“Sorry it’s a mess,” Levi said as he opened the door for me. I climbed onto his cracked leather bench seat. A pair of work boots caked in mud took up my legroom, and a travel mug in the cup holder smelled of strong, black coffee.
“Do you want to bring the dogs?” he asked, circling the truck to unlatch the tailgate.
I leaned out the window and whistled. Maverick and Ranger cocked their heads, their ears standing upright, and bolted back from our next-door neighbor’s pastureland.
I almost propped my feet on the dash before I remembered that Levi and I weren’t that comfortable with each other. We’d always belonged to the same big friend group. We’d both run track and cross-country. I’d tutored his younger sister, Emmy, for a history exam. Mr. Langford would have been my senior English teacher if he hadn’t passed away.
But over the years, I’d noticed Levi avoiding me. He would fall quiet when I joined a conversation and wander away soon after, letting just enough time pass to prevent seeming rude.
Our mutual friends remained oblivious to this dynamic, especially the twins. They’d grown up in church with Levi, attending all the same summer camps and Bible studies. They wouldn’t believe that I could live a couple miles away from Levi, know everyone he knew, and never once hold a one-on-one conversation with him. It was statistically impossible.
And yet the kiss had been our first-ever private encounter. Even then, only a garden trellis had separated us from the other party guests.
I could think of just one explanation for Levi acting so slippery, however unreasonable it seemed: the history between our families.
Levi was Lillian Pickard’s great-great grandson. Lillian was one of the four San Solano girls who had been tried for the 1921 murders of twelve men in the sanctuary of Calvary Baptist. In the late sixties, she had published a tell-all book detailing her friendship with Malachi Rivers, rambling in awe about Malachi’s supernatural powers. Instead of dismissing Lillian’s account entirely, the public deemed her silly and gullible—and therefore innocent.
But then the copycat massacre occurred three years after the publication of Lillian’s book. The same people who had laughed her off began to blame her for sparking the secret fanaticism that resulted in a dozen more murders. Despite her narrative’s unreliability, the book grew popular thanks to the assumption that it inspired dark deeds.
Personally, I was more interested in the historical facts that could be gleaned from the heaps of nonsense—the details about Malachi’s past that couldn’t be found in public records. In my eyes, the book gave meat and marrow to the hollow bones of a mysterious legend.
It was a riveting read. Even my late grandmother—Malachi’s granddaughter—had owned a first edition of Lillian’s book, bound in a faded dust jacket. I’d read it cover-to-cover more times than I could count, but Grandma Kerry had never spoken much about the massacres.
And she had never associated with the descendants of Lillian Pickard.
But that resentment had ended with Grandma Kerry and went unreciprocated. My parents were friendly with everybody. Maggie Arthur, Grandma Kerry’s contemporary and another descendant of Lillian Pickard, was a family friend. She was the one who had encouraged me to volunteer for the Treasures of Texas Heritage Festival. Her granddaughter, Kate, had provided me with three full summers of well-paid work babysitting her daughter.
In other words, Levi had no reason to care about old interfamily drama.
But why else would he have avoided me all this time?
After slamming the tailgate shut, Levi hunkered in the driver’s seat and turned the air vents toward me. A solicitous Southern gentleman.
“I bet your mom and sister are happy to have you back for the summer.” I caught a glimpse of my untamed hair in the side mirror and frowned.
“They are,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Happy to put me to work, too. Apparently ten months is plenty of time for an old house to fall apart.”
As we crept down the road, Levi rested his elbow on the window frame, frowning into the distance. It had to be difficult coming home after what happened. Maybe up in Dallas, he’d found a way to ignore his grief, stuff it in a closet with his San Solano Wolves track tees, become a new person who could pretend not to feel pain.
I remembered the strained expression he’d worn at the going-away party, just shy of a month after his dad’s passing. I’d thought his mom cruel for making him suffer through the whole affair, the lemonade sips and the small talk. She seemed to have already cried herself dry, but Levi looked, in the politest way possible, like he would rather be anywhere else.
I couldn’t stand to watch him like that, in the throes of grief, enduring countless pats on the back and stale questions about his future. So I braved the August heat, carrying my plate of strawberry cobbler out to the garden. I took refuge behind a trellis thick with trumpet vines. And then Levi appeared. When he noticed me there, sweating like a sinner in church, I thought he’d either paste on a stiff smile or continue his quest for solitude.
But he did neither. Instead, he gave me a thoughtful look.
“Sorry,” I said abruptly, like I’d intruded on him changing in his bedroom. “You’re safe here. No small talk needed. I’ll go back and say I never saw you. Better yet, that I’ve never heard of you.”
That earned a laugh. “No, you don’t have to go. Let’s hide here for a minute.”
It surprised me that he would cast his lot with mine. He stared down at his big hands with their freckled knuckles. “It feels like my mom is punishing me for going to college. She’s not going to let me leave without an embarrassing parade.”
“She just wants to show you off,” I said, not quite sure why I was defending her. “SMU is a good school.”
“She wanted me to defer until next semester. I get it. There’s so much to take care of here…sorting through Dad’s things.…” His hazel eyes met mine, their pulsating pupils ringed with fern green and lustrous amber. “But I’m afraid if I don’t leave now, I’ll never go. I’ll convince myself to stay.”
I chewed on my bottom lip. What did this grieving boy need right now? No more idle chitchat or claps on the shoulder.
“I think the hardest part is the regret,” I heard myself say. “My grandma always wanted to share her sage advice with me, and sometimes I just brushed her off. But when she could barely hold a lucid conversation, I missed her ‘teachable moments.’” I laughed softly, fending off the ache of tears. “Is there anything you regret?”
His lips parted in surprise, and then a ghost of a smile tugged at their corners. “No one’s asked me that,” he said, turning toward me and tangling the fingers of one hand high in the trellis. The stance made one lean line of his torso.
“Sorry,” I repeated, shaking my head like a fly had flown into my ear. “I shouldn’t have—”
“No, I’m glad you asked,” he said. “I don’t regret anything. The only thing I’d regret is missing out on opportunities he’d want me to take.”
I smiled a half smile. “Then you’re doing the right thing.”
Something intense passed between us then. Our eyes locked. The taut silence felt as charged as an electric field. I realized with equal astonishment and certainty that he wanted to kiss me, and I stepped closer with no fear of embarrassment, no fear that I’d misinterpreted. My chin tilted upward. He leaned down slowly, reading in my eyes the answer to his unspoken question.