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She darted around him and Jesse stopped, attracted
and repelled by his sister’s magnetic force. “Why didn’t she leave you the damn house?” he demanded.
“Jesse,” she whispered. He kept his eyes locked on the y in the Billy’s Final Score sign over the door of the bar rather than succumb to Rachel’s plan. Her voice was thick with emotion and he was not going to stand here and watch her fight tears. “Before Mom died I wrote you letters, Jesse. Didn’t you get the letters I sent?”
“I got them.”
She had written almost every week since the day she’d left after her high school graduation. Once he turned eighteen and joined the army, he’d finally written her back and told her to stop. And for a year, she respected his request. Then the letters had started arriving again—with a vengeance. He now knew that was about the time she and Mac Edwards had finally gotten together.
There had been cards from Mac, boxes of cookies from Rachel and funny pictures from Amanda—Jesse’s new niece thanks to Rachel’s marriage to Mac.
He’d opened all letters that weren’t addressed in Rachel’s handwriting. The rest he sent back or burned. Except the cookies—a man could only be so mad.
But he’d never responded to Mac’s letters, and only once to Amanda’s. There was never a reason for them to continue sending him stuff. But they had.
The whole family was just so stubborn.
“We’re hoping you might come up to the farm. Amanda is dying to see you again and Mac can’t wait.” She smiled again, all the hope in the world rolling off her.
“I didn’t read your letters, Rachel.”
“Jesse.” She reached out to him as though to touch his arm, and he stepped out of the way. His eyes met hers and he saw what his rejection did to her, the light that it killed in her eyes.
Let it go, Rachel, he urged silently. You keepcoming at me like this and you’re only goingto get hurt.
Her hand curled into a fist and fell to her side. “I know you’re mad. But I tried—”
“Stop it.” Jesse struggled to find that cold dark center of himself, that place where simplicity reigned. “I was a kid when you left. You don’t know me and I don’t want to know you. Just leave it alone.” He watched all that hope crumple in her, like wadded-up paper.
Good. Now, stay away.
He moved past her to his beat-up Jeep and she didn’t try to stop him.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“San Diego,” he told her. He winced as he swung his aching leg into the vehicle. Damn bum knee. “After I take care of Mom’s house.”
“So you’re just gonna run again?”
Everything in him went still.
“Running’s your deal, not mine. I stayed until the old man died. What did you do?”
They both knew the answer all too well—she’d left, when he’d needed her most.
She was a little late if she expected forgiveness now.
Wainwright, the ancient black Lab he’d somehow inherited in the last two weeks, lifted his head from the duffel bag he’d been using as a bed.
Take the dog, Artie McKinley’s folks had said. He’s old and we’re moving to an apartmentinNogales. We can’t have pets. Artie had been their only son, so there had been no one else to take care of Wainwright and they refused to put him down.
What could Jesse do?
So he’d taken the aging dog and now, every time he looked at the animal, he remembered why Artie hadn’t come back to claim his dog.
Wainwright spied Rachel and barked. She flinched.
“I hear you, boy,” Jesse muttered. He turned over the engine and peeled out of the parking lot without once looking back.
DAMN IT.
Jesse braked at the deserted intersection of Goleta Road and Foothill after having driven around aimlessly for an hour. He leaned forward in the driver’s seat and looked right down the long stretch of road that would lead him down to the coast and Highway 101.
He could drive to San Diego, be there by tonight.
He turned and looked left down the length of asphalt that would lead him back to New Springs.
“What do you think, Wain?” The dog struggled to his feet and climbed over the console to sit in the passenger seat. He barked once at a passing bird. “That’s not much help, buddy.”
Jesse’s knee throbbed from all the walking and driving he had been doing the past week and even though he was steering clear of the pain meds in his bag, the relief they offered seemed pretty good right now.
Jesse eyed the waves of heat rising off the blacktop and Wain nudged his thigh with his snout. Jesse patted the dog’s head and wished again, as he had a million times in the past, that his genetic makeup was different.
It would be so damn easy if he was the kind to run away like his sister.
But no, Jesse took after his mother. He had Eva’s black eyes, dark hair and the same stubborn chin. Despite heavy drinking and hard living, his father had looked like a young man when he died, but Eva had looked every one of her fifty-six years, as if all her disappointments and heartaches had been pressed into the lines on her face.
Jesse wondered briefly what was written across his face. What details of his past were visible?
He and Eva were the same beasts of burden, carrying everyone’s troubles and responsibilities like stones around their necks. When everyone else had deserted they had both stayed—in that house, in this town—long after the time they should have left.
Just do what you are supposed to do, he told himself. You’re in this little shithole for areason.
He pulled his cell phone out of the faded green duffel and dialed Chris’s number.
“Inglewood Construction,” Chris answered after two rings and Jesse’s dark mood lifted at the sound of his friend’s voice.
“Hey, Chris. It’s Jesse.”
“Jesse, when the hell are you going to get down here? I am up to my pits in work.” A saw buzzed to life on Chris’s side of the line. “Watch the damn floors!” Chris yelled and Jesse could practically smell the sawdust; he could almost taste it. “Seriously, man,” Chris said. “I need you here, like, yesterday.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry, Chris, but it looks like I’m stuck in New Springs for a few days.”
“Well, the sooner you get here the faster we can drink some cold beers and start making some money.”
“Sounds good,” Jesse said. It sounded like heaven, like the furthest possible thing from the life he’d lived for the past three years. “Sounds real good.”
“Keep me posted,” Chris said. “I gotta run. The guys are pouring the basement floor and I swear if someone doesn’t watch them, they’ll make a swimming pool out of it.”
“See ya, Chris.” Jesse hung up and threw the phone back in his duffel.
Wishing was for fools, something he learned the day his sister walked away from him, so he stopped wasting his own precious time. He was who he was and he had to take care of his responsibilities.
He gave Wain a pat on the snout.
“See what you’re getting me into?”
Wain farted and sighed.
Jesse jerked the wheel to the left and kicked up a lot of dust heading toward New Springs. He took the winding mountain road too fast. Wainwright put his nose in the air and howled and Jesse knew exactly how he felt.
He drove through Old Town, past the Royal Theater and the Dairy Dream ice-cream shop. He took the left after the Vons grocery store, toward the south side. With every twist and turn through his old neighborhood, the pressure in his chest built.
There weren’t any railroad tracks in New Springs, but Jesse never questioned which side of the proverbial tracks he was from. There had been a grit and a filth that came from this part of town and sometimes he could still feel it.
When he was a kid, this particular street had been made up of single moms with kids they couldn’t control. Big, once-beautiful old homes—the first built in the town—had been falling to ruin or divided into apartments while people with money had chosen to live in the newer homes by the rec center on the other side of town.
He shifted gears as the pressure in his chest started to feel like panic.
The turning point of his life had come when Mitch and his family had moved into the neighborhood. Mitch’s mom liked old houses and apparently she’d never noticed the filth until her son had come home after school with Jesse in tow.
Then she’d noticed.
Since those days, however, the old neighborhood had clearly changed. The lawns were now green and nice, the tiled roofs repaired, the houses painted.
It freaked him out. He wiped one sweaty palm on his thigh. He felt like the boy in the fancy shop who security watched—a feeling he hadn’t had since he was a kid.
The old house must be the eyesore on thisstreet.
Mom had died three years ago and the house had been a nightmare then. Jesse could only imagine the damage raccoons and high-school kids looking for a place to get drunk had done since then.
Truth be told, the idea appealed to him—the old homestead a broken-down disgrace among these refurbished houses. All the neighbors once again cursing the Filmore family over their repaired and whitewashed back fences.
Just like the good old days.
But at the corner of Wilson and Pine, where the ruins of his childhood home should have sat, was a house newly painted a creamy yellow color. There were red flowers in window boxes and a shiny white front porch.
“What the hell…?” His mouth fell open as he peered through the open passenger window at the vision.
His heart squeezed uncomfortably.
Man, I wish Mom could have seen it like this.
Jesse pulled up to the curb, and stared, stunned, at 314 Wilson.
That was his old house all right, but it looked nothing like it once had.
Years ago, he’d thrown a rock through the front picture window after a fight with his father. His mom had covered the hole with cardboard because they couldn’t afford a new piece of glass that size.
Now, the cardboard was gone, the replacement window surrounded by flowers nodding in the breeze.
The porch where his father used to sit many nights drinking Scotch and getting mean no longer sagged, threatening to fall away from the house. And the hole Jesse had used to crawl under the porch on nights when Dad kicked him out was covered over. He’d learned later that his mother had kept the back door open for him the way she had for Rachel, when his sister had been the one thrown out into the cold desert night.
All of his surprise and regret quickly boiled down to something much more familiar. Anger.
His mother had left him the damn place as some kind of chain, forcing him back here. Worse, Rachel had been repairing it and shining it up pretty.
Wonderful. A gold-plated chain.
If Rachel thought she could stop him from getting rid of it—tearing the damn thing down if he had to—she was wrong. Rachel could dress up the house all she wanted, repair it and cover up the ugly parts, but underneath it was still the violent and angry home of his youth. There was not enough paint in the world to cover that.
“Let’s go, Wain.” Jesse climbed gingerly out of the Jeep.
Wain barked with an enthusiasm Jesse was far from feeling and trotted ahead to sniff and urinate on a hydrangea bush.
Jesse pulled the key from around his neck, where it hung with his dog tags.
He bent and picked up one of the solid decorative rocks that lined the walkway. He tested its heft and then hurled it through the front window. The glass shattered and Jesse smiled.
Now, it looks like home.
CHAPTER TWO
JULIA ADAMS managed to eat three bites of the cinnamon roll she had grabbed from the motel vending machine then tossed it in a garbage can outside the Vons grocery store. She took another sip of the stale coffee from the motel lobby and dumped that out as well.
She couldn’t get food past the slick bitter taste of nerves at the back of her throat. The anxiety had gathered steam as she and Ben walked into town from the motel and now she was a kettle about ready to blow.
“I think Momma has made a mistake, Ben,” she said to her two-year-old son, even though he was sound asleep in his stroller.
One mistake? How do you figure just one? The voice belonged to Mitch, her dead husband, always there to count her failings.
She hit a crack in the sidewalk and the stroller under her hands swayed, thanks to the loose screws she’d tried repair a million times—the whole thing was just about shot.
The streetlights blinked on and the world past the street receded to shadows. Dusk arrived to the desert town with a beauty Julia had never seen. The enormous sky turned purple and blue and the temperature finally cooled to a tolerable level.
She and Ben had missed the worst of the heat, having spent most of the day inside their motel room. Ben had napped and fussed, confused by the time change, and she’d stewed—replaying Agnes’s phone call in her head, wondering if she’d gotten the invitation all wrong.
The smell of eucalyptus filled the air and Julia, trying to calm the twisting of her stomach, pulled off one of the flat round leaves and rubbed it between her fingers. The oil soaked into her skin, but it wasn’t enough to calm the raging nerves.
She turned left and the reality of what she was doing came down on her like a hammer.
She was about to knock on Mitch’s parents’ door. Her in-laws, who had never liked her, and say…
“What?” she asked herself aloud. “Surprise! Can I stay a while? Here’s your grandson. Do you mind if I take a nap?” She took a deep breath. “Remember when you asked me to come for a visit? When you said you would be here for me?”
I’ve finally lost it. I’m talking to myself!
“Your mother’s a lunatic,” she told her sleeping son, just to prove the point.
