The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

I watched him walk away. “You know what that guy could do if he went to school?”

Valerie squeezed the back of my neck and laid her head on my shoulder.

“Did you hear me?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. She pulled herself closer to me and held my hand and rubbed the top of her head against my cheek.

“Why the silence?” I asked.

“You believe. Others don’t. Loren knows that. You don’t. That’s why I love you.”

She said nothing else until Loren returned from making his call.

WHEN I WENT HOME, the house was dark except for the desk lamp in my father’s office. I unlocked the front door and walked through the living room and past my parents’ bedroom and into my father’s office. He was sleeping with his head on his arms. A cigarette had burned to ash and collapsed in the tray. His uncapped fountain pen and an empty coffee cup sat by the edge of his manuscript. I picked up the cup and smelled it. He kept the whiskey bottle hidden in either the garage or the trunk of his car. He never took it into the house. To my knowledge, this was the first time he’d drunk whiskey in the house.

I sat down in the spare chair by the wall. The attic fan was drawing a nice breeze through the screen. Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy were sitting on the sill. I wanted to wake my father and tell him about the hit men the Atlases may have brought to town; I also wanted to tell him about Loren plowing the car into the gulley. But I knew nothing good would come of it. Had he been at Cemetery Hill, he would have gone straight up the slope with the others, Yankee canister and grape ripping holes the width of barn doors in their lines. And every confession to him of my own fear only added to the burden that sent him back to the icehouse or into the garage after my mother had gone to bed.

I heard Major’s nails clicking on the floor, then his tail knocking against the bookshelves as he walked into the office. My father raised his head from the desk. “Oh, hi, Aaron, I didn’t

hear you come in.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, I’m fine.”

“I was having a dream,” he said. “We were back in Louisiana. You were five years old and I was taking you to the circus. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“You were amazed by the giraffe you saw in the animal pens. You couldn’t believe there was an animal that tall.”

“I remember.”

“Are you sure everything is all right?” he repeated. “Did you and Valerie go with your friend to the church campground?”

“Yes, sir. We had a grand time.”

“Your friend sang?”

“He sure did. People liked him.”

“That was a fine thing you did, Aaron. I’m sure he will always remember your kindness. Is your mother awake?”

“She’s asleep.”

I could see his disappointment. “I guess I’d better take a little walk. If I take a nap before I go to bed, I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. Lock the door. I have my key.”

“Why don’t I heat us some milk and fix some pie. There’s a whole apple pie in the icebox.”

“That’s too much trouble. I’ll be back shortly.”

He removed his hat from the rack by the door and went out on the porch and eased the door shut behind him so as not to wake my mother. Through the window I saw him walking in the moonlight, his shadow moving along the sidewalk like a disembodied spirit that would never find its way home.

THE NEXT MORNING I looked in the mirror. I’d had the stitches in my face removed after six days, but I had kept a medicated bandage over the wound to prevent infection. I peeled off the bandage and dropped it into the wastebasket. The scar resembled a broken red exclamation mark that had drained from my eye. I wanted to think of myself as a Prussian duelist or a soldier of fortune or a deputy marshal backing Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp’s play at the O.K. Corral. Or maybe I just wanted to be brave in the way Loren had been brave, forgetting about himself and risking time in Huntsville for a friend. But all I saw in my reflection was a seventeen-year-old pale-eyed kid who realized that to help his parents, he would have to accept that he might not reach age eighteen. I barely got my hand to my mouth before the bilious surge in my stomach had its way.

I went to the filling station without figuring out I had reported to work an hour early. At eleven A.M. Merton Jenks drove up in a dented black-and-white cruiser and parked it on the grass by the men’s room. The vehicle’s disrepair was the kind you saw only in the cruisers driven by Negro patrolmen in the black wards. Jenks didn’t get out. I walked to the passenger window. “Yes, sir?” I said.