Julie Daugherty had let him down in the worst way, and somehow, Luke had picked himself up and gone on with his life. He wasn’t going to go backward now.
He looked back over the hood of his truck. She was still standing there, her hands tucked into her back pockets, biting her bottom lip, almost as if she was trying to keep from speaking. Her gaze was full of yearning and it sent a shiver of disturbing familiarity down Luke’s spine. He got into his truck and turned the ignition before he made the mistake of asking her why she was looking at him the way she was.
If Pine River had a backwater part to it, Elm Street was it. On this street, the houses were smaller and a little more run-down than elsewhere in town.
Luke found the house where his dad and Leo were staying easily enough—it looked just as Dad had described it when he explained he and Leo were temporarily renting a place. It was a little green clapboard that sat in the middle of a square patch of manicured lawn, surrounded by a chain-link fence. The detached garage was only big enough for one car. A doghouse that looked new sat under a towering elm tree in the yard, but there was no sign of any dogs.
The house was tiny. Luke guessed two bedrooms, one bath. And there was no wheelchair ramp.
He parked outside the fence, grabbed his things, and walked up the gravel drive, hopping up onto the porch and knocking twice before walking inside.
“Hey, hey!” Leo called out as Luke stepped into the front room. “You took your own sweet time getting here, didn’t you? Look at this, Luke, I am about to blow the top off this game!”
It always amazed Luke that Leo could operate a game controller with hands that curved in like lobster claws, the fingers useless. But Leo was a master at making do as his body slowly deteriorated. His head was bent slightly to one side, and his legs collapsed in on each other. He was only a shadow of the man he used to be.
Like Luke, Leo had played football, a big strapping nose tackle with a scholarship to the Colorado School of Mines, and dreams of making the pros. But the spring of his freshman year, his left arm started to shake in a weird way. He couldn’t seem to grip a ball. Their parents took Leo to a slew of doctors and finally, to the specialists. That summer, Leo had earned the dubious distinction of being one of the younger people to be diagnosed with a motor neuron disease.
None of the Kendricks had known what that was, but Luke knew it was bad because of the look on his mother’s face when the doctor said it was closely akin to Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Her face went ashen and she gripped the arms of her chair as if she were fighting to keep from sliding off and melting onto the floor.
The doctor had tried to make it better by telling them that the disease didn’t progress in exactly the same way as Lou Gehrig’s disease, that everyone with motor neuron disease progressed differently. To Luke, that meant there were no rules; it could go fast, it could go slow. But there was nothing that doctor could say that would change the fact Leo’s disease was devastating and deadly.
As far as Luke was aware, Leo had only let the grim change to his life put him on the floor once. After a night out with the guys, Luke had awakened to the sound of his brother sobbing. Leo was on the floor, sobbing for what was lost, for what the future held. He was only twenty years old. But then, in true Leo Kendrick fashion, he’d picked himself and his useless arm off the floor, wiped his face and had said, “Okay. Change of plans.”
There was no greater hero than Leo Kendrick to Luke’s way of thinking.
About a year later, Mom was diagnosed with cancer, and Leo never showed his feelings about his debilitation again. Now, having just turned twenty-six, he liked to joke that his was a different sort of disease that only happened to geniuses—counting himself and the physicist Steven Hawking.
Luke walked over and had a look at the TV. There were dragons breathing fire and a guy that looked like the quarterback Peyton Manning darting around them. Luke put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Is that supposed to be you?”
“Dude, it is me!”
Luke leaned down, kissed the top of his brother’s bent head. “Here,” he said, and put the bag of cookies on a table next to Leo. He dropped his things, opened the bag, and shook a few of the cookies out. “Oreos.”
“Thanks, man. I’m not supposed to eat anything like that, so don’t let the warden see it.”
“Are you having trouble swallowing?” Luke asked, a balloon of fear swelling in him.
“No, you moron—they make me fat.” Leo laughed as he reached for one, managing to pick it up in his almost useless hand. He tucked it into his mouth and chewed crookedly.
“Where is Marisol? Hiding from you again?” Luke asked, referring to Leo’s daily in-home care.