“No problem,” I told him. “Just let me know when.”
“What the fuck are you wearing?” my asswipe older brother Nate demanded, stalking up to us.
I covered one of Isabella’s ears with my hand and pressed her other ear against my chest. “Dang, Nate, even I know not to curse around a three-year-old.”
“Fuck!” Isabella shouted, squirming free. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Nate winced and offered Manny a muttered, “Sorry.”
Pressing his lips together to stifle a laugh, Manny relieved me of his daughter and left me to face Nate alone.
The two of them worked together at the creamery, but Manny was a thousand percent less of a prick than Nate, who I tried to avoid as much as possible. Which mostly wasn’t too hard, because he felt the exact same way about me.
I looked down at my Adios Bitchachos T-shirt proudly and tugged on the hem. “Like it? I got it in South Padre a few years back, but you can probably find yourself one on the internet.”
“Did you not read the part of the email that said ‘church dress’?” Nate was wearing a suit, but that wasn’t a surprise because he always wore suits nowadays—ever since he’d been promoted to executive vice president of sales.
“You don’t think I should wear this to church?” I asked him, flashing a shit-eating grin.
Nate finally noticed my shiner and his face got even redder. “Jesus Christ, Wyatt!” The muscles in his jaw tightened as he ground his teeth together. At this point the man’s molars had to be smooth as glass from all the angry tooth grinding he did. “You just had to go and mess up your face right before we’re supposed to do this photo.”
“Yes, Nate, that’s what I did. I intentionally threw my face in front of someone’s fist with no other thought than to ruin your precious little picture. Because you and your priorities are always at the forefront of my mind.”
While Nate continued to bitch at me, my gaze flicked over his shoulder and I saw Dad eyeing us, his attention caught by the sound of Nate’s raised voice. As soon as Dad noticed me looking at him, he turned his back.
Typical.
“What happened to your face?” My sister Josie appeared beside Nate and grabbed my chin. I winced as she jerked my head to the side, examining my injuries. “My god, Wyatt.”
“And just look at what he’s wearing,” Nate growled. “Can we do the picture without him?”
That would have been fine and dandy by me, but Josie shook her head. “Of course not.”
Nate and Josie were the progeny of my dad’s marriage to Trish Buchanan, his first wife. They both looked just like their mother: same hazel eyes, same shade of straight brown hair, same long noses and angular jaws. They were like two peas in a pod, except Nate was the arrogant, hostile pea, and Josie was the calm, decisive pea who got shit done while the other pea was having a rage stroke.
“I’ll take care of this,” she said as she appraised me coolly. Nate started to open his mouth—to bitch some more probably—but Josie quelled him with a look. Despite being two years his junior, she was the only person besides Dad and Manny who Nate ever seemed to defer to.
Taking me by the arm, she signaled to some well-dressed, uptight-looking dude as she dragged me off to an empty café table in a quiet corner of the shop. When the guy reached us, she ordered him to trade shirts with me.
“Seriously?” I said while the other dude, who I assumed worked for her, started undoing his buttons.
Josie nodded. “Seriously.” Apparently being executive vice president of marketing meant she was hot shit enough to make her employees surrender the shirts off their backs on command.
I pulled my T-shirt over my head and regretfully handed it over to the poor guy. After I’d shrugged into my new dress shirt, Josie helped me with the buttons and straightened my collar before stepping back to appraise the effect.
“Tuck it in,” she told me before addressing the dude now stuck wearing my Adios Bitchachos shirt. “Can you go start getting everyone into position? Tell the photographer we’ll be there in a minute.” When he’d scuttled off to do her bidding, she turned back to me and pointed to a chair. “Sit.”
I did as I was told, keeping my mouth shut as she took a makeup bag out of her purse and began applying a creamy, beige concoction around my bruised eye.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, frowning in concentration.
“Not too bad.”
“You always have to be a pain in the ass, don’t you?” She didn’t actually sound all that angry. Josie never lost her temper, but when she was pissed at you she could get real cold and scary.
I tried to charm a smile out of her. “Yeah, but you love me anyway.”
All I got was a twitch at the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t try to deny it.
Josie was okay, although we’d never been especially close. All my dad’s kids with Trish had lived with their mother when I was growing up, and as a teenager Josie hadn’t had much interest in me. She’d gone off to college when I was twelve and mostly stayed away after that, working in Dallas for a while and then New York, before moving back to Crowder a few years ago to take over marketing and advertising for the creamery.
“That’ll have to do.” She tilted my head to examine her handiwork. “The rest can be fixed with retouching.” Her gaze shifted to my hair with a frown, and she reached into her purse for some styling wax. I let her comb my shaggy hair back with her fingers, knowing it’d just fall right back into my face again. “Forget it,” she said, finally giving up on me. “Let’s just get this done.”
I followed her over to the others, who were standing in front of the soda fountain counter with the original antique King’s Creamery sign behind them. Dad was in the middle, of course, with his bushy gray beard and his balding hair pulled back in the hippie ponytail he’d stubbornly worn all his life. Other than me, he was the least formally dressed, in a sport jacket and T-shirt bearing the company logo over jeans and his signature cowboy boots.
Josie pointed me to an empty spot in the back row next to Tanner before taking her place beside Dad. We all tried to smile and pretend we were happy to be there while the photographer snapped a million photos.
Until finally Isabella lost her shit and started wailing in protest at being forced to stay still for so long. We were all right there with her by that point, and there was a collective sigh of relief when we were finally released.
“Thanks, everyone!” Josie shouted above the din of voices as everyone started milling around. “I know it was a pain, but it’ll look great in our new public relations campaign.”
“Time for brunch!” trilled my stepmother, Heather. “We’ll see y’all at the house in fifteen. Don’t be late.”
After I got my shirt back from Josie’s flunky, I rode over to the family homestead with Tanner, who seemed like he was in an even worse mood than when he’d picked me up earlier.
“Everything okay?” I asked, eyeballing him. “You’re gripping that steering wheel like you want to rip it out of the dash.”
He loosened his fingers, shaking his hands out one at a time. “I got an earful from Nate is all.”