His Best Friend's Baby (6 page)

It would be so simple to open that window, to ease into that dark hushed room, warm and alive with the scent of Julia, sleeping on that old bed. There’d be moonlight and silence and—

Jesse stood and the rocking chair slid backward, crashing into the house.

This has got to stop
.

The world swam from the drugs and he gave himself a moment to get his knee under him before he stalked into the dark house.

He had been right to tell her to stay away. She had to or he wouldn’t survive. He was moving on with his life, putting the accident and Mitch and this town behind him.

So he grabbed another bottle of water and headed out the rusty aluminum back door that had not been changed in all of Rachel’s meddling renovations.

He’d been here two days and one night and so far all he’d been able to get done was write a list of all the things that needed to get done. The roof, the back porch, the kitchen floor—the list was a long one. And he was more tired than he’d thought. His long stay at the hospital
had worn him down. The weakness was aggravating, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Slowly, each day he felt a little better, a little more as though he could get the work done.

The only reason he’d needed the painkillers tonight was because he’d spent most of the day on the roof, climbing up and down the ladder.

His knee was getting stronger and the work helped. He thought of it like conditioning for San Diego and the construction he and Chris were going to do. Preparation for his real life.

The night was cool, the sky clear and deep, and the air seemed damp. Everything seemed damp after the Middle East, where the desert turned everything into grit. Human beef jerky is what Dave Mancino used to say.

That’s all I am, walking beef jerky
.

Jesse smiled—Dave had been a funny kid. Cocky as all get-out, but funny. Five months after the accident and Jesse was just now getting to the point that he could remember anything about those boys other than their deaths.

A million times a day he wished he’d backed Mitch instead of listening to his gut.

The one time in my life I decide not to do
things Mitch’s way and the guy dies
.

Jesse didn’t know whether to laugh or put a bullet in his head.

He stepped onto the long grass and left footprints in the dewy lawn as he crossed the backyard to the garage nestled back amongst some pines and more weeds. The door had once been red but now was the faded gray of weathered wood. The whole structure leaned slightly to the left and Jesse figured gravity would soon take care of the rest.

The garage had never housed a car. Inexplicably, his dad had once come home from the bar driving a golf cart and it had stayed in the garage for a week until the cops had come looking for it.

They’d all laughed over that.

What had always been housed in the garage—and Jesse was half hoping had been sold or lost or stolen over the years—were Granddad’s old woodworking tools. The planers and awls and chisels fit Jesse’s hand as though they had been born there. He had spent a lot of years in this garage with the tools, pretending that the world outside the sweet smell of fresh oak didn’t exist.

He could do with a little of that pretending right now.

The heavy door slid back on the nearly rusted rollers and the odor of sour, rotting wood poured out. He reached for the light switch, and was surprised when it flickered on, illuminating the cracked cement floor.

Along the back wall was the workbench he’d made himself a million years ago and on the wall above it, still as neatly arranged as he’d left them, were the tools.

When he was younger they’d offered him, if not a way out of his family and his home, a way to survive.

Jesse took a deep breath and stepped into the musty familiarity of the garage looking for something, anything, that could be saved.

“Y
OU’RE A KILLER
,” David Mancino’s father
said. “We trusted our boy with you and you
brought him home in a body bag.”

“But look.” Jesse tried to show Mr. Mancio
what he’d brought in exchange for Dave. He
held out his bloody palms and tried to give Mr.
Mancio the still-beating heart
.

“What the hell is wrong with you, boy?”
Mr. Mancio smacked Jesse’s hands away and
the heart fell to the ground. “We heard you
were crazy!”

It’s ruined,
Jesse thought, watching the heart
pump blood into the dirt.
No one is going to want that now.

“Wait, wait. I brought more, just a second.”
Jesse waved over the thin blond woman with
the haunted blue eyes he’d never been able to
forget and she, in turn, led Wain and a man in
a black hostage mask. “See, you can have the
dog, and the—”

Jesse woke to the sound of a key sliding into the lock on his back door. The dream vanished and he traveled from sleep to battle ready in seconds—another little gift from the United States Army. He could kill a man in a hundred ways and he hadn’t fallen fully asleep in over six years.

The pain meds he’d popped last night made his brain feel thick and stupid, but the well-honed instinct in him was still razor sharp.

He crept from the couch, barefoot and in his blue jeans, toward the back door, where he had heard the distinct sound of a lock sliding open.

Wainwright snored on his pillow.

Some guard dog you turned out to be
.

He fully expected Rachel to be busting in, and he relished letting her know in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t welcome. Her days of coming and going in this house were over.

But he yanked open the door only to find Mac Edwards, his arms filled with grocery bags. Jesse rocked back on his heels.

“Help a guy out, would you?” Mac asked over the perforated edge of one of the bags. The look in his light blue eyes went through Jesse like a knife. It was the look his men used to give him—respect and a general gladness to see him.

“I don’t—” Jesse started, but Mac stepped in and pushed the bags into Jesse’s chest. Instinctively, Jesse caught Mac’s burden and Mac used the opportunity to barge in.

“Nice one,” Jesse growled, his throat rusty.

“Old trick I learned from a nine-year-old,” Mac said over his shoulder. He walked past Jesse, through the small mudroom and into the kitchen.

The nine-year-old Mac referred to was him. Jesse had used the trick to dog Rachel and Mac’s every step.

Jesse shut the door with his foot and followed his old friend to dump the groceries onto the counter. He yanked opened the refrigerator door and began shoving the bags’ contents into the nearly empty fridge.

“Just as we suspected, you’re living on road trip food.” Mac reached around Jesse to hold up a turkey sandwich Jesse had gotten from the gas station out by the highway. “Not fit for human consumption.”

“Works fine by me,” Jesse said. He’d been avoiding the grocery store and all of the good citizens of New Springs.

“Good to see you, man.” Mac pulled Jesse into a hug before he could say two words. “It’s
really good to see you.” Mac thumped him on the back, which hurt but, for some reason, Jesse didn’t say anything. He stood motionless, like a scared animal in the hard grip of Mac’s arms. Emotion leaped in him.

I missed you
, he thought.

“It’s good to see you, too,” he finally managed to say. He squeezed Mac tight across the shoulders and then pushed away.

They both laughed awkwardly and Mac held Jesse out at arm’s length. It had been three years since they’d seen each other at his mother’s funeral and Jesse had kept his distance that day.

The moment stretched and Jesse took in the changes time had made in his old friend. Mac was big, thick across the chest and through the arms. His work in the sun had turned his skin brown and given him wrinkles and creases at the corners of his mouth and eyes. But his smile was still quick and his eyes sharper than ever.

“You look old,” Jesse joked.

“You look like roadkill,” Mac shot back and Jesse felt as though he were soaking up the warmth of the sun.

“I see you’ve made yourself at home.” Mac pointed at the broken front window.

Stupidly, excuses came to Jesse’s lips but he stopped himself in time. He didn’t have to explain anything to anyone. Not to Rachel and not to Mac.

Even though he did owe Mac a lot.

“Well—” he grinned like the old troublemaker he’d been “—she did leave the house to me.”

Mac laughed and scratched at the day-old whiskers on his face. “Man, you know, that’s what I always remembered about you.” He pointed at Jesse. “Every time you got into trouble and I had to go down to the police station, you’d be sitting in lockup with this sly grin on your face like everything was going according to plan.”

“What else was I supposed to do?” he asked. “I was so scared half the time I could barely see straight. Which is why I called you instead of the old man.”

“I was too good to you. I should have left you there, might have scared some sense into you.”

“Probably,” Jesse agreed. “But you were always a sucker for strays.”

They both smiled, but the rosy reunion scene soon faded away. They were two men with only the past and his sister in common—both of which Jesse was trying to forget.

“What are you doing here, Mac?”

“I would think that was obvious.” Mac’s laughter was gone, replaced by a sad earnestness in his eyes. “You come back into town after all these years, and you think I’m not going to come by and say hello? Come on, Jesse, you’re smarter than that.”

Jesse shrugged. “I’m leaving in a—”

Mac walked into the small living room before Jesse could finish. He had to follow. What else could he do? This was Mac. He couldn’t hit him.

“Amanda’s in the truck. I practically had to tie her down to keep her from following me.” Mac pointed out the broken window at a gorgeous teenager staring at them from the passenger seat of a truck.

Amanda lifted her hand in a slight wave.

“Wave to her,” Mac insisted, lifting his own arm in a big salute.

Jesse raised one finger. “She sure grew up,” he whispered.

“You’re telling me. Seems like yesterday I was teaching her how to ride a bike.” Mac turned to him with a smile. “She’s dying to see you. Hasn’t been able to stop talking about you since she knew you were back. Some of those letters and packages you never responded to were from her.”

Jesse remembered she’d covered her letters and packages with drawings of bugs and plants—she definitely had her father’s love of science. Her letters had been filled with questions and goofy stories about trying out for the cheerleading squad and not getting in.

“I wrote her once,” he said, and from Mac’s shocked expression he realized that little note had been a secret between his niece and him.

He could not, for the life of him, figure out why he had written her back and told her the cheerleaders missed out on all the fun during the games anyway.

“I don’t feel guilty, Mac, if that’s what you are trying to do.”

Mac stared at him a long time, that weighted assessment that used to torture Jesse when he was a kid. One of those looks from Mac and he’d confess everything.

But Jesse wasn’t a kid, and all of his confessions were his own.

“Jesse,” Mac said with a slight smile that didn’t reach his eyes, “you’re carrying so much guilt it’s amazing you can even stand up.”

Jesse studied the play of sunlight through the poplar out front.

“Well, you’ve got plenty of food in those
bags,” Mac said, breaking the thick silence between them. “Rachel’s worried about you. Said you looked like a stray dog.”

Mac looked him over and Jesse knew what he saw, the scars and the lopsided collarbone, the ribs that were all too visible, the muscles that were wiry and tough.

“That doesn’t look healed,” he murmured, pointing to Jesse’s damaged collarbone.

“It was a bad set.” Jesse touched the slight bend. “They wanted to rebreak it and try again, but I thought it gave me some character.” He tried to make a joke to ease the unbearable pressure between them. His body was witness to how close he’d come to dying and Mac was taking it all in.

“Does it hurt?”

Jesse shook his head.

“God. We’re just so glad you’re alive, Jess,” Mac whispered and a muscle in his jaw clenched. It seemed as though Mac was going to grab him in one of those bear hugs again and Jesse’s body tensed in fight-or-flight mode. Instead Mac tucked the hand he had raised into his pocket.

Jesse looked away. Too many emotions.
Why
the hell did you think this would be easy?
His
plans to come home and sell the house didn’t include encounters with Rachel and Mac. Which was stupid, really, because if there were one thing Jesse knew in this world, it was that he could always count on Mac.

“Well.” Mac heaved a huge breath. “I gotta get back to the farm. We’re harvesting.” Suddenly, Mac threw his head back and laughed his big loud bark that filled the room. In the corner, Wainwright woke up with a start and a growl.

You’re too late, Wain
.

“Remember when I hired you for harvest and you were what…sixteen?”

Jesse focused his eyes out the window, watched a cloud inch its way over the sun and fought to find that place in himself that was removed from the past, Mac, his sister. He needed to be far away from all of it, back in the desert.

“I needed you to drive the tractor from—”

“I remember,” Jesse murmured. “Ancient history, Mac. I’m trying—”

“And you couldn’t figure out how to put it in Park—”

“I remember,” he said, his voice louder and colder.

“The thing rolled down Main Street and Sheriff McNeil tried to give you a ticket until I—”

“Damn it, Mac!” he yelled, breathing hard. “I remember.”

The room was silent and Jesse immediately regretted his crack. Things were building in him, pushing against his bones and his skin, clawing through his efforts to remain detached.

“I don’t think you do, Jess.” Mac’s eyes turned solemn, sad. “Rachel and I have written you every week for the past three years, because we remember.” He looked out the window to where his daughter sat in the truck. “My daughter wrote you. She got classmates to write you and, man, if you had seen her four years ago you wouldn’t have thought it was possible for her to care about someone else.”

Jesse saw so much in Mac’s eyes. He saw every late night Mac had bailed him out of jail because Mitch had grabbed some woman’s purse, or he and Mitch had tipped over the pop machines at the high school. Every twenty bucks Mac had loaned him when times got hard. Jesse saw the pride Mac had felt when he’d gone off to basic training. He saw the calm and strong way Mac had constantly stood by him when Rachel had deserted them both.

“I’m glad things worked out for you, Mac. I really am. You loved Rachel for a long time.”
Jesse struggled to keep his voice steady. “But I am not here to mend bridges with my sister. I don’t know her and I don’t want to know her. There’s no point in it.”

“Well, that’s too bad because she’s a heck of a person.” Mac turned to leave. “I’ll come by and see you tomorrow.”

“There’s no point, Mac. I’m getting rid of this house. Even if I have to tear it down with my own hands.”

Mac laughed. “Well, it’s a good thing you started with the roof. It needs a new one.”

The closing door sounded loud as it shut behind Mac. Jesse watched as Mac appeared from the side of the house and climbed into the truck. He drove off with a honk of his horn as though they were a normal family who got along and Amanda lifted her arm out the window in farewell.

Such simple gestures. But the expectations behind them weighed Jesse down. He had to get out of here fast. Otherwise affection and caring would lock him in the prison of this town.

“H
E DOESN’T SEEM DIFFERENT
than he did three years ago. Is he? I mean, he just looks
skinnier,” Amanda said, unable to look away from the guy standing in the broken window. Three years ago at Eva’s funeral, he’d looked mean. He didn’t look like a cold-blooded killer now. Not that she knew what that kind of person looked like, but still, it was hard to imagine that guy killing his best friend, the way the whole town was saying he had.

She tilted her head to stare at his shrinking figure in the rearview mirror. He looked like the dog she and her dad had found by the highway last year. Cold, angry and flea-bitten.

She smiled at the idea.

Gotta write that one down
.

The article she was trying to write on Uncle Jesse for her English assignment was going pretty slow, no thanks to Dad making her sit in the car like a baby. Her teacher had already warned her twice that the project was worth thirty percent of her final grade.

When she brought home a C in that class it was going to be all Dad’s fault.

They turned toward Main Street, making Jesse and the house out of sight. Amanda faced her dad, who looked as though he’d seen a ghost. A skinny, lopsided ghost.

“Whoa, Dad. Are you okay?”

He nodded. He wiped a hand over his face and sat back against the truck seats with a shaky sigh.

“Tell you the truth, Amanda, I don’t know who that guy was.” He shook his head.

An illicit thrill shot through her. “Did he, like, pull a gun or something?”

“No.” Dad looked at her askance, as if she’d asked if Jesse wore human skulls around his neck. Which, frankly, she thought he might do when no one was looking. The way everybody talked about this long-lost uncle of hers, she figured the guy was half wolf or something. A wild animal trying to readjust to society.

“Was he wearing clothes?” The scary thought just occurred to her.

“Of course, Amanda. Don’t be silly.”

“If you’d let me meet him, I wouldn’t have all these silly questions.”

Dad groaned. “We’ve been over this a million times, Amanda. I know you want to meet him, and you will—”