The Lonesome Young (3 page)

I started running for the truck, just as a group of motorcycles revving nearby roared toward us. One veered close, and the boy grabbed my hand and pulled me behind him. He flipped his middle finger at the guy who’d swerved toward, rather than away from, us.

“I’d rather you keep your hands to yourself,” I said, hating that I sounded like a disapproving schoolgirl.

He laughed and shook his head and pointed to my truck. “After you, Princess.”

I glanced over at the fire. “But Pete—”

“Can catch a ride when the fire is out. Let’s
go
.”

I finally nodded and ran for the truck and climbed in, and jumped a little in surprise when he appeared behind me and shut my door for me. I turned the key Pete had left hanging, and the truck fired to growling life.

“I don’t even know your name,” I said stupidly through the open window.

He grinned, and something rusty stuttered in my chest as the simple act of smiling took his face from stern to beautiful. I caught the gasp in my throat before it escaped, so it turned into a coughing fit, instead.

No doubt I was impressing him with my smoothness more and more every second.

I resisted the urge to pound my face on the steering wheel and instead turned to look in the rearview mirror so I could back up and get the heck out of there.

He stopped me with a hand on my arm, this time gently, as if afraid I’d bolt again. I stared down at his strong tanned fingers, stark against my too-pale skin.

“My name is Mickey Rhodale.”

“Victoria Whitfield. It’s nice to meet you,” I said politely and completely inappropriately for the occasion, as years of conditioning rose up inside me to turn etiquette into farce, yet again. In Connecticut I’d once said “Bless you” to an indie rocker who’d just slammed too much cocaine up his nose, and I’d been famous around school for it for months.

But Mickey didn’t laugh. Instead, he studied my face as if it held the answer to a question he needed to ask.

“It’s nice to meet you, too, Victoria. Now get your pretty ass moving.”

Furious once again, I gunned the gas and got out of there.

• • •

By the time I pulled up the long, curving driveway to Gran’s house—which I guess was my house now, too—all thoughts of mysterious hot guys scattered, because the sheriff department car parked in the driveway had its lights flashing and a deputy in the driver’s seat.

I left the keys in the ignition and hit the door running. What had Melinda done this time? The front of the house was empty, but I heard voices coming from the room Gran called her parlor, and I ran across the foyer to find out what was going on.

Gran, Mom, Melinda, and Buddy were all grouped on and around the overly formal furniture, and their reactions ranged from surprise to joy to disappointment, depending on the face and who was wearing it.

Buddy hurled his compact body at me and nearly knocked me flat on my butt.

“You’re home, Vivi! I missed you every day, and Mom won’t let me go out to the horses on my own, and Melinda is always grouchy, and so is Dad, but I beat the Elite Four at Pokémon Black on my Nintendo DS!” he rattled off in one long breathless sentence.

My sister walked slowly and carefully across the room to hug me. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused.

“Hello, Victoria. We’re having a tough night around here,” she said, enunciating very carefully in that way she had when she was high or drunk. As if saying, “No. I’m. Not. Drunk,” very precisely would somehow convert wishful thinking—or defiant denial—into fact. I hugged her warily. Some things hadn’t changed.

“Call your sister Victoria, Timothy. We don’t use nicknames,” my mother chided my brother, who’d only and always been called Buddy by everyone else but her.

Buddy rolled his eyes up at me, careful that she wouldn’t see. “Do you want some lemonade? Mrs. Kennedy makes it fresh. I’ll get you some,” he said as he escaped the room.

Mom held out her arms and, after a barely noticeable (I hoped) moment of hesitation, I walked over and hugged her. She’d gotten even thinner since August, but I only had a moment to worry about whether or not she’d been eating before Gran was there, gently nudging Mom to one side and throwing her arms around me.

“I missed you so much, girl,” she said fiercely, and probably nobody but me noticed the shine in her eyes. “What took you so long? I thought your flight got in at four.”

I started to explain about the fire, and Pete, but before I could get to the part about the amazingly bossy Mickey Rhodale, the tension in the room snaked its way past my exhaustion into my consciousness.

“What is it? What’s going on? Why is there a cop out front in the sheriff’s car?”

There was a confusion of voices telling me bits and pieces and rumors and truth. It took me a few minutes to get the story straight, especially because it seemed they were trying to hide what we were talking about from my little brother, who’d come back with a slightly sticky cup of lemonade for me.

The gist was that Caleb, one of our new ranch hands, whom I’d met last summer and remembered as a nice guy with tons of freckles and a big smile, might be a casualty of the same fire I’d been reluctant to leave. My dad had gone with the sheriff to see if he could identify the body, leaving a deputy here, which explained the cop and the car out front. In fact, Dad must have even been there when I was, and we just hadn’t seen each other in the confusion, which wasn’t surprising with all of those fire trucks and so many people running around.

The
body
.

I started to shiver, and a bone-deep chill settled into me, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast or slept much in days. Gran noticed. She scooped up a quilt from its cherrywood stand and wrapped it around my shoulders, urging me to sit down. Even Mom stepped up, heading to the kitchen to make tea and sandwiches—which was a wasted effort, since nobody seemed to be able to eat. And then we sat, waiting for more news about the fire.

Any
news. News about Caleb, or why the sheriff wanted Dad, or whether anybody else was hurt . . . the room was shadowed by the threat of a tragedy we didn’t yet know how to define.

Waiting for Dad or Pete to call. Minutes, quarter hours, and then an hour counted off on the incongruously curlicued art deco clock on the mantelpiece, and still we waited without word.

Finally, as much out of a desire to avoid the sight of Melinda’s strained face as from exhaustion, I leaned my head back on the couch and closed my eyes. Unfortunately, the scene with Mickey immediately started to play itself out in my memory.

Now get your pretty ass moving.

Who
talked
like that? Especially to someone he’d only met a few minutes before?

“Do you want to play my game with me?”

Buddy, sprawled on the floor playing his video game, glanced up at me hopefully and then snuck a glance at the clock and my mother, clearly expecting her to send him to bed any minute. His mutinous expression said it all: Nine-year-old kids
never
got to have fun in this family.

I almost smiled, but the weight of the situation and the stern faces of past generations of Whitfields, staring disapprovingly down at me from their gilt-framed glory on the walls, quickly flattened the urge.

“Sure,” I said, hoping to forestall the bedtime argument.

I sat down on the floor with him, and Buddy taught me the seriously complicated rules of one of his video games, while Melinda paced the room like a caged wild thing. My mother watched my sister stonily, pale with either nerves or rage. It was usually hard to tell with Mom.

“Ha!” Buddy grinned up at me and pointed to the screen. “You just got killed by the eighth-level wizard’s apprentice, Gwork.”

I pretended to be horrified. “You’re the dork. I’m not a dork.”

Buddy laughed. “Not
dork
.
Gwork.”

“Now it’s definitely bedtime,” my mother announced, crossing her arms and tapping her foot.

I felt an unwelcome flutter of familiarity at the gesture that had once cajoled and threatened my own nine-year-old self into bed. Buddy apparently knew enough not to argue, so he hugged me, hugged Gran, and trudged up the stairs toward his room.

“Brush your teeth,” Mom called up after him, and he waved one hand in acknowledgment, a forlorn little figure marching to his certain doom.

Mom and I exchanged a grin at his resolute martyrdom, but it wasn’t until she put her “perfect Mrs. Whitfield” mask on afterward that I even realized it. Her first unrehearsed smile in ages, probably, and I’d nearly missed it.

Melinda, oblivious to anything but whatever inner torment was clearly hurting her so much, whirled around and tripped over Gran’s embroidered footstool. She nearly fell but managed to right herself at the last minute, while I watched her with a weirdly peculiar sensation of embarrassment and guilty contempt, as if I were a spectator at a really terrible play.

Mom finally lost it. She shot up out of her chair like a horse from the starting gate. “Sit down, Melinda. Just sit
down
, already. Haven’t we got enough to deal with right now? Poor Calvin—”

“Caleb,” my sister corrected, biting off the word. “You don’t even know his
name
?”

Buddy appeared in the doorway, wearing his blue-and-white striped pajamas and looking freshly washed. He made a face at my mom before she could say anything.

“Yes, I brushed my teeth.” Then he ran over and hugged me again.

“I missed you, Victoria,” he whispered in my ear. “Nobody else makes them stop
fighting
all the time. I miss my friends from the city, too,” he said, raising his voice, “but Gran says we can get a dog.”

“I missed you, too, sweetie. I’m glad to be—”

“No pets in the house,” my mother interrupted. “I know I’ve said that at least a hundred times. I have allergies. It’s bad enough I have to live around all these horses. We’re not bringing an animal inside the house, too.”

Gran and I traded a glance over Buddy’s head. Buddy ignored Mom, or at least didn’t answer, instead running back out of the room. Seconds later, we heard his feet thumping up the stairs. A hot spike of guilt stabbed at me. I’d left him in the middle of Mom and Melinda’s drama. Not that I’d had much choice. Mom was a proud alumna of the same boarding school she’d shipped me and, briefly, Melinda off to. I wondered how hard she was taking it now that neither of us had made it to the end.

She’d certainly become even more shrill since August, when I’d left for school. Life at our house had been really stressful all summer—we’d finally started to realize how far under Dad had gone with his business. For some stupid reason, though, he’d kept up the pretense that everything would be okay for long enough to send me off to school again. As he always said, the neighbors saw your outside, not your inside, and they judged you by it. So the surfaces in our family were as reflective as mirrors—hard, shiny, and with no depth at all.

“I didn’t want you to have to leave that school you love so much,” he’d said when he’d finally made the phone call that there was no more money for tuition.

Rick, my older brother, was already at college, but there was no talk of bringing him home. To be fair, his football scholarship paid for almost everything, but even if it hadn’t, Dad would have found a way to keep him there. Rick was the heir apparent, of course. What Rick wanted, Rick got.

The truth was that I wouldn’t really miss Connecticut; I preferred Kentucky autumns and winters. But I’d miss my friends. We’d promised to keep in touch, but Facebook and Skype were never quite the same as dropping into each other’s rooms at any hour of the day or night. Maybe at least Simone and I would keep the promises we’d made to stay in touch; we’d been roommates for two years, after all.

Maybe.

Now I’d be spending my junior and senior years at Clark High School, home of the Clark County Wildcats.

Go, team.

“It
is
still my house, Priscilla,” Gran said dryly, showing the hint of steel that came from growing up dirt poor and helping build a racing empire with my grandfather from two horses and a dream. “If I decide to get a dog, I’m sure you can take an allergy pill once in a while or something.”

“Why are we talking about dogs when Caleb might be dead? None of you have one shred of human decency,” Melinda said, and now she was crying, huddled around the ancient pillow that told us that
God Is the Light
in nine-year-old Gran’s shaky embroidery.

“Hey. Calm down. Caleb might still be alive. He’s probably still alive,” I said.

“Lord willing, and the creek don’t rise,” Gran muttered. Her early years growing up in a very non-Whitfield family showed up at times of stress through old sayings and down-home cooking. Any minute now she’d be jumping up to make green bean casserole.

I crossed the room and put my arm around my sister’s shoulder. At eighteen, she was a year older than me, but Melinda was fragile. I’d sometimes had to play the big-sister role, protecting her from my parents, bullies at school, and—pretty much—life itself.

Life and her own screwups, which usually involved really bad choices in guys. Caleb had just graduated from high school, and he was cute in that fresh-scrubbed, hard-muscled, farm-boy way. Even though I didn’t want to make the connection between Caleb’s being missing and Melinda’s frenzied pacing, my relentless brain pushed it forward.

I waited to ask until Gran and Mom were arguing loudly about the dog.

“Were you involved with Caleb?” I whispered. I really didn’t want to know the answer, but it felt like something I
should
know, in order to protect her from this. Whatever
this
was.

“He’s my boyfriend,” she whispered, grabbing my arm. “This is all my fault. If Caleb’s dead, I killed him.”

• • •

Somehow I managed to get Melinda upstairs to her room before she had a complete meltdown. She’d taken over the room I usually stayed in when we visited Gran’s, the one with the view of the barn, but I didn’t mind. I’d been at boarding school, after all, so it was only fair. Melinda’s attempt at boarding school had lasted three weeks before they’d expelled her for underage drinking and fired the young assistant professor she’d been trying—fairly successfully—to seduce. She’d spent the past three years battling the addiction and depression that my parents both pretended she didn’t have, so, even though she was eighteen, she was a junior like me. When she bothered to go to school at all.