The Family Plan (The McClouds of Mississippi 1)

His brother answered on the fourth ring, just when Nathan was beginning to think Gideon wasn’t in the mood to answer the phone today. He didn’t worry about waking him—Gideon was always up at sunrise. He said his brain was sharper in the mornings.

Which didn’t mean he was a cheerful riser. “What?” he barked into the phone.

“Sorry,” Nathan said. “Bad timing?”

“Rough scene,” his brother replied. “Been at it since five and I’ve only managed two paragraphs.”

Nathan knew better than to ask how close Gideon was to deadline. Saying the word deadline to Gideon McCloud was like saying kill in front of a trained attack dog. Always elicited a snarl, at the very least.

He settled for asking carefully, “Anything bothering you?”

“Other than intrusive early-morning phone calls, you mean?”

“Other than that,” Nathan agreed equably.

“No, nothing’s bothering me in particular. What’s up with you? Why did you call?”

“I just felt like checking in. I haven’t talked to you in a couple of weeks.”

“Still got the kid?”

“You know I do.”

“Pretty weird, bro. You raising a kid, I mean.”

“I know. But she’s a pretty cool kid. Why don’t you have dinner with us one night this week and find out for yourself?”

“We’ve had this discussion. I don’t need any more siblings. The two I’ve got are trouble enough—you calling me during prime working hours, Deb nagging me every few days to try to talk sense into you.”

“Deborah’s been calling you about me?”

“Yeah. Even though I keep telling her I don’t have any influence over your actions. Never have. Never wanted to.”

Though their personalities were very different, they had been closer than this once, Nathan mused, remembering summer days of swimming and skateboarding, autumn afternoons of basketball and football, spring weekends of baseball and tennis. Gideon had always been rather quiet and introspective, content to spend hours in his room with piles of novels and notebooks for his own scribblings, but he’d withdrawn even more into himself as he’d left his teen years.

Nathan had tried countless times to identify the turning points in his brother’s life, any specific causes for the changes in him. But whatever traumas there had been, if any, Gideon kept them to himself. To their parents’ dismay, he dropped out of college his junior year. A year later he’d sold his first short story. Almost four years after that his first novel had seen print.

His early readership had been small but loyal; his earnings, modest, but sufficient for his simple tastes. And now he seemed to be poised on the brink of breaking out into a larger market. His tightly plotted and eccentrically cast novels were becoming more popular through enthusiastic word-of-mouth from his core of longtime readers. If Gideon was excited about the new direction his writing career was taking, he kept that to himself, as well.

“You remember what today would have been, don’t you?” Nathan asked quietly, wondering if the date had had anything to do with Gideon’s difficulty writing that morning.

Gideon’s reply was curt. “I remember.”

“You want to talk about it?”

Gideon had been estranged from their father even before Stuart had left the family, but Nathan couldn’t believe his brother hadn’t suffered in some way from Stuart’s death, even though he had steadily refused to discuss his feelings. Nathan didn’t think it was healthy to keep feelings so deeply bottled up. He’d been trying for years to maintain open lines of communication between himself and his younger brother, even though he usually felt as though he was the only one making any effort at all to reach out.

He couldn’t remember the last time Gideon had called him. He couldn’t help wondering if he would ever hear from his brother again if he didn’t initiate the call. The thought that they could actually drift that far apart made him even sadder than he had been before he’d placed this call. Maybe dialing his brother’s number hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.

“No, I don’t want to talk about it.” Gideon’s reply was adamant. A heavy silence followed it.

Nathan tried to think of something more to say. “Maybe when you get a little extra time we can get together for a game of racquetball. It’s been a long time since I’ve stomped you.”

“A very long time,” Gideon retorted. “As I recall it, I whupped your butt the last five or six times we played.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve practiced a bit in the past year or so since you last defeated me. I might just surprise you.”

“Could be. I’m out of practice. Haven’t been to the gym in a while.”