodies of her ordinary parents in rock star form on the insert.
Like my prized Optimus Prime toy transformed from semi to Autobot, Shelby transforms into an extraterrestrial species herself—an actual teen. So grown up. Whether by choice or by circumstance, it is refreshing, even validating, to see this side of her.
“Is this real? This can’t be real. May I?”
“Please.” See, everyone is into music.
She opens the scratched and worn plastic cover, pulling the protected insert from it and hovers over it beneath the light of the end table. “Look at them. Ohmygosh. They’re so young. What…about the same age as us?”
“Give or take,” I say. My plan being foiled, I didn’t consider how all of this history might backfire. If she starts calculating, will she figure out that it was her existence that might have…well…foiled their plan?
“Just look at them!” she whisper-squeals like a kid at Christmas. “I mean, they’re not smiling or anything. They’re not supposed to be, right. But their eyes. Their body language. They’re fierce and happy and self-composed. My parents were rock stars?”
“Ahhh, folk rock stars.” There is a difference.
“And look at my mom, she’s so…”
“…Hot.”
She playfully swats at me, leaning over her shoulder. “I was going more for ‘spunky.’”
“Turn it over,” I encourage, my hand brushing against hers.
“She sang and played. Music. My mother?”
Slow down, quick draw. Just enjoy it before you go putting it all together: My mother who won’t have it, can’t handle it, any of it—music—sang it and played it. Why did she stop? “Look. She wrote it, too.” I point to the songwriting credits.
“A writer. My mother was a writer. Now that’s hot.” Like a reverse jack in the box, she turns with a hand on each of my shoulders and pushes me down to the couch. “Where did you get all of this? The CD, the guitar. How do you know all of this?”
“My mom,” I defend and fend off the urge to pull her down onto my lap. “She and your dad were friends.”
“They were?” she whispers at the possibility that someone—anyone—may have fond memories of her father. The soft angle of her dark brows make inverted V’s, pronounced against her round ivory forehead. In the wolf tattoo, I don’t see Ella’s face inside. I see Shelby’s. Like the wolf, is she to be respected or feared? “And you’re just telling me this now because…”
“…I just found out myself.”
“Your mother. Will she talk to me. About him?”
“Ah…well…” I’m sure she would, but do I want my mother talking to Shelby.
“This changes everything, don’t you see. My parents weren’t hopeless.” In her excitement, her hair comes loose and falls around my face, the ends of it attracted to my stubble.
Ohmygosh.
“Thank you.” In her gratitude, her lips cover mine. Soft, innocent, and giving, the silky exchange torments my body with opposites. Hard, carnal, and taking, I have never wanted anyone so badly.
OMFG.
She thrusts herself upright, not even a thought to what she has done. “Can we play it?”
Huh. What? My eyes open heavily, her lips zooming in and out of focus, attempting to still the image—capture the feeling.
“The CD. Can we listen to it?” She pushes the album into my chest.
Uh-huh. I push it back against hers and point to the boombox on the Koronette’s ledge. She is to be feared. Definitely feared.
With the unseen bounce of the laser, “I’ve heard this before…that night in your Jeep,” she says. For not being into it, she easily identifies the distinct singing voice. “My mother is the goat?” Her ear hovers, hopefully identifying the appeal in the natural technique.
“Baa,” I say, able to form at least one word now that she is off my lap.
Comparable to my legs after coach’s weekly mandatory strength training session, the breakfast shift at Hot Brown is excruciatingly slow.
Appalachia begs for her first frost. Another ploy to keep her children on a tight leash, she gives us the beauty of every season, a colorful fall her most magnificent transformation. Even though one might think it would freeze more of us out, journeying for temperate climates, it only keeps us in, warming and waiting for the promise of spring’s return.
I pour myself a cup of coffee, hands hugging and holding onto the comfort. Catching my warped reflection in the mirrored sugar dispenser top, I wonder what caused Ace to look at me the way he did last night.
Not the most attractive face, I wouldn’t call it beastly either. But that’s how he looked at me…after I kissed him. Like I am some beast of prey not to be trusted.
I didn’t mean to kiss him. It just happened. He obviously went to great lengths in procuring the guitar, the CD, the inspiration. He had it all set out, planned for my gratification. He gave me something more than warmth to hold onto.
Just not him, I guess.
But he got up with me—and the roosters—this morning so I could log driving miles in his Jeep on the way to work. And he’s bringing it back this afternoon after his mine shift, so then I can log even more.
Bells hanging from the leather strap on the Hot Brown entrance door jingle as Destiny shows up for her shift. An hour late, she is devoid of her peppy step.
I sit at the counter, refusing to acknowledge her. Don’t even look at her. And please, don’t let her say anything funny. If she were as reliable as she is funny, she wouldn’t have left me stranded. Indebted to an older couple who mercifully waited with me while I was waiting for Destiny, they ultimately gave me a ride from the Sigogglin station back to the end of the hollow road, or I would still be walking.
She takes the stool beside me. Nothing. She says nothing. No “I’m sorry.” No “I had better things to do.” Nothing.
Lips pursed over my mug the way I’ve seen others approach coffee, I sip. Then I groan and keck, forcing it down my gullet, remembering why I don’t drink coffee! Coffee is as deceptive as Appalachia. Looks and smells great, but it’s hard to swallow.
Destiny grabs the silver creamer disp
enser, sloshes some into my mug, and tops it off with a generous serving of sugar. She even stirs it for me, like I am a child.
Better. Tolerable. “Thanks,” I should say. But I don’t. That’s not childish at all.
“Grayson texted,” she finally says something, her voice lacking the excitement it would normally emanate with such information.
What does that have to do with you bailing on me? I want to ask, staying calm and cool. What am I going to have to do—drag an apology out of her.
“To see if you made it home okay. And to tell you, you left your backpack,” she continues in her bland, un-Destiny-like tone.
I jolt upright. Backpack! I hung it on the hook in the bathroom stall. Then after overhearing the snarky blonde, I fled like an incompetent bank robber leaving behind the cash bag.
My homework and the note I need to hand in to coach with UK’s assistant coach’s signature—a legitimate missing of practice—is in that backpack. Coach already affords me leniency. Without a way to and from practice in the absence of the school activity bus, before school officially starts and over holidays, he gives me at-home assignments, trusting that I will do them. State qualifying meets are coming up. I need that note. I can’t miss a competition due to an unexcused absence.
Ace! His Jeep! Oh, no. What would he think of Grayson? What would Grayson think of him? I think I’m screwed. I lay my head down on the counter.
There is also the food. The half-eaten soft pretzel, bag of chips, and two cookies I slipped into my backpack from Champions Kitchen. I didn’t steal it; someone paid for it. It was just laying there on a tray atop the trash station. I couldn’t let it go to waste. But Grayson doesn’t need to know that. My ears burn with embarrassment. Doubt it would surprise him anyway.
“And your makeup!” I jolt upright again. She sent it along with instructions on when and how to freshen up. “It’s in that backpack.” Suddenly I am the one who is sorry.
“It’s okay. You can keep it. You need it more than I do.” She half smiles, making a feeble attempt at humor and easing my conscience.
Just Shelby Page 9