The Jealous Kind (Holland Family Saga 2)

“You don’t have to worry about it.”

“I’m not going to leave you on the street. Now get in. You’re starting to make me mad.”

“What a tragedy for the planet that would be,” she said. “You know what my father said of you? ‘Grady’s not a bad kid. He’s simply incapable of being a good one.’?”

“Come back. Please.”

“I hope you have a great life,” she said. “Even though the memory of kissing you makes me want to rinse my mouth with peroxide.”

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I watched Valerie walk through the cars to the boulevard, her beach bag swinging from her shoulder and bouncing on her butt. Grady was standing next to me, breathing hard, his gaze locked on Valerie, just as mine was, except there was an irrevocable sense of loss in his eyes that made me think of a groundswell, the kind you see rising from the depths when a storm is about to surge inland.

“Sorry this happened to y’all,” I said.

“We’re in public, so I can’t do what I’m thinking. But you’d better find a rat hole and crawl in it,” he said.

“Blaming others won’t help your situation,” I said.

He wiped a streak of ketchup off his cheek. “I was hoping you’d say something like that.”

Chapter

2

MY FATHER AND I went to noon Mass the next day. Even though my mother had been reared Baptist, she did not go to a church of any kind. She had grown up desperately poor, abandoned by her father, and had married a much older man, a traveling salesman, when she was seventeen. She hid her divorce from others as though it had cheapened and made her unworthy of the social approval she always sought. Each Sunday she made a late breakfast for us, and my father and I drove to church in his company car. We seldom spoke on the way.

I never understood why my mother and father married. They didn’t kiss or even touch hands, at least not while I was around. There was a loneliness in their eyes that convinced me prisons came in all sizes and shapes.

During Mass, I could smell the faint scent of last night’s beer and cigarettes on my father’s clothes. Before the priest gave the final blessing, my father whispered that his stomach was upset and he would meet me across the street at Costen’s drugstore. When I got there, he was drinking coffee at the counter and talking about LSU football with the owner. “Ready for a lime Coke?” he said.

“No, thank you, sir. Can I use the car this afternoon?” I said.

“May I.”

“May I use the car?”

“I was planning to go to the bowling alley,” he said. “There’s a league today.”

I nodded. My father didn’t bowl and had no interest in it. The bowling alley was air-conditioned and had a bar.

“Come with me,” he said. “Maybe you can bowl a line or two.”

“I have some things to take care of.”

My father was a handsome man, and genteel in his Victori

an way. He never sat at the dining or the breakfast table without putting on his coat, even if he was by himself. He’d lost his best friend in the trenches on November 11, 1918, and despised war and the national adoration of the military and the bellicose rhetoric of politicians who sent others to suffer and die in their stead. But he drank, and somehow those words subsumed and effaced all his virtues. “You dating a new girl?”

“I don’t have an old one.”

“So you’re changing that?” he said.

“I’d like to.”

“Who is she?”

“I don’t know her real good.”

“Real well.”