Page 6 of Slow Burn
She squinted at him. “Special occasion, my foot. You said the same thing last Thursday when you lost twenty dollars to Jimmy Ray.”
Cole settled closer to Jocelyn, an amused smile dancing along his mouth.
“I didn’t buy the pie!” John argued. “That was all Sissy’s doin’.”
Ellen slapped at his chest. “And who forced you to eat it?”
“I was bein’ polite.”
“Pop’s supposed to cut down on sugar,” Cole murmured.
Jocelyn nodded, expecting as much, but it was hard to look away from the easy affection that bounced between John and Ellen, aching at the what-might-have-been of a scene like that.
“Cole, go on and pour Jocelyn a glass of lemonade and settle in the front room ‘til supper’s ready,” Ellen suggested, her reproachful look still directed toward her husband.
“Please, Ellen, let me help,” Jocelyn offered, though Cole pushed away from the wall and walked across the kitchen to do his mama’s bidding.
“Oh, no, Honey. You just relax,” Ellen said, handing the bag of steaks to John so he could work on seasoning them for the grill.
“But—”
“She doesn’t abide arguin’,” Cole said softly as he poured the lemonade.
Ellen turned to pat his cheek affectionately before she set to work on whatever fixings she’d planned for dinner.
Jocelyn couldn’t help feeling like Ellen was dividing them this way on purpose, and the pinch at the edges of Cole’s mouth said he suspected it, too. He still managed a gentle smile as he tipped his head for Jocelyn to follow him across the hall, two glasses of lemonade in his hands.
The floor complained as they shuffled along through the wide cased opening into the modest living room. A small fireplace sat to the left, its mantel crowded by snapshots of memory, frames overlapping each other so it was hard to differentiate any single image.
One picture stood out, though, drawing her forward. The last one she’d sent several years back, not long after she’d graduated college. Tilting her head, she took in the self-conscious smile, the uncertainty that plagued her twenty-two-year-old self obvious in her face. So much and so little had changed.
There were several of Cole through the years. His rebellious stage, not smiling at the camera, his curly hair long and swept across his forehead, hiding half his face. His high school graduation, a picture of him in front of the restaurant and bar he now owned.
Cole set the glasses on the coffee table and settled on a big leather couch the color of butterscotch candy. The weight of his gaze was hard to ignore.
“It’s an honor to have my photo up here with all these family memories,” she said, desperate to fill the appraising silence.
He leaned into the couch, stretching his arm across the back in a casual way. Very little in his contained stillness seemed casual, though. “Been a picture of you in that frame since that day.”
She didn’t know if he expected her to react to that or to the reminder of what happened twenty years ago—if he expected a reaction at all. Was he bothered that her picture was included with all the images that cluttered the shelf? It was hard to read him, and it unsettled her. She thought maybe there was a question he wanted to ask, but he didn’t voice it.
“It was an impulse,” she said, forced into the confession by his silence. “Sending my picture in my thank you letter to your dad.”
His eyebrows shifted up a fraction, but he said nothing to prompt her. Another wave of uncertainty danced through her.
“He deserved it—my gratitude. But I also had a lot of feelings back then.”Still do,she thought. “And I didn’t have anywhere to put them. Moving away from everything I’d known after losing my mama like that made me latch onto whatever I could. Writing letters to your parents helped me get my bearings.”
The words poured out, more than she’d meant to share, but she stopped before she admitted the most embarrassing part to Cole: that she’d briefly developed a crush on his dad. It was a silly thing a kid in elementary school might do, and certainly understandable from an adult perspective. But it was still uncomfortable to acknowledge that was part of what prompted her to write.
The memory of being cradled against the strong, broad chest while she screamed for her mama was what pushed her to stuff that picture into the envelope. The blue eyes that had held such sympathy, the way he’d said, “You’ll be alright, baby girl,” in that masculine southern drawl, the faintest molasses in his baritone, had solidified her life-long admiration, though she’d moved on from the childish crush.
“Ma’s always enjoyed your letters,” Cole said. His eyes were so much the same as his dad’s—mournful azure pools that seemed to pierce down to the marrow. A smile tugged one side of his mouth up. “She talks about you often.”
Warmth filled Jocelyn’s chest, and a twin bloom of anxiety formed in her stomach. Although she cared deeply for his parents, and maybe by extension him, she knew that what she was doing here would ruffle some feathers. Maybe even theirs. But it was worth burning bridges if it meant getting answers, and she could finally put her mama’s memory to rest. Twenty years was a long time to wait for the truth, and too long for those responsible to live scot-free.
Cole’s gaze sharpened as if he could sense something hidden behind her expression. Maybe it was in her body language. Shewastwisting the high school ring that’d belonged to her mama around her right ring finger. It was one of few things Jocelyn had of hers after the fire destroyed everything else, and that was mostly because it had been at Nan’s house, abandoned after her father had broken her mama’s heart years before.
Jocelyn wore a pair of her earrings, too. She’d brought everything she still had of her mama’s, hoping those few items would help tether her to the town Bonnie Murphy had grown up and died in.
