Seven Years

Mom popped me on the butt with her hand and I chuckled. I might have been in my late twenties, but that woman still saw me as the smart-mouthed little girl who once stood up on a counter at a department store, folded my arms, and announced to everyone that perfume made you smell like a stinky pig. It was a protest because my mom wanted to buy me a bottle of the little girl’s stuff that smelled like overripe bananas.

Ever since then, I’ve despised bananas.

“Let’s go before it gets hot,” I decided. “Do you want to eat at Dairy Queen or come home and make sandwiches?”

Mom grabbed her purse and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. I reached out and hugged her tight.

“Let’s eat out.” She sniffled against my hair. “Maizy can get a chocolate-dipped cone. She likes those. I don’t ever want her to go through life not having the things she wants. Sometimes I still feel guilty for not buying Wes a skateboard when he was nine. I should have given him everything,” she said in a broken voice.

Tears welled in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks. “It’s okay, Mom. I know. You gave him love, and that was all he needed.”

We sniffed, sighed, and laughed at each other.

“My makeup is ruined,” she said, sliding a finger beneath her lashes to wipe away the mascara.

“That’s okay, Halloween is only four months away.”

“You’re never too old to be grounded, young lady.”

* * *

We made a brief stop at the cemetery to lay down a bouquet of beautiful white lilies. Maizy climbed on the statues for a while and then we watched her pluck tiny yellow flowers (which were really weeds) from an open patch of grass and place them on Wes’s grave, arranged in the shape of a heart. She’d never met her big bro, but he would have loved her to pieces.

Afterward, we swung by Dairy Queen. It was a new location that had opened earlier that year, and we stopped in once in a while to pick up a sack of burgers and fries, and of course a hot dog for Maizy.

We were sitting at a table by the window, watching Maizy color with a green crayon, when my mom gasped and covered her mouth. “Oh my God, is that who I think it is?”

I swiveled my head around in the direction she was looking. Sunlight reflected off the glass as the door opened and made me squint. Stepping through the front door of Dairy Queen… was Austin Cole.

Also known as my brother’s “best friend for life.” They’d met in the first grade and had been inseparable ever since. He and Wes had run with the same crowd, sometimes dated the same girls, and could finish each other’s sentences. Austin used to spend the night at our house and we’d treated him like a member of the family. In fact, when I was thirteen, I secretly decided we were going to get married. I had doodled Alexia Cole inside my notebook where no one would find it.

As kids, Austin used to pick on me without provocation. He once plucked off all the eyes on my stuffed animals and would dip his finger in my juice glass at the breakfast table and flick the drops at me. He didn’t have a sister, so he probably didn’t know how to deal with girls. Austin wasn’t doing it to be cruel—he just enjoyed getting a rise out of me. I was a dramatic little girl.

“He’s changed,” Mom said in a quiet voice.

Her sullen expression at his unexpected appearance told the story. The last time we had seen him was seven years ago at the funeral. He’d left town that week without any explanation. No phone call, no letter, and that hurt. We’d been like his second family.

The visual of his body standing in front of the door burned into my retinas. His swagger in those loose jeans, the way his tight T-shirt had come untucked on the right side, the black leather Oxfords, and most notably, the ropes of muscle in his arms. Austin no longer resembled the boyish young man I had last seen seven years ago. He had filled out in all the right places. While I couldn’t see his eyes behind those mirrored shades, I knew they were still crystal blue and the most remarkable feature he possessed, although the slight cleft in his chin came in a close second. Something about those pale eyes against his brown hair and thick brows could make a woman forget her own name.

He was dangerously handsome and held the attention of every woman of age in the room.

“Is she pretty?” Maizy asked, holding up her picture.

I blinked.

Princess in a green dress with an orange face. “She’s beautiful, Maze.”

My heart pounded against my chest and Mom stabbed the ice cubes in her cup with a clear straw. When her eyes lifted and locked, I knew right then and there he’d spotted her and they were engaged in a staring match. I waited expectantly for him to come up from behind and say an awkward hello.

Instead, I glanced out the window and saw Austin walking briskly to the adjacent parking lot where he had parked his classic Dodge Challenger. It was a badass model with black paint and tinted windows.

“Mom?”

I didn’t even know what I was going to ask. I just felt like something had to be said to deaden the moment.

He had been a second son to her, and maybe having him around after Wes’s death might have helped her get through it. I knew that thought crossed her mind, so I shot up to my feet. “I’m going to get some ice cream.”

“Yay!” Maizy cheered.

I marched over to the counter and right out the door, staring at his tinted windows with my hands on my hips. The tires spun, throwing gravel across the parking lot as he tore off.

But I knew Austin had seen me.

A boy named after the city he was born and raised in. A kid who ate dinner at our house three nights a week. A man who now sped off like a bona fide chickenshit when faced with the option of talking to his dead friend’s sister.

A man who’d kissed me passionately the night my brother was killed.

Chapter 3

By ten o’clock that evening, we’d eaten pork chops, watched a movie, and I’d left the house with a bottle of Mom’s whiskey. It wasn’t a favorite drink of mine, but she never touched the stuff and I needed something to help me sleep through the night. My wine collection at home was reserved for good times, and I didn’t want to taint my favorite beverage with sorrow.

This anniversary was never officially over until I was rip-roaring drunk.

On the way home, I made an unplanned visit to the cemetery. It was closed, but no one ever locks up a cemetery so tight that you can’t get in; it’s the getting out part that proves the most difficult.

Wes had a flat grave marker and I hated it. I tried to talk my mom into getting one of the raised ones to replace it, but she’d refused. Maybe that selfish part of me wanted something at eye-level to look at and talk to, or maybe even hug.

“God, Wes. You should see how much Maze has grown,” I said, sitting Indian style over his grave. It was dark as sin, and the only light illuminating the grounds shone from a tall lamp near a marble statue of an angel. “She’s so sweet, not like me. I was a little terror and you,” I said, waving my unsteady finger at the ground, “should have never let me go out with Josh Holden when I was fifteen. What were you thinking?”

I hiccupped and screwed the cap back on the bottle.

“Just because he was on the football team, you thought he was cool and he passed whatever test you had for the guys who called me up. Josh thought he was going to score a touchdown that night.” I snorted. “That was the first time I’d ever been to second base and when he started to slide into third, I slapped his face and walked home. Josh works at the gas station now. But then, who am I to talk?” I yelled up at the trees. “I’m just a candy girl.”