“A plastic apron or some rain gear would have been nice,” Trey commented after Matty lifted Spanky from the tub and rubbed him dry.
“I think they used to have some, but—”
“Let me guess,” Trey said dryly, as he rinsed the last of the dirty water down the drain. “Budget cuts.”
Matty shrugged and they went outside. Spanky didn’t seem to quite know what to with himself. He tentatively sniffed at the grass before moving away and finally deciding it was okay to let go.
“How’d you hurt yourself?” Matty asked Trey.
Refreshing, Trey thought. Someone who didn’t know his history and wouldn’t hold it against him. “Old football injury,” he answered. “Messed up my knee pretty badly.”
“You gonna limp forever?”
“I hope not. I started physical therapy again. Believe it or not, today’s a good day for me.”
Matty gave him an assessing look. “You play here? At Hendersonville High?”
“Yeah. When you were still wearing diapers.”
“Team’s going to suck this year,” Matty informed him.
“So you volunteer here? I thought you were doing community service, same as me.” Trey wanted to change the subject before Matty could ask more questions about his football career.
“Me and some friends, we did some stupid stuff. I got probation.”
“What kind of stupid stuff gets you busted these days? Unless you’d rather not say.” Trey was genuinely curious. Matty seemed like a decent kid. Mary Ann Simpson obviously thought highly of him. Maybe Matty’d gotten a bad rap. Or maybe a local cop had it in for him.
“Smokin’ weed. Vandalizing school property. Stuff like that.”
They were slouching against the outside wall of the building, gazing at Spanky while he poked around in the grass.
“Back in my day…” Trey hesitated. “Man, I sound old, don’t I?”
“You are old.” A smile flashed across Matty’s face, giving Trey a glimpse of the little boy he’d been not long ago.
Pretending annoyance, Trey cleared his throat. “Back when I was your age, what are you, sixteen? Seventeen?”
“Sixteen.”
“Weed wasn’t all that popular but beer was. There was this old cop used to be on duty on the weekends. He’d bust us pretty regularly. Dragged my sorry ass home a couple of times. Always let me off with a warning. Probably because he knew my parents would give me a stiffer sentence than he could.”
Matty glanced sideways at Trey. “Did they?”
“Oh, yeah. First I’d get grounded. No car. No phone. No extracurricular activities. My dad would invent all kinds of work for me to do, stuff he knew I hated. Helping him with inventory at the hardware store. Cleaning out the garage. Pulling weeds.
“Plus he’d give me this sort of tight-lipped silent treatment to let me know how much I’d disappointed him.”
“Too bad kids don’t have something like that to let their parents know when they’ve disappointed them,” Matty put in.
Trey turned to lean a shoulder against the wall so he could look at Matty directly. “Huh. I never thought about my parents disappointing me. They were great parents. Still are, actually.”
“Lucky you,” Matty said grimly. “What about your mom? Did she give you the silent treatment too?”
Trey grinned. “My mom never stayed mad at me for long. She’d tell me what she thought about whatever I’d done and she’d go along with my dad’s punishment. But she’d make up for it by cooking my favorite dinner and baking cookies. Hugging me when he wasn’t around.”
“That must have been nice.” Matty’s tone turned wistful. He gazed out across the fenced area.
“What about your—”
“Come on, Spanky.” Matt clapped his hands, effectively cutting Trey off. The dog ambled over and Matty secured the leash.
Matty introduced Trey to a couple of the other staff members and showed him a few other things he could do to help out on the days he was there, one of which was cleaning the bathroom. Matty handed him a wad of paper towels and spritzed the glass front door with window cleaner, indicating Trey could do the hard part.
“Missed a spot,” Matty informed him when Trey thought he was done.
“Smart-ass,” Trey told him good-naturedly under his breath. Matty grinned.
As they were leaving, Trey glanced at the clouds that had formed overhead. The air had cooled and a breeze had picked up. A few fat raindrops began to fall. He saw Matty removing his bicycle from the nearby bike rack. Trey unlocked the Cayenne with a click of the remote. “You want a ride?” he called to Matty.
Matty glanced at the sky and then at Trey’s vehicle. More raindrops fell. Thunder rumbled and a flash of lightning streaked across the sky.
“Come on.” Trey lifted the hatch and lowered the back seat while Matty hustled over with his bike. He hoisted it in and jogged around to the passenger door.
He buckled his seatbelt and sat back, doing his best not to show his awe. A Porsche Cayenne? Silently Matty admired the buttery leather seats and luxurious interior. The race-car design of the instrument panel and gearshift.
“Nice ride,” he said as Trey pulled out of the shelter parking lot.
“You got a license?” Trey asked, glancing at him before returning his gaze to the road.
“Yeah.” Matty didn’t want to tell Trey he’d barely used his driver’s license. He had no car and nowhere to go if he did.
“I’ll make you a deal. You clean the toilets, I’ll let you drive next time.”
Matty shot a suspicious glance in Trey’s direction. “Really?” Probably another case of an adult promising something he wouldn’t deliver.
“If you want.”
Trey acted like it was no big deal so Matty tried to do the same, but it didn’t come easily. “Sure,” he said as nonchalantly as he could.
“You hungry? I’m starving. I’ll buy. Since you did all the hard work today.”
Rain had begun to pelt the windshield. Matty refrained from pointing out the obvious. Stopping somewhere to eat meant they’d be soaked by the time they got inside.
“There’s a Sonic out near the overpass, right?” Trey asked.
“Yeah,” Matty acknowledged. “But I live on the other side of town.”
“You in a hurry to get home? I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“No. It’s okay.”
The rain kept falling, but underneath the Sonic drive-in area, Trey parked and killed the engine. He lowered the windows and asked Matty what he wanted. Matty’d only been to the Sonic one time, over a year ago, after it first opened. Because he wanted to act like it was no big deal, he stuck to the basics. A hamburger, fries and a root beer.
“So what are you doing all summer? You got a job?” Trey asked after he’d placed their order.
“No.” He didn’t want to admit to Trey that he slept as late as he could and then he hung out with twelve-year-old twins until their mother came home from work. The twins were as bored as he was. When Lisa came home, she turned into a drill sergeant, setting all three boys to work, cleaning the house and helping her with dinner preparation. Matty sensed Lisa didn’t quite know what to do with him. She treated him as if he were a twelve-year-old as well, assigning him tasks and serving him a meal. At some point during the day Dan would appear. He’d engage in half-hearted conversation with his son and grandsons while he rummaged in the refrigerator or pantry. He’d sit at the table and absently gaze at the newspaper while he ate a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast. His ghost-like presence had a dampening effect on the boys’ normal shenanigans and cutting up.
Most evenings Matty biked over to Mamacita’s to check up on her and keep her company.
“You can’t spend every day at the shelter.”
“No. Mostly I’m only there on Saturdays.”
“You want a job?”
A flicker of suspicion flashed through Matty’s head once again. Everything about this guy seemed too
easy. “Doing what?”
“I’m living in my grandparents’ old place. I need somebody to mow the grass and weed my grandmother’s garden. There are a couple of outbuildings about to fall down. I thought between the two of us, we could help them along. I haven’t even looked in the barn, but I imagine there’s a lifetime of stuff out there to go through and decide what to do with.”
“What are you paying?” Matty already knew he’d do it. He could hardly believe a job had landed in his lap. After filling out applications at the Dixie Cream and Piggly Wiggly, he discovered jobs for kids like him weren’t very plentiful in Hendersonville.
“I guess minimum wage to start. What’s that? Eight dollars an hour now?”
“Less than that,” Matty told him.
“Can’t be much less. I’ll start you at eight, anyway. See how it goes. If you’re interested.”
“I’m interested.”
Their food arrived and they dug in, shelving conversation for a while. Trey selected a CD in the stereo. Matty didn’t know what it was, but it was bluesy and rock and roll mixed together and he liked it.
By the time Trey drove back through Hendersonville, following Matty’s directions, the rain had let up.
“Right here’s good,” Matty said, indicating for Trey to pull over at the next corner.
“So where should I pick you up Monday morning?” he asked.
“Here’s good. Thanks for the ride.” Trey released the rear hatch lock mechanism and Matty removed his bike.
Trey lowered the passenger window. “Eight a.m., right?” he called.
“I’ll be here,” Matty assured him.
“What’s he doing here?” Baylee asked Trey on Monday morning. She was loading the dishwasher with everything Trey had allowed to accumulate in the sink over the weekend. From the window she had a clear view of the flower garden, where Matty was toiling away pulling weeds.
Trey’d given him a pair of Grandpa Mike’s gardening gloves and hauled a wheelbarrow out of the barn so he could cart away the unwanted vegetation. Trey hoped Matty knew better than he did what was a weed and what was a flower.
He followed Baylee’s gaze out the window. “He’s weeding the garden,” he told her, wondering why she expected him to state the obvious.
Baylee sent him a glance he couldn’t quite decipher. “I can see he’s weeding the garden. What I meant is why is he here. As in, where did you find this particular person to weed the garden?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Not yet,” Baylee muttered. She turned on the hot water, squirted soap suds into a pan and began to scrub.
Trey leaned against the counter, cradling his nearly empty coffee mug. Wow. He barely knew her, but he could tell by the set of her shoulders and her grim concentration on the pan she was scrubbing that something was bothering her.
His gaze flickered once more to the view from the window. “Do you know him?”
“Yes.”
That probably shouldn’t have surprised Trey, but it did. Where would Baylee have run across a kid like Matty? “How?”
Baylee let a beat pass before she said, “He’s my brother.”
Trey took another good look at Matty, who had picked up a pile of weeds and dropped them into the wheelbarrow. He moved to a new section of the garden and started pulling. Trey brought his gaze back to Baylee. “Funny, he doesn’t look anything like you.”
“He’s adopted.”
“You’re not pleased I gave your brother a job.”
“You don’t know anything about him.”
“I didn’t know much about you when I hired you,” Trey pointed out.
Baylee rinsed the pan and upended it on a towel she’d laid on the counter before she turned toward him.
“How’d you meet him?”
“At the animal shelter. I started my community service there on Saturday.”
“Uh-huh. Do you know why Matty was there?”
“He’s doing community service, same as me.” Trey was mystified. What was her problem?
“Did he tell you he’s on probation?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why?”
“Doing stupid teenage stuff and getting caught.”
“That’s right. He keeps doing it. Cutting school. Breaking his curfew.”
“School’s out now, so that’s hardly an issue, is it?”
“My point is that Matty doesn’t recognize authority. He’s a loner and you need to watch out.”
“I wasn’t planning on giving him the PIN numbers to my bank accounts.”
“Ha ha.”
“All I’m doing is giving the kid a summer job doing menial labor at minimum wage so he can earn a little bit of money. I like him,” Trey added, although it had nothing to do with anything.
Baylee glanced wistfully out the window once more. “I like him too, but—consider yourself warned. I’m going to start the laundry.”
Trey lingered at the counter, watching Matty as he worked. What was it, he wondered, that Baylee wasn’t telling him? “I think I’ll go see how he’s doing.”
After she put in a load of laundry, Baylee went in to the dining room to organize Trey’s mail. There were several bank statements and correspondence from a law firm in Jacksonville; a few ten-by-thirteen-inch envelopes with the return addresses of investment firms; bills from credit card companies and local utilities; and several envelopes that held checks from various entities.
Nothing of a personal nature from what she could see. She opened them and arranged them in individual stacks. She dusted the table’s surface as best she could, maneuvering around the organized piles of papers and mail and magazines before moving on to the bookshelves.
Trey had unpacked more of his belongings since she’d been here last. She paused to check the titles of some of the books he’d arranged on the shelves. Several on Eastern religious practices, Zen and Tao for the most part. A few biographies written by or about American business leaders or political figures. Some that appeared to deal with addiction and recovery as well as a few with self-help titles. “Huh,” Baylee said to herself as she flicked her duster over them.
On a low shelf was a stack of black-and-white composition books. She lifted them up and set them on the corner of the table. She opened the cover of the top one and leafed randomly through it. The pages were filled with Trey’s scrawling, loopy handwriting.
A passage jumped out at her, and she paused to read even though she knew she shouldn’t. Hayley doesn’t love me anymore. Not that I blame her. I lost the best thing that ever happened to me and yet I still can’t figure out how I fucked it all up so bad.
The entries weren’t dated and seemed to free-flow from one into the next. Baylee set the notebook aside and picked up another one, opening it at random. She darted a glance over her shoulder before she gave in to the urge to read one more entry. My fucking knee is killing me. Jesus Christ could they give me something? Anything? An aspirin for Chrissakes. How do they expect me to live like this? I want to kill Brad. He lets me yell at him all I want and he just sits there. When I calm down he says, “How do you feel right now?” And I tell him. I feel like a caged animal. I hate you but I hate myself more—
Baylee slammed the notebook shut and put it back in the stack when she heard the back door open.
She placed the entire stack back on the shelf and sped to the other side of the room, pretending to busy herself with dusting the windowsill. A flash of guilt shot through her for invading his privacy. She had no right.
When Trey’s footsteps stopped, she turned to see him leaning against the doorway, arms across his chest, watching her.
The thought of how close she’d come to turning down this job returned. Trey’s mere presence sent a sort of sick, fluttery feeling of anticipation through her. She had the feeling he was studying her while he kept his distance. Like she was a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
She ran her du
st cloth along the window frames, then moved on to a small walnut cabinet nearby. “Fine.”
Her back was to him, but she knew Trey hadn’t moved. Her senses prickled with awareness of him. She stopped dusting and turned. “Was there something…?” She lost her train of thought, derailed by the intent gaze which belied his relaxed stance.
“Something?” A corner of his mouth quirked up.
“Sorry. It’s your house. Do whatever you want. I’m not used to being watched while I work.”
“Then none of your clients are male.”
Baylee frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Trey blinked. Straightened. “Uh, nothing. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
“No. You didn’t. Never mind.” Baylee reached for a different rag from her carryall and picked up a bottle of glass cleaner. She moved back to the china hutch, spritzed the glass and started to wipe.
Trey moved into the room behind her and took a seat at the table. In the mirrored glass at the back of the cabinet she could see him staring at the littered dining-table-cum-desk.
“I opened the mail,” Baylee told him. “And organized it. I’ll write checks for the bills after you check them over. Those investment reports can be filed. There are some checks there that should be deposited. I can drop them off at the bank on my way home if you want. I wasn’t sure what to do with the legal correspondence.”
She’d finished with the glass, and there wasn’t anything left to clean except the floor, which she’d do last along with all the others. She turned to find Trey’s speculative gaze directed at her. He rubbed a thumbnail along his bottom lip, drawing her attention there.
There was a glint of something in his eyes, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “What?” she asked, hoping he’d shed some light on whatever was going on his head.
He gave her his easy grin as if he was quite pleased about something. “I think you might be the best thing that’s happened to me since I’ve been back.” A jolt of pleasure washed through Baylee before he abruptly squashed it by gesturing at the neat stacks of paper she’d created. “Do you have any idea how much I appreciate this?”
The First Time Again: The Braddock Brotherhood, Book 3 Page 10
