We Begin at the End(4)
She slid the straps over his shoulders and he smiled and she smiled back.
They stood side by side and watched the cruiser pare the long street, and then Duchess slipped an arm around her brother and they began to walk.
The neighbor cut the hose and walked over to the edge of his yard, slight limp he tried hard to correct. Brandon Rock. Broad, tan. A stud in one ear, feathered hair, silk robe. Sometimes he benched with the garage door up and metal blaring out.
“Your mother again? Someone should call social services.” Voice like his nose had been broken but never fixed. He carried a dumbbell in one hand and curled it now and then. His right arm noticeably bigger than the left.
Duchess turned to him.
Breeze blew. His robe parted.
She wrinkled her nose. “Flashing a kid. I should call the cops.”
Brandon stared as Robin led her away.
“Did you see Walk’s hands shaking?’ Robin said.
“Always worse in the morning.”
“Why?”
She shrugged but knew. Walk and her mother, their shared troubles and the way they dealt with them.
“Did Mom say anything, last night, when I was in my room?” She’d been doing her homework, her project on her family tree, when Robin hammered at the door and said Mom was sick again.
“She had her photos out. The old ones, with Sissy and Grandpa.” Robin had taken to the idea of having a grandpa the first time he’d seen the tall man in their mother’s photographs. That he’d never met him, that Star said next to nothing about him, did not seem to matter. Robin needed people, the cushion of barren names that would keep him from feeling so vulnerable. He longed for cousins and uncles and Sunday football and barbeque, like the other kids in his class.
“Do you know about Vincent King?”
Duchess took his hand as they crossed onto Fisher. “Why, what do you know about him?”
“That he killed Aunt Sissy. Thirty years ago. In the seventies, when men had mustaches and Mom wore her hair funny.”
“Sissy wasn’t our aunt, not really.”
“She was,” he said simply. “She looked like you and Mom. The same.”
Duchess had got the bones of the story over the years, from Star when she slurred it, from the archives at the library in Salinas. The same library where she’d spent the past spring working on their family tree. She’d traced Radley roots back far, then dropped the book to the floor when she’d made the link to a wanted outlaw named Billy Blue Radley. It was the kind of find she’d been proud of, something more when she stood up front and presented to the class. There was still a whole load of nothing on her father’s side, just the kind of question mark that drew an angry exchange with her mother. Not once but twice Star had been with a stranger, got herself pregnant, left two children with a lifetime of wondering just whose blood pumped their veins. Slut, she’d whispered beneath her breath. It saw her grounded for a month.
“You know he’s coming out of prison today?” Robin kept his tone hushed like it was a grave secret.
“Who told you that?”
“Ricky Tallow.”
Ricky Tallow’s mother worked dispatch at Cape Haven PD.
“What else did Ricky say?”
Robin looked away.
“Robin?”
He folded quick. “That he should’ve fried for it. But then Miss Dolores yelled at him.”
“Should’ve fried. You know what that means?”
“No.”
Duchess took his hand across onto Virginia Avenue, the lots a little bigger. The town of Cape Haven tumbled its way toward the water, land value inverse to the hills; Duchess knew her place, their home on the furthest street from the ocean.
They fell in with a group of kids. Duchess heard talk about the Angels and the draft.
When they got to the gate she fussed with his hair once more and made sure his shirt was buttoned right.
Kindergarten stood beside Hilltop Middle. Duchess would spend her break at the fence, looking over at her brother. He’d wave and smile and she’d eat her sandwich and watch him.
“You be good.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t say nothing about Mom.”
She hugged him, kissed his cheek and sent him in, watching till Miss Dolores took over. Then she moved on, the sidewalk thick with kids.
Duchess kept her head down as she passed the steps, where a group gathered, Nate Dorman and his friends.
Nate, collar flicked up, sleeves rolled over skinny biceps. “Heard your mom got fucked up again.”
Laughter chorused.
She squared to him straight off.
He stared back. “What?”
She met his eye. “I am the outlaw, Duchess Day Radley, and you are the coward, Nate Dorman.”
“You’re crazy.”
She took a step forward and watched him swallow. “Talk about my family again and I’ll behead you, motherfucker.”
He tried a laugh but didn’t quite manage it. There were rumors about her; despite the pretty face and slight frame, she could turn, lose it so bad not even his friends would step in.
She pushed past, heard him exhale heavily as she walked on, into school, eyes burning from another tortured night.
3
THE ERODING CLIFFS RAN A twisting mile before the road swept the bay and vanished into the tall oaks of Clearwater Cove. Walk followed the line, never edging past thirty.