The materials I found at the hardware store in Merom today are piled at my feet. There are trays, rails, screws, and a battery-operated drill that I found in Peck’s garage. I also found some prepackaged hooks for kitchen cabinets to hang small saucepans or towels or bottles of cleaning liquids.
“I shouldn’t be here,” I singsong through clenched teeth. I bend to scoop up the stuff and scramble out of here when the door swings open.
Nana’s face lights up when she sees me. “Dylan! Oh, honey. I’m so glad to see you.” She scoots back so I can walk by. She spies the boxes at my feet. “What’s all that?”
“Well, I realize now that this might’ve been presumptuous of me, but I was bored today. I don’t start my job for a few more days. So I ventured over to Merom and spotted the hardware store, and before I knew it, I was leaving with the stuff to fix your cabinets.” I shrug meekly. “I hope that’s okay. If not, I can come back or even leave the stuff—”
“Stop,” she gushes. “This is the nicest thing. Please, come in.”
I hold the boxes in my arms and carry them inside. Nana shuts the door behind me.
She leads me through a formal living room that’s really not formal. Pictures dot the walls—tons of them. Baby pictures, others that I recognize as Peck and Machlan. The one closest to the doorway has to be a young Nana and Pops.
I pause, taking in the image. They’re standing in front of this house. Her arm is wrapped around his waist. She has the biggest smile on her face as she looks up at Pops. He’s tall, way taller than Peck, with shoulders that span a mile. He has a head of dark hair and a smirk that makes it impossible for him to deny Peck. It’s exact.
“What I wouldn’t give for those days,” Nana says. She’s standing beside me, looking longingly at the picture. “We had just had Eddie and Jessica.”
I furrow my brow.
“Eddie is Walker and the boys’ dad. Jessica is Vincent and Peck’s mom.” She smiles sadly. “He probably hasn’t told you much about her, has he?”
I shake my head. “Just that he isn’t really that close to her.” I leave out the bit that he doesn’t even know where she is to spare Nana any pain. I’m not sure what the deal is or what she knows, but I don’t want to make waves. It’s not my place.
Nana nods. “Well, my daughter hasn’t been that kind to her children. It breaks my heart.” Her voice quivers. She places a hand on her throat as she looks at the picture of her and her husband. “Jessie was a good girl. Absolutely beautiful. Smart as a whip. I just knew she was going to be a veterinarian as much as she loved animals. She’d spend every waking hour at the farm down the road if I let her.”
She looks lost in a memory I’m not privy to. I just stay quiet and let her work through whatever is going through her mind.
“Something happened to her. Drugs, I think,” she says. “She got with Mel—that’s Peck’s dad—and she was never the same. Still funny and could tell a story like nobody’s business.” She grins. “But she just … disconnected. It’s like she was afraid to get too close to anyone.”
“That must’ve been hard for you,” I say, balancing the boxes in my arms.
Nana’s hand drops to her side. “Listen to me jabber while you just stand there holding those boxes. Just tell me to hush next time.” She scoots down the hallway toward the kitchen.
I place the boxes on the island.
“Can I ask you a question?” I force a swallow as Nana nods. “How long has Jessica been gone?”
“She left for good when Peck was fifteen. Vincent was a senior. That was a hard year. Poor Vinnie acted out, causing mayhem, and Peck sort of internalized it. It was rough.”
I press my hands against the island and think of the weight Peck must’ve been carrying around. The loss of his parents. Taking responsibility for Molly and her problems. The poor kid must’ve been ready to break.
“He seems to have turned out all right,” I say.
She grins. “That he did. He’s a very good boy. If I need something, he’s there. He’s there before I need things.” She laughs. “I guess, in some ways, I’m all he has. It’s why family is so important to him, I think. He’s already lost so much of it.”
My throat tightens as I take in her words.
“All my boys are good, family-centric kids,” she says. “But Peck … it’s different with him. I don’t care what Machlan does to him or how many of my cheeseballs Lance takes or how much he and Walker bicker at work, Peck doesn’t hold grudges. He lives and loves and lets go. The other boys can be mad for a while.”
“I know he’s happy Vincent and Sawyer are moving back.”
“Me too.” She ambles over to her rocker and gets settled. “The boys think I want them all together because it makes me happy. And it does. It thrills this old heart to death. But you know why I really want Vincent back here?”
“Why?”
“Because once you get to be my age, you realize family is absolutely all you have.”
I sit on a barstool. The weight of her words falls on my shoulders, pressing me down into the hard wooden seat.
“That’s unfortunate for people like me,” I say.
“Why is that, honey?”
“My family … isn’t like your family. We just aren’t close.”
I look at the ceiling, concerned that I feel so comfortable with this woman to be opening up like this. But now that the sieve is open, I can’t close it. I don’t want to. With every word, I can feel my load lightening.
“What are they like?” she asks.
“Well, my dad is gone. My mom …” Tears well up in my eyes. “She doesn’t really even like me.” I blink back the water that threatens to spill over my cheeks. I can feel my nose turn red as I try to rein in my emotions. “I don’t know what I ever did to her, but … I have to earn her love, and that’s hard …”
She rocks gently back and forth in her rocker. The sound is soothing in a very strange way.
“Dylan, sweetheart, I’m going to tell you something. And this is a fact with my hand up.” She waits for me to look at her. “That’s not love.”
I try to speak, but my mouth is too dry.
“You don’t have to earn someone’s love. Their respect? Yes. Their loyalty? Absolutely. But true love comes freely. You can’t stop it or start it. You have no control over it.”
Her words hit me in the chest, digging right into my heart. I think they should hurt. They should cut me deep with the truth that my mother doesn’t love me. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t hurt. Because I accepted it as truth a long time ago. But clearly, from these tears, I haven’t fully grieved the loss of love from my mother.
“But here’s another thing for you,” she says. “Parents always, always love their children.”
“But …”
She sighs. “Parents are people too. Take my Jessie. I know she loves her sons. But someone looking from the outside may think, ‘How could she? She left them. She wasn’t a great mother.’ Those people have never considered that maybe the best thing she could’ve done for Vincent and Peck was to leave them.”
I think about that. If she was strung out or into bad things, maybe Nana’s right. But I wouldn’t have thought of that.
“Parents make mistakes,” she says in that steady way of hers. “Sometimes, they don’t know what to do or say. Sometimes they don’t even realize how badly they’ve treated you. They’re just dealing with things the best way they can. Does that make sense?”
I nod. It does. I’m going to need to really think about that to absorb all of it, I think, but it makes sense.
It also hurts my heart.
“Will you promise me something, Dylan?”
“Um, sure,” I stammer.
“Always remember what I just said.”
“What part?”
She smiles. “All of it. One of these days, I’m not going to be around. I haven’t told the boys yet because they’ll just worry themselves crazy, but I had some tests come back not too good. I
meet with a specialist next week.”
“Nana,” I say, mouth agape. “You have to tell them.”
“I will. I promise. But I’ve been sitting on this information for a month, just waiting on the right time to tell them.” She looks at me intently. “I’m fine with whatever happens. I’ve had a great life. I’m ready to go if the good lord calls me home. All I have left are Peck and Vincent, and Vin has Sawyer. Peck has no one. And I’ve sat here praying for God to send him someone …”
I swallow. Hard. “Oh, Nana. I’m not sure that …” I laugh nervously. “I mean, Peck and I aren’t … together. We aren’t serious.”
“You’ll see.”
As though that says it all, she stands up. A satisfied look is on her face, but I don’t feel like this can be over. I can’t have that thrown on me. Is she nuts?
“Nana, with all respect, I promise you that I’ll always … be there for Peck if he needs me, but …”
How do you tell a woman that you can’t promise your everlasting love to her grandson?
I stand in her kitchen, mid-shrug, when she laughs.
“You’ve failed me already,” she says.
“How’s that?”
“You forgot what I said.”
My brain clouds with what feels like a thousand things she just said. “What part, exactly?”
She stands in front of me, taking both of my hands in hers. They’re cool to the touch. The veins sit at the top of her skin as she squeezes me with the grip of a baby.
“You can’t start or stop love, honey,” she says. “It’s just there, or it’s not, and it’s present between you and Peck. Everyone can see it. Maybe not you yet because it’s a scary thing to finally see. It took Walker forever.” She laughs. “But you will. You can’t deny it forever.”
“Okay …”
“Just … love him. Like you, he’s never really had someone love him unconditionally but me, and I don’t count.” She smiles like she’s won a prize. “I promise you that he’ll be patient with you. He’ll be kind. He’ll drive you crazy with his incessant need to make sure you’re all right.” She laughs. “Please just be the same to him. For me.”
I stand, bewildered, as she squeezes my hands again. Before I have to figure out how to respond to that, the back door opens.
And there he is as bewildered as me.
“Um, what are y’all doing?” Peck asks.
Nana winks and drops my hands. “We were saying a prayer before Dylan starts remodeling my cabinets. Never hurt to ask the lord to be in the midst of a kitchen.”
I bite my bottom lip to quell the laughter that shakes my chest.
Peck walks my way. “Okay …” He makes a face like he’s as confused as I am.
I hold my breath as he reaches me. He smells of sweat and diesel fuel, and there’s something entirely hot about that.
My fingers itch to touch him, but I’m still not sure where we stand with all that. It depends on the day, he said. But every day would be a touching day if it were up to me.
He leans forward, his lips hovering over the shell of my ear. “You look so damn good that it’s hard not to put you on that island and bury myself inside you.”
“Stop it,” I whisper.
He plants a kiss behind my ear. “I think today is a fun today.”
“What’s that mean?” I bend away from him so I can see his face.
“That means when you’re done doing whatever it is here, we have plans.”
“Doing what?”
“It’s a surprise.”
I’m not sure how I feel about a surprise, but I know how I feel about that look on his face. And that second, much longer kiss behind my ear? Almost has me salivating.
“So what are we doing here, ladies?” he asks, walking around me. “Did I hear cabinet reconstruction?”
“I got these things at the hardware store. I thought I could put them in the bottom of her cabinets so she can just slide them out when she needs something. That way she doesn’t have to bend over,” I say.
Peck gives me the sweetest smile. “I like that.” He looks at Nana. “You good with that?”
“I’m great with it,” she says.
I pick up his drill. His eyes go wide.
“Is that my drill?” he asks.
I hit the trigger, making it spin. “Yup.”
“We need some boundaries, woman,” he says. “You never take a man’s drill.”
I turn my back so Nana can’t see my face. “I’ll make it up to you later.”
He grins, and all is right in my world.
Twenty-Five
Peck
“What are you doing?” Dylan squeals as I take the corner a little sharp. “Peck!”
Her laughter fills the truck. It even drowns out the roar of my diesel. While I love few things more than hearing an engine roar, the sound of her laughter would be one.
My lips twist into an amused smile as I hammer the gas.
“Oh, my gosh.” She reaches up and grabs the oh shit handle. “I never should’ve agreed to this.”
“You love it, and you know it.”
She looks at me and beams. “Okay. I kind of doooo … Ah! What are you doing?”
I laugh as I pilot the truck up the hill toward Bluebird Hill.
The sun sets behind us, casting pinks and purple rays through the sky. We hit the top of the hill, and I ease up on the gas.
The vision of Dylan and Nana together comes back to me as the truck slows. To say I was blown away today by this woman sitting beside me would be an understatement.
What kind of girl spends her afternoon helping out an old lady rearrange her cabinets? Out of the kindness of her heart?
I look over my shoulder to see that woman gazing out the window.
My heart tugs in my chest.
“Oh, wow.” Dylan gasps as she takes in the view. She unbuckles her seat belt and looks over both shoulders to get a panoramic view. “This is beautiful.”
I look at her and grin. “Yes, it is.”
She smacks my knee, leaving her hand to rest on my thigh. Her fingers press against my jeans as she scoots closer to me.
Her hand is heavy on my leg. I try to ignore it so I don’t get distracted as I whip the truck around to face the valley. I park it right next to the edge and cut the engine.
Pine trees cover the hills and valleys surrounding Bluebird Hill. It’s my favorite spot in the world.
“Peck,” she says. “Wow. Just wow.”
“Right?”
“How did you even know this was here?”
“Well, there’s a sign …”
She jabs me in the side with her elbow.
I laugh. “Everyone knows about Bluebird Hill. It’s not a hill, really. Just a change in elevation. There’s a little wooded area over there,” I say, pointing to the right, “where everyone goes to park in high school.”
“Oooh,” she says.
“And back there is where everyone fights.” I gesture toward a spot behind a giant rock. “But my favorite spot, besides this one, is the one I’m going to show you next.”
“Is it better than this?”
I stick my tongue in my cheek. I can’t wait to see her face when we get back there.
“Maybe,” I say. “We’ll see what you think.”
I start the engine again and stick it in reverse. Gravel and dirt go flying as my tires dig into the ground. Dylan is all smiles.
My spirits are high. Things are just … good. Damn good. Better than I ever imagined things could be.
A part of me doesn’t want to think about it too much. Acknowledging how great things are going will undoubtedly jinx it, and I just want this to last as long as it can.
“Okay, Hawkeye,” I say. “You ready?”
“I mean, I don’t know. Am I?”
Excitement flickers in her eyes as she takes in our surroundings. I veer off onto a path that only locals would ever see. It meanders through a patch of woods, the limbs scraping the paint
on my truck, before opening into a field.
A field of mud.
“Oh, shit,” Dylan says. “Can you back out of here?”
“Nope.” The last syllable pops.
“Um, then what are we going to do?” She looks around. “I mean, there are trees on three sides of us and a giant field of gunk in front of us. I don’t think you really have any other options.”
I roll my eyes. “Of course we do.”
“And what’s that?”
“Buckle up, baby. And hold on.” I grin, my heart beating hard in my chest.
She looks at me warily. “Peck …”
“Five … four …”
“But you aren’t buckled up,” she says, grasping for the seat belt.
“Because I’m an expert. Three … two …”
“Wait!” she exclaims with a nervous laugh. “Is this even legal?”
“One. No. Here we go.”
I wait until I hear the click of her seat belt before I stomp the gas. She clutches the handle above her head, her eyes as wide as saucers.
The engine roars to life as our speed increases. I move the truck a few feet to the left of center. From experience, I know that the mud pit isn’t quite as deep there, and we can rip through it a little easier.
“Peck … Ah!” She screams as we hit the mud.
Thick, brown gunk flies over the truck and coats the windows. I flip on the windshield wipers even though it won’t do any good. It’ll only smear it. Still, it’s good for the experience.
We’re midway through and blind from the mud. I keep the engine roaring as we plow through the wet muck. Dylan giggles beside me, her hand on the ceiling as she tries to keep herself pressed in the seat. I take every chance I can get to take a quick peek at her. The excitement in her eyes is worth every bit of time it’ll take tomorrow to clean this fucker.
“This … is … awesome,” she says, her voice vibrating with the movements of the truck.
“Yeah?”
“Yes!”
I maneuver the truck through the last bit of mud and coast up the other side.
Adrenaline races through my veins. I’m not sure if it’s from the mudding or because Dylan is beside me. … In the mud.
Crazy: Gibson Boys Book #4 Page 19
