I glance at Holly, who gives me a small smile. She’s acting real cagey, but I know she’s probably nervous about our secret getting out.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Brothers,” he says.
“Say what?”
He walks past me, and I hurry after him. He’s moving confidently as he pops the hood and braces it open. “It’s Brothers Boyd,” he says.
“Brothers is your first name?”
He nods. “Yeah, what’s yours?”
“Jensen,” I say, “Childress.”
He dips his arm into the engine bay and starts digging around. “Mind if I call you Jen?”
I shake my head. He takes the toolkit from the bed and starts working on the truck like we’re good friends. I go along with it, because people are friendly in these parts. Miss Holly brings up iced tea after a while. She doesn’t talk much, but I’m too distracted by Brothers to care.
Hell, I thought Kyle was cool, but Brothers is a clear winner.
He’s a charismatic revelation. He talks slow and easy, like nothing bothers him, and he asks me questions like he cares about the answer. It’s not lost on me that this is the first man, including Kyle, to work on my truck with me. That feels good.
I ask him what kind of work he needs me for. He says mostly delivery, pretty easy.
“What’s the pay like?” I ask.
“Around a thousand a week, with room to move up,” he says. “And room and board, for those who need it.”
It sounds way too good to be true. I keep my face impassive and say I’ll think about it. We finish up the truck around noon. Brothers says he’s got to go and hands me his business card. Then, he invites me to Lexington, up to the racetrack, to see some of his horses train. I agree because I’ve never been.
I go, and it’s a whole new world. Brothers knows everybody at the track. He can walk into a room and remember the names of three dozen men, their wives, their children, their dogs too. He chats his way through the crowd, introducing me left and right, shaking hands like a politician.
That night, I go home to Cherry’s trailer like usual. The second I step through the door, I know something’s wrong. Her raspy voice booms over the house, cussing somebody out in the living room. I walk in, and she turns on me.
“You fucking serious, Jen?” she yells.
The phone sails over my head. I duck.
“Jesus, what’s the matter with you?” I say.
“Holly? Really?” She pushes a chair out of the way, coming close enough that I start backing up. “You fucking that whore? I thought I raised you to be better than that.”
“I’m not fucking her,” I say automatically.
“Yes, you are, and you got sloppy with it,” she barks. “I just got off the phone with her, and she folded so fucking fast. Really, Jen? You’ve been fucking her for a year?”
My mind goes back to how scared I was that day on Holly’s kitchen floor, but I don’t know how to explain to Cherry that this wasn’t intentional. It was like slipping on ice and sliding all the way down to a place I can’t climb out of.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Cherry says, voice dropping. “Or I’m going to go over there and kill that bitch.”
My whole body freezes. There’s a pile of things on the table that Cherry never cleans off. Magazines, keys, screws from me fixing stuff around the house. My eyes fall on it, and I realize underneath unopened bills sits my lunch box. The one Cherry packed for me every day my last year of school.
“Leave?” I whisper.
“You explain what the fuck you’re doing with yourself, Jen, or you get out,” she says, deadly quiet.
“I don’t know,” I manage.
