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Tillie’s head appears around the corner. “She’s leaving out the part where they kept getting naked.”
“We weren’t naked!” Except, I guess, we were at the end. “We had some weird chemistry going on. I wanted to be around him, see where it led.”
Garrett shakes his head as he neatly stacks another shelf on the first one. “I reckon it wasn’t easy for him to live up to the pedestal you put him on when you were a kid.”
He doesn’t have to tell me. I already know.
“He fired me in the end. I guess I didn’t understand him after all. Seems like all he wants is a one-nighter.”
“I’m not surprised.” Garrett examines another shelf, splintered on the end. “He always said he wouldn’t get into relationships. Said they weren’t worth it.”
“Right.” I sit up on the sofa. “Because all his guy friends got sucked in by women and stopped hanging with him.”
Garrett pauses in turning a screw. “He said that? Because that wasn’t his reasoning in high school. I was there when it happened. And I don’t blame him.”
Wait. Garrett knows something more?
“What happened?”
Garrett taps his screwdriver on his hand. “I don’t know if I should be the one to say it.”
I circle the coffee table and sit next to him. “Garrett, please. Drew broke my damn heart. We—well, things happened. I thought I was going to move there and be with him. Then he overreacted and fired me and that was it.”
“Overreacted to what?”
“That I still had a job here. He thought I’d already quit.”
“He always had a temper. It came in handy on the football field. He imagined the other players were his dad, and he would tackle the hell out of them.” Garrett turns back to the shelves, but I take the screwdriver from him.
“What was wrong with his dad?”
His eyes meet mine, and I see all the versions I once knew of my brother. The little kid, only a bit taller than me, racing through the house. The sad, silent one after Mom died, trying to hold himself together. The lanky adolescent, desperately trying to be good enough to get a football scholarship, and falling short.
I love him. I don’t blame him one bit for escaping our house the way he did. We all would have done it if we could.
He’s the best man I know, and he’s torn about some secret that could unlock what I don’t know about Drew.
“The story might help me,” I say. “It’s not like I’m going to see him again. I want to work out what happened in my head so I can move on.”
Garrett runs his hands along the shelf and sighs. “All right. His parents were always this perfect couple. Cookies after school. Kiss on the cheek.”
“I only ever met his mom.”
“I was over there a lot. And it looked pretty good to me. But then one day our sophomore year, Drew shows me this box he found in the garage. It’s full of letters from women, and some of them recent. His dad’s got a whole string of them, all thinking he’s leaving his wife for them.”
“Oh no.”
“And that’s not even the worst of it. Old man Daniels catches Drew with the stash. And what does he do? Makes him stand guard at the garage to make sure his mom doesn’t come home while he was banging those chicks in their own bed!”
“What?”
“And as soon as Drew did it once, then his dad had the threat of telling his mom that Drew was in on it. It was the worst damn thing the bastard could have done. So Drew had to keep doing it. Hiding his dad’s hookups from his own mom.”
My heart sinks. No wonder he’s miserable. “That’s terrible.”
Garrett holds out his hand, and I pass him back the screwdriver. “So that’s the whole dirty business. He might have made up some other excuse to you, but that’s the real deal. He never made anyone a girlfriend. He said he thought he might be like his dad, and he couldn’t stand it. I guess the one-night thing makes it easy. You can’t cheat on someone who isn’t yours to begin with.”
I sit by Garrett while he finishes the shelves, and I don’t move when he heads to Tillie’s bedroom to take apart her bed so that it will fit in a friend’s truck.
