by Cora Brent
Cord was standing in the garage of his small rental house when we drove up. He was talking to some dude who looked familiar. Cord waved and headed down the driveway immediately. When I got a look at the other guy I realized he was Saylor’s cousin, another former Emblemer.
“How’s it going, Brayden?” I asked after I slapped my own cousin on the back and started hauling the gigantic crib boxes out of the pickup bed.
Brayden’s huge glasses were sliding down his nose. He pushed them up and grinned. “Well, well. Deck Gentry, as I live and breathe. I hear you’ve joined the exodus.”
“You heard right,” I said, setting one of the big flat boxes against the side of the garage. Cord set the other box beside it.
“I don’t know how to thank you for this,” he said somewhat bashfully.
“You already have,” I assured him. When he smiled at me I suffered an involuntary flashback to the ugly final scene with Benton. Not because Cord reminded me of his father, but because I was reminded that we might be brothers after all.
Brothers. Cousins. Doesn’t make a fucking difference.
Jenny wanted to say hello to Saylor so I followed her into the house. Say was propped up on her bed with her massive belly and Brayden’s pretty girlfriend for company.
“Funny,” she remarked wryly after accepting a kiss on the cheek, “it never occurred to me that bed rest literally meant bed rest.”
“Leisure suits you, dear,” remarked Brayden’s girlfriend, playfully patting Say’s stomach. I could recall the girl’s name now. It was Millie.
Saylor and Millie started fussing over Jenny so I retreated outside and helped Cord lug the cribs to the tiny room that would serve as the nursery for his twin daughters. But as soon as we got the boxes open a cascade of furniture parts and screws fell out. Brayden lounged in the doorway and watched us try to make sense of the instructions, which seemed to have been written by a diabolical chemist. After a few minutes and a lot of confusion, Brayden shooed us aside and took over the project. From there it took less than a half hour of Brayden ordering us to hold this or that heavy piece in place before the two cribs were complete.
“And that’s how it’s done,” he said, rubbing his hands together and gloating.
“You’re the man,” said Cord as he proudly surveyed our handiwork.
“Thanks for noticing,” smirked Brayden as he started to break up the boxes.
I didn’t hang around for very long after that. I felt obligated to get Creed’s truck back to him. Plus I’d promised Jenny that the day belonged to her.
Cordero actually forced me into a man hug before he let me walk out the door.
“Thanks, brother,” he said with real emotion. I was startled until I realized he just meant the word figuratively.
Jenny noticed that something was eating at me but she didn’t press me about it. She waited until we’d returned Creed’s truck to him. Then she hugged me around the waist as she got settled behind me on the bike.
“Deck,” she said softly. “I know where I want to go today.”
“Anywhere, baby.” I meant that but when she said where it was she wanted to go I was surprised. I turned to look at her.
“You sure?”
She nodded and sighed. “Yes. I have to. I mean, I’m not even sure she’ll be there. Of course I have no way to know what hours she works, but before I can really move on I need to look her in the eye. That’s all. I just need to stand in front of her and do that.”
“And I’ll be standing next to you,” I said and kissed her quickly before firing up the bike.
I would stand next to her.
Today. Tomorrow. As long as she wanted me.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
JENNY
It was a heat wave in the middle of February. Even though central Arizona typically boasted some of the highest temperatures in the country, ninety degrees was a little unusual for Valentine’s Day. People had shed their wintry sweatshirts in response to the weather and it seemed like there was suddenly skin everywhere. I had to push past some of it in order to get through the door of Cluck This, which was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. Quent already had a table though and he waved me over.
“Hey, gorgeous,” he greeted me, and we hugged warmly.
“Missed you,” I said honestly as I sat down in a red vinyl chair. “Feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”
He wagged his finger. “Sixteen days.”
“Jeez, you really counted?”
Quent smiled vaguely. Then he seemed amused as he checked me out. “You look good. Really good. I think semen agrees with you.”
I coughed. “No complaints.”
“I also think you need to tell me more about this guy you’re shacking up with.”
“We’re not shacking up. I just, well, um…”
“Spend every day and night with him so that you don’t have time for old friends anymore.” I must have blushed because Quent laughed and patted my arm. “Just teasing you, Jen. It’s nice to see you joining civilization. By the way, I ordered you a three piece basket with fries.”
I twisted a strand of my hair around my finger. Across the restaurant a busy, flustered Stephanie saw me and flashed a smile before scurrying back to the kitchen to grab some more chicken baskets.
“Quent, I saw my mother the other day.”
“What?” He gaped at me. “Where?”
The restaurant was loud and Quent had to lean forward to hear me properly. As I talked I could feel my heart quickening as I relived the moment when we’d come face to face after three painful years.
“I’d never seen her in common clothes, never in all my life. I guess I started to believe I would never see her again. Then one day there she was, folding men’s shirts at the Scottsdale mall. I just stared at her, Quent. It was like noticing a celebrity at Wal-Mart only she wasn’t famous. She was my mother. She loved me and took care of me and then for some reason I will never understand, she allowed my father to ship me off to a nightmare. You know, after that old bastard they’d wedded me to croaked in his sleep, I was returned to her house in Jericho Valley.” I paused. Somewhere nearby a child cried and his mother hushed him. “When they sent me back to her we barely spoke. I couldn’t forgive her. You have to understand, I hadn’t seen a thing of the world. I wanted out but I didn’t know how. Then one afternoon a reporter was driving through, one who happened to know my sister. She offered me the chance I needed. I took it. And a split second before the doors of the van closed, severing me from Jericho Valley for good, I saw my mother. She stood not twenty five yards away. Our eyes met one final time and she smiled.”
Stephanie breezed by, dropping off our chicken baskets and shooting me a curious look before being called away to answer a bellowing plea for more ketchup.
Quent stared at me, wide-eyed. He didn’t even glance down at his food. “Did she smile at you this time, Jen?”
I sighed, remembering how it had gone. By the time Deck and I got to the mall I was nervous. I was glad he was with me. He was quiet as we strolled through the brightly lit aisles but he kept a comforting hand on my lower back. I thought the chances were slim that I would see her at all but then, when I turned a corner, there she was. She looked up at my approach and the pleasant smile she wore for the public froze. And then it vanished completely.
“Jennetta.” Her face was stricken, instantly pale.
Mama, I thought. But nothing came out of my mouth.
Quent was waiting for me to answer and I shook my head. “No. She said my name and then I realized I had nothing to say back. So I left, Quent. I just left her there in the men’s section of Macy’s while Deck chased after me. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t upset. It doesn’t make sense, but I guess I just wanted her to see what had become of me. And once that was done there was nothing else.”
My friend nodded sagely. “It does make sense. The one thing we always had in common, you and me. The burden of rotten mothers.”
I picked
at my chicken. “Maybe I’ll try again sometime. But I don’t think so.”
“So what did your sister say about it?”
“I didn’t tell her.”
“Will you?”
“I should.” I smiled at the thought of Promise. “You should know my sister. I swear you’ve never met anyone braver or better.”
“Well I have an answer to that,” Quent said with a gentle grin. “You’d be pretty tough to outdo in my book, Jenny Smith.” He started eating his chicken with gusto and we switched to happier topics. We gushed poetically over the men in our lives and spent a happy hour relishing the easy comfort of friendship.
When Quent and I finally parted I took a long, circuitous walk around the perimeter of campus, enjoying the sunshine and the busy clamor of the university. It was only the other day, as I was sitting in the middle of freshman biology, when it occurred to me that I no longer felt out of sync. Maybe it had something to do with my new-found happiness with Deck but I thought it was more than that. The sense that I was just a roaming, displaced soul was no longer there. I was comfortable with where I was, with who I was.
I was crossing in front of the strangely beautiful auditorium that had been designed decades earlier by Frank Lloyd Wright when I sat down abruptly on a nearby bench. The sun felt pleasant on my skin and for a few minutes I was just grateful to be beneath it, grateful to be me. I didn’t hesitate to make the call.
Promise had only returned to working as a midwife part time following the birth of her second child. She answered her phone on the second ring.
“Jenny!”
“Promise. How are my darling niece and my sweet nephew?”
She laughed. “Ellie is a doll, already sleeping through the night. And Ash…oh my gosh he’s so full of life and so smart.”
“Just like his daddy,” I said, grinning as I pictured all of them out there together, living happily in Quartzsite.
“Just like his daddy,” Promise agreed and I could hear her smiling too. “So how are things with Deck?”
“Hmm, amazing. That man is incredible, Promise.”
“Hey,” she warned. “Watch it, you’re still my little sister.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll keep my imagery G-rated.”
“I’m sure he primly kisses your cheek every night before depositing you at the dorm.”
“Well, he kisses me somewhere every night. The location doesn’t really resemble a cheek though.”
“Jenny!”
“Your fault. Remember, you were the one who once had the magical sex talk with me, telling me how good it could be.”
Promise sighed. “Yes, and I am glad you’ve learned that for yourself even if it does pain my heart a little to see my innocent girl all grown.” Her voice grew wistful. “You always were the sweetest child, Jenny.”
“No I wasn’t.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t sweet. Or innocent. Inside I was furious, rebellious.”
My sister sighed. “No one would blame you,” she said gently. “You had every reason.”
“Promise, I didn’t just feel that way. I acted that way.”
“Jen, I don’t get it. What do you mean?”
So I told my sister how I had committed a desperate revolt against the Faithful overlords. She hadn’t heard this story before. It explained why I’d been married off so abruptly, although my father and uncle didn’t need much of an excuse to begin with. Promise gasped when I got to the part where I discovered Reese had been killed on the streets of Phoenix after being exiled. The last chapter she already knew; how she and I been reunited and then how I’d gone to live with our brother in California to enjoy the blissful life of an untroubled teenager. If she was grieved to hear that my happy ending wasn’t as simple as it seemed, that I had never been as simple as I seemed, then she didn’t say so.
“I’m sorry,” I said, staring down into my own shadow on the sidewalk.
On the other end of the line the baby fussed but Promise soothed her and she quieted down. “For what, little sister?”
A lone tear fell down my cheek. I was sorry that I hadn’t been capable of her level of honesty. I was sorry for hurting her with this burden now. And that the next one might hurt her too. I swallowed hard and continued.
“I saw Mama. She didn’t go find a place with another order like I thought she would. She works at a mall.” My voice rose angrily. “At a goddamn mall, Promise, can you believe it?”
“Jenny.”
“She dresses common and looks younger than she did three years ago.”
Promise sighed. “I know.”
I thought I’d heard her wrong. “You know? I don’t understand, how the hell do you know?”
“Grayson and I hired a detective to find her last year. I’ve never been to see her, Jenny. I just wanted to know where she was. Maybe I should have told you but you never ever talked about her. It seemed you didn’t want to know, like you’d been able to leave it all behind. It might have been an overbearing act of protection on my part, but I didn’t want to bring the memories back to you.”
“They never really left me, Promise. I think trying to push away the past only made it more powerful.” I looked up as a pair of laughing young women passed on the sidewalk in front of me. In my mind’s eye I pictured them for a moment in the long, stifling dresses of the Faithful. But I blinked and saw instead that these young women were as carefree as they deserved to be. I breathed a sigh of relief. “So Jericho Valley still hasn’t left me. I’ve learned to live with them now though, the memories. Good or bad, happy or rotten, it’s all wrapped up somehow in who I’ve become.”
“I understand. I do.”
“Of course you do.” I brushed my tears away. They’d served their purpose and for now there didn’t need to be any more. “You know, Promise, I’m actually ditching the whole business major thing. It’s just not me. In fact I’m going in a completely different direction, one you’ll appreciate. I’ve applied for the nursing program.”
Promise was enthusiastic. She loved helping people, loved her job as a midwife. I couldn’t imagine a better role model than my sister.
“I left something out,” I said a little guiltily. “It’s about Deck.”
She groaned. “I’m not sure I can stomach hearing it.”
“Don’t be obscene. It’s just that I wanted you to know that I’ve sort of been staying with him.”
“Staying with him? Like living with him?”
“More or less.”
“Which is it?”
“More.”
I thought I heard her smiling. “You’re an adult, Jen. Tough as it is for me to admit it sometimes, you are. And you have a right to your own life, your own love, your own path.”
Talking so frankly and so openly with my sister had its own healing power. When I rose from that bench I was even stronger, more complete, than I had been when I sat down. We are all conceived at least partly from the echoes of our past. But we have the power to overcome the things that have damaged us. We can forge ahead if we choose.
As soon as I heard the familiar ringtone my face broke into a smile. “Hey hot stuff,” I said into the phone.
“You look lonely, baby. You waiting for someone special?”
I swiveled around. “Stalker,” I accused. I could see him. He was a block away, on the other side of the street and looking as sultry and dangerous as ever.
“You know little girl, you’d look damn fine on the back of my bike.”
“Well I do like to look fine. So why don’t you swing on over here and get me?”
He was already gunning the engine. I watched him roll out of the parking lot where he’d been idling. Less than a minute and a single U-turn later he was beside me.
“Hurry up,” he said mildly as he tossed me a helmet. “Traffic’s coming.”
I secured the helmet and jumped on, reveling as I always did in the way his hard body felt inside the circle of my arms. Deck drove straight to the apartment
he’d rented only yesterday. It was mere blocks from campus and had no furniture except for a king-sized mattress that was delivered an hour after he got the keys. We’d already broken it in last night, rocking the springs for hours before collapsing in a sweaty heap together. I figured Deck wouldn’t mind repeating history and I was ready to oblige him. He held back when he unlocked the door though, holding it open and waving me through with a gentlemanly flourish.
I took two steps inside and then stopped, staring. I dropped my backpack and covered my mouth in astonishment.
“So it is possible to render you speechless,” Deck joked as he wrapped his arms around me from behind and swayed gently back and forth.
“Well,” I managed to say, “I know how much you appreciate women who know when to shut up.” Somehow in the span of the six hours I’d been gone Deck had managed to fully furnish the place, complete with a sea of red rose petals scattered from the sofa to the bedroom.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” Deck whispered.
“I’ve never done the whole Valentine’s Day thing before,” I admitted.
Deck reached down grabbed up a handful of rose petals and then let them seductively fall one by one. Once he was empty-handed he took an abrupt interest in my breasts, running the back of his hand across my nipples.
“Well then,” he said in a lusty tone I recognized quite well by now. “This can be the first time for both of us.”
“What do you mean?”
“First time to celebrate the day reserved for lovers.”
“And how do you want to celebrate?”
“By exercising my cock.”
“You’re so articulate, Declan.”
“You’re so sexy, Jennetta.”
I pulled away and turned to face him with a challenge. “You know what? It’s hot in here.”
“It is hot in here, “ he agreed and promptly yanked his shirt off. I stepped back, as I sometimes still did when confronted by the sculpted flawlessness of his body. He was the archetype of manhood. He was perfect.