Path of Destruction (3 page)

What he wanted to say to her he couldn’t pass along through someone else or leave as a voice mail. He needed to see her. Unfortunately, with everything that his family was going through, he hadn’t had a chance to make it back to Hope’s Grove yet.

She was the only reason he had to go back. Practically the whole damn town had been destroyed by the twister. They even had to have his grandfather’s visitation at the funeral home in Summit Bluffs because all that was left of the one in Hope’s Grove was a pile of rubble. Along with the funeral home, he knew that the Hope’s Grove High School had been leveled and his chances of seeing Ella Jane sooner rather than later were high. She’d be walking down the same hallways and maybe even in a couple classes with him in a week when the displaced students from HGHS came to Summit Bluffs.

One week. He could wait one week to see her and beg her for a second chance.

C
askets aren’t light. Even with six dudes, four of them two-hundred-plus-pound linebackers, carrying it.

And when the person inside, the lifeless body that belongs to someone who once laughed with you, fished with you, pushed you to be a better version of your sorry-ass self, is inside, well it might as well weigh four thousand fucking pounds.

Cooper tried to focus on keeping the heavy mahogany box above his head, keeping pace with the guys in front of him. But the ground was soft with mud and he was struggling to keep traction. He was thankful for dark sunglasses shading his eyes from view.

He wasn’t so much crying as moisture with a potency of acid had just remained continually present in his eyes since the moment the police had uttered the words that ripped his world into two halves. One light and one dark. Before and after.

The jagged line was made of the words, “We’re sorry. He was already gone when we arrived on the scene.” Millie Mason had collapsed in his arms and Cooper had been so busy keeping her upright, he’d been unable to fall apart himself. The reality of it all still hadn’t really set in.

Carrying the casket, he saw her, saw her long, blond hair moving gently in the breeze. Storm clouds had rolled in over the proceedings, and wasn’t that just kick-you-in-the-fucking-face appropriate?

Someone had told him that she’d tried to save him. Despite being battered to hell and back herself, she’d lifted his one hundred eighty-five pound body and tried to carry him to the main road. She’d made it halfway and had to lay his body down so she could run after a passing ambulance.

Luckily, one of the paramedics had seen her and they’d stopped. But it was too late.

Late.

Too late.

Everything was too late.

He’d been too late telling her how he felt and missed his chance. He’d told her brother too late. Decided to go with him to get her too late. He’d realized how bad his family’s financial situation was too late.

“Brantley Cooper, wake up! You’re going to be late.”

The female voice startled him, and he sat upright in bed and looked around. He was in the loft of his family’s barn, where he’d been since the storm. His entire body was covered in a thick layer of sweat. His eyes were still wet.

He’s still dead.

His life was still a waking nightmare. And even though the funeral had been over a week ago, his arms still ached from carrying the casket every night while he slept.

“I’m not going,” he grumbled, refusing to open his eyes and see his mother’s reprimanding stare. He could feel her hovering above him.

“You are going,” she insisted. “I need you to take your brothers with you. Your father and I have another meeting with the insurance adjusters today.”

Blessed silence almost allowed him to fall back into the ease of unconsciousness. But then her voice took on the pleading tone he’d never heard from her before.

“Brantley, please. Please help me out here. I need you. This family needs you.”

Another meeting with the insurance adjusters meant another night of his parents being desperate and upset. Not only had the storm taken lives, it had taken livelihoods. The two machine sheds that set on the west side of Cooper Farms had been destroyed, taking over a million dollars’ worth of farm equipment with it. The EF-4 that ripped though the county had managed to annihilate an eighteen-thousand-pound combine and three other tractors and two semi-tractor trailers, leaving shreds of green and white metal strewn across the property. The only piece of equipment that had survived was a rusty, old tractor they only kept around because it had been the first piece of new equipment his grandfather had bought back in the sixties when farming was good.

Not like it was now. The Coopers had been struggling for the past couple of years. They had to jump-start the hunk of junk and use it to clear all the debris from the property. With each and every piece Coop hooked a chain to and dragged to the pile, he thought,
Why even bother?
Wasn’t going to belong to them for much longer anyway.

“Fine,” Cooper relented. “I’ll take them.” He opened his eyes to see his mother’s eyes resting on him.

She looked as if she’d aged ten years. He knew exactly why too. While she was devastated at the losses the community had suffered, it was the fact that, no matter how many times she and her husband met with insurance adjusters, there was no way they were going to be able to make the missed payments. No way were they going to be able to recover the losses.

All that was left of Cooper Farms was his family, a bottomless pile of debt, and an ancient tractor.

A
fter he’d dropped his younger brothers off at the middle school, he planned to head back to the farm and continue clearing debris and doing what he could. He had no plans of attending a single day of school at that bullshit high school they were supposed to attend now that theirs was destroyed.

His plans dissolved before his very eyes when his cell phone rang and Ella Jane’s number appeared.

“Hey, Ellie May. I’m glad you called. I’ve been—”

“Cooper? Oh thank God.” The voice on the other end wasn’t Ella Jane Mason’s. It was her mom.

“Um, hey, Mrs. Mason. I thought you were EJ.”

“She’s getting ready, Cooper. She’s dressed and she has the keys to his truck and I think she’s going to school. Please tell me you’re going to be there today. I’m so worried about her and I don’t know what to do.”

He cleared his throat and turned his truck down a road he hadn’t planned to take. “She said she was going to school today?”

There was a pause and then her mom said, “No. She didn’t
say
that exactly. She still isn’t speaking.”

“At all?” His stomach tensed.

Ella Jane Mason hadn’t said a single word in two weeks. She hadn’t responded to a single phone call or text. And when he’d stopped by her house, she’d either been asleep or pretending to be.

“Not a word, Cooper. Listen, I hate to do this to you. I know your family is struggling as much as anyone’s, and I’ve just gotten off the phone with your mama. But EJ, well, God, she’d kill me if she knew I was telling you this.” She was quiet again, and he thought of what she was possibly about to say and how very wrong she was.

“I, um, know what you probably think, Mrs. Mason. But EJ and I are just friends. And she met someone else this summer and maybe you should try calling him because—”

“Brantley Cooper, if you ever repeat this to her, I will deny it until I’m blue in the face. But you know and I know that Ella Jane has been planning your wedding since she was eight years old. So right now, I don’t want to call anyone else. I want you to be there for her today. You. It has to be you. It’s always been you. Now that—”

A choked out sob cut off the rest of her plea.

“You’re going to look out for her, right? When I’m gone? I need to know that somebody is gonna be here to take care of her.”

“Someone has to look out for her now, Coop,” she said so low he wondered if she’d said it out loud or if he’d imagined it. “She’s all I have left.”

He swallowed a constricting lump in his throat and nodded as if she could see him. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll wait for her in front of the building.”

He could feel the sigh of relief from the other end even though his heart felt as if it’d been caught in a vise.

She thanked him and he ended the call. Pointing his truck toward the absolute last place on earth he wanted to be, he tried to talk himself down from just driving the hell out of town and never coming back.

She needed him. He’d failed her once already.

It wouldn’t happen again.

T
oughen up, girl. You can’t go around acting like the world is ending over every little thing.

The words her brother had said so many times played on an endless loop in her head. Everything he’d ever told her came at her at once, and she grasped at the sound of his voice, trying to memorize it. He would be so disappointed by her lying in bed, weighed down by grief and anger. They’d had a dog, Beck, an old basset hound that had wondered up to the house when they were kids. He’d been in bad shape from the beginning, but in her eleven-year-old mind, love would make him all better. It hadn’t. He’d died after a few months, hiding away in the crawl space beneath their largest tool shed. The one farthest from the house.

She’d cried for a week. Her brother had rolled his eyes and told her to let it go. Dying was a part of life, he’d said, and at least Beck got to leave this world after months of belly rubs and plenty of leftovers. Kyle had said that Beck had died with dignity, choosing the place, and that she was disgracing his memory by wallowing like the world had come to an end. When things like this happen, it’s best to move forward, to focus on the things you can control instead of the stuff you can’t. He’d given her a similar speech when their dad left, except it had involved the words “selfish asshole” in place of “Dad.”

His constant reminders for her to be tough, to stand strong, to let go and move on when their dad left, propelled her out of bed. So she’d let the scorching hot water wash her tears down the drain in the shower, pulled on one of his plaid button-down shirts even though it was two sizes too big, and dug a pair of cutoff shorts from her bedroom floor.

Slipping into her worn out boots, the ones he’d bought her for her thirteenth birthday, she steeled herself from any and all human contact to come.

She’d stared vacantly ahead as her parents told her repeatedly that she didn’t have to do this. The school would understand. Their house only had half a roof and the solid tree out front had been split in half, the one-standing half of it having landed on their garage.

She barely heard a single word they’d uttered.

In her mind, black clouds rolled over a funeral procession. Her mind was muddled by the deluge of painful memories playing in reverse. Bare feet running through the woods, his lifeless body in her arms, the rain slamming down on them, sirens tearing through the sounds of the storm and her screams chasing after them.

Walking outside, she could hardly believe that the sun had the nerve to shine. It was glaring and offensive.

After slipping on his aviator sunglasses, she cranked his truck and tore out of the driveway.

Damaged homes, churches, and businesses blurred past on her drive out of Hope’s Grove. Crossing over into Summit Bluffs was like entering a parallel universe.

Her school was gone. Reduced to ruins. Every memory of every moment of her entire life hurt to remember.

She wasn’t Kyle Mason’s sweet little sister anymore. Wasn’t EJ or Coop’s Ellie May, wasn’t that tomboy that ran around town and watched night trains. She’d lost herself, lost that girl who’d given herself to a boy she’d thought loved in her now destroyed pickup truck.

She was a shell, an empty shell. And she didn’t give a single solitary damn what anyone in this pretty plastic place thought about it.