Delilah bit down, grinding her teeth to keep from asking just how he thought she had it made. Instead, she fixed her gaze on the slow-moving traffic around them, the tangled traffic like the knots of dread and anxiety in her stomach.
Ten minutes later they pulled up to a large two-story stucco building with a red-tiled roof and an adjacent bell tower behind. There was probably a chapel tucked somewhere, too, Delilah thought, annoyed by the fake Spanish mission style.
“Here we are,” Howie said, parking, turning off the engine.
Missy flashed Delilah a quick, nervous smile as they climbed from the car. “Doesn’t it look nice, Dee? And look at that pretty statue in the garden right there.”
Delilah looked. It was just a silly little white plaster monk. “Nice.”
Howie shot her a swift glance. Delilah smiled up at him, showing teeth so he’d think it was a real smile. As if she’d ever give him a real smile.
Together they entered the school office.
A thin, frazzled-looking secretary with short gray hair sat behind the front desk, a phone pressed to her ear as another phone rang insistently on her desk. A half-dozen uniformed students hovered in the entry waiting for her attention, but Howie pushed through them, as if they didn’t matter, and in his world, they didn’t. Delilah squirmed as he loudly announced that Sister Elena was expecting them.
Mrs. Dellinger covered the receiver’s mouthpiece. “I can help you as soon as I’m off the phone.”
Howie’s mouth pressed inward, disappearing. He didn’t like being told to wait, especially not by skinny fifty-seven-year-old women in ugly orange–and-brown-striped sweaters.
“We were told we’d be given a tour at eight,” he said, his face screwing up. “It’s eight.”
“I’ve got it, Helen, thanks,” a big plain woman with short hair
and weathered skin said, emerging from the hallway behind the secretary’s desk. She moved to the counter and extended a hand to Howie. “Mr. Dempsey?”
“Yes,” Howie said gruffly.
“I’m Shelley Jones, the PE teacher and girls’ softball coach—”
“I bet you are,” he muttered.
Delilah wondered if Shelley Jones had heard him, but if she had, she gave no indication. “Sister asked me to show you around.”
Howie’s eyes narrowed to slits. “She’s not here?”
Ms. Jones’s gaze slid over him but she didn’t answer his question. “We only have fifteen minutes. Let’s get going.”
The tour was too short and too fast for Delilah. There were too many halls and stairwells and dopey bulletin boards for her to keep straight. Classroom. Classroom. Classroom. Upstairs. Downstairs. Outside and down a covered walkway. More classrooms. Library. Cafeteria. Another covered walkway. Science lab. Gym. Computer lab.
The day passed in a similar blur. She fumbled with her slip of paper that told her what classes she’d been given and wandered hallways until she found the right room. She took the open desk the teacher indicated, although in history it meant sharing the back table with another student. She opened books to the right pages. She stared straight ahead at the old chalkboards. She wrote down what the teacher assigned for homework. But she didn’t really hear anything. Couldn’t really understand. Didn’t want to understand either.
She didn’t want to be at Memorial High in Oakland.
Didn’t want to live in a crummy white house in a crummy San Leandro neighborhood, which still apparently cost Howie a fortune because real estate was outrageously expensive in the San Francisco Bay Area. But she didn’t care about the crummy, outrageously expensive house and she didn’t want to live in California. She wanted Texas and Mineral Wells. She wanted people and
places that were familiar. More specifically, she wanted Shey Darcy, her only real friend, even though Shey was older than her mom. But Shey had looked out for her. Shey had given her a place to go. A place to escape.
There was no escape here in San Leandro.
After school Delilah grabbed a bottle of black nail polish from her room and chugged down a glass of chocolate milk in the kitchen as the TV blared in the living room
Dr. Phil
. A guest cried. Dr. Phil’s voice rose. Audience erupted into applause.
Great. Dr. Phil was making someone else feel like crap. Some things never changed.
Wiping her mouth, she put her glass in the sink and headed for the door.
“In the dishwasher, Dee,” her mom called from the living room, where she was ironing Howie’s shirts while watching TV. Howie liked everything ironed, and he meant everything—T-shirts, dress shirts, trousers, jeans, even his tighty-whities. And he liked everything on the outside sharp. Heavily starched. Which meant Mama sprayed and ironed, sprayed and ironed. It took her forever. Most of every afternoon.
Dee put the glass in the dishwasher. Headed for the front door.
“Where you going, Dee?”
“Outside.”
“Don’t you have homework?”
“That’s what I’m doing,” she answered, ignoring her school backpack to step outside. It was blue-gray and hazy, the sun already at an angle in the sky. It was beginning to stay lighter later. She was glad. She dreaded being cooped up inside the house with Mama and Howie.
Sitting down on the front steps, Delilah kicked off her shoes, peeled off her socks, and began carefully painting her toenails black.
Her mom hated it when she painted her nails purple and silver or black and electric blue but it made Delilah happy. She liked defying her mom and she liked doing it while watching the neighbor take apart his bike, which he was doing now.
Howie couldn’t stand the neighbor, Jude-something-or-other, a low-life, unemployed good-for-nothing living off welfare.
Delilah looked across the fence at Jude, the low-life, unemployed good-for-nothing and ran the tip of the brush over her pinkie toe, the last toe on her right foot, turning the small pink nail into matte black. He might be a low-life good-for-nothing but he was drool-worthy, even for an old guy, a fact that probably hadn’t escaped Howie’s attention either.
And so as she turned her attention to her left foot, she watched Jude from beneath her lashes as he worked on his bike, and she wondered what he was really like. Howie had forbidden her to talk to him, and so far she hadn’t. But maybe today she would.
Maybe today she should. They’d been here almost a month now.
Left foot finished, she stretched her legs out in front of her to let her nails dry and stared at Jude as he picked up one tool after the other to tighten this and unscrew that. He’d been working on his bike for days now. She’d only seen him ride it once, and that had been right around New Year’s. The bike was loud, really loud, and Howie had gone charging out of the house. Delilah didn’t know what he said to Jude that day, or what Jude said back, but it couldn’t have been good because Howie stormed back into the house and nearly killed Mama.
Flexing her foot, Delilah watched Jude lift the engine into the big bike’s orange frame and begin to secure it in place.
“You actually going to get that thing running?” she shouted across the fence to Jude. “You’ve been working on it a long time.”
Jude-the-lowlife sat back on the heels of his boots and pushed long black hair away from his face before looking at her, black
eyebrow lifting. “It was running a couple weeks ago. Took a ride over to Santa Cruz.”
“Sure you did.”
He just shrugged and returned to work.
Delilah wanted him to talk to her again. She liked his voice. Liked his face. Liked that he wasn’t afraid of Howie. “So why isn’t it working now?”
“Broke down again Sunday.”
“Maybe you should get a new bike.”
“I like my old one. It gives me something to do.”
“Huh.”
“A man can’t have a hobby?” he asked, looking at her over the top of the chain-link fence that divided the two yards.
“Not if he doesn’t have any other form of transportation,” she answered.
“Who says I don’t have any other wheels?”
“Do you?”
He gestured to his small detached garage. “There.”
She glanced at the Pepto Bismol–pink garage that looked every bit as decrepit as his matching house. Inside was an old white convertible Cadillac with blue leather seats. “Does it run?”
“No.”
She nearly smiled. “Didn’t think so.”
“You’re quite the smart aleck, aren’t you?”
“No need to get your panties in a wad. Just making conversation.”
“Nice of you.”
Delilah laughed. She hadn’t meant to. But now that she’d laughed, she was glad, because she liked Jude’s deep, rough voice and how his jet-black hair hung in his eyes and a beast tattoo on his shoulder was inked so that some of its barbed tail circled his biceps. He was the opposite of Howie. Messy, sweaty, untidy. His
voice was the same. Deep, untidy, rough. He talked like he needed a throat lozenge. Delilah liked that.
J
ude had made a mistake making her laugh. He shouldn’t engage her. Certainly shouldn’t encourage her, especially as it wasn’t the first time she’d sat on the front steps to watch him work. She was a teenage girl after all. And teenage girls were a dangerous mix of hormones, curiosity, and attitude. And this one, with her shaggy blond hair and rebellious pout, more than most.
“Your dad wouldn’t like you talking to me,” he said, wiping greasy hands on a tattered white rag dangling from his back jeans pocket.
She shot to her feet. “He’s not my dad.”
“Stepdad,” he corrected, watching as she sauntered barefoot in her red-plaid pleated skirt down the walkway to cross the tidy lawn and approach the chain-link fence.
“He’s my mother’s husband. That’s it. She married him. I didn’t.” She glared at him as she leaned against the fence.
Jude cocked an eyebrow. She had attitude all right. Probably didn’t get her real far with the old man. “Either way, he wouldn’t want you talking to me. You should get back into the house before he comes home.”
She tossed her head. “I’m not afraid.”
“No?” he asked softly, watching her face. She wasn’t a happy little girl. She had purple patches beneath her eyes and her whip-thin body hummed with tension. Some scary shit probably went down in that house of theirs. Not that it was any business of his. He’d already been warned off by her daddy-o. As if Jude wanted a little girl that way. Freaking creep.
“I’m Delilah,” she said, running the palm of her hand across the metal links.
“Nice to meet you, Delilah. Now go inside before—”
“You men are all the same. Always telling women what to do.”
“You’re a woman?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Am, too.”
He gave her a hard look and she struggled to hold his gaze. And then she shrugged her slim shoulders. “Almost.”
“When?”
“August.”
“That makes you fifteen and a half.”
“What are you, an accountant?”
He shook his head. “Your daddy really won’t like you talking to me.”
“I already told you, he’s not my daddy and I don’t care what he thinks.”
“But I bet he can be plenty hard on you when he wants.”
She abruptly averted her head, stared down the street with its row of small, square homes built post-WWII. For the most part the landscaping was as tired and spare as the neighborhood’s plain, practical architecture. And then she jerked her chin to look back at him. “Do you have a last name? Howie calls you Jude-the-lowlife but I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to call you that, or by another name.”
Jude smiled reluctantly. “Is that what he calls me?”
“Yes, sir.” Delilah smiled sweetly. “But maybe that’s what you prefer…?”
The girl was trouble with a capital
T,
he thought, but he liked her fire. “It’s Knight,” he said, walking to the fence and extending a hand over scraggly rosebushes. “But you can call me Jude.”
She lifted her face, her brown eyes assessing. “Jude Knight.”
“That’s what my mama named me.”
And then it was her turn to smile. She put her hand into his.
“Nice to meet you.” Her grin split her face. For a moment she was half woman, half child, and bubbling with life.
She froze the next second when a shiny gray town car pulled into her driveway.
“Howie,” she said lowly, swiftly letting go of his hand and burying her fingers in the pleats of her skirt.
Jude saw the hard, hollow look return to her face.
Some serious shit went down in that house, he silently repeated, waiting for Howard to emerge from the car. Jude had met a lot of men like Howard in his life and he’d never liked one of them.
Howard didn’t waste any time. He slammed the car door behind him and came charging across the lawn. “Shouldn’t you be doing homework, Dee?” he said, closing the distance between them. “First day of a new school and all.”
Delilah lifted her chin. “It’s done.”
“Then you should be helping your mother with dinner.” Howard looked at Jude and curved his lips into a thin, unpleasant smile. “Is there something I can help you with?”
At six two, Jude was tall, but Howard had another inch on him. But Howard could have had a foot on him and Jude wouldn’t have worried. He’d earned his hard-core reputation by being good with his fists. And knives, guns, fishhooks, and razor blades. He didn’t mind pain. He healed fast. He had nothing to lose. So he didn’t lose.
“No,” Jude said, smiling lazily at his neighbor. “Can I help
you
with something?”
Howard opened his mouth and then shut it, seething. He reached for the girl, hand clamping down on her thin shoulder, making her flinch. “Don’t let us keep you,” Howard said, his fingers tightening on Delilah’s shoulder. “Looks like you’ve still got a lot of cleaning up to do.”
The girl twisted and slipped free of Howard’s grasp and, after shooting Jude an indecipherable look, ran back to the house.
Jude was glad she’d escaped, and he glanced over his shoulder to his front yard with the sprawl of tools and motorcycle parts. It
was
messy. It was always messy. “Oh, I’m not cleaning. Just puttering around.”
“Maybe you should think about cleaning up.”
“Why? I like it this way. Can find everything I need just where I left it.”