CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(28)
Instead, as his eyes searched my face, something softened in him. He looked down and nodded.
“You’re right,” he said quietly.
“Oh.” I almost fell over from shock. I really hadn’t expected mature agreement. “Really?”
“Really.” He broke into a grin. It had a sheepish quality. “I can be a dick. I know that. But you make Con happy and I’m happy he has you.”
“Oh,” I said and swallowed hard, lowering my head. A tiny gecko scurried across the rocks and then disappeared into a dusty crevice.
“Erin?” Stone prompted.
“Do I?” I asked, snapping my head up and looking him in the eye.
Stone was confused. “Do you what?”
“Do I make Con happy?”
He gave me a funny look. Then he shifted position and stared out into the distance again. “That’s a bullshit question. You know you make him happy.”
I did. Mostly I did. It wasn’t hard to recall the countless times Conway Gentry had looked at me with tender love in his eyes. Girls threw themselves at him all the time and he never gave them the time of day. If Con was tired of me he wouldn’t have stuck around for two years. I should know all this without being told. But it still meant the world to hear it from the guy who wouldn’t blow sunshine up my ass to spare my feelings. Not when it came to his brother. Stone, for all his flaws, cared about Conway very much.
“I do know,” I said and smiled. Stone relaxed and smiled back.
“Well,” I said, clasping my hands together, “in the spirit of this new semi-friendship, can I offer you a glass of fresh homemade lemonade? It should be cold by now.”
Stone considered. “You made it yourself?”
“Yup. Measured the mix and everything.”
He laughed. “Well then, you’ve got a taker. I’m a sucker for over sweetened beverages.”
We walked slowly, almost leisurely, back to my house. Now that Stone had let his cocky fa?ade slide a bit he opened up a little. Mostly he talked about Conway and all the trouble they got into when they were kids. Many of those incidents I knew about, some of them I didn’t. It had always seemed like the earliest sounds of my childhood included Tracy Gentry screaming their names at the top of her lungs as she hunted the neighborhood to make them answer for something or other they had done.
A half forgotten memory suddenly bubbled to the surface and I nudged Stone. “Remember when my mother found you guys hiding in our pantry? You couldn’t have been more than four or five. She opened up the door to grab some cake mix and you both popped out, howling like wolves. She screamed, fell over backward into a kitchen chair, and laughed until she could hardly breathe.”
“I remember that,” Stone chuckled. “Our hands were all filthy because we’d attacked our parents’ new Egyptian silk sheets with magic marker and we were hiding because we knew there’d be hell to pay. Your mom was always cool whenever we showed up, although that time she did make us dunk our hands in a sink of soapy water to get all the ink off. Then she sat us down at the table with you and gave us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Finally our dad came by to haul us back home.”
At the end his voice kind of fell away and he sighed. A strange shiver rolled up my spine and we walked for a moment in silence, the mood turned grim over the mention of lost parents.
“You look like her,” Stone finally said. “Your mom.”
“I know.”
No one needed to tell me that. I had pictures. I had memories.
“I don’t talk about her much,” I said slowly. “My dad certainly isn’t up for daily trips down memory lane. I can’t blame him. And I never know what to say to my sisters to make it all not as bad as it really is.”
Stone was silent for a minute and then exhaled loudly. “A shitty deal for all of you. I mean, with her accident and all,” he added quickly.
An accident. That was what everyone called it, at least to my face. I was tired of pretending. “It wasn’t an accident, Stone. You know that.”
He didn’t argue with me. I had to give him credit for that. By this time we’d climbed beyond the wash and had nearly reached my house. It should have felt strange, having Stone by my side as I unlocked the side door. And for a moment I did suffer a twinge of shyness. But then as I poured the lemonade Stone started talking about Conway and boasting with pride about how good his brother was when it came to fixing cars.
“He’s good at everything,” Stone bragged. “Smartest guy I know.”
The teachers at Emblem High had long ago thrown in the towel where the Gentry boys were concerned. Their mother certainly never offered much in the way of encouragement. Conway usually shrugged it off whenever I told him he could do much better. Maybe he didn’t believe me because no one else in his life understood how wonderful he was. But now, listening to Stone, I had to admit it was a warm relief to hear someone else appreciate Con’s potential.
When the rusty hinges of the screen door howled open I figured it was Penny, escaping from day camp like she’d been threatening to do every day. I was in the middle of a laugh and had managed to snort lemonade through my nose when Con appeared. From the look on his face, it seemed he would have been less surprised to walk into my kitchen and discover a pair of basset hounds making pancakes.