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He’d once been intimidated by Elena, but he’d gotten to know her now, and knew that among other things she had a surprisingly wicked sense of humor. Something he never would have guessed at, going by her mother, the stern, imposing Mrs. Valencia, whose reputation as the toughest teacher at Creekbend still stood several years after she’d retired to help Elena care for her son Marcos. Marcos, who was so like his stepfather Sean and he himself that they called themselves Nerds Anonymous, a joking nickname Marcos had coined.
Sean had done wonders for the boy, and vice versa. And it left Cody sometimes feeling a bit…left behind. The odd one out again, as he’d felt back in school. Except, he didn’t want what Sean had. Oh, the woman to be crazy about and who was crazy about you, sure, that’d be nice. Maybe. Or maybe he’d had enough of that, with all his brothers crashing like felled oak trees.
Yeah, he should probably avoid that. Especially after he’d been practically smitten with the gorgeous blonde who had arrived back in January to do a feature story on Ry for an art magazine, and she’d turned out to be the worst kind of…witch. Obviously, his judgment left something to be desired. So, it was just as well there was no one in the picture, or even on the horizon. Now if Mom would just back off…
You’re next, bro.
Never happen.
I know. That’s why I’m safe.
The joking exchange he and Ry had had—before Kaitlyn had dropped into his life—had seemed probable at the time. It would take a special woman to accept Ry’s life and lifestyle. He’d never expected it to happen soon, let alone so fast. But it had, and Ry was so obviously happy and Kaitlyn so nice, he couldn’t begrudge him.
Even if that left him as the last single Rafferty.
He opened the drawer to his right and dropped the check into it. It landed atop a large, printed photograph. He resisted the urge at first, but finally pulled it out. He stared at it, thinking of all the times he’d thought about framing it and hanging it up in here. But he always turned coward and put it away in the drawer again. He didn’t think he could take seeing this image of his tall, strong, impossibly brave father holding the eight-year-old he’d been every day. In the picture he was grinning up at the man in uniform with pure delight; Dad was home, and all had been right with his world. And Dad was grinning back at him, the love practically pouring out of his green eyes. Eyes he’d passed down to that boy in his arms.
With a deep sigh he moved to slide the photograph back in the drawer. But he spotted the other picture that had lain beneath it and stopped. This one was smaller, and newer, printed off by a friend’s new pocket printer bought just for the purpose of printing photos from his phone. It had made the guy a hot property at that convention in Dallas five years ago; for all that it was a tech con and digital was everything, there was still something about a print copy you could hold in your hands or give to the friends the shots were taken of.
He lifted the second picture out of the drawer and looked, not at himself—he didn’t need any reminders of how dorky that particular spiky haircut had been—but at the girl beside him. The girl he’d spent four days—and nights—almost nonstop with. The girl he’d bonded with unlike anyone else he’d met. So petite she seemed almost tiny, Gwen had had a brain the size of Texas. She had been quick, clever, witty, and a genius with just about any kind of tech there on the convention floor.
She’d also been dying.
He dropped the smaller photo back in the drawer. Put the bigger one on top of it. Pulled the check Roth had written back out. And slammed the drawer shut with a bang.
I really am going to start calling that the death drawer.
He gave a sharp shake of his head and got up abruptly, sending the chair rolling halfway across the room. He ignored it. He reached out and grabbed a pushpin from the corkboard where he pinned temporary reminders and stuck the check up there. That he wouldn’t mind looking at every day. Remembering her face as she’d grimly written the thing out. He could use the laughs.
Then he headed over to the kitchen alcove. His was a bit better equipped than Ry’s in the barn—although he had a feeling that might change now that Ry wasn’t alone over there—but not much bigger. He put on a pot of coffee that he knew wouldn’t taste as good as Mom’s in the main house. They all agreed on that, although none of them could figure out why. But it would be caffeine-laced, and that was all that mattered at this point.
Then he turned and walked into his bedroom. Which was, he noted, a mess. It was a big enough room to withstand a bit of clutter, but this was insane. Tech diagrams here, his big tablet there, e-reader on the nightstand, next to a couple of books he hadn’t been able to get in that form—that all would have been fine. But when you added clothes and shoes tossed everywhere, forgotten as soon as he shucked them off, wrappers from his caramel habit, and the overflowing wastebasket, it was a bit of a disaster even to his eyes.
His mouth twisted wryly. Sometimes he was so focused on some problem in his head he really did look past what was right in front of him.
With a sigh he started picking up the clothes at least. He was down to his last pair of jeans and a couple of T-shirts, so he was going to be forced to do laundry soon. Remembering his earlier thoughts about him being next on her target list, he made a mental note to be sure and do it on a day when Mom had a committee meeting for the Bluebonnet Festival.
Assuming the darn flowers ever showed up.
He grimaced. He was just worried about getting that video Mom wanted as soon as possible. He knew the signature Texas flowers would bloom, they always did, and for a few weeks every bit of open, unpaved ground would be covered with them. It was like a rite of passage every year.
The image from that photo in the drawer shot through his mind again, along with a memory of that first spring without Dad. The emerging flowers had been one of the biggest steps on his path of grief, when he’d realized that Dad, who had loved them and painted them so beautifully, would never, ever see them again.
Mom had found him out in the south pasture, where a big swath of the flowers always erupted. He’d been there a while, tearing the bluebonnets out of the ground as fast as he could move. She’d understood immediately. As she always seemed to. She’d pulled him into her arms, and he’d gone from angry to broken so fast it had made him almost dizzy.
“It’s all right, Cody. I understand. Sometimes I want to rip the world apart because it took him from us.”
“’s silly,” he’d mumbled, gulping the words out between sobs. “Just flowers.”
“And they’re back again and he never will be. It’s not fair.”
He remembered clinging to her, taking comfort not in the words stating the cruel reality, but in the realization that he wasn’t alone in this consuming, horrible feeling. And that Mom knew, as she always seemed to, what not to say. Not to give him any platitudes or phony reassurances that everything would be all right. No, she’d acknowledged and made clear she shared his pain and anger. And that had somehow lightened it, just enough that he could go on.
Until the next time. And the next.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and went back to picking up dirty clothes. And thinking maybe he wouldn’t wait until his mother was gone to do laundry, after all.
In fact, maybe he’d make sure she was there.
