Page 127 of Thick as Thieves

“Was our sitting in it together like this another of your fantasies?”

“The only one that didn’t involve fucking.”

She laughed and laid her head against his chest. Tweaking the hair on his pec, she said, “This is lovely. The sound of the rain on the roof. The scent of it.”

“Um-huh.”

After a short stretch of silence, she said, “Ledge? When you needed help tonight, you called Don, not your uncle. Why?” She must have felt him tense, because her fingers became still and she raised her head to look at him. “I know he reared you, but you don’t talk much about him.”

He leaned his head back against the slats of the chair and began to rock slowly. “My dad was Henry’s brother, older by barely a year. My dad was in the navy, stationed in San Diego. He was about to be deployed to a ship that patrolled the Persian Gulf.

“I wasn’t even two years old, so I don’t remember any of this, but I’m told that he and my mom went out with a group of friends for one final fling before the men shipped out. They rode home with a guy who shouldn’t have been driving. He plowed them into a bridge abutment. Killed everyone in the car.”

She returned her head to his chest. “Unlike you, I at least have vivid memories of my mother. Although I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.”

“I can’t say. My uncle Henry and aunt Brenda came out there to get me and brought me back to Penton, where they were trying to make a go of the bar. Life with them was the first one I remember. They treated me like their own. Maybe because they never had a kid.

“When I was six or seven, thereabouts, Aunt Brenda got really sick, really fast, and died of stomach cancer three months after her diagnosis. So then, my uncle Henry was stuck with me to raise by himself. But if he resented it, he never once, not ever, showed it.

“When I got my discharge from the army and came back, he was his same jolly self. Everybody’s friend. But I noticed that he would be in the middle of one of his bad jokes and forget the punch line, and usually it was a joke he’d told a hundred times.”

“Oh, no,” Arden murmured. Again she lifted her head and looked into his face. “Alzheimer’s?”

“I finally had to put him in a place in Marshall. For his own safety. It’s a nice facility. He’s well looked after. The staff—”

She leaned up and stopped his lips with hers. “You don’t have to justify doing what is best for him and for you.”

“You sound like George.”

“Who’s that?”

He told her. “He keeps an eye on Uncle Henry for me.”

She returned her head to his chest, and they continued to rock for a time before she said, “It’s because of him that you’ve stayed here in Penton, isn’t it? Rather than pursue your ambitions.”

“He’s the main reason. When I was helpless, he didn’t cut and run. I won’t cut and run on him.”

“That’s very self-sacrificing. What one would expect of a hero.”

“I’m no hero, Arden. Listen. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

He tilted her head up to look at him. “Last night when you got mad at me for ending what we’d started on the stairs, you thought it was because of Crystal. Now you know better.”

“You stopped because of Jacob.”

He was so focused on what he was going to tell her and how he was going to phrase it that the name didn’t immediately click. “What?”

“Because of my pregnancy, you assumed there was, or recently had been, a man in my life.”

He shook his head. “No. Believe me, a phantom ex wouldn’t have stopped me.”

“Then why did you? Does it involve Rusty Dyle, Foster, my dad, all that?”

He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes. It’s about all that.”

“Then can you please put it on hold?”

“No.”