Summertime meant long, hot days and all-day baseball games. Staying up way past our bedtime. Jumping off the rocks into the cool, bottle green water at the swimming hole. It was the three months of the year when I had my boys more or less to myself. And that was the way I liked it.
“Keep an eye on Jesse,” Kate told us. “We’re about to start a movie. It’ll be a miracle if we get past the opening credits before your father falls asleep.”
“If you picked an action movie, I’d stay awake,” Patrick grumbled.
Kate laughed and their voices got muffled as they headed into the family room to watch a movie.
I side-eyed Brody, thinking about what he’d said about the wild horses. “Sounds like a good dream,” I said. “The wild horses and the land.”
Brody cracked the sunflower seeds between his teeth and said nothing. Some days it was a chore, trying to navigate all these ‘boy hormones.’
“What’s yours?” Jude asked me. “You know mine. You know Brody’s. What’s your dream?”
My dream was that everything would stay exactly as it was. I didn’t want anything to change. I didn’t want us to change. But I couldn’t say that. It sounded stupid. Besides, that wasn’t a dream. It was a wish. And we were already changing. I saw it in the way Jude sometimes looked at Ashleigh. I saw it in Brody’s swagger whenever girls were watching him, and the way he’d wink at them as he passed by, causing them to blush and giggle.
“I don’t know. I guess I want to do something with nature. Like... a landscaper or something.”
“That’s cool,” Jude said, and for a change, he wasn’t even teasing me about anything.
“Why do you want to be a Marine so much?”
“I want to fight for our country. I want to do my part to protect our freedom.” When he talked like this, he sounded older than thirteen, like he had the future all figured out.
“I want to feel like I made a difference,” he said quietly.
“You just want to fight,” Brody said, throwing down his cards face up. I glanced at his hand. It was a full house. “Stop acting like you know anything about war or what it would be like to have a gun pointed at you. You know nothing about the real world because you live in this perfect little world and that’s all you’ve ever known.”
Having said his piece, Brody jumped off the porch and stalked away. I stared at his back, dumbfounded, and tried to figure out what had just happened and why Jude’s words had made him so angry.
Jude strode after him and grabbed his shoulder, turning him around to face him. I moved to the porch steps and sat on the top one so I could watch.
“What the hell was that about?”
Brody shook his head. “Just speaking my truth, like your dad said I should.”
“Your truth? Have you been to war?”
“There are all kinds of wars, Jude, and you don’t know shit about any of that.”
“Why don’t you tell me since you seem to be some kind of expert.”
They faced off, their shoulders squared, their eyes narrowed like they were about to rip each other’s heads off.
“Why are you coming down so hard on Jude?” I asked Brody. “It’s not his fault…”
Neither of them looked at me or even paid attention to my words so I didn’t bother finishing my sentence. They were angry about something I wasn’t privy to. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen them disagree. They fought a lot in private but at school, and in public, they were always on the same team and they always stood up for each other.
As Jude always said, they were family and family always came first. It was the McCallister motto.
“I thought you wanted to stay with us,” Jude said, his voice low and angry. I got the feeling that the thought of Brody not wanting to stay cut Jude to the core. He was hurt but trying not to let it show. That’s what boys did. They locked down their emotions. Patrick was always telling them to ‘tough it out.’ “I thought you liked living here.”
“Let me put it this way. I had two choices. Shitty. Or shittier.”
“What’s so shitty about living with us?”
“I’m the stray dog your family took in because my mom is too fucked up to stay clean and my dad…” Brody hung his head and left his sentence hanging.
“What about your dad? I thought you didn’t know him.”
“I know enough.”
Brody turned to go. Jude grabbed his arm to stop him. “What do you know?”
“That’s the thing about speaking your truth. You get to hear everyone else’s truth and it ain’t always pretty.”
“Where’s your dad?” Jude asked again, not about to let this go.
“Prison. Locked up in a cell. For life. Happy now?”
Oh, my God. My eyes widened. His dad was in prison? For life? That had to mean he’d done something really, really bad. Like kill someone.
Stunned by Brody’s answer, Jude released his cousin’s arm. For once, Jude had nothing to say. He rubbed the back of his neck, a look on his face like he was sorry but didn’t know how to say it or what to do to make this better.
“Yeah,” Brody said, shoving Jude’s chest. “So think about that when you’re off fighting a war for our freedom.”
With those final words, Brody turned and strode away.
“Brody.” I went to chase after him but Jude grabbed my arm and held me back.
“Let him go. He just needs some time on his own. He’ll be back.” Jude sounded so confident that I wanted to believe him.
I watched Brody cross the field and then he leaped the fence and I lost sight of him. Maybe Jude was right. Maybe Brody needed space. But what if he needed to know we were there for him?
About an hour after he left, Kate came to the screen door and asked us to get Jesse to come inside for his bedtime. We found him next to the barn, playing with a tiny green lizard he’d found.
“Set it free,” Jude said. “Put it in the grass.”
“But the lawnmower might get him.”
So we took the small lizard down to the fence and set it free in the tall grass on the other side of it.
“Have a good life, Bug Eyes,” Jesse said, waving goodbye before he turned and ran up to the house.
Jude and I looked at each other, both of us thinking the same thing. Without saying a word, we climbed the fence and went in search of Brody.
It was dusk, the fireflies were out now, cicadas chirping loudly as we followed the creek. I looked out over the rolling hills and trees on the other side. Brody could be anywhere. “Maybe he’s on the ranch somewhere.”
I stumbled on the uneven ground, and Jude caught me by the elbow before my knees hit the ground then took my hand in his bigger one and guided me along the creek bank. I looked down at our joined hands. It was the first time we’d held hands like this. It felt a lot nicer than I would have thought.
Being with Jude always made me feel safe. Like he could protect me from anything. He made me feel braver and I liked that.
“I know where he is,” Jude said.
We walked for another ten minutes before I caught a glimpse of Brody through the trees, sitting on top of a rust-red cargo container.