The Misconception (7 page)

Billy straightened from the car and cocked his head as he regarded his handiwork. His golden hair was in wild disarray, dipping into his eyes and covering his neck, but it didn’t disguise his good looks. His baggy shorts were slung low around his hips and his shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a sinewy body that belonged more to a man than a kid.

His little brother had grown up right under his nose. Billy not only had an old Ford Mustang he called his own, but had almost finished a year at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Jax was paying for the college, but his mother had forbidden him from buying Billy a car. That, his little brother had done on his own.

Billy spit on an edge of his rag, leaned over and diligently rubbed at a spot on the hood. Life in the Chicago suburbs, Jax thought, was far removed from the life he’d pulled his family from five years before.

It was a glorious day in April, and Billy was worried about shining his car, no doubt to impress some girl, instead of helping his mother scrape enough money together to feed her family. His brother lived in a luxurious climate-controlled house in a neighborhood with yards resembling thick green blankets instead of a stifling two-room apartment surrounded by cement. Eviction wasn’t a word that ever entered his mind.

Everything, in short, was exactly as it should be.

“Hey, Billy,” Jax called as he crossed the lawn to the driveway. Billy turned, his face breaking into a grin. “What goes through an insect’s mind last before it splatters against the windshield?”

Billy gritted his teeth, as though preparing for a particularly nasty blow. “Oh, no.” He put his hands in front of his face. “Don’t make me guess, Jax. Please don’t make me.”

Jax ignored him and kept walking. He smiled, anticipating his brother’s laughter. “His butt.”

Billy groaned. “Damn, that was lame.”

“It was not.” Jax shook his index finger. “Admit it, Billy. That was one of my funnier jokes.”

“Funnier? Doesn’t that erroneously assume some of your other jokes are funny?”

Jax advanced toward his brother, surprised anew that Billy was only two or three inches shorter than he was. He remembered when his brother barely reached his waist. He ruffled Billy’s blond hair roughly.

“Erroneously? What’s that? College-boy talk? If you’re such a smart guy, how come you don’t get a haircut? Your date’s gonna bark when she sees you because that mop on top of your head makes you look like a golden retriever.”

Billy’s golden brows rose, and he moved swiftly away from the car, toward the hose. Jax recognized his intention, glanced down at his Italian loafers and tailor-made casual clothing and hot-footed it to the house. He wasn’t fast enough. Spray cascaded over him, followed by Billy’s teasing laughter. “Now who’s the smart guy? You don’t call a man with access to a hose a golden retriever.”

Covering his head, laughing despite himself, Jax sprinted the rest of the way to the house and let himself in through the front door. He stood in the foyer, dripping on the wooden floor he’d insisted on paying extra for when he’d moved his mother from the inner city. She’d protested that hardwood was a needless extravagance, but he thought excess was just what his mother needed after a lifetime of insufficiency.

His younger brother appeared in the entranceway to the kitchen, holding half a sandwich even though he’d probably eaten lunch an hour ago. Drew was blond like Billy, a trait they’d inherited from the father who’d left them before either were out of diapers.

Eddie Bagwell hadn’t been much of a father, but at least he’d been married to their mother for a brief while. That was more than Jax could say for his own father, whose name he bore but whose face he’d never seen. The result of Sheila Drayton Bagwell’s romantic liaisons were identical, though. Both times, she’d ended up with sole responsibility for children who should have grown up with two parents. At the very least, his mother’s men should have helped her support the children they’d helped create.

“What happened to you?” Drew asked before he finished chewing. Their mother liked to say her youngest son was a work in process, but the world better watch out when he added the finishing touches.

Even at four inches shorter than Jax, Drew was an even six feet. His features were too large for his face, and he wore his hair preppy short, but the net effect was so compelling it was hard for strangers not to stare at him.

He struggled with his weight, but only because his high school wrestling coach had decided he should compete at 171 pounds. This past wrestling season, that decision had resulted in serious dieting plus a sectional championship. In the off-season, Drew made up for the dieting by eating everything in sight.

“Billy happened to me,” Jax said. “Let me give you some advice. Don’t ever call him a golden retriever. Especially when your clothes are dry-clean only. Throw me a towel, okay?”

“Sure thing, bro.” Drew took another bite of his sandwich before he disappeared into the kitchen. By the time he reappeared and threw Drew a towel, the sandwich was gone.

“You call this a towel?” Jax held up a square of material roughly one foot by two. “Looks more like a handkerchief to me.”

“It’s all I could find,” Drew said while Jax toweled himself off with the oversized handkerchief. He managed to dry his face and one muscular arm before the cloth was saturated. He hoped he wouldn’t look too wilted when his clothes dried. He’d spent too many years wearing hand-me-downs and blue-light specials to not strive to look his best now.

“Hey, you know that wrestling camp I’m going to?” his brother asked, making no move to get him another towel. “We had a guest instructor this morning. Guy by the name of Manny Ramirez. Name ring a bell?”

Although it was as though the bells of St. Mary’s were chiming in his head, Jax shrugged. “Should it?”

“Of course it should, man. Ramirez said he was the guy who pinned your ass in the state tournament when you two were high school seniors.”

“Oh.” Jax shrugged again, as though the name of the wrestler who cost him a state championship wasn’t burned in his mind. Football had been so popular at Ridgeland High that he’d been well known for his outstanding play at linebacker, but wrestling had always been his first love. “
That
Manny Ramirez.”

“Yeah,
that
one.” Drew affected a wrestler’s stance, bouncing on the balls of his feet with his legs apart and his elbows tucked close to his body. “He sure remembered you when I asked if he knew you. He even gave me some pointers on how to take you down. Let me try it, Jax.”

Jax rolled his eyes. “We’ve already been over this, Drew. I was a heavyweight, remember, and I weigh even more now than I did then. I’m too big for you to take down. And I’m, what, fourteen years older than you.”

“Manny says size and strength aren’t nearly as important as speed and technique. Come to think of it, old man, youth is also an advantage.”

“Thirty-two isn’t old.”

“Then prove it,” Drew said, still bouncing. “Let me try.”

“Cash? Is that you, Cash?”

The stairway leading to the second floor was off the foyer, and Jax turned at the sound of his mother’s voice, smiling at the way she persisted on calling him by the name she’d given him at birth.

He temporarily forgot about his bouncing brother until Drew shot forward and down, hooking an arm under Jax’s right knee. He pivoted, driving his shoulder into the back of Jax’s leg.

“Hey, stop that,” Jax protested, but it was too late. His leg buckled. Aided by the water his other brother had doused him with, it slid out from under him. He fell to the floor in a landing so hard a crystal vase bounced off the foyer table and shattered, spraying water and flowers.

In defeat, Jax lay flat on the floor and closed his eyes. When he opened them, both his mother and Drew were staring down at him.

“I knew I could do it,” Drew said. “I knew I could take you down!”

“Really, Cash. If you miss wrestling this much, why did you ever leave it?” His mother had her hands on her ample hips. She was shaking her head in a way that, for just a moment, reminded Jax of that bewildering woman in Washington D.C. who had paid him for sex. “Surely there’s a high school somewhere that needs an experienced coach.”

Jax anchored himself on an elbow and made a face at his brother. He rubbed his smarting hip. “What are a wrestler’s favorite colors?”

“Oh, no,” Drew moaned, putting a hand on their mother’s arm. “I sense one of his jokes coming. Please, Mom, make him stop.”

“Black and blue.” Jax threw back his head and laughed. He was the only one of the three who did. His unsmiling mother patted the top of his head consolingly.

Drew extended a hand and helped him to his feet, and their mother came forward to enfold him in a soft embrace. The top of her head came to the middle of his chest, reminding Jax he must have inherited his size from the son of a bitch who’d fathered him and split as though nothing momentous had happened. In Jax’s estimation, that was the lowest thing a man could do.

“I’m not even going to ask why you’re wet,” his mother said when she drew back from the embrace. She wasn’t yet fifty, but her face was deeply lined. “Come into the kitchen with me, and I’ll get you a towel and something to eat. Drew, since you attacked your brother, you can clean up this mess.”

Jax wasn’t really hungry, but he knew better than to argue with his mother when the subject was food. She’d fed him a lot of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese while he was growing up, and she seemed intent on making up for it now.

The kitchen was a cook’s dream with wall-to-wall maple cabinets, marble counter tops, a floating island and an attached sun room that was the perfect setting for leisurely meals. Jax’s mother had chosen wallpaper shot through with yellow and orange, a choice that shoved aside the memory of the dark little kitchen in the dingy apartment where they had lived for so many years.

Jax pulled up a stool to a counter where his mother was assembling sandwich fixings. Although he could handle himself in the kitchen, his mother wouldn’t hear of him making his own sandwich. Years ago, he’d made plenty of meals for Billy and Drew while she’d labored to bring home a paycheck.

“I’ll replace the vase, Mom,” Jax said as he dried himself with the towel his mother handed him. “You were right. Drew and I shouldn’t have been wrestling in the house.”

“Pshaw, you buy me too many things already,” his mother said with a wave of her hand. Unfortunately, it was the hand that held a knife. Jax backed up his stool. “I can do without another vase.”

“That’s the point. I don’t want you to do without anything.”

She paused in making his sandwich, reached across the counter and patted his cheek. He kept an eye on her knife hand while she did so. “You’re a good son, Cash, but I worry about how much you spend. That fancy place you have in town must have cost you a pretty quarter.”

“A pretty penny,” Jax corrected.

“Don’t you give me that. The price of that place was a lot closer to a quarter than a penny.”

Jax smiled. “Mom, stop. I can afford it.”

“But are you happy with what you’re doing? When you were teaching at the high school and coaching the wrestling team, you seemed so happy.”

Drew came into the kitchen and pulled up a stool next to Jax. “Leave him alone, Mom. He’s raking in the bucks, and that’s what life’s all about.”

“Life’s about being happy,” she countered, slicing a tomato with a vicious chop, “and he was happy coaching wrestling.”

“Everyone knows wrestling doesn’t pay.” Drew reached out and peeled a slice of cheese from a nearby stack. Their mother rapped his hand, but he smiled at her and popped it into his mouth.

“Actually, that’s not always true,” Jax said. “Pro wrestling pays plenty.”

Drew made a rude noise. “Pro wrestling? Now there’s a joke. That’s why serious wrestlers get so little respect. It’s because of guys like the Undertaker who make up moves called stupid things like the Tombstone Piledriver—”

“Did you know that the Undertaker is six feet ten?” Jax interrupted.

“—and ridiculous duos who slam dance in the ring like those Headbanger guys—”

“Mosh and Thrasher,” Jax supplied.

“—and other guys who have these elaborate entrance acts that are just laughable. The biggest joke of all is that so-called wrestler who calls himself something like the Secret Stallion.”

“I think it’s the Secret Stud.”

“Yeah, something stupid like that. When he comes into the arena, he has these women who—”

“Do we have to talk about pro wrestling?” their mother interrupted. “Can’t we have a normal conversation that doesn’t have to do with thrashing and funeral directors?”

“Undertakers,” Drew corrected.

“Whatever. It’s too silly to talk about.” She slapped the last piece of bread on the sandwich, sliced it in half with another tremendous chop and handed it to her eldest son. “I want to hear more about Cash’s job.”

“My job? No, you don’t, Mom. It’s awfully boring. Bore-you-to-tears boring, in fact.”