Mitchell: I got an apartment in the Hillsboro West End area. It’s biking distance from campus on nice days. I think you’d like it. The pic is the view from the patio.
Mitchell: Anyway. I wanted to apologize one more time. I know you deleted my messages after we broke up instead of reading or listening to them, and I don’t blame you. I was such a jerk. I guess I’m just hoping you read this. I’m so sorry, Pearl.
“Be sorry, asshole,” I muttered. So much had happened in the past five months. So much had happened in the past twelve hours. Mitchell didn’t deserve to know any of it. He didn’t deserve an I forgive you… even though I’d reneged on all our plans and didn’t tell him until I had to.
I didn’t regret my decision, but if I’d just told him about it earlier, I could have avoided these pangs of conscience. I closed the message without answering or deleting it, unsure which to do. No rush, either way. Besides, I had a job to land.
Brittney Loper’s words reverberated in my head and I wondered what had made her think them. If you wanted Boyce, you could land him. I didn’t want him to just want me in his bed. To manipulate him into promises or arrangements because of that want. I wanted him to love me like I loved him. I wanted to be his only. But no one had ever been Boyce Wynn’s only, and I wasn’t foolish enough to view that as some sort of challenge. He wanted me sexually, yes. But interpreting desire as proof of love produced a counterfeit result, born of immeasurable evidence and hidden formulation and a vague hypothesis with no falsifiable alternative.
He was a magnet and I was a magnetized entity. One week was all it took to submit to the magnetic field that trailer had become, and there were nine weeks to go. The only question was whether his undivided attraction would last the whole nine weeks—whether my heart would be shattered before the time was up or I would shoulder the pretense of being the one who left, my dignity intact, outwardly.
I had what in science is known as a hindsight bias. When it was over I would say I had known all along how it would end, because I’d been here before. It could be argued that I would influence the result—that my wrecked heart would be a self-fulfilling prophecy—but I couldn’t see how that mattered one way or the other. And that’s when I knew how far gone I was.
chapter
Eighteen
Boyce
Sunday afternoon I’d sent Brit packing with balanced tires and orders to get a new set as soon as she could afford them when Pearl texted me. She not only got the job, they wanted her to start right away. Aunt Minnie—who was about a hundred—had taken a spill over Katy Perry, the inn’s reception dog, and fractured her femur one week before her knocked-up front-desk girl got put on bed rest.
If I were Pearl, I’d have thought long and hard about the bad luck making the rounds there before signing on, but she’d always been a logical sort of girl. Luck one way or the other wouldn’t faze her because she’d never believed in it.
She came home around ten thirty, tiptoeing through the trailer for no good reason because I was wide-awake, staring at the ceiling and praying for a gully washer despite the fact that there was a two percent chance of rain and not a cloud in the goddamned sky. She fell asleep on the sofa while I tossed and turned and cursed the fact that my pillow still smelled like her.
Sam showed up Monday morning, full of beans because she’d survived her trial period and was now a bona fide employee. We were working on a routine brake job under the lift I’d set low so she could see and reach everything. I pulled my weight bench over so I didn’t have to squat. I’d never worked on an underbody while seated, but it was damned sight more uncomfortable than I’d have thought.
“You were in the Marines?” she asked, all offhand like she thought I’d start spilling war stories if she was sneaky enough. Since I’d rolled the sleeves of my T-shirt to my shoulders, she had stolen several veiled peeks at my tat, not near as wily as she thought she was.
“No. My brother was.” I didn’t elaborate and didn’t intend to.
She was quiet for a minute, taking in that word—was. When I spoke of Brent to someone unfamiliar with his story, which was rare because I didn’t speak of him at all if I could help it, a strained moment always passed during which I hoped they’d heard everything that word implied. People could express sympathies all day long and I would nod and accept them, but I didn’t want to discuss the loss of him.
“My mama was too.”
I glanced at her downturned face and wondered if Silva had known this. Of course he had, that sly bastard.
“I got the tattoo on the third anniversary of 9/11, three months after he was killed in action,” I said. “He had the same one.”
“Did you mean to join up too?”
“No. Brent—” Damn if his name spoken aloud didn’t still lance through me. “Brent was the Marine. I was always the grease monkey.”
She smiled faintly. “That’s what my dad calls me. His grease monkey.”
“You’re a monkey all right. A damned ornery monkey.” I was sure she’d have some comeback at the ready—likely one that proved my point—and we’d leave the grim discussion of dead brothers and mothers behind.
“Dad says he’d rather I be cranky all the time than pretend to be happy when I’m not.”
Not exactly the retort I’d expected. I handed her a wrench and pointed to the bolt she needed to tighten.
As she turned it, she said, “My mama got out when she got pregnant with me. Dad’s never told me if she meant to stay out or go back. I think she meant to go back. But then, you know, me. With all this.” She pounded a fist on the arm of the wheelchair and stared at her lap. “She killed herself when I was three. I don’t remember her. But in every picture we have of her, she’s smiling.”
I didn’t know how the hell to respond to that, so I didn’t. I was at a loss for what Silva was thinking, sending this kid to me. I couldn’t fix her. All I could do was give her a job, though working had been a savior of sorts to me once I allowed it to be.
“Congrats, monkey—you just replaced brake pads all by yourself.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’ve never done it before.”
“Ever gotten paid to do it?” I shot back.
She blinked and her mouth quirked a little on one side.
“Don’t waste time being smug. Get to work on the next one.”
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