Keeping Promise Rock (47 page)

and the water receded and I was so crazy—I thought I won something, you
know?”

Crick was looking at him wide-eyed, and he blushed.

“I didn’t say it made sense. But I thought, ‘That’s it. I beat God.’

And then God sucked me right into Comet’s grave when the water left, and
I barely made it out. And I realized that it’s not whether you beat God—

it’s what you have when the fight’s over. I wanted you. I wanted you alive
so bad… and just like that, the fight was over, and what I had was The
Pulpit… and you. I wasn’t going to be mad at you if I still had you. Just
wasn’t.”

Crick was quiet so long Deacon started to regret he told the story.

Maybe too many words really were bad. Maybe he had the right idea,
keeping them all close to his heart.

“Deacon—God, Deacon. You amaze me.” Crick was looking at him
all wide-eyed again, with that same fuzzy glow in his face that he used to
have when he had been in grade school and Deacon was a god and not
just a very shy boy with a very wonderful circle of family.

“I was certifiably insane—not amazing. Crazy.”
Crick shook his head and reclaimed Deacon’s hand. “Come here.”
He was bigger, so he pulled until Deacon sprawled gracelessly over his
wide chest, looking at him with surprise and a certain amount of
embarrassment.

“What were we talking about again?”

“We were talking about how you’re going to walk away from step-Bob, because if you can face God down in the middle of a fucking flood
and be glad because you still had me, then you can ignore a bit of human
trash for the same reason.”

“He hurt you.” Deacon heard the stubbornness and didn’t care.

“Not as much as I hurt you,” Crick said softly. “And you forgave
me.”

Big sigh. Looking into those brown eyes, that goofy, crooked smile,
that narrow, appealing face, Deacon’s brain just shorted out. No room for
animosity or a lifelong grudge—Crick was smiling at him, just him, and
Deacon’s anger was far, far away.

“If I promise not to kill him on purpose, can we just be done with
this?” Fine. Fine, fine, fine. No more fantasies about beating the guy’s
face in. He was done.

“Not a problem. Can you kiss me again?”
Deacon smiled from his perch on Crick’s vast chest. “Yeah, not a
problem either.” And it wasn’t.

“What are you thinking?” Crick asked him now, balancing coffee and keeping the satchel at his hip carefully away from potential disaster.

Deacon looked up from that mesmerizing, cold water, took his coffee from Crick’s game hand, and turned his face up to the summer sun.

“I’m thinking that this is about the prettiest place I’ve ever seen,” Deacon said seriously. “I’m thinking that I could live here, like Lisa’s parents, on one of those islands. We could stock up our shit and bring the horses and only see the rest of the world once a month, and life would be pretty fucking okay.”

Crick looked out at the blue sky and the indigo sea. They’d gotten a good hotel room—one that overlooked the Sound in Seattle—and they’d woken up that morning, looked out, and seen whales out in the distance.

Deacon had stared at them as avidly as a child until he caught Crick staring at him instead of the whales.

“What?”

“I forget sometimes what a kid you are.”
Deacon blushed. “I’m still older than you.”

“Yeah, but not by much.”

“You’d miss home,” Crick said with affection, and Deacon turned to him, trying to articulate the thing that had been brewing in his chest since they stepped off the plane.

“I’d be home. Don’t you see, Crick? Just because we’ve always made our lives in The Pulpit doesn’t mean we have to keep trying there when it’s not working.”

“Deacon!” Crick was honestly shocked. His hair, long enough now to whip in his eyes in the fierce, cold wind, flew about his face as he stood absolutely still on the prow of the moving boat.

But Deacon couldn’t stop. “See, here’s the thing. With the money you put in the bank account, we’ve got some space. We could sell the land, keep the horses, pick up shop and just fucking move. Probably not here, but you know, there’s land in Gilroy or Salinas—places where nobody has ever heard of us, nobody gives a crap about who we are or what we were like as kids. It would just be us and the horses and the ocean, about forty-five minutes away.”

Crick finally moved. He wrapped his game arm around Deacon’s shoulders and steadied his long body against the railing, and pulled Deacon in to kiss him on the temple. Doing a thing in public like that, for the two of them, was almost like they’d sprouted wings and flew in the wind gust of the ship like the eagles they’d seen playing above them.

“Your daddy’s ashes are scattered on that land, Deacon. Don’t tell me that doesn’t mean something to you.”

“It’s a holy place because of what’s in our hearts, Crick. We can make another place for our family to worship where the worship doesn’t cost us our blood.”

There was quiet then, nothing but the roar of the wind and the grounding hum of the ferry’s engine.

“Are we really going to lose it otherwise?” Crick asked, and his shoulders slumped with the words, giving Deacon some of his weight. “I don’t want to leave our home, Deacon. I can see how this has gotten to you. I know you hate the lawsuits and the appearing in court and the paperwork. And I always swore I’d do anything to get the hell out of Levee Oaks. But The Pulpit
is like a whole different place, and I don’t want to go.”

“Do you think I do?” Deacon retorted bitterly. “But there’s going to come a time, if we keep losing money, where we can’t break even. Where we won’t be able to afford to buy anything close to what we’re going to have to leave. Wouldn’t it be nice, if we have to leave our home, to not have to start over from scratch?”

Crick’s breath was reassuringly warm in Deacon’s ear. “Well then…

how about we wait until that time happens, okay? When it comes a month where, if we keep losing we won’t break even, we’ll have a family vote then, and decide.”

“Family vote?”

“Yeah—Benny, Jon, Amy, Andrew, Patrick—family. The weight of this isn’t all you, Deacon. We’ll take up the slack.” Deacon swallowed, feeling light and powerful—he was a god with a ten pound barbell if his family was there to help him with this.

“All right then. Family.”

At that moment, the intercom belted out “Anacortes,” and that was their stop. Time for Crick to go face up to his own demons now that Deacon’s were all put to rest.

The Arnolds lived in a crooked three-story house that was built organically into a hill. The thick green growth of ferns and redwoods that surrounded it—and the fact that the house itself was painted a weathered blue—made it look like something out of a fairy tale, and Crick laughed softly as they walked up the steps.

“I called her ‘Popcorn’—but I maybe I should have called her

‘Pixie’, you think?”

Deacon smiled reassuringly and then blushed in spite of himself. To Deacon, this journey alone seemed incredibly brave, and he said so.

Crick stopped dead on the landing and turned to him. They didn’t touch, but Crick’s eyes were warm as he said, “I don’t think I could do this without you. Have I thanked you yet for coming with me?”

“No need,” Deacon muttered, shoving at Crick’s hip to get him to move.

It was Crick who knocked at the door, and when the sweet-faced, middle-aged woman with jeans, a sweatshirt, and a silver-blonde ponytail opened the door, it was Crick who started to introduce them.

As it turned out, he didn’t need to.

Her face, which had set into grief-lines and sadness, lit up as soon as she laid eyes on Deacon.

“I know you!” she said with a genuine if tearful laugh, opening the door and gesturing for them to enter. “You’re Crick’s Deacon—and that would make you Crick. Oh my God! I’m so glad you two came.” Deacon turned a rather special shade of red. “Thank you, ma’am,” he muttered, and they were ushered in.

“My husband will be so sorry to have missed you,” Mrs. Arnold told them as she seated them in the living room. It looked like a comfortable room in spite of the doilies on the furniture and the ornate area rug on the hardwood floor. The floor had scratches on it from the old dog by the fireplace, and the area rug was clean but not without spots. There was even some dust on the drapes and above the mantelpiece, and since both men were well acquainted with dust and less acquainted with rooms that had been decorated by what seemed to be a family of pixies, the dust helped put them at ease as well.

“We can come back tomorrow,” Crick offered, although they had planned to go sightseeing the next day, and Deacon felt a little bit guilty at the relief that came when Mrs. Arnold shook her head.

“No, I’m sorry—he’s taking our youngest to visit colleges in California. She’s thinking of going to Cal Arts Valencia or USC. He wanted to show her around a little.”

Deacon caught Crick’s eye, and they both smiled a little crookedly.

It was good to know someone was going on to live their “if only”s.

Crick sighed then, looked the woman in the eyes, and spoke the truth. “I’m so very sorry about Lisa, ma’am. She was about the best friend I’ve ever had—it… I miss her every day.”

The woman’s eyes grew bright, and she reached across from her seat and patted Crick’s knee. “So do I, sweetie. But I’m so glad she had you over there. You know she wrote me, didn’t you?” Crick shrugged. Lisa asked if she could tell her mother about him—

he didn’t think it was that big a deal. “Yes ma’am. We read our letters to each other. Helped pass the time.”

Deacon couldn’t keep the strangled noise from escaping, and to his surprise, Mrs. Arnold clapped her hands together and regarded him fondly.

“He really is as adorable as she said he was…. She thought you were a very lucky young man, did you know that, Carrick?” Crick shot Deacon a very dry look, but Deacon was too immersed in his own mortification to return it with much aplomb.

“She told me a couple of times. Yes ma’am.”

“And you did such a good job on his pictures—here,” she said, rising. “I’ll go get your sketchbooks. You’ll be wanting them back.” The rest of the afternoon was… sweet. It was the only way Deacon could think of it later. Neither of the men was much used to mothering, but Lisa’s mother managed to cram an awful lot of it into a few hours. They got an earful about how Lisa had wanted to earn her own money for college and how the Army seemed like the way. They got to read her letters home and see her pictures growing up and even her old room. It was as pixie-fied as the rest of the house, with pastel colors and little-girl frills, and Crick told Deacon privately that he didn’t wonder that the poor woman had ended up with the biggest fairy in the U.S. military—a crack that got Crick a solid thwack on the back of the head when Lisa’s mother wasn’t looking.

By the time they left the house to take the bus to the last ferry, Crick had cried a little, and so had Mrs. Arnold, and all of them had mourned a rather extraordinary young woman.

And Deacon was prouder of his lover than he had ever been in his life.

“She really was an awesome kid, Crick,” Deacon said as they boarded the ferry. “And she loved you like a brother….”

“Sister,” Crick sniffled. “She said I was the big sister she never had.” Deacon laughed and smacked him on the back of the head again.

“You were both certifiable.” And then he grabbed Crick’s hand. “And I’m 322

so glad you had each other, man. I really wish she’d been able to come home, but I’m so glad you had her while you were there.” And Crick, with his one-track stubbornness, managed to turn even that to his advantage. “Did you see their house, Deacon? That was her grandmother’s house. She loved it—she grew up there. I want our house to be like that. I want Parry Angel to bring her kids to our house and all her friends to come to dinner. Tell me we can make that happen—please?”

“Man, we’ll do what we can, okay? We’ll put it to the family and do what we can.”

And it was the best that he could give.

IN THE end, it was a near thing.

They proposed the plan to the family as soon as Jon brought them home from the airport. Jon wanted in immediately. “We’ll move with you,” he proclaimed grandly from the kitchen table, and Deacon said that was awfully swell of him to commit to, since his poor wife was stuck at home with her feet up while she gestated. Jon pulled out his cell phone, punched in the number, and said, “Amy, if Deacon ups and moves The Pulpit to Gilroy or Bumfuck Egypt, you want to go with him, right?” He held the phone to Deacon’s ear in time to hear Amy’s “Hell yes—why did you even need to ask?”

And that was the start of the very first family meeting.

They did it once a month, on the first, as Deacon added up the bills and figured how much the ranch had lost that month. The entire family gathered in the kitchen, Deacon put the facts and figures on a big pad of paper and showed them the property available on the market for the assets they had.