AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I also didn’t bother telling her I was a grown-ass man and could decide when I wanted to get up, since there was no point in staying in bed feeling sorry for myself anyway. Self-pity wouldn’t pay the bills. Nor would revisiting the past where Dallas Kent had been equal parts tormentor and secret fantasy.
I waited until I heard the door close and then climbed out of bed. I hurried through a shower and got dressed, then grabbed Dallas’s coat from where I’d draped it over the back of my desk chair the night before.
My father was, unsurprisingly, parked in front of the TV. Predictably, he didn’t acknowledge me when I walked through the living room. There was a plate of half-eaten food sitting on the table next to his chair. “Are you finished?” I asked as I motioned to the plate.
He harrumphed at me, so I took that as an affirmative and took the plate with me into the kitchen. My mother was humming quietly to herself as she cleaned the countertops. “Eggs, dear?” she asked absently.
I didn’t bother reminding her for the umpteenth time that I wasn’t a breakfast person, preferring just a cup of coffee to get me going in the morning.
“No, thank you. I need to get going.”
“I need you to stay and watch your father this morning,” my mother said as she began rinsing out the sponge she’d been using to clean with.
“I can’t.”
“Nolan,” my mother groused, clucking her tongue. “I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to spend some time with your father while I run my errands.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that babysitting my father was not the same thing as bonding with him. “Your car broke down last night on Highway 12. I need to arrange to have it towed.”
My mother turned, her expression pinched. “What did you do to the car?”
I sighed inwardly as I went to get a mug and filled it with coffee. “I didn’t do anything to it. It broke down last night. I told you that when I got home, remember?”
Her eyes narrowed and she shook her head in irritation. “No, you didn’t. You came in and went straight to your room. Didn’t even apologize for making me miss evening services.”
I welcomed the burn of the coffee as it singed my tongue. “I need to deal with your car, and then I need to drive over to Ashburn to see if anyone’s hiring.”
“Ashburn? That’s over an hour away. What am I supposed to do without my car for two hours?”
“I won’t be driving your car since it will likely be in the shop. I’m taking Dad’s car.”
My father’s car was a thirty-year-old hatchback sedan that had a manual transmission, which my mother had no clue how to drive. I had no idea why they’d kept the rattrap so long, since my parents usually shared the car that was only twenty years old, but I was glad for that fact today. What I wasn’t glad about was that I’d have to use what little room I had left on my singular credit card to pay for repairs to the Buick.
“So, what, I’m just supposed to sit here all day?”
I barely managed not to ask her if she wanted to switch places and she could get her ass out there to find a job.
“What happened to Dallas Kent?” I suddenly blurted as my eyes drifted to his coat, which I’d laid over the back of one of the kitchen chairs.
My mother made a low sound in her throat and shook her head. “Nothing he didn’t deserve,” she said. “Those poor parents of his,” she added, and then she was making the sign of the cross against her chest.
“What happened to them?” I asked.
“That boy killed them,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper as if we were in a crowd of people she didn’t want to overhear her gossiping.
After all, gossip was so uncouth.
“His parents are dead?” I asked in surprise.
My mother nodded and went to fetch her knitting bag from a side table. She returned and dropped down into a chair. Apparently, knitting and gossiping went hand in hand because she didn’t continue until her hands were moving the knitting needles in a practiced rhythm I didn’t quite get.
“His mama died instantly, but his daddy suffered for years.”
“How so?” I asked. “What happened?”
“It was the night of the Fourth of July picnic…after the fireworks. He was driving them home when he ran the car off the road. Folks say they saw him drinking.”
“Did he come home for the holiday or something?” I asked. Dallas Kent had been on the fast track to get out of Pelican Bay. He’d earned a full-ride scholarship in baseball to Vanderbilt University. I’d overheard the high school’s baseball coach telling my father once that baseball scholarships were insanely difficult to get to any school, so the fact that Dallas had gotten one, and a full-ride one at that, had been nothing short of a miracle.
