His Best Friend's Baby

“See ya, Chris.” Jesse hung up and threw the phone back in his duffel.

Wishing was for fools, something he learned the day his sister walked away from him, so he stopped wasting his own precious time. He was who he was and he had to take care of his responsibilities.

He gave Wain a pat on the snout.

“See what you’re getting me into?”

Wain farted and sighed.

Jesse jerked the wheel to the left and kicked up a lot of dust heading toward New Springs. He took the winding mountain road too fast. Wainwright put his nose in the air and howled and Jesse knew exactly how he felt.

He drove through Old Town, past the Royal Theater and the Dairy Dream ice-cream shop. He took the left after the Vons grocery store, toward the south side. With every twist and turn through his old neighborhood, the pressure in his chest built.

There weren’t any railroad tracks in New Springs, but Jesse never questioned which side of the proverbial tracks he was from. There had been a grit and a filth that came from this part of town and sometimes he could still feel it.

When he was a kid, this particular street had been made up of single moms with kids they couldn’t control. Big, once-beautiful old homes—the first built in the town—had been falling to ruin or divided into apartments while people with money had chosen to live in the newer homes by the rec center on the other side of town.

He shifted gears as the pressure in his chest started to feel like panic.

The turning point of his life had come when Mitch and his family had moved into the neighborhood. Mitch’s mom liked old houses and apparently she’d never noticed the filth until her son had come home after school with Jesse in tow.

Then she’d noticed.

Since those days, however, the old neighborhood had clearly changed. The lawns were now green and nice, the tiled roofs repaired, the houses painted.

It freaked him out. He wiped one sweaty palm on his thigh. He felt like the boy in the fancy shop who security watched—a feeling he hadn’t had since he was a kid.

The old house must be the eyesore on thisstreet.

Mom had died three years ago and the house had been a nightmare then. Jesse could only imagine the damage raccoons and high-school kids looking for a place to get drunk had done since then.

Truth be told, the idea appealed to him—the old homestead a broken-down disgrace among these refurbished houses. All the neighbors once again cursing the Filmore family over their repaired and whitewashed back fences.

Just like the good old days.

But at the corner of Wilson and Pine, where the ruins of his childhood home should have sat, was a house newly painted a creamy yellow color. There were red flowers in window boxes and a shiny white front porch.

“What the hell…?” His mouth fell open as he peered through the open passenger window at the vision.

His heart squeezed uncomfortably.

Man, I wish Mom could have seen it like this.

Jesse pulled up to the curb, and stared, stunned, at 314 Wilson.

That was his old house all right, but it looked nothing like it once had.

Years ago, he’d thrown a rock through the front picture window after a fight with his father. His mom had covered the hole with cardboard because they couldn’t afford a new piece of glass that size.

Now, the cardboard was gone, the replacement window surrounded by flowers nodding in the breeze.

The porch where his father used to sit many nights drinking Scotch and getting mean no longer sagged, threatening to fall away from the house. And the hole Jesse had used to crawl under the porch on nights when Dad kicked him out was covered over. He’d learned later that his mother had kept the back door open for him the way she had for Rachel, when his sister had been the one thrown out into the cold desert night.

All of his surprise and regret quickly boiled down to something much more familiar. Anger.

His mother had left him the damn place as some kind of chain, forcing him back here. Worse, Rachel had been repairing it and shining it up pretty.

Wonderful. A gold-plated chain.

If Rachel thought she could stop him from getting rid of it—tearing the damn thing down if he had to—she was wrong. Rachel could dress up the house all she wanted, repair it and cover up the ugly parts, but underneath it was still the violent and angry home of his youth. There was not enough paint in the world to cover that.

“Let’s go, Wain.” Jesse climbed gingerly out of the Jeep.

Wain barked with an enthusiasm Jesse was far from feeling and trotted ahead to sniff and urinate on a hydrangea bush.

Jesse pulled the key from around his neck, where it hung with his dog tags.

He bent and picked up one of the solid decorative rocks that lined the walkway. He tested its heft and then hurled it through the front window. The glass shattered and Jesse smiled.

Now, it looks like home.

CHAPTER TWO

JULIA ADAMS managed to eat three bites of the cinnamon roll she had grabbed from the motel vending machine then tossed it in a garbage can outside the Vons grocery store. She took another sip of the stale coffee from the motel lobby and dumped that out as well.

She couldn’t get food past the slick bitter taste of nerves at the back of her throat. The anxiety had gathered steam as she and Ben walked into town from the motel and now she was a kettle about ready to blow.

“I think Momma has made a mistake, Ben,” she said to her two-year-old son, even though he was sound asleep in his stroller.

One mistake? How do you figure just one? The voice belonged to Mitch, her dead husband, always there to count her failings.

She hit a crack in the sidewalk and the stroller under her hands swayed, thanks to the loose screws she’d tried repair a million times—the whole thing was just about shot.

The streetlights blinked on and the world past the street receded to shadows. Dusk arrived to the desert town with a beauty Julia had never seen. The enormous sky turned purple and blue and the temperature finally cooled to a tolerable level.

She and Ben had missed the worst of the heat, having spent most of the day inside their motel room. Ben had napped and fussed, confused by the time change, and she’d stewed—replaying Agnes’s phone call in her head, wondering if she’d gotten the invitation all wrong.

The smell of eucalyptus filled the air and Julia, trying to calm the twisting of her stomach, pulled off one of the flat round leaves and rubbed it between her fingers. The oil soaked into her skin, but it wasn’t enough to calm the raging nerves.

She turned left and the reality of what she was doing came down on her like a hammer.

She was about to knock on Mitch’s parents’ door. Her in-laws, who had never liked her, and say…

“What?” she asked herself aloud. “Surprise! Can I stay a while? Here’s your grandson. Do you mind if I take a nap?” She took a deep breath. “Remember when you asked me to come for a visit? When you said you would be here for me?”

I’ve finally lost it. I’m talking to myself!

“Your mother’s a lunatic,” she told her sleeping son, just to prove the point.