I jabbed a finger over their shoulders. “I’d better . . .”
“Sure.” The frowner shifted to allow me room to pass between them.
I didn’t look back, but I felt their eyes on me as I walked away, and it only made me more self-conscious. On impulse, I veered away from the trail, and ducked through the closest door I could find—the side entrance to the barn—to escape their continued scrutiny.
I pushed the door closed with a relieved sigh, and stared at the beaten wood that separated me from their stares. “I’m such a chicken,” I muttered under my breath.
A soft snort answered as if in agreement, and I turned to find a filthy potbellied pig in its pen, its beady eyes watching me.
He was a small one. Wouldn’t be made into dinner anytime soon. Regardless, I steered clear of him. I had always hated getting close to the animals, only to realize they were never there the next summer. It had taken a few years for me to realize what Pop did with them, and once I had, I’d cried for days.
Now, I passed the curious pig, half a dozen cows with upturned ears, and a horde of mingling chickens as I wandered farther into the barn. Above me, the loft was filled with bales of hay. A separate, large room contained farming equipment, rusted with age. Another held supplies, and feed for the animals.
Mama had already told Jeffrey and me that we would be expected to help out with taking care of the animals, and pitch in during harvesting season. I didn’t mind helping. Anything to keep my mind off of the inevitable.
My mother was dying. She would die. Soon.
Some days I accepted it. Other days, I did everything I could to avoid thinking about it. Right now, that included snooping through the barn.
The last room I came upon appeared to be a storage room, filled with a variety of tools and other random stuff. I nearly walked back out, to see if the boys had returned to the roof and the path was clear, when the pile of boxes in the corner grabbed my attention.
As I neared, I noticed that one of the boxes was filled with pictures. I took a seat on the dirty wooden floor, and sifted through them. Several I recognized—of me and Jeffrey, of Mama. Even in her youth, she was recognizable. Mostly because she looked like me.
I sorted through a cluster of pictures before stopping on one of my mama standing beside a young man. A light dress floated around her legs, lifted in the breeze, while he stood straight as an arrow in a military uniform. Her eyes were warm, and fixed adoringly on him while he stared at the camera.
I pulled the picture closer to my face, and gasped. It was like getting a glimpse into the future and seeing what Jeffrey would look like in five years. No mistaking who we both got our eyes from.
I flipped the photo around, looking for a caption. In faded ink, barely visible, I was able to make it out. Caroline and Robert, 1951.
The year before I was born.
The main door flew open behind me, and the boy I ran into earlier waltzed into the barn. I quickly returned the photograph and rose to a stand as he returned a few tools to their proper spots. I inched out of the storage room, wondering how best to announce my presence, when he spun around to find me creeping up on him.
His chin lifted fractionally. “Hey.”
“Hi.” I offered a faint smile as his gaze drifted over my shoulder.
“What have you got in there?” He nodded at the boxes and took a few steps closer.
“Just, uh . . . just some old pictures. I’m done looking.”
He stopped and stunned me with a grin. “You didn’t get hurt earlier, did you? I’m really sorry—”
“No. I’m fine. Really. Not the first time I took a spill around here.”
Again, my adventures in bike riding and tree climbing came to mind. I had suffered more cuts and bruises on this farm than any proper girl should. Then again, I was far from proper. Ma always said I should have been a boy.
For some reason, he found my admission amusing. I stared at him long after his chuckle faded, and his eyes leveled on mine from across the room. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”
I flinched, because he did look familiar, but I didn’t know why. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t place him. “Um, no. Should I?”
“That’s funny.” He shook his head in bewilderment, and the grin on his face grew. “I thought everyone was supposed to remember their first kiss.”
The tree house had been my pride and joy. Mitch and I had spent months building and turning it into a young boy’s oasis, complete with a few of Dad’s girly magazines stuffed under a purposely loose board in the floor. Not that I’d really known what I was looking at, but my brother thought it was vital for us to have them.
I vividly remembered the night I found a girl in our cherished hideaway. I hadn’t known what to think about that. Even if she had been an okay girl, she was still a girl.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as I swung a leg over the ledge, climbing into the cozy enclosure.
Her back was to me, her long, untamed blonde hair spilling nearly to her waist. She jumped, and turned a set of wide green eyes on me. Once she registered who I was, her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?”
I stared down at her with arms crossed defensively across my chest. “I’m allowed in here. It’s my treehouse.”
“Oh.” Her face fell. “I didn’t know it was yours.”
“Mitch and I built it last fall.”
“Well, it’s nice.”
“What are you doing here anyway? It’s not summer yet.”
Until that night, I’d never seen her outside of summer. Though I’d never told her, I’d always looked forward to her arrival. It was always nice to have someone else to play with other than my brother. Two weeks into summer break, we were usually ready to kill each other.
“Mama brought us to visit, just for the weekend.” She stared at me bravely. “I turned twelve today.”
I gave her a skeptical once-over. “You don’t look it.”
“I’m not much younger than you,” she fired back. “And you definitely don’t look like no twelve-year-old!”
“I turned thirteen last month,” I returned defiantly before taking a seat at the railing overlooking the creek, and let my feet dangle over the edge. “I’ll shoot up soon enough. Mitch grew nearly three inches the summer he turned thirteen.”
Silence followed, though I knew she was still behind me. The floor creaked when she shifted her weight. I glanced over my shoulder to find her watching me nervously.
“You can stay if you want,” I told her. “But you can only be up here when I’m here. If Mitch finds you, he’ll skin both our hides.”
“Deal,” she agreed brightly.
“What are you doing up here all by yourself anyway? I thought you said it was your birthday.”
“It is. Ma made me a cake and everything.” She sat on the floor beside me, and scooted to the edge so that her legs dangled next to mine. “I just wanted somewhere to think, that’s all.”
“Think about what?”
She sighed heavily, and rested her chin on the middle board of the railing. She was quiet for a long time, and I started to think she wasn’t going to answer me. I busied myself with the small rip in my pants that Mama was always telling me to stop messing with before I tore them up good, and waited.
Finally, she mumbled, “I thought I was going to get my first kiss this morning.”
“What?” I blurted.
“Before we left, a boy in my neighborhood came by to give me a present. He said he likes me. I think he almost kissed me, but then he ran off.”
I laughed, and she spun around to sock me in the arm with her fist. I would never admit it to her, but she hit hard for a girl—a scrawny one at that.
“It’s not funny,” she snapped.
“Sorry,” I muttered while I rubbed my arm. “What’s the big deal anyway?”
She turned to look back out over the creek flowing lazily beneath us, and shrugged. “I wanted to have my first kiss. Haven’t y
ou already had yours?”
I wrinkled my nose as if the thought of kissing a girl was disgusting. Truth was, I didn’t want to answer her question. I was a boy. I had a reputation to uphold. No way could I tell her I hadn’t kissed a girl yet. I was thirteen. Shouldn’t I have done that by now?
My brother thought so.
“My neighbor, Rose, has kissed a lot of boys,” she muttered.
“Good for her.”
She straightened her back with a determined nod. “Maybe I’ll just tell her he kissed me. She’ll never know.”
“Okay.”
“That’s what I’ll do.” She nodded determinedly. Her eyes drifted to mine, and she jumped when she realized I was watching her. “I’d better go, before Ma sends Pop out to look for me.”
I stayed where I was, staring at the moonlight reflecting off the calm surface of the creek, as she got up to leave. The sound of her shoes scraping over the ledge was the only noise in the otherwise peaceful night. That, and the thumping of my heart.
“Shit.” I shot to my feet with a groan. “Ana?”
Her head lifted. “Yeah?”
I crossed the uneven floor, and stuck my hand out. She frowned up at me, but took my hand, and I pulled her back into the treehouse. She was a full head shorter than me, and I hadn’t even hit my growth spurt yet. I suspected she would always be a little runt.
But she was okay. Cool, even. For a girl.
And that was the only reason I made her an offer.
“Maybe I can be your first kiss?” I stuffed my hands into my pockets as I watched her reaction.
Her head tilted to the side. “Why?”
“Why?” I shrugged. “So you don’t have to lie to your neighbor, that’s why.”
And so I could get it over with, and tell my brother I had finally kissed a girl. I wouldn’t tell him it was Ana, though. He’d never let me hear the end of it if he knew it was her.
“Okay,” she agreed softly.
We stared at each other for a long time after that. I knew what came next—I had snuck up on Mitch kissing some girl behind the church a few months ago—but for some reason, I couldn’t convince myself to go through with it. I froze . . . like the big wussy Mitch always told me I was. She blinked, waiting for me to man up.
I sighed. “To hell with it . . .”
I bent my head down and pressed my lips to hers. I counted to five—really slowly, because I wanted it to be a good kiss—before I pulled away with a grin. Surely, that was enough to make her happy. Brag-worthy, I thought.
Then again, I was wrong.
She blinked up at me. “That’s it?
That’s it?
That had been the response I got the first time I ever kissed a girl.
Needless to say, I’d improved over the years. I’d had practice. Lots of it. Hell, I started practicing later that summer with Carrie Edwards. Got to second base the summer after that. The rest was history.
Maybe Ana had started something that night by giving me something to prove. Or maybe I was destined to be the asshole I was now. All it took was one look at my father’s history to realize the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
I grumbled as I climbed into my truck—a beaten down lump of red metal, and the only decent thing I’d gotten from my father. My mood stemmed from a combination of disbelief that the girl I’d grown up with hadn’t recognized me, and the usual sourness that accompanied any recollection of the asshole that provided half of my DNA. And because I refused to give that man more than a brief thought, I blamed it mostly on Ana’s poor memory.
To think, I’d actually felt a brief episode of excitement when I’d learned she was coming back to stay. Granted, the circumstances of her return sucked. But I hadn’t seen her in five years . . .
Needless to say, a lot had changed in five years. Gone was the scrawny, big-eyed little girl that had followed Mitch and me up every tree and to every fishing hole. In her place stood a reminder that I was very much a testosterone-driven boy—technically, a man as of two weeks ago.
Ana walked out of the barn and crossed in front of the truck as she wandered toward the house. The frown on her face when she glanced in my direction was probably warranted. My memory was a little blurry, but I was pretty sure the last summer she was here was the summer all the other girls started getting boobs . . . and I started noticing.
I gripped the steering wheel as I watched her now. Jesus, when had she grown up?
The passenger door jerked open, and I peeled my gaze away from Ana as Travis Winter climbed into the seat. His gaze followed the previous trajectory of mine, and he smirked.
“She’s cute, right?”
“Hardly,” I snorted. “She’s just a kid.”
“Nah, man.” He stripped out of his sweat-soaked shirt, and tossed it on the floor before slipping on a clean one. “Never seen curves like that on any kid.”
“Forget it, Travis.” He looked up at the audible edge to my voice. “She’s only sixteen, man.”
I wasn’t going to tell him that she was almost seventeen. And I was definitely not going to tell him how I’d remembered her birthday all these years.
He turned to look out the windshield again, but she was gone. Back in the house, safe from Travis’s predatory eyes. Where she belonged.
“She looked older,” he muttered.
I didn’t let him know that I agreed with him. She did look older. Problem was, even now, I remembered a version of her that consisted of messily braided hair, smudges of dirt on an innocent face, and scuffed up knees. I still saw the girl that used to follow me everywhere, because boys were more fun to play with than girls. Or maybe it was just because, geographically, I was the closest kid her age all those summers.
Didn’t matter. She was in the do-not-touch category for a lot of reasons. Only one of which, I knew, would work to deter Travis from the path I suspected he was going to take. As I took a left out of the driveway, onto the dirt road that led into town, I laid it out for him.
“If Joe catches you going after his granddaughter, you’ll be out of a job real quick.”
Travis made a grunting noise from the front seat, and I snuck a glance at him. The smirk on his face faded as my words sank in.
“Not to mention, he’ll probably chop your balls off,” I added for good measure.
And I meant it. One thing I’d learned from being neighbors with the man my entire life was that you didn’t mess with him, his farm, or his family. Though he had always considered my family an extension of his own, I didn’t think he’d hesitate to castrate me for messing around with Ana. Travis would have no chance.
Confident that I’d pushed Ana off his radar, I dropped my friend off at his old two-story house in the middle of town. The Pit was another block from there, and currently filling up with cars ahead of the usual Saturday night rush at the arcade/diner/ice cream parlor. As the only place in town for teens to hang out, it was almost always busy.
Mama made good tips weekend nights—money that we desperately needed now. Tonight, she worked the early shift. Still good money, but not enough. Never enough.
Which was why I took on every repair job Joe Maxwell offered. Hopefully, he would have another job once the barn roof was fixed. Because with no recent word from my brother, almost a year and a half into his service in Vietnam, it was just Mama and me struggling to pay the bills.
Keep the house. That was Mama’s priority.
I waited in the truck as she exited the building’s side door. The wind caught her dark hair and flimsy skirt as she darted across the busy parking lot, and I chuckled at her expense as she struggled to hold both in place. Seeing the scowl on her face, I reached across the seat to help her with the door.
She hoisted herself onto the seat with a sigh, and smoothed her hair back into place. Her nose wrinkled after she settled, and got a good look at me. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”
“That’s what working on the roof of a barn in this heat does to me, Mama.”
I rose a hand to wave at the car full of senior girls gesturing frantically as I maneuvered the truck out of the parking lot. If I didn’t have my mama with me, I would stop. Instead, I settled for sneaking a peek in the rearview mirror as I drove off.
Mama didn’t notice. As I expected, she dove into a discussion about the unseasonably warm weather. Even for coastal North Carolina, it was warm for January. I could only hope it evened out this summer, or every farmer would have a wilted crop come September.
As we bounced along the dirt road toward home, I found myself inspecting the Maxwells’ field that separated their farm from ours. How Joe had managed to farm it on his own all these years was impressive. He didn’t own much—maybe a little more than we did—but it was still amazing that he’d managed to maintain it. Last season’s crop, the first after my brother got drafted, had been a bitch for Mama and me to harvest ourselves. I was not looking forward to another season on our own.
Just another reason to hope my brother came home soon.
“Did Caroline and the kids make it in today?”
I snapped out of my daze, and turned a confounded expression on Mama. “What?”
“I asked if the Maxwells’ daughter and grandkids made it okay,” she repeated.
“Uh, yeah. They got there a little before I left.”
Mama remained silent as I stopped at the end of our drive to collect the mail. The mailbox wobbled on its post as I slammed the door shut—just another thing that needed to be mended around here.
“How does she look?”
Mama finally broke her silence, and I blinked at the gravel driveway a few times before coming to a stop beside the house. Why did she care what Ana looked like? Maybe she thought I was planning to—
“Is it as bad as Marly said?” Mama asked, and I shook my head in confusion. “Caroline. Ben, is Caroline as bad off as Marly said?
“Oh, uh . . . yeah. She didn’t look good. Really skinny and weak.”
Mama clucked her tongue as she reached for the door handle, then stopped to pin me with a look. “What’s wrong with you today?”
“Huh?”
What Comes Next Page 2