“Just finished up.” He walked into the trailer, pulled his big bag out from under the bunk, and laid it unzipped on top. “Listen, my um…my brother’s here. Waitin’ for me out in the truck. He says we need to hightail it home.”
“Why’s that?” Garrett asked, his voice suddenly serious.
“Hasn’t said yet. Thought I’d best check in with you while packin’ up to head back.” He gathered his bathroom gear and dumped it in. Most of his stuff was still in the truck. He had some kind of mental block about unpacking, this trip.
“You’re comin’ home tonight? That’ll thrill everybody. ’Specially Lily.”
“Yeah, but keep that to yourself.” He looked around the room, gathered up some clothes, a notebook, and pencil and threw those in. That was everything but the guitar.
“Ah. I gotcha,” Garrett said. “It’ll make for a great surprise. What’re you, about two hours away?”
“Closer to three,” he said. “Everything’s all right, then?”
“Everything’s fine. We’re s’posed to arrive in two hours for the meal, but we’ll still be there in three. Drive safe. Your brother comin’ with you?”
“Looks like.”
“Good. Use the time to get to know him.”
“I will. Keep an eye on things, okay?”
“She’s surrounded by family, Bubba. She’s safe. I’ll head over early, soon’s we hang up, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“It would,” Ethan said. And for some reason his old man calling him Bubba hadn’t even chafed that time.
He pocketed the phone, put his guitar into its hard-shell case, and headed back out with the duffle over one shoulder and the guitar case in his hand. He slung the bags into the back of the truck and got behind the wheel.
For a while, he had to focus on the bumper-to-bumper crush of vehicles trying to get out of the fairgrounds all at once, but eventually they pulled out of the crush and onto the highway.
That was when he finally said, “I don’t know what question to ask you first. Why have I never known about you?”
“I didn’t know about you either, till a coupla years ago. Our father didn’t want us to know about each other.”
Ethan kept taking short looks at him as he spoke. “Why not?”
Jeremiah shrugged. “He was training me to help him run the biz, he said. But he was really getting me just entangled enough to take the fall for somebody’s fuckup. Somebody more important. I was sure he’d get me out. But he didn’t. After a year, I got my own lawyer, had him set up a meeting with the prosecutor. Told ‘em everything I knew and they turned me loose early.”
Ethan nodded slowly. He listened with care. His brother’s voice was deep, with a rasp at the lower registers. He seemed the epitome of calm.
“And then you started hanging out at my family’s favorite little cantina.”
“I was still working for Dad, you know. He was running his organization from behind bars. He didn’t know I’d talked—wouldn’t have known until I testified, but he died before it got that far. Meantime I had to play along. If he’d found out—I’d be as dead as our mothers.
Ethan winced when he said that.
“He sent me to Manny’s Cantina to look things over, he said. I knew by then I had a brother. I knew his last name was Brand and he lived in Quinn, Texas, and how close that was to Mad Bull’s Bend. And while I was there, I saw one of your cousins, heard her talkin’ about you.”
“Which cousin?”
“The drop-dead gorgeous one,” he said.
Ethan crooked a brow. “They’re all gorgeous.”
“Willow.” Jeremiah looked out his window at the passing scenery. “She was sayin’ something about Bubba being as big as his dad even though he was adopted, and I knew it was you. Took another six months of my hangin’ around that cantina to learn that Bubba Brand was Ethan Brand, the country singer.” He shook his head a little self-deprecatingly. “I should’ve known first time I saw you, though. You have our father’s eyes.”
Ethan managed not to grimace.
“When Dad died, the lawyer told me he’d left you everything and you were plannin’ to refuse it all, so I’d be next in line to inherit it. I can’t afford to turn it down.” He shook his head. “Not the business, though. That’s done. I’m cashin’ out. Let other crooks fight over his territory.”
