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She pushed the covers off and crawled across the bed to him. When she got there, she sat cross-legged behind him and put her arms around him. “Tell me why you’re how you are. What happened to you?”
He looked down at where her white hands crossed over each other in the center of his chest, right over his heart.
She trusted him.
It was like getting cut by a knife that was so sharp, it went deep, fast, and it didn’t even hurt at first. You took your hand away, thinking you were fine, and then you saw the blood, and the ache started up.
Too late to stop it. Too late to do anything but bandage himself up and stagger through the aftermath.
“Please,” she said.
He couldn’t give her forever. Babies with big eyes and round cheeks. But he couldn’t pretend not to owe her the truth.
“My brother Patrick and I … You really don’t know this already?”
So many people did. His old friends, everyone who’d gone to school with him and his brothers and sisters. Most of the folks he did jobs for already knew. It wasn’t any fun, seeing his history on their faces, but it did simplify things.
“No,” she said.
“I guess you’re too young.” All the Mazzaras had been out of high school before she even started. And maybe it made a difference that she lived in Camelot, not Mount Pleasant.
He took a deep breath. “Patrick and I used to run around together. He’s fifteen months younger. I gave him his first beer, you know? We smoked weed for the first time together at one of those parties in the basement of South Hall. You ever go to one of those parties?”
She shook her head, rolling her forehead back and forth on his back.
“ ’Course you didn’t. Well, we did. I dropped out of high school partway through my junior year. I was bombing trig for the second time, failing English, too, and I didn’t see the point anymore. I wasn’t any good at school. If I read for too long, I would get this dull pain behind my eyes, and the lines would start to swim around at the ends, so I couldn’t get from the end of one line to the beginning of another.”
Amber inhaled, sounding like she was about to speak.
“It’s not what you think, dyslexia or anything like that. I got tested for all the learning disabilities, and I didn’t have any of them. It’s actually my eyes—or it was my eyes. This eye doctor I went to a few years ago figured it out. She called it ‘convergence insufficiency,’ and she says nobody tests for it as much as they should. Anyway, she did therapy with me and fixed it in, like, three months, but back in high school I had no fucking clue. I just knew I hated school, and I’d do anything to avoid having to spend all day long in a classroom. So as soon as I could drive, I bought a car with money I’d earned working for my dad, and I started skipping all the time. I took Patrick along for company.”
“Did he drop out, too?”
“Eventually he did. He was a better student than me. I was lucky to pull C’s and D’s, and Patrick got mostly A’s. My mom was furious with me. She said I ruined his life.”
Amber rested her cheek against his back and slumped against him.
“So we raised a lot of hell is the short version. Patrick had an on-again, off-again girlfriend, and he got her pregnant. He was trying to straighten up and be a decent dad, but I kept pulling him out to the bars with me, getting him to be my wingman when I was chasing tail. Both of us were working for my dad by then, but we came in late for shifts, took off early. Gave him a lot of gray hair. Probably took ten years off his life, even before the accident.”
She squeezed him tighter.
“Patrick and his kid’s mom didn’t get along. They fought a lot, even before the baby was born. But he loved that kid. Nicole was her name. He had his day with her on Sundays, and he never missed it, no matter what kind of crazy shit I dragged him into the night before. Sometimes I went along. I liked her, too. She was a real sweetheart. We would take her to McDonald’s, go to the swings at the park.”
His hands were cold, and he’d broken out in a sweat.
That shiny cap of white-blond hair. Her stick legs in stretchy pink pants, and that round little-kid belly.
He used to lie on the floor, and she would sprinkle him with fairy dust. Kid magic.
“One day I’d had him out all hours drinking, and we were late picking her up. Patrick started arguing with Alicia. They were yelling in the driveway and giving me a headache, so I went to lie down in the backseat. When Patrick got back in the car, he was so mad, he went tearing down the driveway. Nicole was hiding behind the car.”
“Tony.”
“Ran her over. Killed her.”
“Oh, Tony, no.”
Her body on the gurney with a sheet over it.
