CHAPTER 5
Billy
Heat rose from the asphalt as I walked out to the parking lot with Jimmy and Hank. It was springtime and the weather was changing. Days and nights were getting hotter.
We were all silent. That wasn’t unusual for Hank, but it was strange as hell for Jimmy and me. I wasn’t sure if the cat that had our respective tongues was the finality of the will reading or the reappearance of our long-lost sister.
When we reached the point in the lot where it would’ve made sense to break off in different directions to our cars and still none of the three of us had said anything, we stopped in our tracks and just stood there, awkwardly.
It was a damn strange situation. I’d never been at a loss for what to say to my brothers, and they’d certainly never been short of words around me. It wasn’t like we always talked things out in the most civilized or levelheaded ways. Hell, sometimes we yelled until the walls shook, or worked out our differences with our fists. Pretty normal testosterone-driven stuff, especially for three brothers who’d been raised (more or less) by a drunk who had trouble taking care of himself, let alone them.
Yeah, it was clear from our normal mode of interaction that we’d lost the one civilizing influence in our lives when we’d lost our mother, and that any impact she’d been able to impart had been too early to overcome our more rough-and-tumble instincts after she was gone.
But this… Hell. This strained silence was something altogether new.
“Why the fuck did no one tell me that we have a sister?” Jimmy broke the silence in an uncharacteristically harsh tone.
Jimmy was the most laid-back, easy-going, good-natured human being on the planet. He was the “flirt” out of the Fs used to describe us. He didn’t get riled up easily, but looked downright pissed off now. I didn’t blame him, but I also didn’t have an answer for him. It might sound ridiculous, but I’d never thought to bring it up. The day of the funeral, I’d locked away all my emotions and memories and thrown away the key.
It wasn’t just Cheyenne that we didn’t talk about. We never discussed Mama either.
Hank’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. “Family meeting. At the house.”
Family meetings were held in one of two places, the bar or the house, depending on where Pop was holed up drinking. If he was at the bar, we’d meet at the house and vice versa. It was strange not having to take that into consideration.
An unwanted emotion began to fill my chest. To be fair, any emotion other than pleasure was unwanted. I tried to live my life maximizing the good and ignoring the bad. It had worked out pretty great for me so far, but I was beginning to think I might need to start facing some of the not-so-pleasant aspects of life. Still, the last thing I wanted to do was relive any more of the past than we already had today. “I’ve got things to do,” I said.
At the same time, Jimmy piped up with, “What food ya got?”
The phrase the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach was more true of Jimmy than any man I’d ever known.
Hank looked at both of us, his expression flatter than a stretch of Kansas highway. Finally, he intoned, “I ain’t askin’.”
With that, he turned and marched to his truck, never looking back once to see if we were following. It wasn’t necessary. He knew that if he used that tone, we listened. It was the way things were.
Hank had stepped up after we lost our mom to a car accident and our dad to the bottle. He’d made sure that we went to school, had clean clothes, and ate. He’d gone to parent-teacher conferences, rushed us to the emergency room when we broke bones or were running high fevers, and bailed both our asses out of jail. Jimmy was picked up when he was seventeen for trespassing when he and his friends broke into the high school to play a senior prank. I got arrested at age sixteen for public indecency when the police chief caught me having sex with his daughter behind the Dairy Queen.
Hank had more than earned the right to call a family meeting and us to show up.
Jimmy and I exchanged looks, and then he flashed a wry smile. That was just how Jimmy was. It didn’t matter the situation, he’d find some way to grin at it. It wasn’t like he thought everything was flat-out funny. But, there was always some angle for the smile to latch onto.
If there was a way to laugh about something, even if there was a mountain of sadness or fear or whatever the hell else underneath it, then that’s the road Jimmy would take.
He raised his brow. “Well, damn, looks like his panties are in a bunch.”
I grinned, still a little too shell-shocked to joke around. Sure, I’d put on a good show in the office, making it seem I wasn’t bothered. I didn’t want Cheyenne to see how shaken I was, and I definitely didn’t want our very attractive attorney thinking I was thrown for a loop.
In front of just my brothers, though, it was a different story. We had pretty well-calibrated bullshit meters when it came to each other and pretending with them just wasn’t realistic.
“Seriously, though,” Jimmy said, his demeanor becoming somber. “I do have one question for you before we head out to Hank’s. And I need you to be totally honest with me.”
I braced myself, hoping that I would find the words to explain why in the hell I’d acted as if Cheyenne was never born. “Shoot.”
“Should I rely on Hank to feed us or should I get a burger on the way?”
I shook my head as I headed to my truck, answering him over my shoulder as I went. “Do what you want. Just get your ass out to the house. Hank was serious, and you know how he gets when he’s serious.”
As I pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the long road that led through downtown and then out into the country, I let the truck meander at a leisurely pace. Back roads were normally what one would take for a short-cut, I was doing the opposite. This was my long-cut.
There was no hurry. If I knew Jimmy at all—and I sure as hell did—he’d be getting food before heading out to Hank’s. He’d figure, what was the harm? It would be a win-win situation. If Hank didn’t provide us with food, he’d already be full. And if Hank did have lunch for us…well, hell. Eating twice in one afternoon never killed a man.
And since I had no desire to sit in silence with a seething Hank while we waited for a carefree Jimmy to come waltzing in twenty minutes late with beef on his breath, I was taking my sweet time.