Her fingers traced the lines of the cross. “Please, God, watch over my boy. Keep him safe.”
Ellie shivered in the school parking lot, jumping from one foot to the other, her bare legs blotchy and red. “C’mon, Brick,” she whispered into the wool scarf around her neck. “Where are you?”
“Ellie!”
Ellie turned and saw Becca Gilley waving a bright purple mitten. “Bell’s about to ring. You’re going to be late.” Ellie clutched her books closer to her chest and looked at the road. No truck. No Brick.
“I’m coming,” she yelled over her shoulder. “Just one more minute.” The sound of busybody Becca’s saddle shoes slapping against the pavement grew louder. “Whew,” Becca said, leaning on Ellie’s shoulder. “I can’t breathe in this weather.” She tugged on Ellie’s sleeve. “You have got to stop waiting around for Brick. He’s supposed to stay away from you. You could get him in trouble.”
Ellie shrugged off Becca’s hand and thought, not for the first time, that she looked like a fifty-four-year-old teenager in her blue, cat-eye frames. “So now everybody knows my business? How did you find out?”
“Like you weren’t going to tell me anyway. Daddy said Brick’s father was carryin’ on about it last night at O’Doole’s. Said you had some nerve thinking you were better than Brick when your mother is—”
Ellie turned toward her. “My mother is what?”
Becca looked away. “Never mind. He’s a mean man, Ellie, that Bull McGinty. Daddy says he’s always tryin’ to pick a fight. Talks terrible about his own son, too. Says he should’ve drowned him when he was born. Can you imagine saying that about your own son?”
The snow was coming down harder now. “Becca, next time you’re thinking of saying something to make someone feel bad, maybe think again.”
“I’m sorry, El. I was just sharing information.”
“Nobody understands Brick like I do,” Ellie said. “I know who he really is.”
“Oh, El. Don’t do this. Brick’s not long for this town. Everyone knows he’s going to get a basketball scholarship and be the first basketball player from Jefferson High to go play at college.”
Ellie turned her back to Becca and looked out at the road. “So, he has plans. What makes you think I don’t have plans, too? That we don’t have plans together?”
Both of them turned to the sound of wheels crunching on packed snow. Ellie waved at Brick. “Oh, boy,” Becca said. “Now you’re going to be late for sure. I’ll see you inside.”
As soon as Ellie saw Brick’s truck, she went from worried to wounded. So what if Grandpa said Brick couldn’t pick her up anymore? Did that mean he could just wander in anytime he wanted? He should have been here a half hour ago. “If you were in a hurry to see me,” she said. “Which you obviously aren’t.” One look, she told herself. She’d let him get one good look at her, and then she’d turn and run off to class.
Brick waved at her through the windshield as she raised her eyebrows and jutted out her chin in silent reprimand. She turned and started stomping toward the school’s front entrance. She heard his truck door open and slam shut.
“Ellie!”
She kept walking, but slowed down at the sound of his running.
“Ellie, please.”
Please? That didn’t sound like Brick McGinty.
She turned around and saw blood crusted over his swollen left eye, and a bruise under it pooling in a deep shade of violet. “Brick, what happened to you?” She pulled off a glove and started to reach for his swollen eye. He dodged her hand and pulled her into a hug. “Nothing. It looks worse than it feels.”
“Who did this to you?”
“I told you. It’s nothing.”
Ellie looked up at his face. “He did this. Your father.” She licked her fingers and rubbed his cheek. “You’ve still got blood on your face.”
“Let’s get you inside, Pint. Your legs are so red, they look like they’re going to snap in two.”
Ellie stepped back to look at him. He was wearing his letterman’s jacket, but no gloves or hat, no scarf. The ridges in his red hair were sculpted with his usual dab of Brylcreem, and looked sharp as ice. “I don’t care if I freeze to death,” she said as she unwound her scarf and tossed it around his neck.
“I don’t need your pity.”
“Good,” she said, forcing a smile. “Because I’m not offering it. You’re my mighty Brick. Let’s go inside. We can talk later.” The second bell rang. Brick squeezed her hand and with his other hand grabbed the leather strap buckled around her books. “C’mon, we gotta get in there or both of us will be banned from tonight’s game.”
Across the street, Wayne Fetters’s breath clouded the windows as he sat in his pickup truck, waiting to see when his granddaughter would go inside. He saw her shade her eyes as she waited in the parking lot, talking to Becca Gilley. He saw her stomp her feet in the snow trying to keep her legs warm. He saw her drop her books and run into the arms of Bull McGinty’s boy.
Ellie rising on tiptoes to touch his face. Looping her arm through his. Kissing him, twice, before running with him into the building.
Wayne Fetters saw it all.
“Goddamn him,” he said, turning the key in the ignition and pulling away.
Ada wiped her hands on her apron as she walked into the living room and sat in the rocking chair facing her husband. The chair creaked as she lowered herself into it with an audible sigh. Wayne raised the evening newspaper a little higher in front of his face.
“You know I’m sitting here, Wayne,” she said. “And we both know there’s no way you can’t hear that child crying her heart out upstairs.” Wayne shifted in his chair and rustled the paper, saying nothing.
Ellie started pounding again on her bedroom door, her every wail punctuated with Sheba’s howls. “Let me come down! Please let me out! Grandma! Grandpa!”
Ada covered her face with her hands. “Oh my Lord. I can’t take this a minute longer. Wayne, you can’t keep her up there forever.”
Wayne flipped down a corner of the paper. “She was kissing him, Ada. I saw it with my own eyes this morning. Not even an hour after you told her she was not to see that boy again, she was holding his hand and kissing him. I saw her.”
He rattled his paper again and tried three times to snap it upright before throwing it to the floor. He reached for the radio perched next to them on a step stool Ada had made out of coffee cans and upholstery remnants. He turned it on and fidgeted with the dial.