“I brought Drake out. His truck’s in the shop. He’s been hanging with Harlan—they have a duck lease. Harlan’s taking him back home so . . .”
Drake was Dak’s much younger brother—a bonus baby for the Roberts family. I remembered Drake as a plump, silent boy who always peeked out at me from behind corners when I visited Dak’s house. I couldn’t imagine him as an eighteen-year-old driving a truck, but I guessed that was his age now.
“I don’t need a ride,” I said, glancing back at Gran’s house, wondering if Griff would come look at my car and figure out the issue. Or maybe my cousin would even give me a ride into town. I pulled out my phone and glanced at the time. Three thirty-eight. I had to be polished and ready to go for drinks with Ty at five thirty.
Ed Earl came around the corner of the house, his gaze on me.
“Okay, where’s your ride?” I asked Dak.
“Over there,” he said, pointing toward a shiny F-250 that looked exactly like what he would drive. Dark gray, no frills, tires big enough to get him unstuck.
“Let’s go,” I said, walking toward the truck.
Dak followed. I only knew this because I heard the crunch of his shoes on the gravel. I wasn’t looking back because Ed Earl might think he had a chance to “say his piece,” which I fairly knew would be a grovel about how he’d had no other choice and how if he’d turned himself in, he would have gone away for hard time and his family would have starved. Violins played in my head, and then I dashed them to smithereens with the big hammer of resentment that was always nearby.
“Unlock,” I called back rather bossily.
But Dak did as I asked, the locks unclicking so I could scurry up into the passenger’s side. As I fastened my seat belt, I peeked through the windshield and saw Ed Earl standing in the drive of Gran’s house with his hands on his hips, looking at me with disgust.
Dak climbed in and cranked the truck. “Are you running from Ed Earl?”
“No . . . Okay, yes. I don’t want to talk to him.”
“Because . . . ?”
“He’s responsible for me going to jail?” I said, not unsarcastically.
Dak slid his gaze toward me and then backed out of his spot, which was jammed between my mom’s Jaguar (yes, that’s how she’d spent her back injury money) and a jeep that looked like every sixteen-year-old boy’s wet dream. Which meant it was one of my cousins’.
We bumped down the road skirting the lake. Daffodils clumped at the base of big pine trees, a bunch of schoolgirls nodding at gossip, and the sun played peekaboo with the puffy clouds. The sticky new green paired with the cerulean sky deserved more than my sour mood, but my afternoon hadn’t gone the way it had in my head when I had struck out for Gran’s right after I got off my shift at Printemps. And to make it worse, now I had to buy a new alternator or starter or battery or maybe even a new car that I couldn’t afford. So yeah, screw the beauty around me. I wasn’t in the mood for its cheer.
Thankfully, Dak was silent as he wended around sharp turns and stop signs as we entered the small community of Mooringsport. Here was a town that time had escaped. One could be convinced it was 1957 or 2022. Same houses, same junk stores, same vista of the cypress-studded lake. I liked that about the small dot on the map—the way the old town never changed. I’d take comfort where I could.
We sped over the bridge, heading south, and I watched a boat zip along the channel, its frothy wake disrupting the glassy water. I sighed. “Beautiful.”
Dak looked over. “Yeah.”
And that was pretty much it for conversation for the next five minutes. I took that time to soak up the way he smelled, the nineties country music on the radio, and the stack of little trees that made the cab smell like men’s cologne and leather. Dak draped one forearm on the steering wheel while the other propped against the console between us. The man had great hands with strong, blunt fingers and knuckles that had met a few noses. They looked like the kind of hands a woman wanted on her body. I certainly had at one time.
“I like the bar,” I said after we’d departed Mooringsport and were zipping along Highway 1 over the speed limit but not so fast that I couldn’t appreciate the rolling fields interrupted by stands of woods flowered with dogwood and redbud.
“Thanks. When I left the league, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. Had some offers to coach in the minors and a few bites on broadcasting, but that’s not me, you know. I thought about all my strengths, and alcohol was one of them. I mean, I was good at making drinks and indulging in the oil of good conversation. Plus, after being on the road so much, I wanted to come home and stay in one spot.” His mouth curved into a self-deprecating smile as he glanced over at me.
I felt that smile down to my toes, but I jerked my gaze away so I didn’t reach out and touch his arm. Which was a crazy compulsion I had. “I understand. I think about leaving this place, but the ‘out there’ is scarier than being in the same city as my mother.”
“She’s still here?”
“Didn’t you see her at the party?”
“I wasn’t looking for anyone. Mostly, I’m just looking out for my kid brother.” He shot me a look of apology. I got it. My family wasn’t the kind that people wanted their daughters to marry or their sons to get mixed up with. He changed the station and then looked back over at me.
“So Juke said you’re working for an antique store?”
“Yeah, it’s a really nice one right off Line Avenue, and I’m about to graduate with a business administration degree. I’m thinking about continuing with school, but not sure. I might have a new opportunity soon. Or not.” My mind flitted to Cricket and her mother’s insistence I do something more with my reconstructed haute couture pieces. I wanted to believe that I could parlay my love of creating something new from something old into a career, but I doubted that was possible. Two women cheering for me was a far cry from actually getting other women to buy my pieces. What was the market for something like what I did? And such a venture would require money—I couldn’t sell the pieces out of Cricket’s store. I would probably have to take it online. And that was a whole new ball game—ads, marketing gimmicks, seeking influencers. I didn’t have that kind of money to invest.
My sigh was heavy.
“Oh, surely it’s not that bad. You’re smart and pretty. Already have those two things going for you, and you seem very intent on overcoming what happened to you.”