Keeping Promise Rock (36 page)

“I want to keep my home, Jon. I want to live the life I’ve always lived with the people I care about. Whatever we have to do to make that happen, whoever we have to sue, whatever I have to sign, I’m there.”

“Good, Deacon. I’ll be there the day you get home with Crick. I’ve got some shit that needs your signature, okay? You get home, settle him down to a nap-nap, and call me. If you want to keep The Pulpit
,
we need to kick this into gear.”

Deacon shuddered and hung up. It was time to go visit Crick.

On the last day, as they approached Crick’s room, Crick was sitting up in bed wearing Army-issue sweats and a white T-shirt. There was another man in the room—an officer, by the looks of him—and he and Crick were talking companionably, if a little bit formally.

Crick caught sight of them and said, “Sir, um, excuse my sister and the baby—they’re trying to get in.”

The CO turned and stepped back, smiling at Benny to make her more comfortable. Her eyes were saucer-big, and Deacon had to laugh. Crick, Benny—neither of them were particularly comfortable with authority.

“Hey there. You must be Deacon. Crick says you’re taking him home?”

Deacon smiled and flushed and extended his hand in greeting. “I’ve got to get instructions,” he said apologetically. “But yeah, once we’ve signed everything and I get instructions and meds, we’re good to go.” He looked up at Crick and gave a nod. “I’ll be back in a bit. Drool over the baby; you’ve got a backlog to make up for.” Crick had improved nicely over the last week. His bandages were lighter now, and he could sit up and move and get to the bathroom by himself. (He’d been right though—his first bowel movement had been a public event, and not a pretty one. Benny had left the room in an embarrassed flounce, saying she had enough of that with Parry Angel, but she’d gotten an orderly to come help Deacon with the clean up. The orderly had been impressed that Deacon knew what he was doing, and after he left—with a big ol’ bag of laundry—Crick said sourly that Deacon would do anything to see his ass again. Deacon had said, “I reckon so” with so much amiability that it made Crick smile a little and blush.) At the moment, Benny could set the baby on his lap with no worries, and Crick got a good grip on her, bouncing her a little on his good leg.

Deacon strode away briskly, looking to scare up Crick’s doctor.

He was coming back about an hour later with what felt like half a ream of paper instructions, a bag of painkillers and antibiotics, and numbers written in sharpie of who to call in California for physical therapy. Crick still had shunts to be removed from his internal injuries and muscles that needed to be stretched and worked. Some of the skin on his arm and leg and his hip had been burned badly, and the bandages needed to be kept clean and dry, and all in all, just reading the instructions made Deacon feel queasy. It had been close, so damned close. Crick had made it through by the skin of his teeth—and a lot of lost muscle and damaged viscera as well. But what was left of him seemed to be sound, and Deacon could only be grateful that all of that and his crooked grin were coming home.

Crick’s CO met him down the hall. Deacon had asked at the pharmacy and learned that the guy was leftover from Crick’s boot camp days. Deacon thought it was damned decent of him to check in on an old recruit.

He nodded respectfully as they passed, and the man—thirty-ish and bland, with pale eyes—stopped him.

“The girl didn’t come?” he asked, and Deacon blinked.

“Sir?”

“Crick—he told me before he shipped out that… what was it?” The man stopped a little to remember, and Deacon managed to catch on to the fact that Crick had given a cover story. “Right—something about how he could have had everything he wanted and he thought he was getting kicked to the curb instead. I was just wondering if the girl was still waiting for him, since she didn’t make it to the hospital.” Deacon’s estimation for the Captain went up a few more notches, even as he searched for as much truth as he could spare. “That situation is still waiting for him, sir,” he said after a moment. “If I can keep the ranch, Crick will have anything he wants waiting for him there.” Captain Roberts nodded and frowned, and Deacon felt acutely uncomfortable as the man’s pale eyes searched his face.

“Sir?” he asked at last, eager to get back to Crick. Their flight left in a couple of hours, and Deacon didn’t want to have to hurry Crick’s fragile, healing body through the gates.

“Why didn’t he say anything?” the captain asked at last, faintly.

“Sir?” Deacon’s heart about stopped in his throat.

“He was there, in my office, and I asked him if he’d been recruited drunk. All he had to do was say he was… you were….” Captain Roberts blushed. “Just one sentence, and I would have written him up his….”

“His what?” Deacon asked, flushing with anger now and not embarrassment. “What would you have written up?”

“His dishonorable discharge.” The man had the grace to blush himself.

“Crick may have made a mess, sir, but he also made a promise.

There’s not a dishonorable bone in that boy’s body.” Keeping Promise Rock

Captain Roberts looked at him there, embarrassed and a little angry, but still looking him in the eye and standing up straight, and said, “I would imagine you’d know something about that.”

Deacon ducked his head and looked away. “I have my days, sir.”

“Well, I hope this is a good one. Take care of that boy—he impressed a lot of people while he was serving.” Deacon looked the man in the eye and shook his hand, saying, “He impressed me first.”

Coming Up Close

THE trip home sucked—what else could it do? The doctors had wanted to keep him an extra couple of days after all, but Crick had begged to go home, and Deacon had begged some more, and more convincingly, so his original release date held. To make the trip easier, Deacon had managed to score some first-class tickets from Atlanta to L.A., so Crick wasn’t all squashed up like a pretzel, but the plane from L.A. to Sacramento was a commuter flight and didn’t have first class seats. Crick was in agony by the time they got off that one, in spite of the pain pills Deacon made him swallow.

Deacon had been good about other stuff as well—getting a porter with the little electric cart to take Crick to the gate so he didn’t have to hobble, cane in hand and every nerve ending on fire, or keeping Crick hydrated and finding him good seats in the airport while they waited. On the cramped commuter flight, Deacon sat with the baby on his lap the whole time so Crick could have the extra seat to stretch. He didn’t say much, and often when he spoke, his cheeks colored and he looked away.

Crick knew that his shyness—the terrible introversion that Deacon had managed to hide so well through most of his life and had never once allowed to color his relationship with Crick—had kicked in.

It hurt almost as much as the shredded skin, violated muscles and perforated entrails.

Deacon was shy with
him.
With Crick. One of the handful of human beings he had ever talked to with an open heart. It had taken Crick nearly Keeping Promise Rock

ten years to figure out that Deacon was different with him and Jon and Amy and Parish than he was with the rest of the world.

It took him one plane flight to realize that if Crick had lost that place of honor for good, he’d lost everything.

But there wasn’t much he could do about it on the plane, and Deacon looked so tired anyway. His face was just as pretty and composed as it had always been, but the bags under the eyes and the deeper grooves in the sides of his mouth were a testament to the fact that he was not nearly the easy-going man that Crick had planned to seduce on a spring day. When they were at LAX and Deacon left them sitting to go find the guy with the electric cart, Crick asked his sister why Deacon looked like death warmed over.

“There’s something going on with the bank,” she told him, feeding the baby crackers one at a time. (Any more than that and they ended up on the floor.) “He won’t tell me, but he’s been spending an hour or two at night with Jon on the phone, trying to figure it out. And we lost some more clients this week—I think he’s been juggling finances too.” Crick looked at her, his entire body one big mass of aches, and tried to wrap his head around the kind of panic Deacon must be feeling.

“He can’t lose The Pulpit,”
he said after a moment. “It would kill him.”

Benny frowned at him, and he suddenly saw the mother and the adult who had sprung up in the last two years. “Deacon’s stronger than you think. What would kill him is thinking he’d let us down. You tell him the weight of your happiness doesn’t rest on The Pulpit, and he’ll survive if it goes.”

Crick frowned back, not in any mood for this argument. “How could he not know that?”

“I don’t know, genius—how could you not know that he wanted you when he’d just slept with you? If you could go off and join the Army after that, he can think you only love him for the goddamned ranch.” She stood up restlessly from the vinyl seat then, brushing her hands off on the pockets of the black hoodie she was wearing over a bright pink skirt. “This conversation is pissing me off. Me and Parry are gonna go to the bathroom—try not to join a cult or anything while we’re gone.” Crick had stayed put until they boarded the plane, but Benny’s words rang in his ear nonetheless.

For one thing, Deacon had told her what made Crick join the Army—and he really couldn’t believe Deacon had opened up that much to anybody else. Apparently, Benny had made the short-list, and while it made Crick happy to know Deacon had someone else in his camp, Crick got the definite impression that Benny would throw him over for Deacon any day of the week, and that sort of hurt. But really, what made him ponder that moment for the entire hour and a half they were over California was the cold, hard truth.

Deacon had forgiven him—he could see it in every line of the man’s body. There was no anger in him, no lingering resentment. The shyness was worse, much worse, but still, there wasn’t any anger, and that was something. Crick just hadn’t reckoned on the fact that Deacon wasn’t the only one who had a right to be pissed.

This fact was made acutely painful when they arrived back at The Pulpit
.

Jon was there at the airport to pick them up in his big-assed Mercedes, and as Crick leaned on his cane and Jon hopped out to get the bags, instead of the hug he was expecting, he got a restrained smile.

“Glad you made it back, Carrick.”

“Glad to be back,” Crick said awkwardly. He was wondering what he had done now.

When they got into the car, Jon made a couple of attempts to talk to Deacon about business, but Deacon put him off each time.

“We had a deal,” he said. “You have my time after Crick’s settled.

His head’s about ready to blow off his shoulders—let’s not strain it any more than we have to, okay?”

Crick looked at him gratefully from the backseat, and Deacon managed a wink and another blush before Jon spoke again.

“Fine—you go ahead and put Crick first now—he’ll appreciate it when you’re trying to support six people in a one-room apartment with a job skill that went out of fashion fifty years ago!”

“I can EMT too,” Deacon said with a smirk. “That should get us a two bedroom apartment the very least.”

“I’ve got my GED,” Benny chimed in proudly. “Hell—we might even get the one and a half bath and the good kind of peanut butter!”

“You’re going to college, Benny,” Deacon said, his good humor suddenly evaporated. “Jon and I have seen to it. Dammit, one person in Keeping Promise Rock

this family is getting the fuck out of dodge and going somewhere besides Iraq!”

“Amen to that,” Crick added in spite of the dim tunnel his vision had become. Leave it to Deacon to set Benny up when the rest of what he loved was apparently going under.

The bedroom looked pretty much exactly how Crick remembered it.

Of course, the little cedar box with all his letters in it was new, and so was the calendar with the kittens, but the rest of it….

“Damn, Deacon—I swear the comforter still has creases from the bag!”

Deacon was settling him back on the pillows after another couple of pain pills and his antibiotics. “You still like it, right?” Crick looked around the room and smiled. Oh yeah—it was the haven he’d meant it to be. “Absolutely!”

“Good. I don’t think we can afford to do it up again.”

“It’s not too gay for you, is it?” Crick asked, realizing how very, very light-toed it seemed after two years of desert fatigues and stinky man-feet.

Deacon laughed in earnest—his first real laugh since Crick had arrived and stumbled into the house, intent on rest and quiet before he killed himself to escape the pain. “Wait ’til you see the girls’ rooms. This place looks positively butch compared to Benny’s!” And with that, Deacon went to fetch Crick some lunch. Crick was asleep before he came back, but when he woke up several hours later, there was a cooling bowl of soup with some garlic bread on the end table by the bed.

He awoke vaguely when Deacon came in to change his bandages and the sheets underneath him—his shunts had been leaking overmuch, and Deacon deftly re-sheeted the bed without hardly moving him. A few hours later, Deacon woke him up for more pain pills and to shovel some soup down his throat (different soup—the other stuff had been taken away), and by the time Crick awoke, disoriented and needing to pee like no racehorse in history, it was well into dark.