The Diary (4 page)

He'd had no further run-ins with his uncle, although he'd heard that Cole was gunning for him, that he planned to take a tire iron to AJ's car in retaliation for AJ's having torched his. AJ gave little credence to the rumor. Like most bullies, Cole was a coward at heart—he wouldn't risk picking a fight with someone his own size. He was more interested in getting drunk than in getting even. Recently AJ had read in the paper that his uncle had spent a night in jail on a drunk-driving charge, which meant he must have been royally plastered; usually the sheriff let offenders off with a slap on the wrist. The only thing that surprised AJ was that it hadn't happened sooner.

In all honesty, AJ wouldn't have spared half a brain cell's worth of worry over his uncle if it hadn't been for Elizabeth Harvey. Seeing her today had stirred up all those old feelings again. And now he knew there would be no peace for him until he'd gotten it off his chest.

He skirted the fairgrounds, finding the footpath at the southernmost end, where the beaten earth gave way to a pasture carpeted in knee-high timothy grass. On the other side of the pasture lay the creek where, last summer, he'd cooled off with a dip at the end of each day's work. Some instinct led him in that direction now. He hadn't intended to take her this far—farther than he knew she wanted to go—and each time he glanced back over his shoulder, he was a bit surprised to find her gamely trudging along behind him. She still looked a little ticked off, but mostly puzzled and maybe a bit intrigued. Beautiful women, he knew, had little experience with men who kept them guessing, so she had to be curious as to where all this was leading.

When they finally reached the creek, he was surprised to see how high it was—no doubt a result of the previous week's wet spell. This time last year, he'd been able to wade across to the opposite bank without getting his rolled-up pant legs wet. Now water tumbled over rocks with a sound like pouring rain, gnawing greedily at the banks where they hadn't already been devoured. More faintly came the sounds of children splashing and calling out to each other from the swimming hole upstream. Near it, he recalled, was the shallow cove, hemmed in by rocks and tree roots, where last year at this time he'd stumbled across the stash of watermelons being kept cool for the fair's annual barbecue and fireworks display. He could see them in his mind's eye, bobbing like so many legless turtles, and remembered how sweet the one he'd snitched had tasted.

He found a shady spot under a weeping willow where they would be shielded from view. Elizabeth glanced at him skeptically before carefully lowering herself to the ground, tucking her full skirt under her as she did. The skirt was gold with a pattern of red cherries. It made him think of a dress she'd worn often in the fourth grade, a yellow checked smock that tied in back, with strawberries embroidered on its crisp white bodice. Back then, whenever he closed his eyes at night, it was those strawberries he saw as he drifted off to sleep.

But if she had any misgivings about following him here, she seemed to have set them aside for the time being. “What a lovely spot!” she remarked, gazing out at the water chasing itself over the rocks. She stretched her legs out in front of her, smoothing her skirt over her knees.

“Last summer, this was where I came every day to cool off,” he told her.

She nodded, seeming all at once awkward in his presence, as though they'd only just met. Which, in a way, was true: This was the most they'd interacted in the fifteen years he'd known her.

“It must get awfully hot, sitting outside all day long,” she said.

“You don't notice it so much when you're concentrating on what you're doing.”

She turned to eye him curiously. “Funny. I don't recall you being much of an artist in school.”

“That's because I never showed my stuff to anyone.” He gave a small, pained smile. “It wasn't until my grandma happened to come across my sketch pad one day that she knew what I'd been doing all those hours holed up in my room. That's when my grandparents decided I had too much time on my hands and put me to work in the store. I didn't pick it up again until I was at Silas. They had us do crafts there—occupational therapy, they called it.” He paused briefly to register the effect of his words, the way Elizabeth started slightly at his mention of his time in juvenile detention before she quickly rearranged her features into a neutral mask. “I used to kill time doing caricatures of the other guys. I got to be pretty good at it after a while.”

“Good at making fun of other people,” she said in the huffy tone she'd used earlier.

“Only the thin-skinned ones saw it that way.”

“Oh, so now you're saying I'm thin-skinned?” She still sounded mad, but he saw the twinkle in her eye under her raised brow.

“No,” he said. “I admit you have a point. I took a cheap shot, and I'm sorry for that.”

He hadn't meant to hurt her feelings. Seeing her again, it had all come bubbling up. It was as though his hand had taken on a life of its own while sketching her. It hadn't helped, either, that she was more beautiful than the last time he'd seen her, if such a thing were possible. He'd left behind the memory of a pretty girl and returned to find a woman so lovely it broke his heart just to look at her. Like right now, the way the light reflecting off the water shimmered on her face, accentuating the curve of a cheekbone and painting the tips of her eyelashes gold, showing the down on her cheek that was normally invisible. Her eyes were the green of the water swirling amid the rocks, and the emotions they stirred in him were just as turbulent. It was all he could do to maintain a polite distance when he ached to take her in his arms.

“It would help if I had an explanation.” She leveled her gaze at him, arms crossed over her chest.

“All right. I owe you that much, I suppose.” He aimed for a lighthearted tone, though the muscles in his chest were tight from holding his emotions in check. It was an effort just to breathe. He hadn't expected it to be so hard after all this time; he'd thought he'd put it all behind him. He stared down at the ground, plucking at a blade of grass as he began the painful process of dredging up the past. “Do you remember that day you stopped by the store?” However long ago, the memory was etched in his mind. Clearly Elizabeth hadn't forgotten either.

“How could I not? You practically ignored me.”

He sighed, feeling as though he were standing at the brink of a gulf that he must now attempt to bridge. “If it seemed like I was ignoring you, it was only because I …” He paused, frowning in thought, before summoning the word. “Poleaxed. That's what I was, poleaxed. I couldn't think what you were doing there, in my grandparents' store of all places. My next thought, crazy as it might sound, was that you'd come to see me. It would have been the happiest day of my life if that had been the case. But then you—”

“I asked if you had any Dr. Pepper.”

He looked up to find her staring at him with wide eyes.

“That's right,” he said, nodding slowly at this new revelation: She didn't just recall the incident, she remembered it in detail. Why would it have stuck with her, unless—?

He didn't get a chance to finish the thought. “I did come to see you,” she rushed ahead. “But you … I thought … well, I don't know what I thought. That I was bothering you or something. You acted so …” Her hands fluttered up like a pair of wing-shot birds before falling helplessly back into her lap.

“Rude?” he supplied with a little snort of laughter.

She smiled at him. “That's one way of putting it.”

“The truth is, I was crazy about you,” he confessed, adopting the tone of a man much older and wiser shaking his head over the antics of a foolish boy. He didn't tell her that he'd been in love with her for as long as he could remember; that probably would have been more than she could handle. “I had it so bad, I was all bottled up inside. I couldn't even talk to you; I was too scared you'd guess. I know I must've seemed like a real jerk, but honestly, I didn't think you cared.”

“I don't know what I could've done to make you think that. I always tried so hard to be nice,” she said, frowning in confusion.

“I thought it was only because you were looking to make another conquest.” Even as he watched her frown deepen into a scowl, he felt compelled to add, “In all fairness, can you blame me? All those guys hanging around you, doing handsprings to get your attention—don't tell me there wasn't a part of you that didn't enjoy it.” If the caricature he'd done had rubbed her the wrong way, he suspected it was because she'd recognized some truth in it.

Her face relaxed in a small, grudging smile. “Maybe. A small part,” she acknowledged.

“I also thought maybe the reason you were being so nice was because you felt sorry for me.” At her puzzled look, he added with a dry, self-effacing laugh, “I suppose that sounds as if I'm flattering myself. The truth is, half the time I didn't think you even noticed me.”

“Oh, I noticed you all right,” she said. “It would've been hard not to.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked guardedly.

“I don't know. You had a certain … quality. You always seemed to go your own way.”

He smiled at the irony. “Me? I was wandering around lost most of the time. All I knew to do was to keep moving. Sitting still was a recipe for trouble in my house.” He thought once more of Uncle Cole, and a shiver of loathing went through him. “Most people don't know this,” he went on in the purposely casual tone he adopted whenever he discussed his family, “but you can get used to practically anything if you're forced to put up with it long enough.”

“Then I guess I'm not most people.” She looked him directly in the eye as she spoke. A veiled reference to her mother? he wondered. Practically everyone he knew had a story about having run up against the formidable Mildred Harvey at one time or another. It was said that Aldous Harvey, Elizabeth's father, had died purely in self-defense; it was easier than having to stand up to his wife.

AJ recalled his one, never-to-be-forgotten encounter with Mrs. Harvey, the night of his and Elizabeth's second grade play. After the curtain had gone down, while the other children were being fussed over by family members, he'd been standing off to the side, as usual, his grandparents nowhere in sight. He looked up at one point to find a large, imposing woman looming over him. “Where are your parents, little boy?” she demanded. He shrugged, suddenly tongue-tied, and she bustled off as if thoroughly disgusted by this sad state of affairs—or perhaps by AJ himself. In hindsight, he supposed she'd only been looking out for him, but at the time it left him feeling deeply ashamed and even more conscious of the fact that he was alone.

“No, you're not,” he said, meeting Elizabeth's gaze. It was God's honest truth. She was like no woman he'd ever met.

She smiled, her gaze as compassionate as it was direct. “I don't mean to speak ill of your grandparents. I barely know them,” she said. “It's just that they always seemed so … well, like raising their grandson wasn't the life they would have chosen if it had been left up to them.”

“You're right, they wouldn't have. But that was only the half of it,” he said, the old bitterness beginning to throb deep inside him like a rotten tooth he'd been doing his best to ignore until now. “You see, they never got over my mom's death. All they had left was me and my uncle. And God knows he was a disappointment to them. They tried in their own way, I suppose. I'll give them that. But with my uncle Cole, all they did was turn a blind eye. Whenever he got into trouble, they either didn't want to know about it or they made excuses for him.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Petty stuff mostly—drinking and carousing, that kind of thing. And women, there was plenty of that, too. Let's just say it wouldn't surprise me if I found out I wasn't the only grandchild.” He gave in to a bitter laugh. “I'm just the one they had the rotten luck to get stuck with. Maybe that's why they didn't do anything to stop it when my uncle started beating on me.”

“He beat you?” Elizabeth looked aghast. “Oh, AJ, I had no idea!”

“How could you? I never let on to anyone. Who would I have told? All it would've done was earn me another beating.”

“How long did this go on?”

“Years. Until I was big enough to fight back.”

“So that's why you—” She broke off, clearly not wishing to stir up any more bad memories.

“Why I set fire to his car?” he finished for her. “Yeah. But it's a little more complicated than that. Part of it had to do with you.”

“Me?” Her eyes widened further.

“Cole saw some sketches I'd done of you from memory. He put two and two together, and from that day on he wouldn't stop pestering me. He'd go on and on about you having a boyfriend and how I didn't have a prayer of ever getting to first—” AJ broke off, continuing in a tight voice, “That, and other stuff. Things I can't repeat.” He dropped his gaze, looking back down at the ground, at the bald patch where he'd plucked out every last living blade of grass. “I tried to ignore it, but it got so bad that finally I just snapped.”

“Oh, AJ. I'm so sorry.” He looked up to find her regarding him with an odd mixture of tenderness and outrage. “It should have been your uncle they locked up, not you.”

“It could've been worse.” AJ tried to make light of it. “At least it got me out of the house.”

“Still …”

“Listen, that's not why I brought you here. I wanted to explain about why I acted the way I did. You see, somehow I got you mixed in my mind with all that other stuff, even though I know it wasn't your fault. In a funny way, I might even have blamed you. Because I don't think I'd ever have gone so far as to set fire to his car if it hadn't been for those things he said about you.”