• • • • • • • • • •

“So Pearl moved out and now you’re taking her on a date?” Thompson chalked his cue and sank two balls.

I watched him line up his next shot and threw back half a Shiner. “Not exactly. Her group is taking her barhopping to celebrate her turning twenty-one. I’m just… tagging along. As her designated driver.”

“Hell, man—twenty-one? Thought Pearl was in your and Rick’s year? She’s barely older’n Amber—and Amber’s still got two or three years left at A&M.” His little sister was the only Thompson kid to go to college. He sank one of my stripes and cussed.

“Pearl moved up a year.” I lined up my shot and sank one ball in the far corner.

“And the folks you’re tagging along with—they’re all grad students? Scientists? Fuck, Wynn. That setup would intimidate the shit outta me, and I’ve been to prison.”

He’d nailed it. Not much unsettled me, but being the soon-to-be-jobless mechanic among a bunch of academics—got that word from Pearl—was fucking intimidating. But she’d never asked me to go out with her—in public—before. Hell if I was saying no.

“Brit swears there’s wedding bells in your future.”

Scratch. “Dammit, Thompson.” I glared, and he chuckled. Christ. Why couldn’t Brit limit spouting her damned ridiculous speculations to me? “Since when have you and Brit been getting cozy?” I asked, which shut him up right quick. They’d had a falling out when she’d defected to his little brother in high school. Brit went where the weed was back then. Meth wasn’t her poison, and she wanted nothing to do with it, which meant she’d stopped wanting anything to do with Randy.

“She’s stopped by the shop a time or two since I got out.” He replaced the cue ball and sank his last two solids and then the eight ball. “Nice to know how I can finally beat you at pool, man. Mention the word wedding and you go down like I jerked a knot in your tail.”

I grabbed the triangle to rack the balls. That word didn’t rattle me as it related to Pearl, except in the utter impossibility that I would ever be good enough to make her mine.

Pearl

“Most people are away at college when they turn twenty-one, Mama. I’m a college graduate.”

She wrung her hands. “I understand that, mija. I’m only worried about your safety. You’re telling me you’re going to go out and drink excessively, on purpose… it’s just not like you.”

I sighed. Getting wasted on a regular basis wasn’t something I’d ever done—that much was true—but I hadn’t abstained altogether. Even if alcohol hadn’t played a prominent part in my college experience, I’d done my share of partying and suffered the crappy hangovers to prove it. Not that I was going to confess that.

“Boyce will take care of me.” I raised my left hand and placed the other atop the Better Homes & Gardens on the coffee table. “No alcohol poisoning. No driving drunk.”

Her jaw locked.

“What?”

“What about him? What good does it do for you not to drive drunk if he may do it?”

Jeez. “He won’t. This was his idea, Mama—he promised to be my designated driver for the night, and there’s no one I trust more.”

“I see.” She arched a brow, looking at me, but then she blinked, lips parted, dark eyes locked on my face. “What’s happened between you and that boy in the past few weeks, Pearl?”

I was tired of denying his importance to me. There was no reason to hide it, not anymore. Not after living with him half the summer. Not when he was leaving, maybe forever. “It hasn’t been just the past few weeks, Mama. Boyce and I have been close friends for a very long time.” Close friends who’d shared moments in his bed that made my toes curl in my boots just thinking about them. “I trust him completely. You can trust him. I’ll probably be hammered when I get home, but I’ll get home.” Safe and sound, he’d said.

“He seems like a decent young man,” Thomas said. “Been running that garage alone, hasn’t he, since his father died?”

“He’s been running it alone since his father got sick a few years ago. He was half-running it when we were in high school.”

“So Wynn’s belongs to him now?” he asked. Thomas drove Mama’s Mercedes and his Nissan pickup to the dealership in Corpus when they needed maintenance. He’d never used a mechanic on the island.

“No. His parents never divorced, and there was a will leaving everything to his mother. The garage, the trailer, everything belongs to her now. She abandoned Boyce and his brother—who died in Iraq right before Boyce started high school—to fend for themselves with an abusive, alcoholic father. I don’t blame her for running from him—Boyce doesn’t blame her—but he was seven! How could she leave him there?”

Mama said nothing, but her lips pressed so tight they’d lost color and her hands were tight fists. She’d left her home and everything she’d known to protect herself and me before I was even born. I’d watched her refuse everything Thomas offered until he extended his proposal to adopting me, until he swore to love and care for me as if I’d been his natural-born child.

Thomas frowned. “I remember when his brother died. Brent Wynn. True hometown hero—decorated for bravery postmortem, I think. I had no idea about their father. Will Boyce remain at Wynn’s working for his mama, then?”

I shook my head. “We think she just wants whatever cash she can get for it now. He built that place up to what it is now, thinking it would be his. He’s proud and strong, and he’s survived things I can’t even let myself think about. Now he’s losing the one thing that mattered to him—that garage. He’ll probably find a job as a mechanic, but not here. He can’t stay and watch her dismantle everything he’s done.”

I pulled at a loose thread on my skirt to hide the desolation I felt at the thought of his departure. Once he put down roots elsewhere, a rift would begin to form between us. It was inevitable. There would be nothing for him here anymore.

• • • • • • • • • •

La Playa was always packed wall-to-wall, but on Fridays it was overrun. There were usually as many people waiting for a table as there were people eating, but the owner was one of Boyce’s numerous satisfied customers. We’d been seated at a pieced-together table for ten in less than twenty minutes.