Pearl had pulled up five minutes ago and parked her little import on the gravel drive next to my TA. She’d grabbed her backpack from the backseat and waved a hand as she crossed the yard, glancing back at Sam before turning toward the trailer. We hadn’t discussed my employee, and this was the first day she’d arrived home before Sam’s dad arrived to pick her up.
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“What’re ya—blind?”
“I was.”
I said no more, hoping Sam would return to tightening lug nuts with that torque wrench. We’d wasted five minutes bickering about why she couldn’t use the pneumatic wrench to do it. (Because you need to learn how to tighten them using exact measurements first—by hand, I’d said. But the pneumatic is faster, she’d whined.) I finally stopped arguing with her and just stared until she started applying some elbow grease.
“Well, that’s cryptic¸” she said, arching one blond brow.
“My roommate is not up for discussion. Neither—as I’ve already made plain—is my sex life.”
“Or lack thereof.”
“Shut it.” Man. Silva must be laughing his ass off over pawning this kid off on me. “Tell me what you do if the threads are oiled instead of dry.”
She rolled her eyes so hard her head followed the movement. “Reduce the torque.”
“Good, genius. By how much?”
“Um, fifty percent.”
I laughed and she scowled. “Not unless you want this guy to lose his wheels heading down the highway and come back to cuss you straight into the gulf, if he comes back at all.”
“Hey, y’all need something to drink?”
Sam and I both turned toward Pearl’s voice. She was holding two cans of Pepsi.
“Thanks!” Sam said, smiling. The hell? With that blond hair poking in every direction, her face looked like a happy cartoon sun. I hadn’t known she could be happy. “I’m Sam, by the way.” Or friendly.
Pearl handed each of us a can and smiled back at Sam. “I’m Pearl. So Sam—you’re Wynn’s new employee?”
“Provisional employee,” I said, popping the top. “She’s got one more day to prove herself. I’m still on the fence.”
Sam’s eyebrows shot toward each other like magnets and her mouth tightened into a knot. If she’d had laser vision, I’d have been sliced up one side and down the other. Leaning halfway out of her chair, she plunked the can on the concrete and put all her effort behind that torque wrench, fighting to keep from smarting off to me in front of Pearl.
Pearl caught my eye with a tiny shame on you shake of her head and that damned smirk I’d do almost anything to set off.
I tipped the can back with a quick wink, taking a long swallow to hide my grin from Sam.
• • • • • • • • • •
In clearing out Dad’s room, I’d discovered things I’d forgotten he had and things I’d been unaware he had. Time-pressed to empty the room, I’d tossed anything worthy of keeping into a box I put aside for later inspection. Between Pearl moving in and Sam showing up, I’d forgotten about the box and my appointment with Mr. Amos until it popped up on my phone’s reminders.
I separated tax forms and any documents that looked business-related from birth certificates and photos I’d known nothing about—two or three of my mother and a few dozen of Brent and me, but none past the age we were when Mom left. I unearthed the flat box containing Brent’s Silver Star Medal. Inside, along with the Medal, were his dog tags and a laminated photo. I slipped the chain over my head and dropped the tags into my shirt.
The photo was a selfie of Brent and Arianna on the beach. Behind them, the sun was coming up over the water. It was scratched up like it had been in a wallet, taken out often. He’d probably had this photo with him—either on him when he died or with his effects. It had been eight years, which some days felt like a century and some days like yesterday. I flipped it over.
Arianna had written: Your home is right here next to me ~ A.
In my mind, my big brother had always been older and stronger than me, but he’d been my age when he died—twenty-two—and now I was weeks from turning the age he’d never be. The only decent parts of me were there because of him. Tears that hadn’t come when Dad died came all too easily for the brother who’d been more of a father to me than my old man had ever been. But when Brent was a boy, getting called words a kid shouldn’t even hear, taking punches from a full-grown man to protect our mother, to protect me, who’d stepped in to be a father for him?
• • • • • • • • • •
Mr. Amos’s office was the front room of his wood-frame house off Palm Drive, where he lived alone. I parked in the driveway, next to a well-used boat sitting on a trailer, ready to be hooked to the white Silverado backed up to it. A couple of palm trees and a massive oleander shrub shaded the porch swing to the left of the doorway. The only way I knew I was at the right place was the wooden sign hanging beside the front door that said Barney Amos, Attorney at Law.
I handed over the box full of possibly significant papers and checked out his office walls and shelves while he examined them. In addition to his law school diploma (Loyola—I’d heard of that one), there was a pic of him with fishing buddies, one with the mayor, one of his daughter on her wedding day, and one of Austin—a smidge older than Mateo’s boys—holding a bass as tall as he was. In Cub Scouts, we’d called him Bug on account of his eyes.