by Cora Brent
But when he just shrugged and said, “Sounds good,” I couldn’t come up with a single argument to the contrary.
“Guys,” Cord said as we reached the truck. “I was thinking maybe we could ask the young Gentry boys if they want to come stay up in Tempe for a week or two this summer. We’ve got an extra bedroom at the house.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. We could take them to the museums in Phoenix, take them on a tour of the university. Maybe that would be enough motivation to get them to think of school more seriously.
But despite all that I couldn’t make myself answer cheerfully because I knew something I hadn’t told Cord or Creed. Things were about to get rough between the brothers, if what I’d seen as we drove away from their house earlier was any clue. Stone had been acting strangely evasive, then there was a heated exchange with a girl that looked like it was apt to end in the bedroom.
There would have been nothing awful about it, just teenage drama bullshit, except for the fact that I recognized her. I recognized her right away because I’d met her before. She was Erin, the girl next door. She was Conway’s girl.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CORD
It had seemed like a good idea when I suggested it, but now that we were actually walking into the Emblem Diner I started feeling uneasy. The dark interior was a stark contrast to the blazing world outside but maybe it made the place feel cooler or something. My brothers seemed comfortable just pushing right in, but I hung back, a little wary as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There wasn’t really a reason to be wary. It was extremely unlikely we’d find Benton hanging out in here since he gravitated toward hard drinking holes rather than family restaurants. Plus, we’d all watched him get carted home by one of Emblem’s finest. Still, I would rather be able to clearly see what I was walking into.
A few of the patrons looked us over but most showed no interest. I relaxed a little as I realized even the familiar faces were only going to nod briefly and then return to their drinks. There was nothing to worry about in here.
Creed and Chase headed for a table in the corner and I automatically followed. It wasn’t more than a few seconds before a waitress in a tube top approached. I wasn’t surprised to recognize her.
“Oh my god, is it really you guys?” she squealed.
Kelly Barnes had been in the class after ours and had lost some of the hopeful prettiness of her youth. I realized she was watching me in particular.
“Hi Kel,” I answered, feeling rather uncomfortable by the memory of just how well I had once known her. “How have you been?”
“Amazing.” She laughed. Her laugh sounded like a dry dog bark. “You know, I’ve only got a few hours before my shift ends. You guys have got to let me take you out for a round of drinks.”
“Ah, thanks Kelly, but I promised my wife I’d be home early.”
“Wife.” She screwed up her pretty face. Poor Kelly, she wore her thoughts out loud. She clicked her pen and stared real hard at her notepad. “What’ll you have?” she asked in a much less enthusiastic voice.
“Burger and a coke,” I told her.
“A Coke?” She was puzzled.
“Please,” I said with a straight face.
“Burgers and cokes all around,” Chase grinned with a wink. “And a bowl of those salted peanuts if you got ‘em.”
“Whatever you say,” Kelly grumbled before retreating.
Creed was watching me tap my fingers on the table. He frowned. “Something wrong?”
“Maybe we should have just pointed our noses toward home.”
“Not too late,” Chase offered. “We can get something to eat in Queen Creek.”
I shook my head. I was just being paranoid.
Creed snapped his fingers. “Cord, someone’s watching you.”
“I think Kelly already got the picture.”
“It’s not Kelly.”
I didn’t want to turn around. This had been a mistake. I turned slowly, half expecting to be eye to eye with another ancient conquest. Instead I found myself looking into the face of my father-in-law.
He was sitting by himself at the restaurant bar with a half empty pint of beer in front of him. He had evidently just come from his guard shift at the prison; he’d rolled up the sleeves of his wrinkled work shirt but still had his nametag on.
John McCann’s face was tired but not unfriendly as he gave me a nod of acknowledgement and waited to see what I would do.
“Invite him over,” Chase suggested but I hesitated. If Saylor’s dad had wanted to keep company with us he would have climbed off the bar stool and made his way over here himself.
“I’ll be back, boys,” I excused myself and cautiously approached the bar.
Since Saylor and I had gotten married, my relationship with John McCann had slowly evolved from angry glares into sort of a stiff politeness. I figured he was trying his damn best to get used to me but couldn’t quite let go of the fact that not only was I a Gentry but I was a Gentry who had badly hurt his only daughter when we were kids.
“John,” I said, and carefully held my hand out. He shook it, as he always did, but pulled back quickly. Again, as he always did.
John swiveled around on the stool as I sat beside him.
“Saylor with you?” he asked and I heard the hopeful rise in his voice.
“No, she’s home with the girls.”
John smiled faintly. “How are Cami and Cassie?”
“Beautiful. Like their mother. Getting bigger every day. Say posts pictures online all the time, don’t you see them?”
“Yeah, I do. I should come around more. I haven’t seen the girls since Christmas and I keep meaning to make the drive up but we’re understaffed and I’ve been putting in twelve hours, seven days a week.” He paused, took a drink and then turned a frank stare on me. “I’m sorry, Cord. About your mama.”
I stared at the lacquered surface of the bar. “You know the truth. You know she’s been gone a long time.”
He nodded and his mouth turned down. “You know, I remember her well. When she first got here she drove the town berserk. Man, she was a beauty. “
“So I’ve heard,” I said quietly.
He nudged my shoulder slightly. “I’m sorry, kid. Didn’t mean to rub salt in the wound.”
“You didn’t. There’s no point in dwelling on what’s gone though. That girl you remember died long before my mother did.”
“Fucking Benton,” he spat and I saw the hatred in his eyes. I didn’t know what kind of run-ins the two of them had endured, growing up at the same time in the same small place but it certainly wasn’t friendly. John grimaced. “Shit, I just keep shoving my foot in my mouth, don’t I?”
“It’s okay,” I assured him, watching my brothers pretend like they weren’t trying to overhear us as some waitress other than Kelly dropped off our drinks.
John took another sip of beer and was slow to put the glass down. He’d probably run out of things to say. A few times it over the years it had struck me that there was always this elephant in the room, just squatting there blinking at the two of us. There was always something that had gone unsaid, something we had never talked about. Maybe today was the day to send all old hurts to their final end.
“John,” I said and he looked up. “All these years and I’ve never apologized to you.”
He tensed. “For what, Cord?” He was going to make me say it, to acknowledge what I’d done.
“For treating your daughter like dirt. For hurting her, humiliating her.” I swallowed. “I never really understood what it must have been like for you, until I held my own girls.”
He watched me without blinking. Saylor had inherited her green eyes from him.
“I hated you,” he said tersely. “That’s no mystery. For a father to see his little girl hurting like that, it’s agony. I figured you’d end up being the same miserable heap your old man was.” Then he sighed and looked kind of unhappy. “But you were just a dumb kid with your own fucking problems.”
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“I was,” I agreed. “And I still don’t know what the hell I ever did to deserve your daughter. I don’t know why she gave me a chance to prove I wasn’t that nasty piece of shit any more. But I’ll happily spend the rest of my life atoning for that and for every other fucked up thing I ever did if that’s what it takes to be the man that Saylor and the girls deserve.”
He nodded sadly and turned back to his beer. “I wasn’t there for her enough. I was a rotten father most of the time.”
I didn’t argue with him. Saylor was more wounded by her mother’s flat out rejection, but she had always acutely felt his emotional distance. Still, there was a bright side. He deserved to hear it.
“She turned out to be an amazing woman anyway.”
John smiled. “Yes she did.” He took his phone from his back pocket and ran his thumb over the screen. The wallpaper was a photo I had taken of Saylor as she held our newborn baby daughters. Her smile was so full of brilliant joy it made the screen fairly radiate. John stared at the image of his daughter and granddaughters for a moment before flicking to another picture. It was Saylor as a toddler. She carried a dandelion in her hand and a look of wistful wonder on her face.
“I got married too young,” John said with dreamy regret. “I wasn’t ready to be a dad and by the time I got used to the idea she was half grown and it seemed like I didn’t know her at all. It’s only now that I realize she’s the only good thing I ever managed to do with my life.”
I felt myself softening toward the man. He wasn’t the perfect father but he loved his daughter. “It not too late. Take a day for crying out loud. Take two. Drive up to Tempe. It would make her so happy and you could spend time with the girls. “ I swallowed. “You know, you’re the only grandparent they’re going to have.”
I hadn’t realized that was true until I said it out loud. But Saylor’s mother wanted nothing to do with any of them. My mother was now dead. And if Benton came within a thousand feet of my girls I would rip out his fucking jugular.
John pocketed his phone and stood. “Yeah, I’ll do that. Soon, I promise.” He held out his hand again and for the first time his handshake was sincere. “Do better than I did, Cordero. Be there every damn day.”
“I plan to.”
He started to leave and then turned around again. “Again, I’m sorry about Maggie. Please know that there are still some folks in Emblem who remember her as more than a wrecked addict.”
It had always made me sad, to hear stories about what my mother had been like a lifetime ago. It didn’t make me sad anymore.
“Thanks, John.”
When I rejoined my brothers we kept the conversation light as we waited for our food to arrive. The brief sense of calm that I’d felt standing atop the butte with my brothers as we looked at the landscape of our hometown started to return. I would always wonder now and then if there was anything else I could have done for my mother to save her from herself and from Benton. But mostly I’d come to terms with the fact that there wasn’t any other way this could have ended.
“Should we start heading home?” I asked my brothers when the meals had all been polished off.
“Yeah,” Chase said, and then he grinned as he glanced at his buzzing phone. “My bride misses me.”
Probably about ten minutes earlier I’d heard the wails of nearby sirens but they didn’t alarm me. Then they began multiplying and the shrieking symphony started attracting more attention. Some of the other diners began craning their necks to see outside to Main Street, a few even wandering outdoors to find out what the fuss was all about.
A man I vaguely recognized walked inside and wiped his sweaty face with a red bandana before making his way over to the bar. A word caught my attention and I didn’t imagine it because both Creed and Chase were instantly alert, staring straight at the newcomer who had said ‘Gentry’. But he wasn’t looking our way. I knew that whatever had happened had nothing to do with us.
Someone asked the man a question and he shook his head. “Nah, not the kid who works down at Carson’s Garage. It was his brother, Stone Gentry.”
Chase was up and out of his chair in a heartbeat.
“Hey,” he called and the man spun around.
His scowl vanished when he got a really good look at us though. “I know you boys. Benton’s kids, right?” He winced. “Lord sure did take a colossal crap on the Gentrys today. First Maggie and now that hellraising teenager.”
Creed threw some money on the table and grabbed my elbow. “Come on. Let’s go see what the fuck this is.”
Chase looked pretty shaken up already and the man who’d come barreling into the diner dropping names was low on details. I put a hand on Chase’s shoulder and guided him outside. Every red flashing light in the county was collected at the south end of Main Street. In the middle of it all was a pile of twisted metal and beside it a covered stretcher that didn’t conceal the shape of the human body it held. A pair of paramedics picked it up gingerly and started walking back to a waiting ambulance. We didn’t make it ten yards before we ran right into Gaps. He looked like he might vomit on the pavement.
“I was heading down to the diner,” he said and sounded as if he would rather be saying any other words than the ones he needed to say. “Heard you were there.”
“Where’s Stone?” asked Chase. “Is that him? Is he dead?”
Gaps swallowed and looked at the ground. “No, Stone isn’t dead.”
“But someone is?”
“Yes,” he nodded sorrowfully. “Someone is.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
CREED
There was no word that described the news. ‘Horrible’ and ‘tragic’ was the kind of shit people mumbled when they didn’t really know how to label it and just wanted to get away.
At some point between the time we left him standing in front of his house in all his cocky, shirtless glory and half an hour ago, Stone Gentry had stolen a car, raced another jackass kid through the streets of Emblem, and finally crashed so hard his passenger, a teenage girl, was killed instantly. The other driver was a classmate who’d suffered a number of injuries and was carted away in an ambulance. Stone Gentry, however, managed to walk away from the wreckage without a scratch.
He might have been wishing he was dead though, or at least unconscious, as he was hauled away in handcuffs. Just before he was hustled into a squad car he glanced back at the mess he had made. I caught the sick look of grief on his face. There was no way we’d be getting him out of this one.
“Who was the girl?” I asked. “The teenage girl who was killed?”
Gaps grimaced as he looked back at the wreck. “Erin Rielo.” He sighed. “Good kid, good family. Sometimes I play pool with Mack, her dad. Erin was his oldest daughter and he’s going to be hurting like no man should ever have to hurt.”
Erin. The senseless death of a young girl was awful no matter what. But as I tossed the name around in my head I had the nagging sense that it should mean something particular to me.
The instant he heard the news Chase let out a weird noise and lowered his head for a minute, looking like he was going to be sick. Then he lifted his head, swallowed, and surveyed the scene grimly.
“Where’s Conway?” he asked hoarsely.
“Oh, shit,” Cord muttered softly and then he too looked like he was going to be sick.
“Conway wasn’t in the accident, was he?” I asked. Even if he wasn’t involved, of course he would still be devastated. I’d seen firsthand what a close bond the brothers shared. Those two were like peanut butter and jelly and probably had been since they were babies. So yeah, Conway was bound to take Stone’s arrest pretty hard, given that his brother was almost certainly looking at a lengthy prison sentence if everything Gaps had said so far was true. Still, I felt like I was missing something that my brothers understood.
“He wasn’t involved,” Gaps confirmed. “I know he’s been putting in weekends at Carson’s Garage so I sent a car around to look for him there.”
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nbsp; I nodded. “Okay.”
“You know Erin,” Chase told me. “We met her. Con’s girlfriend.”
And in a flash I understood what they already knew. I remembered the way she hung on his arm, a pretty young girl in love. And I remembered the way he stared down at her as if he couldn’t believe his dumb luck that she was with him.
I just stared at the ground. Nothing I could say would be adequate. A horrific tragedy had just become even more appalling.
Gaps hurried away when another officer beckoned. With Chase leading the way, we edged a little closer to the fatal scene. Glass was everywhere. Two mangled cars – one a beat up classic Chevy and the other a newer model Toyota – had come to rest about fifteen yards apart after the crash. The corner was the site of a four way stop and Gaps had said they were racing. It didn’t really make sense how they would crash into each other if they were racing side by side, but I supposed there were any number of scenarios that could have happened. Maybe they were trying to avoid another driver, or a pedestrian. Maybe one had spun out and smashed into the other.
It didn’t matter how it had happened. The result was still the same.
The three of us stood there, miserable and silent. It seemed wrong to leave. Stone had been hauled off to the police station but no one had seen Conway yet. We couldn’t abandon him if there was a chance we might help him in some way.
“Erin! Get the fuck off me, man. ERIN!”
By now a sizeable crowd had gathered on the perimeter of the wreck. Emblem residents had walked away from their dinners and their places of business to see what all the fuss was about. Once they heard just how bad it was they spoke in hushed whispers and stared sadly at the ruins while staying at a discreet distance, lest the horror of it get too close to them.
We heard Conway shouting before we saw him break through the crowd. His face was wild as he shoved aside spectators and first responders, trying to reach the scene. One nearby cop moved to grab him but he backed off when Gaps appeared and issued a quiet request to the other officer.
