That photo was taken right around the time he’d gotten in a nasty little argument with Mike Roderick on the playground over whose turn it was to use the red rubber ball at recess. Roderick had resorted to the sort of tactic guaranteed to chop Eli off at the knees. He’d mocked his stutter.
“Eli Barlow takes f-f-f-f-orever to get a word out!”
Eli was tall even then, but he’d frozen. Mute and paralyzed with shame.
And Glory had hurtled out of nowhere.
He’d snagged her by the collar before she could take a swing at Roderick, but her arms were windmilling. “I’d rather wait forever to hear him say one word than listen to you say anything, booger face!”
To his credit, Mike Roderick knew a little girl had just shamed him but good. He’d apologized.
Eli didn’t stutter anymore. Mike Roderick was now on Hellcat Canyon’s City Planning Commission, a fine upstanding citizen with two kids and a mortgage. The two of them were on perfectly cordial terms. But damned if Eli didn’t look at him and still think “booger face.”
Glory would fight to the death for people she cared about. She was a fighter, period.
Which is why it was so strange she was still in Hellcat Canyon. And it seeded a traitorous little suspicion: Had the fight gone out of her? Had she decided to do the Greenleaf thing, which was nothing?
He jerked when his cell phone erupted in a ring.
He lunged to answer it. “Hey, Cam, what’s up?”
Becky Cameron was a deputy in the nearby town of Black Oak who’d been married to a big sweetheart of a Samoan guy for twenty years, and she had three adorable giggly kids.
“You sound a little groggy. Were you sleeping, heartthrob?”
He cast his eyes ceiling-ward. For a time there, his image had been all over the news thanks to the meth ring bust—print and digital and television. His colleagues still gave him endless shit about it, mostly involving nicknames. “Heartthrob.” “America’s sweetheart.” That sort of thing.
In other words, they were proud of him.
“Just worn out from a long day of saving Gotham City. You?”
“Not as awesome as you, precious. But listen, I wanted to tell you something in confidence. Totally off the record, just a rumor, but where there’s smoke there’s fire and so forth, otherwise I wouldn’t be calling you now.”
“Shoot.”
“Word is that Davenport is retiring at the end of the year.”
He was quiet for some time.
“Huh.”
Which was Eli’s way of saying, “Holy crap.”
Davenport had been county sheriff for twenty years. The end of the year was a month and a half away. This was indeed monumental news.
Cam was a cousin of a cousin or something like that. She had her finger on the pulse.
“And Devlin is of course being talked about as his replacement.”
Leigh Devlin was the obvious choice, since he was the current undersheriff. A good man, smart as hell, gruff. He’d worked with Eli’s dad, and he’d been immeasurably kind to Eli’s family after his dad was killed. It was Leigh Devlin Eli had turned to for advice when he’d decided not to take that football scholarship and instead become a sheriff’s deputy.
And suddenly Eli knew exactly where Cam was going with this.
“Among others, Barlow, your name came up for undersheriff.”
Yep. That confirmed it.
“You fall asleep on me, Fabio?”
“Fabio?”
“Hot guy on a lot of covers?” Cam tried.
“Okay, now you’re really reaching. And now I know what you do in your spare time.”
“Hey, at least I got a hobby. Who or what are you doing in your spare time?”
That question just made him feel bleak and surly, when what he wanted to do was savor the possibility of a triumph for a few moments longer.
“Shut up,” he finally said, with typical eloquence.
She laughed.
Undersheriff. He savored that word in his mind.
Second in command in the whole county. That would mean no patrolling. Almost double the income.
And leaving Hellcat Canyon for good.
“So anyway, Barlow, I thought you might like some time to think about what you want to do, when it comes down. In case it does. Is that cool?”
“Yeah, of course. Thanks, Cam.”
“I’m having a barbeque for my bae’s birthday in a few weeks. You comin’?”
“Love to. Remind me, though. Send me an e-mail or text.”
“’Kay. Night, lover boy.”
He snorted and ended the call, then exhaled and leaned back against the couch again.
A slow smile spread over his face. Undersheriff. The title made it sound like he needed a cape.
And all that did was make him think of Glory and her hair, and Sir Walter Raleigh and the cloak, and how much better good news became when he shared it with her, and how she hated him right now for doing what was essentially his job.
And his job . . . well, like it or not, he was his job and his job was him.
His smile faded.
Damn. He was also really freaking lonely.
He wished he could fast forward to the wife, the kids, the two cats, and the mutt dog he’d always imagined. Truth be told, it had always been hard to picture Glory in that context. Even though she loved her sister’s kids.
It was harder, though, to picture anyone else in it.
That was the paradox of his life. To be stretched out on a sort of Catherine wheel, pulled between equal and utterly opposing desires. And if you believed the legend of the Eternity Oak, he had only himself to blame.
But “martyr” had never been on the list of his ambitions.
He ran his thumb over her laughing face in that photo in his hand. As if he could dial back the past. That’s not how time worked, though.
He took one last deep breath. He’d survived endings before. He could make destiny his bitch. And he would get over this.
And then he finally put that picture of Glory in the drawer with all the rest of them and slammed it shut.
Chapter 4
“Gary Shaw, that Sierra Property Management fella, the one that Britt Langley works for? I hear he’s single.”
Glory’s drooping head shot up. She’d been inhaling coffee steam from a mug faded to a streaky yellow from countless journeys through the dishwasher. It was nine a.m. She’d spent the six previous hours mostly staring at her bedroom ceiling because her mind felt one way about Eli Barlow and her body felt another way entirely, and when her mind got tired, her libido took over. She’d flopped about in her bed like a pair of jeans in their old dryer. Irritable and yearning.
And she couldn’t get the last words he’d said to her out of her head.
Now she was sitting at the kitchen table with her mother, the anticipated foreclosure notice on the table between them. Truth be told, in the annals of Greenleaf History, it wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened, or even the first time this had happened since this house was built in 1960. Still, miracles were not to be expected.
And seeing a foreclosure notice in person did tend to elevate adrenaline.
“I feel like the entire first part of a conversation took place inside your head, Mama. Why on earth are you talking about the Sierra Property Management guy?”
Her mother looked alert and fully groomed, complete with lipstick, even if her clothes were as faded with laundering as Glory’s coffee mug. The radio, the one that had been in the family since before she was born and sat on the kitchen table between them, was on low.
“Baby girl, I’m just saying, that’s the kind of guy who would make a perfect starter husband for you. He won’t beat you, and if he tries you can outrun him. He’ll kick in a few years and you’ll still have your looks. He’ll leave you with all his properties—you sell ’em, move on to a bigger city, where the men have more money, and pretty soon you got yourself, oh, an Audi. God didn’t give you a
face or boobies like the ones you got without a plan in mind.”
She was only half joking. Charlotte Greenleaf was nothing if not a planner. Clearly the foreclosure notice had her thinking about Glory’s future.
Gary Shaw was probably sixty-three if he was a day. Hollywood probably contained its share of hot sixty-three-year-olds, but Hellcat Canyon sure didn’t. Every guy over sixty looked like Glenn Harwood, the owner of the Misty Cat Cavern, with a big comfortable stomach and a luxurious gray broom of a mustache.
Glory could have said, “I’m going to be a big rich rock star, Mama,” but that sounded as improbable as marrying Gary Shaw at the moment.
She sighed. “Mama, do you ever listen to yourself? It’s like the women’s movement never happened. And for the love of God, please don’t ever say ‘boobies’ again.”
“You think picking out a husband doesn’t require any business savvy? I do my due diligence on a guy before I buy in, use my assets and experience to make the sale, and then I sit back and enjoy the rewards and take my lumps, as the case may be. How, I ask you, is that different from those rich guys like Getty? Society wants to judge me, so be it. What I do takes nerve, baby doll.”
Glory was momentarily transfixed by this loopy rationale.
Then she zeroed in on the fatal flaw in this logic. “Getty never had to sleep next to Raymond Truxel.”
Charlotte tried to glare at her daughter, but she’d never been able to hold on to mad too long. She grinned instead. It was the smile that hooked men every time: wry, bittersweet, dazzling because every man thought she harbored some secret sadness, which wasn’t far wrong. “Every strategy has its risks.”
Two husbands had come and gone since Henry “Hank” Greenleaf crashed his car into a freeway meridian and flipped it three times off an overpass when Glory was three years old and Jonah was six. Two husbands who had given Glory two stepsiblings—her sister, Michelle, who had three kids (who all had different fathers) and lived two towns away, and her younger brother, John-Mark. Truth was, Charlotte wasn’t a great husband picker but she was, against all odds, an optimist who tended to see the best in people. That was both her nicest quality and her fatal flaw.
Hank’s ashes went on the mantel and the 1963 Martin 000–18 he’d gotten in trade instead of a paycheck for doing some off-the-books house painting went in the corner of the living room, more a monument than an instrument, dusted but otherwise ignored until Glory got her hands on it in one of her “I wonder what would happen if . . .” moments.
It had been like letting the genie out of the bottle.
Writing songs was the closest she’d ever come to being able to impose some kind of order or meaning onto anarchic feelings, the ones that outright made you suffer from the beauty or awfulness of them.
Which was how she’d ended up writing something like five songs about Eli.
Five so far.
They didn’t say the word Eli in the house anymore. They didn’t say Jonah, either.
Not after Glory had refused to go with her mom to visit her brother in jail three times in a row.
Jonah had apparently been paying his own and her mom’s mortgage with his ill-gotten gains.
All that money Glory saved toward leaving Hellcat Canyon had gone to keeping that roof over her mom’s head.
And now that money was gone, and the silly bank still wanted to be paid.
“Pass me those cigarettes, sweet pea, will you?” Charlotte added.
Glory handed her the crunched pack of Camels next to the napkin holder. “You better take it easy on those since (a) we don’t have much money for vices and (b) if you get a disease we can’t afford to send you to a doctor.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Glory Hallelujah, I’m still your mother.” It was reflexive and distracted and she said it over a Camel stuffed between her lips. “And I’m indestructible, child.”
This probably wasn’t far wrong.
Still, as a concession, her mother didn’t actually light the cigarette, and then she sighed and laid it down as if she were surrendering arms. And smiled at her daughter. It was absurd, but it made Glory feel loved. And just as when she fought, when Glory loved, she went all in.
How could you want to hold on to something exactly as much as you want to get away from it?
Her plans—which could be captioned as “get the hell out of Hellcat Canyon and get famous”—had long been a subliminal hum in the family. But no one she was related to had ever really talked it about it, unless it was Jonah, who’d allowed vaguely that she should “go for it.” There was simply no roadmap for success in the Greenleaf genetic makeup, and no vocabulary for it, either. Not one of them had ever before felt inclined toward a shred of ambition beyond enjoying each day. They wouldn’t dream of leaving any more than the trees covering the hillside would uproot and voluntarily hop a plane to New York City. They were as indigenous to the place as the forests and scrub covering the hills.
Unless, of course, you counted Jonah. Though the two hours between Hellcat Canyon and the prison cell he occupied hardly counted.
It was Eli who had championed her.
On impulse Glory peeked in the big old ashtray where, per household tradition, they emptied whatever spare change happened to be in their pockets. Last time she’d looked there was probably about five bucks in quarters and dimes and nickels.
Just as she suspected: it was empty except for a Post-it note and two strawberry Starbursts, neither of which had been there earlier. Strawberry was her favorite flavor as it so happened.
She read the Post-it:
Glory—I had to donate the change in this ashtray to my car repair fund and I’ll replace it when I can, but meanwhile, please enjoy these Starbursts.
Xoxo John-Mark
She rolled her eyes. John-Mark earned just enough money to buy the beater car he drove to work and pay for the room he rented. Though the beater car was an endless money hog. At least John-Mark was trying to make an honest living.
Still, five bucks was five bucks.
“Guess John-Mark stopped by,” Glory said dryly. She picked up the empty ashtray and shook it.
Her mom snorted. “I asked him to fix the gutters.” And then she reached over and turned up the radio suddenly. “I like this song.”
“Me, too.”
The boppy hooks and thick harmonies of “In the Forest,” a song by the improbably named band The Baby Owls, was so ubiquitous now she’d actually heard their neighbor, the nasty Mrs. Binkley, humming it as she ruthlessly clacked her big Edward Scissorhands trimmers over her hedges. Mrs. Binkley’s yard was flawlessly, almost spitefully, groomed. It was a passive-aggressive response to years of living next door to the Greenleafs, whose yard was untamed at best, and featured a number of pretty things growing in the wrong places, which rather described the Greenleafs themselves.
This is the chorus
Of we’re lost in the forest
You can never bore us
Because we’re lost in the forest
Just try to ignore us
While we’re lost in the forest
Going round and around and around
It was a pretty stupid song, but then the lyrics of a lot of great songs didn’t bear up well under close examination. Glory didn’t hold that against it.
Her mom hummed softly along. Funny, but Glory couldn’t remember hearing her mom ever sing out loud. Not even Christmas carols, and who could resist those?
“Maybe you could learn how to play it, Glory.”
“Already did, Mom.” It was an easy one. She’d even given it her own bluesy spin, just for fun.
“Good for you, honey.” But Charlotte said it absentmindedly. Her thoughts were back on their previous track. “You know . . . you might actually meet a movie star. Like Britt Langley did.”
A cable TV series set during the Gold Rush—called, appropriately, The Rush—had begun filming on location in Hellcat Canyon, taking advantage of rugged vistas and picturesque rivers and rocks a
nd so forth. It starred John Tennessee McCord, who had improbably swept Britt Langley off her feet. Understandably, it had been the talk of the town. And even YouTube.
“Heard she just quit waitressing down at the Misty Cat to go to Los Angeles with John Tennessee McCord,” her mom supplied. “Sort of a last-minute thing.”
Her mom somehow got all the gossip. It circulated through Hellcat Canyon the way Whiskey and Coyote Creeks did. Charlotte Greenleaf was a social creature, and people liked to talk to her anyway.
Glory humored her. “Gosh. Maybe I will.”
Britt was very pretty and well-spoken, and she’d always been quite nice to Glory, which patently wasn’t true of a lot of women in town. She couldn’t begrudge Britt either happiness or a movie star.
But Glory was pretty sure Britt Langley had never bitten a guy.
Or cursed his genitals.
And no movie star with a brain in his head would go out to the Plugged Nickel.
Damn. She needed to quit that job.
Her mom got up to refill her coffee. “You have any plans this weekend, sweet pea? You should be having some fun. Going on dates.”
Glory almost snorted. “Don’t worry, Mama. Pretty much every guy in Hellcat Canyon wants to go out with me. I’ll pick one when I’m ready.”
That statement was 100 percent correct, if one understood that “go out with her” meant “do her.” And Glory knew the difference, by God, and no one was more particular while looking more like a vixen.
Her mama liked bravado. “That’s my girl,” her mama encouraged absently, gazing out the window. Possible new husbands for herself probably scrolling like a stock market ticker through her brain.
The sun was up a little higher now and shining through the sheer, faded yellow curtains. Like the radio, those curtains had been in the kitchen for as long as Glory could remember. The Greenleafs were like the Simpsons, she thought. Their kitchen curtains never changed, either. They were covered in little corncobs.
She’d begun to feel like she was sentenced to play a game of computer solitaire long after no moves were left. Or maybe she was lost in the forest, going around and around and around and around.
Wild at Whiskey Creek Page 4