KDBookOnline
Share Us
Ryan smiles. “Maybe you should be a little less yourself.”
Eddie nods like it’s good advice.
“You should go swimming,” Ryan says, looking out at the group now splashing around in the blue glow of the pool lights.
Eddie thinks about it. “Nah, I’m not getting in the water with the Chlamydia Brothers.” Eddie’s charming nickname for Aiden and Jake. “Not enough chlorine in the world for that.”
“Good night, Eddie,” Ryan says. He starts toward his room.
Eddie calls out to him, “I really gotta see this girl someday.”
Ryan turns, curious. “What girl?”
“The one you’re so hung up on.”
Inside his room, Ryan pulls off his shirt. It’s oppressively hot. Eddie’s not wrong about the air conditioning. He sees that his dad left a voicemail. The guy still can’t send a text like a normal person.
Ryan’s about to play the message when he spots something on the floor, an envelope, like someone had slipped it under the door. He opens it and his heart trips:
I need to see you. Tomorrow, 10 a.m. at the Palazzo.
I know who you are.
2
LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS
Poppy McGee wakes with a towering figure glaring down at her. On the frayed poster in her childhood bedroom, Beyoncé wears a sequined mini, holds her legs in a wide stance, hands on hips, casting a sultry gaze.
Poppy used to have that confidence. But after three years in the Army she fears she’s lost her groove. It doesn’t help that she’s back home, sleeping in bright pink sheets with Queen Bey looking disappointed in her.
She gets up, showers, dresses, and stares at herself in the mirror hanging from the back of her door. Her new uniform is an ugly shade of brown and doesn’t fit well. At five-one, she looks like a kid dressing up as a UPS driver with a sidearm. She tucks a strand of her long red hair back in the bun, straightens the name tag: DEPUTY SHERIFF MCGEE.
She didn’t want the job. Didn’t want to come back to this town. But after her abrupt military discharge, her options were limited. And someone needed to take care of her father after Mom died unexpectedly. Poppy had been on the phone with her, their daily call, when her mom said, I don’t feel so good. And that was that. A stroke. A year before Poppy’s twenty-first birthday; a year after Dad’s cancer diagnosis.
The hits, as they say, keep coming.
She takes a last look in the mirror, straightens her spine, and heads out of her room.
In the kitchen, she’s surprised that her father is up, sitting at the table. He looks tired and weak and ashen. Her older brother, Dash, has stopped by too. There’s a grease-stained McDonald’s bag on the table, and a handwritten sheet of spiral notebook paper that says: Congratulations!
“What’s all this?” she says.
“It’s your first day…” Dash says.
Her dad coughs, and Poppy gives her brother a look. This is why she came back. Dash has no judgment about her father’s health, about anything, really. The first clue is that he’s a grown-ass man and still goes by his high-school basketball nickname.
“Let’s get you back in bed, Dad,” Poppy says.
“To hell with that,” her father says, reaching for the McDonald’s bag, retrieving a breakfast sandwich, and putting it on the plate in her spot at the table.
“Yeah, chill, Serpico,” Dash says.
“Who the hell is Serpico?” She doesn’t wait for him to reply. She sits at the table and unwraps the McMuffin.
As they eat, Dash jabbers on, her father laughing. Whatever his faults, Dash has their father’s heart, he always has.
When they’re finished, Dash piles his plate in the sink. Poppy says, “I hope this celebration includes cleaning up.”