it in, telling herself to remember that he had to take his time, but he eventually opened up.
“I’m going away,” he finally blurted out.
“Away?”
“To live somewhere else.”
This startled her, but she knew if she peppered him with questions he would clam up. So she settled on one thing she knew was true. “I’ll miss you,” she said simply.
He looked startled, then pleased, then he blushed. She knew when he felt his cheeks heat, because he lowered his head again.
“Where are you going?” she asked, careful to keep her tone casual.
He didn’t raise his head. He tapped his fingers in a restless rhythm. Took a deep breath, let it out.
“I’m going to live with my brother,” he said in the same kind of rush.
“Your brother?” She was genuinely startled now.
“Yeah. Luke. Luke McGuire. My half brother, really. You don’t know him, he was gone before you came here.”
No, she didn’t know him. But she knew of him. It was hard to live in Santiago Beach and not know of the town bad boy who had departed the morning after the high school graduation he’d barely achieved and never been back. Luke McGuire might have been gone for better than eight years, but his reputation had lingered.
“I didn’t realize you were in touch with him,” she said carefully. “You never mentioned him before.”
“He’ll be coming to get me soon,” David said.
Amelia noticed he hadn’t answered her directly, but didn’t belabor the point. “When? Do I have time to get you a going-away present?”
Again the boy blushed. “I…don’t really know. Not yet, anyway. But he’s coming. I know he is.”
For a moment David sounded like a child waiting for Santa Claus, and she wondered if the arrival of the brother was as much a fantasy. She also wondered, as she had before, if the phantom brother wasn’t part of David’s problem, if because some people expected him to be just like his troublemaking brother, it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
David met her gaze then, his jaw set and his chin up. “You’ll see. So will my mom. She can’t keep him away, even though she hates him.”
Amelia considered that. Ordinarily her response would have been something soothing, assuring the boy his mother surely didn’t really hate his brother. But she had met David’s mother, knew that Jackie was very conscious of appearances and hated to be embarrassed. Given Luke’s reputation and what the woman had no doubt gone through raising him, she could easily believe there was no love lost between the two.
“It must be difficult, if he and your mother don’t get along, but you want to go live with him.”
“She doesn’t know about it. Yet,” he added, his expression turning mutinous.
“Does she even know you’ve been in touch?”
“No. Yes.”
Well, Amelia thought, there’s a teenage response for you. She waited, knowing David would explain if she just waited.
“I mean she knows I wrote to him, but she stole my first letter before the mail lady picked it up. I found it in the trash.”
Amelia smothered a sigh; she couldn’t think of anything more likely to make an already resistant teenager downright stubborn. But it wasn’t her place to pass judgment on his mother’s parenting skills.
“So you wrote again?”
He nodded, a little fiercely, the blond hair flopping in time with the movement. “Couple of weeks ago. And I took it to the post office myself. I even bought the stamp myself, ’cause I know she started counting the ones in her desk. She puts a mark on the next one on the roll. She thinks I’m too dumb to figure that out.”
Amelia couldn’t imagine living that way. Her parents might have been older and a bit fussy in their ways, but she had never had to live with this kind of subterfuge and mistrust.
“And what did your brother say?”
“He hasn’t answered. Yet.” This time the “yet” was in an entirely different tone, one of stubbornly determined hope. “I think he’s just gonna come and get me. He doesn’t have time for writing letters.”
“He doesn’t?”
“Nah, he’s too busy.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m not sure, but cool stuff. He’d never have some boring job or wear a tie or nothing like that.”
“But you don’t know what he does do?”
“No. But he’s not in jail, like my mom says!”
Amelia’s breath caught. “Jail?”
“She just says that. She’s always said it, that he was probably in jail somewhere. She’s always sayin’ bad things about him.”
Amelia felt an unexpected tug of sympathy for the absent Luke McGuire. “You were young when he left, weren’t you?” she asked gently.
“I was almost eight.” He sounded defensive. “I remember him really good. He was really cool. He used to take me with him places, unless he was with some girl. And sometimes at night, you know, when I was real little, when I couldn’t go to sleep, he’d sneak in and read to me.”
And there it was, Amelia thought. The birth of a reader. Somehow she never would have expected the inspiration to be the disreputable Luke.
Primed now, David kept on, extolling the virtues of his long gone half brother.
“And he’d bring me stuff, not stuff you buy, he didn’t have much money, but stuff like a neat rock, or a feather, that kind of thing. I’d put it away in my special box—” He stopped suddenly before adding sourly, “Before my mother found it and threw it all away.”
Amelia sighed again. She herself had had a collection of leaves she had pressed and dried, all the different ones she could find. Her mother hadn’t liked having them around, she thought they were dirty, but Amelia loved to look at them, and that was all that had really mattered; the collection had stayed.
Thanks, Mom, she whispered silently, as she often did to both the parents she still missed so much. And never had it mattered less than it did at this moment that they hadn’t been her biological parents.
“People say he was kind of a…troublemaker,” she said carefully; she didn’t want to join a chorus, but she did want to know if David was utterly blind to any faults his brother had.
“Yeah, he got in some trouble.” The boy said it with a kind of relish that made Amelia nervous; she wondered if this was the key to David’s new friends, who seemed to find—or make—trouble wherever they went. “He was no nerd like my mom likes,
