The Lonesome Young (10 page)

“Heard you been consortin’ with Whitfields, boy,” she said before Ethan could speak. “You’re gonna stop that right now, you hear me?”

I’d always tried to be courteous to her, especially in her own place, but her high-handed command set my blood to a slow boil.

Ethan stood up and patted her shoulder. “Shut the hell up, Ma,” he said, but there was no real heat behind the words.

She smiled at him like he’d complimented her cooking, and I was struck for about the hundredth time by just how damn strange my entire family was. I bet Victoria didn’t have to deal with weird relatives. The Whitfields probably all sat down together for tea and crumpets right about this time of day and complimented each other on their awesomeness. I grinned, imagining what Victoria would have to say to me about
that
, and unfortunately Ethan saw me.

“I don’t think you have much to laugh about,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “I heard about you and the Whitfield bitch. I want you to stay away from her.”

I glanced down at the pistol tucked casually into his waistband, and wondered how many parole violations he committed on a daily basis.

“I don’t actually give a damn what you want,” I said flatly. “If we’re going to talk
wants
, I want you to quit dealing drugs, and people in hell want iced fucking lattes, but we get what we get, right?”

I loosened my stance, ready for him to make a run at me. He’d done it before.

This time he laughed.

“Growing a pair of balls, little brother? She’s not worth it. She’s a high-priced piece of tail who’ll use you and leave you crying, just like every Whitfield who has ever had anything to do with a Rhodale,” he said, putting his gun on the table and slouching back down in his chair.

“Not every Rhodale,” Anna Mae said, and her slow smile sent a shudder snaking down my spine. “If you ever get the chance, ask your girlfriend’s daddy about me.”

Ugh. I didn’t want to know.

“She’s not my girlfriend, and I don’t even know her, so you can all quit worrying about it,” I finally said, lying with a perfectly straight face. “Not that my personal life is any of your business.”

“See that you keep it that way,” Ethan advised darkly. “Rhodales and Whitfields don’t mix.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Ethan?” I was exasperated with the stupidity. “What did that family ever do to you?”

He narrowed his eyes, which were the exact same shade of blue as mine, Pa’s, and Jeb’s. Funny how the same color could look so different.

“It’s more what did they do to all of us over the years, Mickey, and what they’re trying to do now. Did your new little piece of ass tell you that no sooner did her loser father get back in town than he started making noises about getting his horse buddies to buy up land in the county? He’s trying to turn our side of the county into some kind of suburban fucking paradise.”

I deliberately looked around as if assessing the value of the tacky fake-wood-paneled walls. “So you’d get to sell this place for a fortune to the developers.”

“Never,” Anna Mae snarled.

“Big picture, Mick. If a bunch of rich assholes move in here, we’re going to have a lot more law enforcement to worry about than dear old useless Pa.”

I leaned against the door, nodding at Jeb when he clattered down the stairs from the second floor and walked into the kitchen.

“You’re surprisingly well-informed for a twenty-two-year-old who just got out of jail,” I said. “Are you sure your facts are right?”

“When I get the wrong facts, people get hurt,” Ethan said. The matter-of-factness in the way he said it got to me more than if he’d shouted and raged.

Whatever piece of the brain that governed compassion and morality was damaged in Ethan—or missing altogether. Jeb, laughing like a fool, wasn’t much better.

“Maybe you need to grow a spine,” I told Jeb. “Get away from Ethan and start thinking for yourself.”

Ethan’s eyes were cold and dead when he looked at Jeb, and I was suddenly very sorry for offering my opinion. I still didn’t know what had happened between the two of them, but I didn’t think it had been resolved, and I didn’t want my big mouth to get Jeb shot.

“Have you seen Caro?” I asked, abruptly changing the subject.

Ethan knew exactly what I was doing, but for whatever reason, he decided to let it go. For now, at least.

“She’s working at the Suds ’n Giggles,” Jeb offered. “They let her use the apartment over the Laundromat in exchange for managing the place.”

“And the girls?”

“School and daycare,” Anna Mae muttered. “I don’t know why that daughter of mine won’t live here, where I could raise them babies right.”

I figured that was exactly why Caroline refused to live at the compound. She’d seen first-hand how Jeb and Ethan had turned out under their mother’s tender care, and she didn’t want little Summer and Autumn anywhere near Anna Mae.

“I’m going to go visit her,” I said, ready to end this encounter. “You want to send any message with me?”

Anna Mae loaded me down with an apple tart, a Tupperware dish filled with the stew she’d been stirring, and a loaf of fresh cornbread. Then she started rummaging in the cupboards and refrigerator for more.

“This is all I can take in my saddlebags,” I said. “I’ve got my books in there, too.”

“You tell her I’m coming to visit those babies and get my dishes back,” she said, and if it had been anybody else, I would have suspected the shine in her eyes was from a tear or two at being estranged from her only daughter.

But this was Anna Mae.

“You remember what I said,” Ethan told me as I headed out the door. “I got a few days’ grace period on certain things, but then we’re going to talk about that job, too.”

I turned around with my arms full of his mother’s cooking and looked him straight in the eye. “No, we’re not. I don’t want to work for you.”

“Want don’t pay the same debt that
need
does, baby brother,” Ethan said.

His cell phone rang, and a shadow crossed his face when he looked at it.

Jeb dropped the spoon he’d picked up to ladle out some stew, and gravy splattered across the white linoleum floor like arterial blood in a cop show. “More bad news?”

“Not in front of the boy,” Anna Mae snapped.

Ethan nodded and pointed me to the door before answering his phone. All the way across the porch and down the steps, I imagined I could feel him aiming his pistol right between my shoulder blades. Rhodale brother had killed brother in Kentucky before, according to the tangled stories of our family history. Considering our violence-obsessed gene pool, it would probably happen again.

I didn’t breathe easy until I was a good mile down the road.

CHAPTER 11

Victoria

I
walked in on my mother arguing with Melinda but turned around before they saw me and walked right back out of the parlor, headed for the kitchen. Usually, I stood up for Melinda and tried to act as a buffer between the sharp edges she and mom used to slice and dice each other, but the day had already been exhausting. All I wanted to do was get a snack and retreat to my room.

Mrs. Kennedy was baking snickerdoodles, and I stopped at the entrance to the kitchen, enjoying the warmth and the scent of cinnamon and sugar goodness. Buddy, tucked up on a stool at the long granite counter doing his homework, flashed a grin at me, and I noticed another tooth was missing.

“Victoria, look!” He grabbed a pretzel stick off the fruit, cheese, and snacks plate in front of him and carefully pushed it through the gap in his smile. “Ta da! I can eat without opening my mouth!”

I dropped my backpack and applauded with real enthusiasm. “That’s the best thing I’ve seen all day.”

The best thing if I didn’t count Mickey’s deep blue eyes, his wickedly seductive smile, or the look on his face when he’d said he wanted to get to know me. But I didn’t think Buddy would understand that.

“My teacher said I was very observant,” he announced proudly.

Mrs. Kennedy smiled at him, waving me into the room. “I’m sure she did, sweetie,” she said.

“And so you are,” I said, kissing the top of his tousled head.

Buddy was Mom and Dad’s miracle baby, born a good two years after the two of them had started sleeping in separate rooms, and I’d missed him like crazy when I’d been away at school.

Miracle baby, my ass. More like “too many mint juleps at the Derby” baby
, Melinda had said once or twice, but I always told her to shut up. The last thing I ever,
ever
wanted to think about was my parents getting smashed and hooking up.

“I observed that almost everybody in Clark Elementary is a white person,” he continued innocently. “Not like back home at all.”

“Say goodbye to diversity, Buddy,” I advised him, selecting a cookie.

The cook cast a disapproving glance at me, but she didn’t disagree.

Buddy slapped his crayon down on the map of Kentucky he’d been coloring. “Hey, no fair! Mrs. Kennedy said no cookies before dinner.”

I kind of envied him. I couldn’t remember back to a time when a cookie had distracted me.

“You can share mine,” I said in a stage whisper, breaking it in two pieces and giving him the bigger one. “But only if you let me color part of your map.”

He happily agreed, and we sat there and ate our cookie and some fruit and colored Kentucky purple, green, and cornflower blue, while he quizzed me on the state bird (Cardinal), state flower (goldenrod), and state song.

“‘My Old Kentucky Home’?” I guessed.

“Yes! But what about the state insect?” His entire face lit up, because he loved it when he stumped me, and we both knew insects were not my area of expertise.

“We have a state insect? That’s gross,” I said, stalling.

“Yes! And you have to guess what it is!”

“The horsefly?”

“It is around here,” Mrs. Kennedy said, not looking up from her potato peeling.

“No!” Buddy swung around on his stool. “The honeybee!”

“You’re a honeybee,” I said, making my hands into claws and growling. “I’m going to tickle you!”

Buddy shrieked with laughter and ran out of the room, clomping down the hall, probably off to pester Pete just like I had at his age. We heard the front door bang shut and my mother yell at him not to slam doors. Mrs. Kennedy and I sighed at the same time.

“Can I do anything to help?”

She cooked a huge lunch for the ranch hands every day, but they got breakfast and dinner on their own. It wasn’t like the old days, where everybody bunked in the barn and ate all their meals together. Half of the staff lived on the ranch in a series of small cottages, but the rest lived out in town, and they all wanted their own space during their time off. Then again, ranch hands hadn’t had cable TV or the Internet in the old days, either.

Mrs. Kennedy had worked for Gran as long as I’d been alive, but I’d never known there to be a Mr. Kennedy, and she was kind but reserved, so I’d never felt comfortable asking her about him.

Before we’d moved in, she’d been used to relaxing in the evenings, since Gran never ate much, but now that we lived here, she had to do dinners, too. I felt like we’d added a burden to her day, so I usually asked if I could help, but she always said no.

Today she surprised me.

“Maybe you could slice up those carrots?”

“Sure.”

We worked in silence for a while, and then she cleared her throat. “This is none of my business, and I know I’m overstepping, but I feel like somebody has to warn you—”

“About the Rhodales.” I finished her sentence, setting my knife down on the cutting board with a little bit too much force.

“Well, yes.” She dried her hands on her apron and turned to look me in the eyes. “They’re trouble. That family has been no good since long before anybody can remember, and—”

“But the
sheriff
is a
Rhodale
,” I said, knowing I was being rude to keep interrupting her, but I wasn’t winning the rudeness sweepstakes in this conversation, after all. I wasn’t the one butting into somebody else’s private life. “So he turned out okay, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but he’s not . . . he’s not . . .”

“He’s not what?” I folded my arms.

“He’s . . . not a good sheriff,” she finished, almost triumphantly.

My mouth fell open, and all I could think was
poor Mickey
. Growing up under the cloud of past generations of “no-good Rhodales” must not be much of an incentive to turn out any better, especially when popular sentiment had already judged him and found him guilty. Guilty of being a Rhodale, at least.

Of course, we were the Whitfields, of Whitfield County. I wondered what people were telling him about us.

Melinda wandered in, only weaving a little, but I figured it was my cue to leave Mrs. Kennedy to her vegetables and her prejudices.

“Here are your carrots. I’m taking Melinda upstairs.”

The kindness in Mrs. Kennedy’s eyes made me feel vaguely ashamed for snapping at her, but after hearing the truth behind Mickey’s story, I couldn’t help but be outraged on his behalf.

I wondered what that said about me and my actual feelings for Mickey Rhodale.

• • •

I waited until Melinda turned off the shower to start my interrogation.

“How did you manage to get wasted when you stayed home sick from school?”

“I had a few pills left in one of my purses. The black sequined one,” she admitted, opening the shower door.

I shook my head and handed her a towel, watching to make sure she didn’t slip and fall. She’d done it before and had a small scar on her right temple. Showering while stoned wasn’t a good idea.

Melinda had the same blond hair and green eyes as me and Mom, but while the combination looked stern and patrician on Mom, and not bad but fairly ordinary on me, on Melinda it looked ethereal, like she was an elf or a fairy changeling. Whenever I caught her watching the rest of us with a faintly confused expression, as if she didn’t understand how she’d ended up in such a difficult family, it only enhanced the impression.

She dried off and started to get dressed, and I finally felt like she was steady enough to manage on her own, so I left the bathroom and headed for the chair next to her window. I had to move a pile of clean, folded laundry to the floor before I could sit on it. Melinda loved to fold laundry—sometimes she’d come into my room and fold all of mine, chattering away—but she never, ever put it away, so her room usually looked like a garage sale about to happen.