You have no idea.“I admit it crossed my mind that I might run into you while I’m in the area, but I wasn’t expecting it last night. I guess you weren’t either.”
“You could say that.” He rested the mug on the arm of the chair. “What are you even doing here? I had the impression you never intended to grace us with your presence again.”
The words were confrontational, but Carter’s demeanor had never lent itself to snippiness. The handful of times they’d fought as children, it’d been Jeff’s temper that got the better of him or else some thoughtless oversight on Carter’s part. He was too good-natured to be intentionally cruel. In any case, what he said was true and no less than Jeff deserved.
“It’s kind of a long story.”
Carter shrugged with his whole body, same as he always had, loose and languid. “I’m off today.”
“Yeah, I guessed.” Jeff gestured. “Wardrobe change.”
“So what gives?” Carter pressed, as if they were still as close as they’d been as kids. “You’re kind of a big deal now. Don’t you have a tour to prepare for or something?”
Jeff squirmed. “Is this really what you want to talk about?”
“Hey, I’m just finding my feet here.” Carter held up his hands in surrender. “We could talk about how you left and we didn’t speak to each other for fifteen years instead, but that didn’t seem much better.”
Jeez.Jeff ran a hand through his hair. “I remember people in small towns being better at small talk.”
That earned him a smile. “I remember you being a scrawny kid with a buzz cut. Things change.”
“Not everything,” Jeff muttered. He turned his mug in his hands, realized he was, in fact, fidgeting, and set it down next to his foot. “So, if we’re not going to talk about when I left and we’re not going to talk about why I’m back, do we have anything to talk about?”
Carter watched him quietly for a moment and then asked, “Do you want to find out?”
Jeff’s heart battered against his ribs.
Before he could answer, Carter went on. “I mean… I understand things with Howl are kind of, uh, intense at the moment. I wasn’t going to make you talk about it, and I know you’re probably wary of people selling stories about you to the media, because people are gross like that. But if I wanted to do that, I still have that tape—”
OhGod.
“—of your eighth-grade talent show—”
The one where Jeff got a ridiculous boner onstage. Thank God for guitars—
“—and it’s never seen the light of day, so.”
Jeff dropped his head into his hands. “How much do I have to pay you to destroy that?”
“Are you kidding? Mom would kill me, she and Dad were so proud of you.”
“I remember,” Jeff said wistfully. His own father had missed it, of course—ostensibly why Mr. Rhodes had taped the performance in the first place, so his dad could watch it later, when he got home from the hospital. “What was it your dad said—something about a fishhook?”
Carter tilted his head back against the chair as though he were soaking up the midmorning sun. “He said you sang like you had a fishhook in your heart and someone was pulling it out through your lungs.”
Jeff had admittedly been kind of an emo teenager. “He should’ve been a poet.”
“He always said it cost too much to feed us, so he had to be a mechanic instead.” He opened his eyes and turned to look into the trees. “He never made us feel bad about it, though. It was just a joke.”
Was it? Carter had two brothers, and they were all six feet tall by the time they were halfway through high school. Maybe now that they were grown he had time to write more, since they could feed themselves. “How is he these days?” Jeff probably owed him a visit.
The expression on Carter’s face made his blood run cold.
Oh God.
Carter swallowed visibly. “I’m sorry, I thought… I thought, you know, maybe you were in town for the memorial.”
Jeff wanted to throw up. Carter’s face was drawn and his eyes—they weren’t quite glistening but there was an extra shine there.
