If only he could slam all inconvenient emotions and memories into drawers and forget them.
Eli let his head fall back against the big plump macho leather couch—which was his one splurge when he was promoted to head deputy, though he was still getting used to how it looked in the middle of the family living room—and closed his eyes. And he released a sigh so deep and endless it was like he’d been holding it his entire life.
“It wasyourinfluence keeping Jonah on the straight and narrow, Eli. See what happened practically the minute you left Hellcat Canyon?”
That was his mother’s way of trying to comfort him. His mother had never quite approved of his friendship with the Greenleafs.
Hell. She might actually be right.
Jonah had always thought rules got in the way of getting what he wanted, which was having a good time. He was forever looking for short cuts, for loopholes, for shades of gray. And sometimes this was fun and sometimes with this was trouble and often even the trouble was fun, and he’d never had a rudder because he didn’t have a dad.
Eli was his father’s son. But he’d also learned all on his own that for him, ruleswerethe short cut. Otherwise you unfailingly had to go back and learn something you’d skipped in an attempt to get what you wanted faster, or stop to clean up some mess you’d made on the way.
Or, like Jonah, take a plea bargain and go to prison for five years for helping to transport meth one town over.
It amounted to the same thing.
Jonah had been a very small part of a big operation.
But it had been the biggest betrayal of Eli’s life. And even as he kind of understood how it all might have come about, the fury and hurt had been white-hot. Then cold and hard as granite.
His mom had never understand the appeal of the Greenleafs. Which for Eli was the loving chaos of their house. The defiance and resourcefulness and humor in the face of not-quite-poverty. How funny and quicksilver and kind and game for anything Jonah was, and how being with them had been like taking a hit of oxygen and was as colorful as Disneyland.
His mom may or may not have an inkling about his true feelings for Glory. She hadn’t wanted him to take the Hellcat Canyon job instead of heading to Miami, that was for sure.
Eli pushed himself up off the couch abruptly and strode to the fridge, reached back and pulled that one remaining picture down from under its magnet. He took it and a Snapple back to the couch with him.
It was a shot taken in spring. He and Jonah, gangly, floppy-haired, shirtless, impossibly thin and long-limbed in their cutoff shorts. Eli never really felt the passage of years until he saw himself like that. They were both about eleven years old, their skin golden-brown and smooth, almost shining like metal in the sun because they were still so...new. They were washing the battered old Greenleaf car and Jonah was aiming the hose at Eli.
And there was Glory in pink shorts and a white shirt, about eight years old, her black hair all the way down to her butt. Glory never did have the patience for braids. She opted for one big ponytail in the summer, either behind her, like an actual pony, or to the side or up on her head, like a fountain. Most of the time her hair sailed out behind her, because she liked to flourish it, like a magician with a cape. Her mouth was wide open and her eyes had disappeared and her arms were crossed over her stomach because she was laughing so hard, so hard it was like she could hardly bear it. He used to tease her that he could see all the way to her tonsils.
That photo was taken right around the time he’d gotten in a nasty little argument with Mike Roderick on the playground over whose turn it was to use the red rubber ball at recess. Roderick had resorted to the sort of tactic guaranteed to chop Eli off at the knees. He’d mocked his stutter.
“Eli Barlow takes f-f-f-f-orever to get a word out!”
Eli was tall even then, but he’d frozen. Mute and paralyzed with shame.
And Glory had hurtled out of nowhere.
He’d snagged her by the collar before she could take a swing at Roderick, but her arms were windmilling. “I’d rather waitforeverto hear him sayone wordthan listen to you say anything, booger face!”
To his credit, Mike Roderick knew a little girl had just shamed him but good. He’d apologized.
Eli didn’t stutter anymore. Mike Roderick was now on Hellcat Canyon’s City Planning Commission, a fine upstanding citizen with two kids and a mortgage. The two of them were on perfectly cordial terms. But damned if Eli didn’t look at him and still think “booger face.”
Glory would fight to the death for people she cared about. She was a fighter, period.
Which is why it was sostrangeshe was still in Hellcat Canyon. And it seeded a traitorous little suspicion: Had the fight gone out of her? Had she decided to do the Greenleaf thing, which was nothing?
He jerked when his cell phone erupted in a ring.
He lunged to answer it. “Hey, Cam, what’s up?”
Becky Cameron was a deputy in the nearby town of Black Oak who’d been married to a big sweetheart of a Samoan guy for twenty years, and she had three adorable giggly kids.
“You sound a little groggy. Were you sleeping, heartthrob?”
He cast his eyes ceiling-ward. For a time there, his image had been all over the news thanks to the meth ring bust—print and digitalandtelevision. His colleagues still gave him endless shit about it, mostly involving nicknames. “Heartthrob.” “America’s sweetheart.” That sort of thing.