Keeping Promise Rock (21 page)

Jon and Amy had their own lives, though—and so did Deacon for that matter. After another week of babysitting, Deacon’s friends left them to return on a weekly basis for dinner, and Deacon and Benny were left to fend for themselves.

As it turned out, they did all right on their own.

Benny was enrolled in independent study. Deacon took her once a week to turn in her completed packets and pick up new ones and to take Keeping Promise Rock

her quizzes, and he had no worries in the school department. Deacon told her it was because she was smart, and she told him it was because she didn’t have the moron exposure in independent study that she had in regular school. In the meantime, she cleaned the house, took the business phone calls, made vet appointments, and did whatever else needed doing.

As Deacon remarked more than once, she was stunningly competent.

Deacon would go out, feed the horses, work them, give the riding lessons, prep the likeliest horses for show, move the animals about in their pastures, care for the gestating mares, get Even Star to exercise his now famous super-come-blowing-money-cock, and everything else that needed to be done outside, and Benny would stay inside and make the business run like clockwork.

It was the same stuff that Crick had used to do on his off-shifts, but Benny had the time to treat it like a real job. She wrote herself a schedule, did all the horse ranching stuff in the morning, worked on her schooling in the afternoons, and by the time Deacon came in at dinnertime, she’d made him something to eat as well.

Deacon found the whole thing a little spooky, and he told her so.

“It’s not right that a girl your age should be so organized. It’s
damned weird. Have a slumber party or something.”
Benny had looked at him searchingly, afraid that she’d done
something wrong. “I’m… I’m sorry… should I, um do something
different? Did you need something else?”
Deacon smiled at her, his heart shattering a little as he remembered
Crick at this age. “You’re doing great, Benny. Just….” And oh, the irony,
because he could hear Jon’s voice in his head even as he said it: “Just
don’t forget to ask for stuff. Don’t forget this is your home too. You’re
getting a little big for your old clothes—remind me, and I’ll take you
shopping. We can get stuff for the baby too. You’re….” He’d had to trail
off because she’d started to cry. Damned female hormones—that was the
only reason for it.

She’d launched herself at him, still crying, and he muttered, “You’re
Crick’s family, Benny. How’d you expect to be treated?” But she hadn’t
been able to answer him.

So finding the bathroom covered in hair dye was actually not a bad thing, he reflected now. It meant she was comfortable—it meant that maybe they could bicker over the television, and she’d ask for some kid 140

shit for Christmas, and that maybe he’d come in and get to microwave something because she got lost in a book or something. (He took her to the library once a week—he was always surprised at how much that girl could read.)

She came back, and he was opening cupboards in a search of one of those stupid little things that could mean so much in the course of your day.

“What’re you looking for?” she asked. “Let me find it so I can get in there and clean the place!”

“Lip balm,” he asked, a little embarrassed. He’d been putting on weight steadily, but he was still thin enough that he got dehydrated easily.

He moved out of her way, and she reached into one of the fiddly little drawers next to the sink and pulled out…

A little tan tube of cherry-flavored Vaseline.

Deacon took it from her numbly. “Where’d we get this?” She shrugged. “We had some and ran out. I got it at Wal-Mart the last time you took me shopping.”

Deacon nodded and gripped the thing tight in his palm, his good mood and cheerful irritation completely gone. Without another word he turned and left the house.

“Where are you going?” she asked when she heard the door open.

“It’s almost time for dinner!”

“Forgot to feed Comet!” he muttered back. It was the best answer he could come up with, since, for the first time in nearly three months, what he really wanted was at least a fifth of anything that would club him over the head and make him lose consciousness.

Comet Star was the ugliest horse Parish Winters had ever bred.

Someone had given him a brood mare in lieu of payment once, and she had been sixteen hands, gangly, dish-faced, swaybacked, bony-hipped, and the attractive color of fresh yellow baby-shit.

But
damn
was she sweet. Her name was—appropriately—Sugar, and they still used her as a riding horse for beginners. She was what Parish termed “bomb-proof”—it would have taken nothing short of a grenade launch to startle that horse, and if only beginners were riding her, they’d never be on long enough to figure out how uncomfortable she really was to ride.

Comet was sired by Even Star, which was like taking Sugar’s disposition and adding a big dollop of honey and chocolate. His father’s genes had given him some nice conformation—he wasn’t swaybacked, and his hindquarters were as round and as handsome as Even’s—but his face was still dish-shaped, and the squishy tan color hadn’t gotten a shade darker since he’d been born. (He was listed officially as “buckskin”—

Parish always said that if a self-respecting buck woke up that color, he’d donate his hide to ladies’ fashion as revenge against God.) Sadly enough, breeding for a sweet nature was out of style, so Comet had been gelded—

but since he’d promised to grow to seventeen hands, they’d kept him.

Parish had known at the time that Crick would need something big enough to ride.

Deacon had the presence of mind to grab some carrots from the burlap bag hanging on the door, which was a good idea, since Comet liked to nuzzle. He stood there for a couple of minutes, nose to nose with the big doofus, just breathing in horse. Why was it that horseshit and sweat and hay could smell so much like home?

Comet lipped the carrots from his hands and whuffled against Deacon’s shirt. Deacon stroked his sensitive nose, and for a lost space of time, it was all the comfort he needed.

“Who needs Jack Daniels?” he asked rhetorically, because it sure as shit felt like he did. “I’ve got you, you big pussy. We’ll make do until he gets back.”

“I brought you dinner,” Benny said behind him, and Deacon turned and saw she’d set a bowl of stew on a hay bale along with a big glass of milk.

“Sweetheart, you didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, I did,” she said back, making herself comfortable on another hay bale. “You were coming out here to stay for a while—you can’t afford to miss a meal, Deacon. Not right now.”

“Well look who’s practicing to be mama,” he said, but he said it with a smile, and she wrinkled her nose at him.

“I need practice. I didn’t have the best role model in the world, you know.”

Deacon sighed and gave Comet one last nose bump, and then he moved back to eat his stew and try and be the person Benny needed. “You had Crick—he’ll do.”

“I had Parish and you too,” she said. “Tell me—did Parish ever yell at you?”

Deacon remembered the day he told his father that he was giving up college to stay and make sure Crick had his shot. “Once,” he murmured, taking a bite of stew.

“Now see!” Benny was legitimately upset, and Deacon wondered what it was he’d done now. “I made you all sad again!” she sniffled, and Deacon scooted over and reached out to loop an arm around her shoulders.

One of the things he and Benny had enjoyed about living in proximity was that they were both “off limits”—she was too young and too pregnant, and he was too old and too in love with her brother, so there was no sexual tension between them. They were, for the most part, genderless beings to each other, and as such, Benny could sit on his lap and he could hug her to his side, and together, they could cling to each other like children. There were no misunderstandings, there were no inappropriate moments—there was only humanity and human comfort. It was, Deacon could admit to himself, one of the reasons he’d come out to talk to Comet and not gotten in the car and driven to the liquor store.

Benny wasn’t going to be like this if he let her down.

“Shortness, you cannot be responsible for everything that makes me sad. I’m a recovering alcoholic, remember—shit had to pretty much be under my skin to begin with.” She leaned into him and sniffled some more and muttered something about “fucking hormones,” but he didn’t call her to task for her mouth any more than she ragged on him.

“It was the cherry Vaseline, wasn’t it?” she asked, and then continued without waiting for an answer. “What—did you guys use it as lube or something?”

Deacon almost choked on his own tongue. When he was done saying intelligent shit like “Ulngursrsnlgggg,” he managed, “The things you know about sex… for the love of crap, Benny, could you try to pretend I’m a virgin or something so you don’t kill me?” But Benny was laughing instead of crying now, so he figured it was worth a little bit of embarrassment on his part. “It
was!”
she crowed.

“Omigod! That’s soooooo
sweet
!”

Deacon had to laugh—he wasn’t sure when gay couples had become romantic in the under-twenty women’s crowd, but Benny sure seemed to think he and Crick were fashionable. Well, good for her. He imagined Keeping Promise Rock

they’d be facing enough challenges when Crick got back without worrying what she thought about the two of them.

“Yeah,” he said quietly, able to live that memory for a moment without the bitter, Crick-less aftertaste. “It was.” They were quiet for a moment—nothing but the whuffling of horses and the shifting sounds that indicated large animals settling their bones for the night. The sun had set—it was late October, after all—and it was getting a little chilly. Deacon shed his jacket with some maneuvering and threw it over her shoulders, and she let him.

“What happened, Deacon?” Her voice was so quiet, and he was so…

needy, to talk about Crick, that he couldn’t find the fancy word-dance that he’d used when Jon asked him.

“Well, we were out at Promise Rock and”—he gave her a brief, tight smile—“freshly out of cherry lip balm, and Crick asked me if it was forever. And I tried to tell him it was.”

“I don’t understand,” she said softly.

“Benny, you’ve lived with me for two months, and you haven’t stopped waiting for me to yell at you or get drunk or throw something.”

“Yeah, so?”

Deacon leaned his head back against the horse stall and remembered Crick’s face that day, the way it closed down before Deacon could finish his sentence. “Well, your brother never stopped waiting to come home and find his shit on the front lawn. I was trying to give him forever, and he thought I was throwing his shit on the front lawn. By the time we got it all sorted out, he’d already joined the Army—as a pre-emptive strike, sort of.”

“To cut you out before you could do it to him,” Benny said like she understood.

“Yup. And you know the rest.” The rest was him falling apart. In spite of Crick’s (extensively re-read) letter, there weren’t enough good deeds in the world to erase his complete shame of those first months.

Benny sighed and rested her head against him, as happy in the quiet as he was. “I don’t know how you could forgive him,” she said quietly, and he looked at her in surprise.

“Well, I haven’t yet. Why do you think I drank so much?” Her shock was palpable, so he gave her a sweeter—and ultimately more important—

truth. “But I will, Shortness. I have no choice. He’s Crick. How do you not 144

love your brother?” He didn’t wait for an answer but shook his head instead. “It’s damned impossible. Forgiveness will happen—I can’t live with anything else.”

She chewed on that for a while, and then, out of the blue, said,

“Deacon, what’s your middle name?”

He laughed a little. It was a family joke. “Parish.”

“Like your Daddy?”

“Yeah—and his middle name was ‘Preacher’, which was my grand-daddy’s name, and his middle name was ‘Pastor’, like his daddy. It goes back to, like, before the Gold Rush.” He was getting sleepy, and she was getting heavy as she leaned on him.

“Are they all, you know, religious?”

“Yup. That’s why Parish called the place The Pulpit
.
Which is really funny, since I don’t know if any of us have stepped foot in a church since back before the Civil War. Why’d you want to know?” Her hair smelled harsh, like dye, but the rest of her felt like a child, in spite of what she was carrying in her belly. He wanted to protect her—hell, he wanted to raise her. He had a sudden inkling as to where Parish got his drive to collect muckrakers. There were just too many children in the world who needed a daddy. Parish gave what he could, and he’d taught Deacon to do the same.

“I wanted to name the baby ‘Parish’,” Benny said unexpectedly. “I figure it can be a girl’s name too—I was hoping your middle name would be something, you know, unisex or whatever, but it’s better. That way I can name her after you too.”

Deacon’s throat caught. “That’s wonderful, Benny—Parish would be so proud.” He didn’t add that he wasn’t worth a namesake. This was his daddy they were talking about.

“Yeah,” Benny sighed, “but naming a girl ‘Parish Deacon’ would probably get me put up for child abuse.”

Deacon chuckled. “Very probably. What’s your middle name, Shorty?”

“Angela… but I don’t want to name her after me. That’s like a curse.”

He grasped her chin with his fingers and made her meet his eyes under the drying mop of “blood garnet” hair. Her narrow, gamine face was earnest, and thankfully filling out after the last two months of steady food Keeping Promise Rock

and comfort. “Then name her ‘Angel’—for hope. ‘Parry Angel’. It’s a very pretty girl’s name, you think?”

Oh gods, her smile was as goofy and as charming as Crick’s. Her eyes shone with tears, and she rubbed her face on his shirt. “If I ever have a boy I’ll name him Deacon Carrick,” she threatened, and he laughed.