Edge (Gentry Boys #7) Page 5

  Even though the drive only lasted a few minutes, Emily was already dozing off when I pulled up to our apartment building. It was one of those restored midcentury buildings that brought quaint charm to an area that was being slowly revitalized by young professionals looking to be closer to downtown.

  Tonight a few people were hanging out on their balconies, enjoying a quiet evening. The faint echoes of jazz music reached my ears as I opened the door.

  “Did you leave a candle burning?” Emily yawned as she threw her purse on the sofa and flicked on a light.

  “No, it’s the essential oil diffuser.”

  “Smells like Christmas candy.”

  “Peppermint. With a drop of orange.”

  Since I was far too keyed up to consider sleep I started mixing up a loaf of banana bread. Emily sat at the vintage black and white dinette and kept me company while cheerfully chewing through half a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips.

  “You still haven’t come clean,” she accused me as I placed the loaf in the center rack of the oven.

  I closed the oven door and set the timer. “You want to lick the bowl?”

  “Don’t be absurd, of course I do, but don’t change the subject.”

  “Remind me what the subject is.”

  Emily tapped her fingernails on the table. “It’s whatever got you so spooked that you abandoned your shoe in your haste to get away from it.”

  I thought about Conway, about the lazy smile he’d given me and the fire that flashed in his eyes as he looked me over. Funny, but I couldn’t remember a single conversation we’d ever had before. We must have talked to each other at some point when we were kids. Even after I moved away I would frequently visit Erin and whenever I did Conway was always around. Yet somehow it seemed like we’d never faced each other directly until tonight.

  Emily was still waiting for an answer. I ran a sponge under the tap and started wiping down the counter, carefully keeping my voice even. “Just an old memory, that’s all. Sometimes they surface when you least expect them to.”

  Emily tilted her head and I thought she was going to keep asking questions but then she changed her mind and folded over the chip bag before standing.

  “Roe,” she said softly, a rare use of my old nickname. “If you ever want to talk about anything, I’m here for you.”

  For some reason my eyes welled with tears. I knew Emily wasn’t just speaking empty words. But seeing a piece of the past right there in the flesh, glaring at me balefully and making sexually charged comments had been confusing in a way I didn’t have words to explain. Maybe I’d be able to deal with it tomorrow, once I was able to get past the way my body had lit up when he touched me. I swear I could still feel it, even now.

  “Thanks, Em,” I whispered, and kept my eyes glued to the digital oven timer until I heard her shuffle down the hall to her bedroom.

  She’d never met Conway but she would have known the name if I’d mentioned it. I’d told her all about them; Erin and the Gentry brothers.

  Conway had been Erin’s longtime boyfriend. However it was his brother, Stone, who’d been driving the car when a fatal moment stole Erin from all of us. I’d never been friendly with the Gentry brothers, not even when we were kids. There was something about their family, a dangerous undercurrent of violence and shitty luck that seemed to follow them through the generations. Those two had started going through trouble and girls long before they should have known much about either one. But they’d lived next door to my best friend and she’d been crazy about the younger brother, Conway, for years until he grew into some common sense and fell for her in return. I’d seen them together often enough to erase any doubt that they were truly in love. I even had a grudging kind of respect for Conway. No matter how reckless he and his hell-raising brother were, the way he treated Erin redeemed him a lot, at least in my eyes.

  I could still remember the way her eyes shone whenever his name passed her lips, the way she would clasp her hands together and hold them close to her chest as if her heart was bursting.

  And I remembered him too, how he would open his arms for her and rest his chin atop her head. Given my own history of romantic misfortunes I was far from an expert but I knew there was nothing fake about what Erin and Conway had together.

  Maybe that was why it was so hard to merge the pictures in my memory with the brooding oversexed hood who’d shown up tonight.

  For a few minutes I just stood in the middle of the empty kitchen, listening to the sawing sound of Emily brushing her teeth. Eventually I heard the creak of Emily’s bed and the fizzy noise of her sound machine.

  This apartment building was mostly full of over-educated twenty somethings determined to prove how non-conformist they were beneath their expensive clothes. There was this guy on the first floor – Frank, I think his name was – who climbed up to the roof at least twice a week and belted out sad jazz on his saxophone. He must have had a bad night because he’d just started playing and the sound echoing through the walls was even more mournful than usual. I’d never met him but Emily had. She said he was an accountant.

  The banana bread was still baking so I wandered into my bedroom. Every piece of furniture was a rehabbed item from a downtown consignment store, a far cry from the designer décor of my father’s house. I ran my hand over an antique oak dresser that I’d stripped and varnished. The top drawer tended to stick but fell out completely if pulled too far so I handled it carefully. The object I was looking for was right in front anyway.

  I lifted the beautiful wooden keepsake box out and thought about the girl who’d owned it. Her father had given it to me, right before he’d moved out of state with his remaining daughters. I’d tried to talk him out of giving it to me, insisting that such a personal treasure should be kept for Erin’s younger sisters but the man shook his head and pressed it into my hands anyway.

  “You were a sister to her too, Roe,” he’d said and then he kissed me on the forehead like he had probably done for his lost child many times in her young life before she was taken from him.

  The box itself was a beauty; hand carved and passed down from Erin’s grandmother if I recalled correctly. An elaborate cross was etched into the center of the lid and even though the Rielo family had never been religious to my knowledge, the box seemed like such a cherished relic that I felt almost reverent whenever I touched it.

  Long ago I’d filled the box with all the physical memories I had of Erin. Pictures, childhood notes, wrinkled movie theater stubs, other small bits and pieces that would once have been discarded as trash but now were rare, cherished links to a beloved friend. In the corner was a carefully folded piece of paper. I held the compact square in my hand and closed my fingers around it. I didn’t need to read it because I remembered everything it said. I didn’t even know why I’d kept it so carefully preserved, other than the fact that it was the most honest letter I’d ever received. No one had to confirm its truth for me. The writer had known things he couldn’t possibly have known unless Erin had told him. And if some of it was true, then I trusted that all of it was. He had no reason to lie, not to me anyway. I suppose I kept the letter because Erin would have wanted me to know that he’d been her friend, that for all the terrible things that were said about the Gentrys then and now, things weren’t what they seemed.

  Maybe few things in this world were ever what they seemed.

  Erin’s two little sisters had kept in touch via email and social media. Penny was going to college in Texas and Katie, sweet little Katie, would be in high school next year. Whenever I looked at her Facebook profile I was always struck by her resemblance to her older sister. Same cloud of dark hair, same innocent smile.

  Whenever I came home from college I would find the time to make the sad drive down to Emblem to visit the grave of my best friend, never empty handed, always carrying some trinket or treasure that I’d come across in a store and bought because I knew she would have loved it. Yet it was only today that I realized since I’d m
oved back I’d only visited once. I wasn’t sure what I believed about death, if some part of the soul lingered in this physical realm, but whenever I knelt in the grass at Erin’s stone monument and listened to the wind I felt comforted.

  The last time I’d driven down to Emblem, right after Thanksgiving, I’d left a piece of rose quartz, tying it up in a velvet pouch before setting it gently on her stone. There was never anyone around who could tell me what happened to all the things I’d placed over the years. Crosses, crystals, an angel figurine. They were always gone the next time I returned. I didn’t believe they’d been spirited away to some kind of ethereal, otherworldly place where Erin was but I hoped they hadn’t just been thrown away. I hoped they somehow found their way into the life of someone who might smile over them.

  Last autumn as I’d walked out of the cemetery gates I was struck anew by the unfairness of it all. I used to think that we’d been left behind, all of us who loved her. But she was still there in a way, still in Emblem. She’d never had the opportunity to leave. Meanwhile those of us she’d loved had moved on.

  Erin’s family.

  Me.

  Conway Gentry and his brother, Stone.

  We’d fled, we’d scattered, one way or another and for our own reasons. We’d left that dusty town to its ghosts and run when we could.

  As I closed the wooden box I again remembered the look in Conway’s eyes, the haunted defiance that flashed and disappeared.

  And I wondered.

  In a way, maybe some of us were still running.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CONWAY

  This last name of mine comes with a history.

  It’s possible every small town American enclave has its own myths and legends to choke on but ‘Gentry’ always had its own definition.

  I forget the specifics of the story but some time in the grim Depression era a gaggle of my forefathers staggered out of the prairie dustbowl and plopped down in Emblem, a little Arizona desert town with a small Main Street, a large prison, and not much else.

  Small towns have long memories and even if you’ve never been guilty of a crime, sharing a name with those who have can be enough of a condemnation.

  For example, if your great grandfather once shot a local shopkeeper during a drunken rage spree, people remember.

  If you have a distant uncle who bludgeoned a young farm worker to death over a poker game, people remember.

  If there’s some fifty-year-old rumor about incest between first cousins, people remember that too, even if it was never true.

  My brother and I were born in better circumstances than most of our family, thanks to our father, Elijah Gentry. Years would pass before I would discover that there was some truth behind the gossip that we were not his sons. My mother had blurted out the whole sordid story one drunken night. It just so happened that I was the only one there at the time to hear it.

  Through all her gasping tears and foul curses, she told me that Stone and I were the sons of Elijah’s cousins; two dangerous, troubled brothers. They’d lived in The Dirt, which is what town kids called the sporadic, often ramshackle dwellings scattered beyond outer Emblem. Stone was the son of Chrome Gentry, a ladies man and consummate con artist, while I was the son of Benton, the most brutal son of a bitch ever to walk the desert. By now they were both dead so at least there were no Daddy Dearest reunions to worry about.

  That didn’t change anything though. Nothing could change history; nothing could change who you were.

  Stone had been told the truth after his release from prison almost two years ago. His older half brother, Declan, or Deck, as he was always known, was the unofficial Gentry patriarch now. Honestly, if I had to pick a man I’d like to live up to, it would be Deck Gentry.

  As for me, I had some half brothers of my own but they were still in the dark about who I really was. Stone had tried to argue with me but I wanted it that way. Stone was faithful. I knew he wouldn’t say a word.

  Cord, Creed and Chase were triplets who had suffered through a rough childhood and eventually worked their way up to the happy lives of family men. They were good guys, all three of them. If they’d known I was their brother they would have made it their collective mission to turn me into a good guy too. I couldn’t let them gamble their necks and waste their time like that.

  “Hey!” called Cordero Gentry with a genuine smile as I stepped into the festive backyard. He greeted me with a fist bump and I felt myself smiling back as I responded in kind. Cord was a tattoo artist and even his knuckles were decorated with ink.

  “You’re early,” he said.

  I checked my watch and noticed that yes, I was nearly half an hour early. I couldn’t blame Cord for his surprise. I didn’t have a habit of showing up early for family gatherings. But since Stone got out of prison I’d at least been making an effort to put in an appearance.

  “Thought maybe you could use some help setting up,” I said even though the idea had just occurred to me.

  Cord glanced around his backyard, which had been festooned with a cornucopia of pink and black decorations. Originally Stone and Evie hadn’t been planning on having an engagement party. The rest of the family had other ideas.

  “Well, Saylor and the girls had it all pretty well taken care of before I even woke up this morning,” he admitted.

  A burst of childish laughter came from inside the house and a second later Cord’s three daughters came running outside. Yipping and jumping all over their heels was a chubby black and tan puppy.

  The youngest girl, Cadence, collided with her father’s legs and smiled up at him.

  “Can we fill the kiddie pool for Angus The Dog?” she asked in a sweetly wheedling voice.

  The dog’s tail whipped back and forth and his long pink tongue hung halfway out of his mouth. He jumped back with a squealing growl when he noticed me but then started wagging his tail again when I bent down and offered my palm.

  Cord picked the little girl up. “What did your mom say?”

  “She said to ask you,” piped up one of the twins. Cami had long brown hair and clear green eyes, a mini-me of her mother, Saylor. She put her hands on her hips and stared her father down like she was daring him to say no.

  “I don’t know, girls,” Cord said, looking around the impeccably decorated yard. “That’ll make quite a mess and I’ve got to help your mother get the food out here for the party.”

  “Please, Daddy,” begged the blonde twin, Cassie. She was usually quieter, more gentle than her forthright sister. Cord took one look at her dimpled smile and I could see the heart of a devoted father melting right then and there. Cord would give his girls the entire goddamn galaxy if he could.

  “I could help them,” I offered. “We’ll stay over there in the corner underneath the mesquite tree.” I winked at the girls to show them I was on their side. “I promise to do everything in my power to keep the mess to a minimum.”

  “Yes!” shouted Cami. “See? You don’t need to worry about messes. Conway will take care of everything.”

  The girl grabbed my hand and started dragging me over to the side of the house where a blue plastic pool was propped up against the fence.

  “All right!” shouted Cord. “But you need to make sure the dog gets dried off and don’t let him in the house with wet paws or your mother will freak.”

  “Adults can be so dramatic,” Cami confided as she fell into step beside me while I carried the pool to a corner.

  “Sometimes,” I agreed, choosing not to point out to her that I was actually an adult myself.

  Even though I wasn’t the most sentimental bastard I had to admit that there was nothing cuter than kids playing with a puppy. As I rinsed off the inside of the pool with the garden hose and started filling it with water the kids rallied around, splashing and squealing with excitement. It kind of made me feel like a summer Santa Claus. The pool was only about eight inches tall so it didn’t take long to fill and the minute there was enough water in there Cami picked up the sq
uirming puppy and deposited him inside his backyard bathtub.

  Angus The Dog stood there for a second with a look of canine bafflement. Then with a hop of glee he started bouncing around like a giant, wet, furry jellybean. The girls crouched around the sides of the pool and competed for the dog’s attention.

  “Having fun?” teased a female voice and an elbow poked playfully into my side.

  I found myself peering down at Evie Dupont, my future sister-in-law. She laughed at the wild scene and clapped her hands together before giving me a warm hug.

  “How are you, Con? I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “Been keeping myself busy,” I said, loosely wrapping an arm around her for a chaste, brotherly squeeze. “So let’s see the ring.”

  Evie looked down lovingly and then held out her delicate left hand. I didn’t know jack shit about rings but it looked appropriately sparkly. I offered my congratulations again, even though I’d already said them to her over the phone.

  Evie squinted up at me and I felt myself fidgeting under her appraisal so I looked away, scanning the yard.

  “Where’s our boy?” I asked.

  “Oh, Stone will be back here any second. Deck and Jenny were pulling up so he hung back to greet them but when I caught a glimpse of what was going on here I just couldn’t wait to get a better look.”

  The girls simultaneously noticed Evie and tackled her with hugs and dripping arms. Evie took it in stride while I watched her with admiration. The thing about my brother’s girl is that she was sweetly pretty but not the kind of gorgeous that would stand out in a sea of faces. That always changed the second she opened her mouth and started talking. When that happened she was freaking luminous. Stone was a hell of a lucky guy. At least he knew it.