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“He’s furious at me. The truth is... He’s conveniently furious at me. Carter isn’t as involved in Benny’s life as he should be. His mom basically forces him to keep the terms of the custody agreement. If she didn’t, Benny would spend every weekend with me. He’s just mad at me, and wants to be mad at me. And I know that Carter thinks I’m making things unstable for Benny. But I haven’t seen him this happy... Ever.”
“I’m sorry,” Brody said. “That he’s like that.”
“Yeah. Me too. He wasn’t. But things change. People change. I... I’m trying to change. I’m trying to stop being a victim of my circumstances. I’m kind of an expert at that. Got divorced, didn’t want to, moved into an apartment because it was what I could afford in proximity to Carter, and I wanted Benny to be involved in his life... Well, now I’m making a decision for myself, and I actually think it’s a good one for him. There’s a cave. He’s about to explore a cave. And it scares me. But it’s an adventure.”
“Yeah,” Brody said. “Every little boy needs adventure.”
“I bet you didn’t have any shortage of adventure growing up here.”
“Yeah well... He didn’t actually get a chance to ask my brother about his scars.”
“No. I think he got distracted by the army men.”
He felt right then like they were both back in the hallway. In that moment of obvious tension. Her breathing increased fractionally, her pulse pounding at the base of her throat. He wanted to press his lips to it. He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her.
And then he remembered, they were walking toward a cave, and there was a child present.
“Well. If Gus had told the story, you would know a little bit more about our childhood.”
“He was a boy when that happened?”
“Yeah. He got locked in a shed when it was on fire. Our dad set the fire. And locked him in there.”
She stopped walking so abruptly that a spray of gravel shot up around her feet and hit him in the back of the leg. “What?”
“We had a lot of adventures here. They weren’t all good ones.”
“Brody, did he...? He was abusive?”
“Yeah,” Brody said, tension building in his chest. He shouldn’t have brought this up.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No,” he said.
And he could feel the questions brewing inside her, but she didn’t ask any of them.
He was glad of that, because he didn’t have answers for them. Whatever they were, he didn’t have answers.
He hated his dad.
And he didn’t.
How the hell did you explain that? He couldn’t. Not to himself. Not to his brothers. So he just didn’t think on it much at all.
And he sure as hell didn’t talk about it.
They rounded the corner and came up to the mouth of the cave, dark and yawning, and a little too like a portrait of Brody’s soul for his liking.
“Whoa,” Benny said. “Do you think there’s a bear in there?”
“Probably not,” Brody said. “Come on.” He reached into his pocket and took out his keychain flashlight, and shined it around the mouth of the cave.
There was a small tunnel that went back pretty deep, but the main cavern was big, and fairly shallow, giving a sense that you were in a cave, without actually putting you in any danger of being lost or anything like that.
“So cool,” Benny said, delighting in his words echoing off the cavern around them. “Did you ever find any gold in here?”
Places like this had been an escape from their father, and escape from the tension in the house. That had been gold, all on its own.
