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Instead, he’d been a leasehand in that other town. He’d pumped gas at the Texaco out on the highway just north of Wilde’s Crossing, fixed cars at the same place because he was good at engines. He’d broken horses for whoever needed horses broken; weekends, he’d even delivered groceries for the supermarket. He’d hated all those jobs, but he’d done them because they put money in his pocket.
He could do that stuff again, but he couldn’t wait until summer. He needed a place to live and once he found it, he’d need to buy food and pay the bills that went with living on your own, and that took money. What he had in his savings account would not be enough.
On top of that, he’d have to find a job he could handle with his cast still on and his ribs feeling like knives stabbing him in the chest if he moved too fast. Once he found that job, he’d quit school. There was no other solution.
Miss Cleary would be all over him and he hated to disappoint her, but what choice did he have?
She subscribed to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and he went through it each day, looking for jobs. There were none. None, anyway, for a seventeen-year-old kid with a busted ankle.
He got TJ to drive him to the bank, took out all the money in his account—four hundred and twenty bucks—and counted through it twice. He had enough to take the bus to Dallas. Or Austin. Or Houston. Then…
He couldn’t get past the then, except to know that he could not impose on Miss Cleary’s hospitality any longer.
That afternoon, when she got home from school, he was waiting for her in the kitchen.
“I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” he said. She didn’t look at him; she was busy putting things in the fridge. “But it’s time I stand on my own feet.” She did look at him then, graying eyebrows raised, and he had to laugh. “Figuratively speaking, I mean.”
“Ten-dollar word for a two-dollar student,” she said calmly.
Hadn’t Alden said something like that to him the night of the accident? Not that it mattered. He was who he was, who he’d always been, the Wilde kid who was a troublemaker, who wasn’t the kid his old man had wanted.
Who was the reason his mother and now his brother were dead.
Pain slashed through him, but he wasn’t going to give in to it. Pain was weakness. That was one of the lessons his father had taught him.
“Nothing to say, John?”
He cleared his throat.
“Ten-dollar words don’t change a man’s life.”
“Neither does doing something foolish.”
He wasn’t going to rise to the bait.
“The thing is,” he said, “I’m moving out.”
Miss Cleary folded her arms.
“I’ll repay you for everything as soon as I can.”
She didn’t answer.
“It might take a while.”
“You have a place to go?”
“Yes,” he said, lying through his teeth.
“And a job?”
“Sure.” What was a second lie after you’d told the first?
“What about school?”
“What about it?” he said, and even he could hear the belligerence in the words. “Miss Cleary. I don’t meant to seem ungrateful…”
“Do you mean to sound stupid?”
“Dammit,” he said, belligerence giving way to anger, “you know that I’m not stupid!”
“I do know it. And you know it. So how come you’ve decided on such a stupid plan? We both know you don’t have a place to go or a job, and if you quit school you’ll never be anything but the bum your fool of a father thinks you’ll be.”
Johnny wanted to tell her she was wrong, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t, because he knew damn well she was 100 percent, completely, totally, absolutely correct.
His shoulders slumped and he sank into a chair at the kitchen table.
“I can’t go to school and work at the same time,” he said softly. “And I can’t you let you go on supporting me forever.”
“Correct on all counts,” she said briskly. She took the chair across from his. “Which is why I’ve come up with a plan.”
“A plan?”
“You return to classes on Monday—you’re strong enough for that now.”
“You don’t get it. I need a job. A place to live…”
“And I need someone to help out around here. Outdoors, once you’re out of that cast. Indoors for now. Dust. Sweep. Fix things that need fixing. Do some things in the kitchen.”
“Me? Me, dust and sweep and do things in the kitchen?”
“You,” she said, staring him straight in the eye. “Do a decent job, maintain a B average in school—”
“What?” he said, halfway between laughter and disbelief.
“Maintain a B average, do what needs to be done around here and I’ll give you room, board and twenty dollars a week.”
“Is this a joke?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do I look like a woman with a sense of humor, young man?”
She didn’t. And she wasn’t. Everybody knew that.
“Well? Is it a deal?”
A deal? A proposal so ridiculous it was almost insane?
Work as a handyman. Go on living with a stern old woman… A stern old woman who had showed him more care than his father ever had, the father who had not tried to find him or contact him since the day of the funeral.
Johnny looked up.
“Why?” he said softly.
He knew she’d understand the question, and she didn’t disappoint him.
“Because you’re a much, much better man than you think you are.”
Johnny swallowed hard.
“It’s a deal,” he said quietly, and Jean Cleary rose to her feet, came around the table and did something he knew he’d never forget.
She bent down and hugged him.
CHAPTER FIVE
HE PULLED C’S.
Then B’s.
When he scored a B-plus on a calculus exam, he had to bite back a whoop of victory. He wanted Miss Cleary to see it, but he didn’t want her to think it mattered all that much to him so instead of telling her about it, he left the test paper lying on the kitchen table where he did his homework each night.
She spotted the paper and picked it up.
He waited for praise. What he got was the dry suggestion that B’s were better than C’s, but A’s were better than B’s.
Jesus. What in hell did she want from him? He wasn’t any kind of student, no matter what she thought—and, to prove it, he studied harder.
Son of a gun.
Next time around, he got an A, and another A on a bio exam.
A’s became familiar grades, with B-pluses close behind. And on the home front, as he thought of it, he learned how to cook pasta, make pancakes from scratch, pick up his room and do his own laundry.
He told himself what hell he’d face if his pals from school saw him doing any of those things, but the truth was that he didn’t have many pals now that he’d quit the football team. Not that he could play with a cast on; not that there was football this time of year. But the team always hung out together and he wasn’t into doing that anymore.
He had chores to do, homework to complete, a life to live that suddenly didn’t have much room in it for fooling around.
He did make time for seeing Alden’s girl.
Her name was Connie and he’d never said more to her than hello or goodbye. Now, whenever their paths crossed, she gave him such a sad-eyed look that one day he sat down beside her in the lunchroom.
“Hey,” he said, sparkling conversationalist that he was.
“He talked about you all the time,” she said in a soft, small voice. “And about how close you two were.” Her eyes filled. “You must miss him a lot.”
Johnny looked at her. Everybody else at school avoided the topic. She, this mousy-looking Connie, was the only
one who’d even mentioned that his brother was gone.
“I miss him more than seems possible,” he blurted out. “And you must miss him, too.”
She nodded. “I always will.”
Years later, it would dawn on him that maybe that had not been the best groundwork for a romantic relationship, but right then neither of them was looking for romance, only for comfort.
They took to eating lunch together and then to hanging out together and by the time he realized they were in a relationship at all, his life had done yet another 180-degree change.
A change that began the last day of that agonizing school year.
He hadn’t replaced the Mustang—he couldn’t afford to and besides, the thought of getting behind the wheel of a car held little appeal.
He’d bought himself a bike instead. Nothing fancy, just a Raleigh that he picked up, used, at a garage sale. It got him wherever he needed to go, and when he heard guys snickering behind his back, he took care of them fast. Losing Alden had mellowed him, but the quick Wilde temper he’d always shared with his old man—though not with his brother—had turned out to be dormant, not lost.
The day school let out for the summer, he rode home feeling pretty good, anticipating the pleased reaction Miss Cleary would have to his report card—A’s in math, science, history and English, B-plus in Spanish and Italian. Her approval had come to mean a lot; it was only in the darkest hours of the night that he let himself wonder how Amos would have reacted to his being on the honor roll, man, the honor roll!
As he turned the corner for home, because that was how he’d come to think of the Cleary house, he told himself that it didn’t matter a damn that he had not heard from his father since the funeral. He knew that Miss Cleary had. He’d seen an envelope addressed to Amos lying on her desk early one Saturday morning.
It was gone a few minutes later.
Consumed by curiosity, he’d said to hell with ethics and once she was out of the house, he’d gone down to the mailbox where he figured the letter would be waiting for the postman. He’d steamed it open. Inside, he’d found a check for five thousand dollars made out to Agnes Cleary torn in half, along with her stiffly worded note.
I have no need of this, Mr. Wilde, she’d written, but you might wish to consider that John has need of his father’s love.
