She could feel the light of eyes on her skin all the way through to the end.
She finished with a flourish and held her guitar up high. Jonah threw his arms up and bellowed, “My baby sister, everybody!”
Later, she thought she recalled hearing clapping and cheering. But at the time, the only thing her senses took in was Eli.
He’d smiled at her slowly. And gave his head a slow shake. Like he simply couldn’t believe the wonder of her.
And it was odd, in that it had started out as kind of a joke.
But if Eli had walked up to her and demanded she put into words what she was feeling right then and there, she would have had to use words likeI’d do anything for youorforever.
She froze, guitar dangling from her hand. That was the moment she understood that those feelings had been growing and growing out of sight, like the roots of that huge liquidambar tree in the Greenleaf front yard that had one day cracked the driveway right down the middle. And remained the bane of Mrs.Binkley to this day.
Then his girlfriend—Tiffany Margolies, who was brainless, which was probably why she didn’t mind being on top of the cheerleading pyramid as she had absolutely nothing to lose if she toppled from up there to the ground onto her head—flounced over and looped her arms around Eli’s neck from behind and the moment snapped like a spiderweb.
The very next morning, before school, Glory had gone and done something a lot of people would have considered rash.
And she’d never told a soul about it. Not one.
Though she was beginning to wonder if she’d pay for that rashness for the rest of her life.
Glory realized her hand was splayed against the glass case in the music store as if that whole night was trapped inside.
She forced herself to rise to her feet. She was happy Dion was focused on his guitar repair because her eyes were burning. Eli was everywhere. In everything.
It was so hard to imagine it any other way. Son of a bitch.
“Found that forty-five at the Our Lady of Mercy Thrift Shop,” Dion told her. “Got it for a buck. It’s in incredible condition.”
It was a moment before she trusted herself to speak over the knot in her throat.
“I’m surprised they didn’t payyouto take the devil’s music off their hands.”
The ladies in that thrift shop could be judgey. Dion was a sweetheart, but he looked like a big heathen with the enormous hair and the tattoos and his round belly taxing the elastic powers of his Pink Floyd t-shirt.
“There was a moment there when I thought my conscience was bothering me and I considered telling them what they had. But then I figured out that the twinge was just the burrito I had for lunch. I’ll let you have it for twenty-five bucks.”
“Highway robbery. I can get it cheaper on eBay.”
Given that she’d had to root between the sofa cushions for the change she was using to buy a new pack of strings today, this was an entirely rhetorical observation.
“Cheeky wench,” he said without rancor. He relished haggling and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the value of music ephemera. He could not be taken. “Maybe five bucks cheaper, if that. I’ll give the extra five bucks to the thrift shop to assuage my guilty conscience.”
“Can’t do it today. I’ll take some strings, though.”
“D’addario lights?”
“You complete me, Dion.”
“Do youseeit?”
Mrs.Wilberforce’s voice was trembling with hushed outrage. She was wearing a scarf tied over row upon row of curlers, all wound round with iron-gray hair, and they looked like a crew of little Boy Scouts in sleeping bags. Eli figured she must be really incensed to call him before her hair was done. She was always stylishly turned out, in her seventy-year-old way. She was wearing white capri pants and little black ballet flats and sunglasses with gold initials at the temple. He was pretty sure they were Giorgio Armani.
Heavenly Shores Retirement Community was like a cross between Disney’s It’s a Small World ride and a miniature golf course: tidy streets of permanently parked mobile homes of varying vintages, all painted in some tasteful pastel shade, each one immaculate and personalized in some way—a picket fence here, a little pocket-sized yard exploding with petunias or roses or whimsical statuary there.
Law enforcement in Hellcat Canyon could swing between banal and deadly in a heartbeat, and Eli was hoping to burn off some residual Glory angst today by maybe chasing a bad guy. But he was so tired this morning that he found Heavenly Shores kind of soothing. A little like that time he’d stayed home from school sick and had taken a whopping dose of cough syrup and watchedTeletubbies.
“Mrs.Wilberforce, forgive me, but what exactly are we looking at?”
