by Alison Kent
“You look fine,” Everly said, stepping into the doorway.
“I look like crap, but it’s been one of those days. Lord, I haven’t thought about Boone Mitchell in years—”
“Mom! Grammy B’s coming to take me and Joel to Dairy Barn for supper.”
“Then you’d best finish your geography assignment, kiddo,” Penny said, ruffling the sandy blond hair of the boy, no more than eight or nine, who came running into the room. “Jacob, this is Ms. Grant. She works at the newspaper in town. Ms. Grant, this is Jacob, my oldest.”
“Please to meet you, ma’am,” the boy said, offering his hand, then running off to presumably do the schoolwork standing in the way of him and his burger basket.
Penny smiled after him. “And thank God that lets me off the hook for cooking. Dean can throw a steak on the grill when he gets home. I can toss a salad. Add a bottle of wine, and my night is complete.”
The inside of Penny and Dean Blaylock’s home was surprisingly neat. Everly didn’t know why she’d been expecting anything different. Except she had. She was being a snob, thinking the interior of a house in Southwest Crow Hill would look as sad and rundown as it did out.
She followed Penny to the kitchen, taking one of the four chairs at the smart pine table while the other woman turned on her Keurig machine.
“I’ve got Emeril’s decaf, or Dunkin’ Donuts original.”
Considering the state of her nerves . . . “The decaf would be great, thanks.”
“So you’re writing about Boone and the boys,” Penny said, reaching into the cabinet for matching ceramic mugs. “Cream and sugar? Black?”
“Cream and sweetener, if you have it.”
“I’ve got the pink stuff, sure,” she said, bringing a holder of packets to the table along with Everly’s cup, going back for a small carton of half-and-half and her own. “So what do you want to know? What kind of story are you doing?”
Everly stirred her coffee, thinking about what Les Upton had told her, having a hard time picturing this woman being raised by that man. “Lots of folks are interested in where they’ve been, and what it’s been like to come back after so many years. You went to school with them, am I right?”
“I did,” she said, lifting her cup and blowing across the top, her cigarette smoldering in the ashtray at her elbow. “But I didn’t know Dax or Casper well at all. Only Boone. That boy . . .” She shook her head, sipped. “He was such a sweetheart. And to have gone through what he did with my family. I guess you know about all of that.”
“He told me about the night your father . . .”
“Came home and beat my mother half to death?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper, her perfectly arched brows rising.
Everly nodded. She’d wanted information on Boone. Less for her story than herself. But she hadn’t thought what she’d be putting Penny through by coming here. She didn’t know the woman, but that didn’t let her off the hook for invading her privacy.
Listen to her. Since when had she cared about invading someone’s privacy? And yet, having her own privacy invaded at the end of her years with Toby had given her the perspective she’d lacked as a journalist. The fact that she was letting that lesson fall by the wayside for personal gain . . . God, what was she doing here?
“Yeah, that was not one of my finer moments. I had a lot of not-so-fine ones in high school, but wow did I ever let things get out of hand that night. I’ve always wondered if I hadn’t been such a slut,” she said, holding up a hand at Everly’s gasp, “if that night wouldn’t have been totally different. And before you argue that I wasn’t, you only have Boone’s version of what happened.”
“That’s not quite true.”
“How so?”
“I was talking to some other friends of the Dalton Gang recently. At the Blackbird Diner. Your father stopped by my table.”
“Lucky you,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Did he tell you it was my fault the way things happened?”
“No, and please don’t blame yourself. Abuse is never the victim’s fault,” she said, and the words hung there so long she actually looked up, seeing her history, her face in Penny’s. She hadn’t thought she blamed herself for inciting Toby’s wrath, but maybe she had, yet in that moment, she knew she never would again.
And then she thought about Boone, not the boy he’d been who’d known this woman as a girl, but the man he was now. The man who carried just as much baggage as she did, but seemed to never let it weigh him down. Like Penny, he’d moved beyond what had happened. Everly was the one stuck in the past.
“I heard that a lot growing up. From my mother, of all people. She knew it wasn’t her fault that my dad beat her. He didn’t always, just later, when their lives got so pathetic. I think she was looking for an easy way to check out. Rather than suicide by cop, suicide by husband.”
Her hand shook as she brought her cigarette to her mouth. “What gets to me when I think back is how happy she is now. She met a new guy in Corpus Christi. He was a widower, had two kids. I think she’s more mom to them than she ever was to me, but I can’t hate her for that. My dad really fucked her over. She got through it the only way she thought she could. As bad as it was, it worked out in the end.”
“Can I ask you something personal? Totally off-the-record. It has nothing to do with the story, but after meeting your father, I’m curious.”
“Shoot.”
“With everything that happened, why did you come back here to live?”
Penny’s smile, as she reached for another cigarette and lit it, left Everly somewhat unbalanced. She’d expected to find a bitter, broken woman. Penny was anything but. She was a bit frazzled maybe, but she was responsible for the care and feeding and schooling of two young boys. Frazzled was hardly a character flaw with all she had on her plate.
“I’d been born here. I grew up here. Crow Hill, for being a nothing spot on any map, is my home. I left for a while with my mom. I spent a few months in Corpus with her at her sister’s while she got over the physical damage. But all that time I was away, I missed my life here. I missed my friends.”
“Your father was still in prison when you came back, yes?”
“He was. I stayed with my bestie, Missy Fowler. I got a job at the Dairy Barn. And that’s where I met Dean. Or rather, met him again. He’d been two years ahead of me in school, and he’d played football so I knew who he was. But I had no idea he knew who I was,” she said, a blush creeping up her extraordinarily long neck to stain her cheeks.
None of this was what Everly had expected to learn when she came here today. She’d thought, for no reason other than prejudice, that she’d find a chip off the Les Upton block. But Penny was delightful, leaving her lost as to what to think about where this woman fit into Boone’s past.
“Obviously he did know,” Everly said, a smile spreading easily over her face as she lifted her coffee to drink.
“I can’t even tell you what it was like, being courted by a man like Dean. He was already working for Len Tunstall. He’s been there all this time, actually. He’s such a good provider for me and the boys. He was so quiet and so strong. I’d always thought strength meant brute force. And a lot of yelling.”
“Because that’s what you’d seen with your father.”
She nodded, tapped the ashes off the end of her cigarette. “Dean won’t let my father in the house. He won’t let him know the boys. I mean, they know he’s their grandfather. And Dean will take them to the garage on Daddy’s birthday and at Christmas to give him cards, but that’s all. He stays with them every minute. I never go, but Jacob and Joel tell me about it. I don’t think they particularly like the visits, but they don’t hate them either. They’re more curious than anything. Daddy is nothing like their PopPop, Dean’s dad.”
“Sounds like coming back to Crow Hill turned out for the best.”
Penny looked down, her eyes going damp, then red as she struggled not to cry. “When I was a little girl, I thought my daddy hung the mo
on. He was so sweet to my momma. We did things together as a family, some of the same things Dean and I do with our boys now. I couldn’t imagine my life being any better than it was.”
“What happened? How did he . . .”
“Become an abusive pig?”
“Yeah.
“I don’t know.” She turned in her chair to cross her legs, and lean her head against the wall. “He drank more than he should have, for one thing, and he screwed up on a couple of rebuild jobs because of it. He couldn’t keep good help. Folks moved to Skeet Bandy’s garage.”
“So his business declined.”
She nodded. “Momma had been a beauty when they got married. Just gorgeous,” Penny said, and Everly didn’t doubt for a minute that the daughter took after the mother. “I guess she’d put on a few pounds, I mean, hello. They’d been married twenty years. It wasn’t like he hadn’t lost most of his hair and gained a gut. Maybe she didn’t get the attention she wanted from him, so she looked elsewhere. Not saying I know for a fact that she cheated, but I heard talk. Most of it from him. And since she ignored me and he doted, well, it was easy to believe him. Funny, because he turned out to be such a goddamn liar.”
“He told me Boone sold drugs to the kids at school.”
“Oh my god, he did not,” she said, then pressed her fingers to her mouth as if doing so would help her lower her voice. “He’s a liar. That’s such a lie. Boone Mitchell wouldn’t have come within a hundred feet of drugs. Beer, yeah. That boy liked his beer. But he was too smart to mess with things that would mess with him. No, Daddy hated Boone because he stood up to him. Momma quit because he broke her down. She couldn’t deal with the ugliness anymore. She just gave in,” she said. “But not Boone. Never Boone.” Then she picked up her mug, frowning when she realized it was empty, going silent instead of brewing another cup, or reaching for a third cigarette.
Everly went quiet, too. She understood the ugliness. She understood the giving in. She’d managed to get out from under Toby’s rule before she’d reached the point Lucinda Upton had, but she understood. She’d been lucky she had the money, and the contacts, and the friends who’d helped her escape.
“I’m sorry to drag you through all of this,” Everly said, realizing how deeply she meant it. “I really only intended to ask you about Boone.”
“That’s okay. It’s good to talk about it occasionally. My friends have heard it all a thousand times, and I try not to let it build up, but it happens.” She toyed with a wisp of hair that had fallen out of her rooster tail. “Dean always knows when I’m down about it, and with me never having to say a word. I don’t know what I’d do without him. He is the best man. The best father and husband. If I hadn’t come back here . . . I can’t imagine having missed out on knowing him, and loving him.”
Thoughts of Arwen and Dax, Casper and Faith came to mind. How often had Everly heard her best girlfriends say the same things about their men? Penny wasn’t any different. She didn’t have the money Faith did, or the business Arwen did, or the connections Everly did, but she was a woman in love. And in that regard, she had things Everly had only dreamed about.
“You know, I owe Boone a big apology.”
“How so?”
She shrugged, tapped the end of her cigarette box on the table. “I was so screwed up in high school. Obviously, right? Judging by my behavior. I got him into such a big mess, knowing how both my folks would react at catching me with him.”
Everly frowned. “You knew your father would go after your mother?”
Another shrug. “That part I can’t say for sure. Maybe.” She paused, flipped the top of the box open and shut. “It was like a keg of gunpowder inside our house. I couldn’t deal with it anymore, the wait, and I used Boone for the fuse. And that was really shitty of me.”
It was, but shitty things were part of being teenagers. “It was a long time ago.”
“Not so long that I don’t need to make things right.”
Everly left after that, turning over everything Penny had said, wondering about the one thing she hadn’t: having been pregnant with Boone’s baby.
TWENTY-SIX
BOONE WAS IN a mood and had been since seeing Everly Monday night. Three days now, and he was still regretting the confession he’d made. What the hell had he been thinking, telling her he’d been falling apart, that he was losing it. Bellyaching about the conditions on the ranch, none of which were her concern. All of which had been building to a worse head of steam than he’d realized.
And then she’d been worried about using his food stores, when what she should’ve been worried about was his not using a condom Friday night or Sunday morning. By Sunday, the horse was out of the barn, but Friday . . . He’d torn off her clothes, cut open her clothes, ruined them, and buried himself so deeply inside her he’d disappeared. All without a goddamn condom. But, no.
She’d been worried about him.
She’d stood there in Tess’s kitchen, in his kitchen, listening and fitting right in, wearing her heels and her buttons as if that’s what anyone wore to stand at the stove. She’d cooked for him, stirred the soup and soothed him and calmed him and cared for him. And she’d done it all without once telling him to buck up and get over himself. But she hadn’t spent the night. She’d gone home. And since then, she hadn’t called.
First thing he’d done the last three nights after walking into the house was check the log on the phone. No messages. No missed connections. He’d stretched out the soup, finishing it last night, but he hadn’t called her back. He hadn’t even called her tonight, knowing he was coming to town.
What in the hell was wrong with him that he couldn’t pick up the goddamn phone and call?
So what if she didn’t answer? Her not answering would hardly be the end—
“I thought you did most of your drinking at home,” Faith said, climbing onto the stool beside him where he sat nursing his sorrows at the Hellcat Saloon bar. “On the back porch. With your cooler of beer.”
His cooler of beer was empty. His wallet would be when he left here tonight. “Had to come to town to sign some papers for Nora about the furniture going up for sale. Wasn’t in the mood to go home.”
“Because of the auction?” she asked as he drank. “Letting go of Tess’s things?”
“That. And . . . other stuff.”
“Everly?”
He shrugged. Made no sense that he had a hard time going home because of a woman who didn’t even live there. But she’d been there enough that he missed her when she wasn’t. He lifted his beer with a grunt, let that serve as his answer.
His sister reached over to rub his shoulder, making him feel even worse because her being there helped. He shouldn’t need her to be there. His having next to nothing to his name was his problem, not hers. But it did help, having her, having his dad, his mom.
He should’ve come home to stay a long time ago. Except if he’d done that, he might’ve settled down too soon, worked a spread that wasn’t his own, married the wrong woman. Missed out on knowing the one he couldn’t get out of his mind. She was unforgettable, Everly Grant.
And she was making his life pure hell.
“Do you want to come over for supper? Clay’s cooking tonight. Not sure what he’s cooking, but it really doesn’t matter because it’ll be better than anything Casper or I could whip up.”
“Thanks,” he said, shaking off his thoughts of moments ago. “But I’m going to sit here awhile.”
“You can’t drink your supper, Boone.”
“Watch me,” he said, emptying the first bottle of the night.
Faith pulled her phone from her purse, typed out a text while saying, “Then order food. My treat. Have a burger. Have a steak. Just do more than drink.”
“I don’t want you spending your money on me,” he said, but he knew his sister and it was no use. She was already signaling for Arwen.
“Boone wants a twelve-ounce rib eye, medium rare, a baked potato, loaded, and a side of squash cass
erole. That and the beers go on my tab.”
“You don’t have a tab,” Arwen said, jotting the order on a green ticket and tearing it off. “But I’ve got your credit card number saved,” she added, waving the paper as she headed through the kitchen’s swinging doors.
“See?” Faith said, patting Boone’s shoulder. “Problem solved.”
The problem of his empty stomach. Which, come twelve hours from now, would just be empty again. “What’re you doing here anyway?”
“I was on my way home. Saw your truck and stopped.”
“Home from where?” It wasn’t his business, but it kept her from digging into his. And him from doing more whining. He was damn sick of hearing himself cry like a baby.
“From the high school. I’ve been helping Momma with the holiday carnival planning,” she said, and when he groaned, added, “I was glad to see your name on the list of volunteers.”
Yeah. That’s how it had happened. “Trust me. I did not volunteer.”
“You didn’t have to. Momma volunteered for you.” When he grunted again, she got back to patting and rubbing. “It’ll be fun.”
He took back his earlier thoughts about being glad he had his family close. But only long enough to order a second beer. “No. It won’t.”
“C’mon. You’ve been gone sixteen years. You’ve missed a lot of holiday carnivals.”
“Nope. Haven’t missed them at all.”
“Then think of it as doing community service to make up for all the shit you caused at the last one you were around for.”
She had him there, though he was pretty sure it was Dax who’d started the fire in the hay bales used for the hay ride. “At least the trailer’d been unloaded and the tractor unhitched. We weren’t total heathens.”
“Yeah, you were,” she said, glancing over his head toward the door. She took a swig from his fresh beer bottle, then said, “I’m going to head home. Don’t you move until you’ve finished the dinner my saved credit card number is paying for.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving her on her way, but not before she’d planted a big sloppy kiss on his cheek.
