I open my mouth to tell him Maggie already taught me, but I feel Mom’s hand squeeze my knee beneath the table and I close it while Jason goes on to explain the process.
He rarely says more than a sentence or two together, but now he’s talking and animated as he gestures and mimes the movements I need to make next time I drive Daphne. He does this sometimes, comes alive in a way the prison seldom lets him. It’s bittersweet, seeing him like this, because it never lasts. A single wrong word or a sound or even just a random thought, and he’ll go quiet as sudden as a candle snuffing out. I’m watching him intently so I see it happen, like a flinch, and I have no idea why. One second he’s smiling and shaking his head about my car, and the next his shoulders are rolling in as his head drops down, the transformation happening before my eyes in the most heartbreaking way possible. He’s gone for the rest of the visit, lost in himself no matter what Mom or I try to do or say to draw him back out.
After Mom hugs Jason goodbye she moves away to give my brother and me the semblance of privacy for a few seconds. I wrap my arms around his waist and try not to think about how much less of him there is to hold.
“You’re really okay?” he asks, his words muffled by my hair, softening the rasp.
I want to return the question to him, only I know I won’t like the honest answer any more than he’ll like mine. So I sigh audibly. “I spent all my money on a car that hates me. Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
I feel his slight laugh and it’s like sunshine finding its way into this windowless room. I want more of it. “Maybe when you call this week you can go over shifting gears again with me?”
“Sure, Brooke.”
A cleared throat from the guard makes me let him go, but his expression doesn’t dim when he looks at me.
“But you gotta practice on your own too. Why don’t you drive out on the dirt road by Hackman’s Pond? You know we’re pretty much the only ones who go out that way since they paved Williams Field Road. You can stall and start without anyone around to notice.”
I lower my eyes and, when I answer him, mine is the voice that sounds hoarse. “Maybe,” is all I can say, because I know that today at least one other person will be there.
“No maybe,” he says, looking and sounding more like my bossy brother. “You gotta leave me knowing you’re gonna do right by that car.”
Looking up at him, I nod.
CHAPTER 11
Mom and I don’t say much after leaving the prison. I keep waiting for it to get easier, for it to feel normal seeing him in that environment, but it never does. If anything, it gets harder to have to leave him in a place he doesn’t belong any more than Heath’s brother belongs in a grave.
I glance at Mom once the prison is well behind us, but if her thoughts are similar to mine, no part of her shows it. Her hands on the wheel stay loose and relaxed while mine tighten around the hem of my shirt. Blue, Jason’s favorite color. Mom’s blouse is the same hue.
Closing my eyes, I will my heartbeat to steady.
“Headache?” Mom asks, switching off the radio and briefly turning to me.
“No,” I say. “Just thinking.” But she’s already reaching for her purse, and I take the aspirin she gives me without protest.
“He looked better today, don’t you think?”
I resist closing my eyes again. I don’t want to remember Jason as we left him. There’s always something desperate lurking below the surface in his face when they take him away, a fear and longing that he knows better than to voice. Some visits, I have to pry my fingers from the edge of the table, not because I want to stay but because I can’t bear to leave without him.
And yet...he took a life.
I glance out the window and the few trees we pass, they aren’t live oaks, but they’re enough to remind me of the boy who might have been waiting for me, and the boy whose life was taken.
Two hours later we hit the dirt roads that signal we’re a few miles from home. Apart from the warm breeze and the cicadas’ timbal clicking, the afternoon is as quiet as the road is empty. I lean back at the odd slowing of my heart, wondering if even now there’s a red truck parked by Hackman’s Pond.
I hesitate by our car when we get home, and my unwillingness to go in is more than the usual reluctance I feel whenever Mom and I return from visiting Jason. It doesn’t even help that I see Uncle Mike’s truck parked out front, and Uncle Mike usually makes everything better.
Uncle Mike isn’t technically my uncle. He was my dad’s best friend growing up and is the closest thing to a brother he has now, and to hear him tell it, the owner of a still-broken heart from when Mom chose Dad over him. Mom always reminds him that they barely dated and that he was the one to introduce her to Dad.
Uncle Mike is still single though. Back when he used to drink and would end up crashing on our couch some nights when we had to take away his keys, he’d sometimes say stuff about how he should have fought for Mom instead of watching his best friend steal her heart. He always laughed it off though, made some joke to me, Jason and Laura about any prospective single moms we might know.
Uncle Mike is trudging up from the basement when Mom and I push open the screen door. His gaze alights on Mom’s face first, but the smile he gives me is almost as good. Uncle Mike isn’t as tall as my dad, or as broad. He still has all his hair, blond and a little curly, though he keeps it short, and he’s constantly lamenting his inability to grow a full beard. He’s a nice-looking guy, Uncle Mike; he’s just never going to catch the eye of the one woman he wants to catch.
He hurries over to hold the door for us.
“Thanks, Mike,” Mom says on her way to the stairs. “Can you stay for dinner?”
“What kind of fool would say no to that?” He cranes his neck to watch her ascend the stairs. Then his gaze falls on me. “Hey, kid. How’s the ice treating you these days?”
