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“Hey, Jer?”
“Yeah?” He turns to face me.
I crook a grin. “Thanks. For earlier, I mean. Thanks for…getting it.”
His lips stretch out into a smile, blond hair tarnished gold from the lamp behind his head, curling around his head like a halo.
He nods. “Always.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Momma was in a car accident.
“I want to see her,” I tell Mr. Gavin.
He picked me up from school, and now he’s taking me to his house where I’ll be staying the night.
“You’ll see her first thing tomorrow when she’s released. They just want to keep her overnight for observation, just to be safe.”
“Why?”
He cuts his gaze to me from where he sits behind the wheel, eyes bunched in the corners. “It’s just hospital rules.”
Pursing my lips, I stare out the windshield and nod. Normally I’d be so excited to get to ride in Mr. Gavin’s black pick-up. I feel like a grown-up, getting to sit up front, and play with the radio. Unlike Dad, Mr. Gavin doesn’t care if I touch stuff.
“Okay, then I’ll stay with her in the hospital,” I say determinedly.
“Mason…” He flicks the blinker, and turns onto the private dirt road leading to him and Mrs. Linda’s house. It’s still sleetin’ out, but Mr. Gavin’s got chains around his tires, making it so we don’t slip and slide.
Like Momma did.
From the radio, a band Gavin told me is called Alice In Chains plays quietly, singing something about staying away. “I’ll write it down for you when we get to the house,” he’d told me. And I said back, “I don’t care. I don’t want it. I just want my mom.”
Now, he slows the truck to a grinding crawl as a white mailbox appears between the trees up ahead. Beyond it, through the slant of snowy-looking rain, there’s a yellow farmhouse with white shutters.
“We’ll call her, okay? As soon as we get ya settled inside.”
“But I need to see her.”
Parking the truck, he unbuckles, before turning and helping me with mine, unwrapping it from the hooks on my booster.
“I know, Segar,” he says gently in that rough, Wolverine voice of his.
My lips twist hearing his nickname for me.
“Who’s Segar?” I’d asked him once, when he said if I wasn’t a little Segar in the making after he caught me carrying his big guitar around and singing, pretending I was just like rock stars in the videos he’d showed me.
“Bob Segar. A damn legend.” And then he’d showed me one of the best songs I’d ever heard—“Old Time Rock & Roll.”
A legend…
I wanna be a legend someday.
Turning off the engine, taking the music with it, he hops out, shuts the door, and rounds the hood to come help me out.
Grabbing his hand, I jump down.
He gets my backpack from where he shoved it behind the bench, and swings it over his back. Ruffling my hair, he tells me to watch the ice as we make our way to the side door to strip off our wet boots in the mud room.
