Reckless: A Bad Boy Musicians Romance Read online

  Apparently that’s going around today. Change is catching, and I’m not sure I want to have any part of it.

  ‘I… I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Sorry. That’s fine. Let me know how it works out.’

  I’m not in the mood to fight it, but I can’t hide the snappy tension in my voice – not from Mom and Pete, who are used to me and can tell when there’s something wrong even if they’re not prying me open for details. I’m suddenly extremely glad I’m not working the afternoon shift alongside them. Perhaps it would be better for me to just go home, lose myself in some trash TV or a good book, and try to forget that today has ever happened.

  ‘It’s just an idea, Carrie,’ Pete says gently. ‘Might not even come to anything. I’ll just cook up some things, try a few new recipes out, see if any of them take off. Maybe your Mom decides not to go along with it – but hey, worst case scenario she gets a nice fancy dinner out of it, eh?’

  ‘Pssh,’ my mother says. ‘Only one? After I carried all this food in by myself? You’re out of your mind.’

  And what about me? I want to say. Do I get a say in it? Or am I still just the kid waitress who has to wait for the adults to finish talking?

  I’m digging my fingernails into my palm, hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to draw blood. It’s not about the menu, I know that. I’m not exactly thrilled about it, but this reaction – this overreaction – has far more to do with Hale than the thought of Pete suddenly serving rocket salad or melanzane alla parmigiana from Dad’s old kitchen. I still can’t shake myself free of that sad look in his eyes, or his words.

  Everyone makes mistakes, Carrie.

  Did he really think me staying was a mistake? Really? I was a sixteen-year-old girl, for God’s sake. I had a future – a future I wanted to share with him, but it was still mine. I had plans. I had goals. I couldn’t just throw them away on a one-in-a-million lottery that just happened to pay off. I couldn’t–

  ‘Carrie?’

  My mother is looking at me; down to my clenched fists, and then back at my face. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  I nod. I’m scared if I talk my voice will crack, and her parental concern will sweep away any chance I have of getting out of here any time soon. Thankfully, she seems in the mood to pick up on my hints. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘Enough menu talk for now. How’s business going today?’

  I spread my hands to the empty restaurant. ‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘Booming.’

  ‘Caroline…’

  ‘We’re fine. We just opened back up again.’

  ‘Just now? It was supposed to be at four.’

  How can I explain it? Why bother? ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I lost track of the clock, I guess.’

  ‘You know we’re never going to get more customers if we don’t open on time, right?’

  ‘I know, Mom.’

  ‘Consistency,’ she says. ‘That’s what people want. Good food, fair prices, and an open door when the sign says it’s going to be open. Your father –’ She manages to stop herself before I can stop her, but it doesn’t matter. We both know what she’s thinking.

  Your father would have opened on time.

  That’s true. The man was like clockwork, and it’s precisely because of his reliability that the Red Rose Diner managed to hold its own for so long. How could I possibly compete with that?

  I’m doing my best, I want to tell her – to shout, to scream, to yell until she understands me. It’s not my fault I ended up stuck in this town, managing this diner. This wasn’t the life I wanted. It wasn’t the life I asked for.

  But I don’t, because Dad wouldn’t have. Because that’s the standard I need to hold myself to. It’s certainly the standard that everyone else will be holding me to, anyway.

  Then again, I think, Dad wouldn’t have changed the menu, so…

  Before I can respond, Mom lays a soft hand on mine. ‘It’s OK, honey,’ she says. It’s the same voice she’d use when I was a little girl, the voice that followed dropped ice cream cones and skinned knees and made everything alright again. ‘We’re doing OK.’

  It helps, but not as much as I think she is expecting it to.

  ‘What got you so distracted, anyway?’ she asks.

  From out in the kitchen, Pete lets out a little laugh to himself. I shoot him a glare, and he gives me a silent nod in return. I’m fine with him ribbing me in private – well, fine-ish – but I don’t want him to bring Hale up in front of Mom, who’ll be able to figure out the full story and won’t approve in the least. He’s got enough wits about him to go with me on it and not ask why.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just thinking.’

  ‘That’s my Carrie,’ she says. ‘Always with your head in the clouds.’

  It stings, a little more than it should. It’s not that I doubt her affection towards me, but… well, sometimes my mother is a difficult woman to be around. I love her, and deeply, but I worry that maybe when Dad died, the best part of her died too. The charm. The optimism. The willingness to dream.

  Leave her be, Rosie, he would have said if he was here. Of course she’s got her head in the clouds. How else are you supposed to get the best view? Then he’d smile that smile, a wide beam that swept you along in its path like a tornado, leaving you never quite sure where it was going to put you down. He’d grab her by the hand, twirl her around, and they’d dance right there on the floor of the diner, her laughter as she told him to get off her reaching every corner of the building, spilling out onto the street outside, and he’d refuse, would continue mugging for laughs until she broke and until I joined in, would take me by the hand and twirl me around, and we’d dance, dance, dance…

  Days gone by. Sweet and bitter.

  ‘Oh look,’ Mom says, pulling me out of my dream and back to monotone reality. ‘Someone dropped a wallet.’

  And that’s when I feel my heart freeze in my chest.

  That’s not a conversation I want to have – not now, not ever. There’s no way my mother will have forgotten the name, or the feelings that went along with it: the emptiness, the loss of appetite, the nights I cried myself to sleep after he left. She was never what you’d call Hale’s biggest fan in the first place, but after he ran away I could tell she found it hard to keep even the most basic level of civility towards him and his memory. The thought that he was back in town, not least that he had been right here in the diner – back to hurt me again, no doubt – would lead to an argument I wasn’t in any mood to hurry long.

  She reaches to pick it up, but Pete is quicker. His hand darts out to the red leather billfold like a viper.

  Sweet relief.

  ‘Al’s,’ he says hurriedly as she raises a disapproving eyebrow at him. ‘He must have dropped it when he was in here earlier. Honestly, with those damn glasses of his it’s no wonder he didn’t notice.’ He snatches the leather billfold up before my mother can get enough of a look at it to see that it’s emphatically not the kind of wallet a man like Alan Ridgewick would be carrying around in his Levis, let alone crack it open and find out for sure. He looks inside, makes an obvious show of sliding out the license – I’m sure making a careful note of the name, so he can quiz me about it later – and then closes it up tight. ‘Yep. It’s Al’s, alright,’ he says, and then slowly, unmissably: ‘Someone should probably take it back to him.’

  ‘I’ll do it!’ Mom and Pete stare at me like I’ve gone mad. It’s a little too enthusiastic, but I don’t care. I’ve got the perfect excuse to go and see Hale again, and I’m not letting it get away. ‘I mean, you know, I’ll go.’

  My mother sniffs at the very idea. ‘Oh, let him come and get it,’ she says. ‘He’s in here every day. He probably hasn’t even realised it’s gone.’

  ‘I’ve got the afternoon off and it’s practically on my way home.’ I shrug. ‘No big deal.’

  ‘It’s at least ten minutes out of your way.’

  ‘I’m in the mood for a walk. You know. Exercise. G
ood for the soul.’

  If my mother is about to voice another objection, she decides against it. Pete tosses me the wallet just as the first of the dinner run’s customers come through the door, a family with a bunch of small children, and I’m out of the door before she can ask me to help her out. I turn around for just long enough to see Pete grinning at me through the glass. Have fun, he mouths silently.

  I wait until I’m around the corner until I call for a cab. I don’t know about fun, exactly, but I sure as hell plan to get myself some answers.

  By my reckoning, they’re way past due.

  Chapter Four

  FISCHER,

  HALE ANTHONY

  428 E 36TH STREET

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK 11234

  I must have read over that little plastic card a thousand times on the way to the trailer park. A dozen or so words, but no answers. Just like its owner, I think. The license doesn’t tell me much, but I can still piece together fragments – and until I get to Hale’s trailer and confront him in person, that will have to do.

  New York.

  Even with the words there in bright, bold capitals, I find it difficult to believe. I mean, I knew he must have gone somewhere when he left; it wasn’t as though I thought he’d up and disappeared off the face of the earth, even though that would have been a much less painful explanation as to why he’d never called, or emailed, or even written me a simple letter. I figured that he’d probably set out north, maybe tried to get work on a farm or something – you know, some casual labour, where he could put his strength to work and earn himself just enough money to get by. Perhaps he even might have got as far as Austin or Dallas – but New York? New York, of all places? It never even occurred to me that he might have travelled so far from home.

  It's been ten years, a little voice in my head reminds me. A lot can happen in ten years. A lot can change.

  As if I don’t already know that.

  Jesus, even his license photo looks good. How is that possible? I’m pretty sure there are laws against that sort of thing.

  The picture is a couple of years old, and the face that stares back at me is in a sort of transition between the Hale I used to know and the Hale who walked into the diner this afternoon, but it leans towards the latter. The hair is neat, shorter than I’m used to; it’s a good look for him. But then again, what isn’t?

  And what else?

  There’s not a lot else to go off; no photos of loved ones, no hidden notes. Fifty or so dollars in bills, plus a little change jingling in the pocket. A bank card, complete with his looping signature. A card from the Red Cross proudly announcing that he’s a blood donor. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary – or even noticeable, but for the fact of who it belongs to.

  The wallet itself, though… that’s a different story. It’s an impressive piece of work. Real leather, detailed stitching, not machine-made. The kind of wallet that costs more than most wallets will ever hold inside them. The kind of wallet that is less about convenience and more about sending a message.

  What the hell happened to Hale in New York that he could afford something like this? How did he go from thrift shop clothes to fine leather goods? Was it a gift, perhaps – and if so, from whom? A rich girlfriend? A wife? What anniversary is leather, anyway? Third? Fourth? No later than that, surely?

  My God, what if he’s married?

  I really don’t know him at all, I think. Not the new Hale, anyway. The old Hale, I had a pretty good handle on – although even he had secrets. Things he would never willingly have shared with me. Things he kept to himself, bottled up tight in the fear of… what, exactly? That they’d drive me away? That I couldn’t understand?

  I’m tired of secrets. I want it all to come out, every last bit of it. It’s the only way for me to be sure of anything right now. I have to know it all.

  The cab pulls to a stop just outside the trailer park. Dick Willis, owner of the only taxi in Eden, looks over his shoulder at me. ‘Here you go,’ he says, unable to keep the uncertainty out of his voice. ‘You sure this is the place, Carrie?’

  I nod. I might not be sure about much at the moment, but this is something I have to do.

  ‘Well, each to their own, I guess. That’ll be eleven dollars, thank you kindly.’ I hand him a ten and a five and gesture for him to keep the change, which he does without question, pocketing the money so fast it’s as though he thinks it’s going to float away on the breeze. If only he was so liberal with his tips at the diner, I think. Maybe we wouldn’t be struggling so much.

  I’m here. It’s time – and yet I can’t help but pause before I get out of the car. ‘Something wrong, honey?’ he says.

  ‘Could you wait here?’ I ask. ‘Just for ten minutes. I don’t know if my… friend is going to be in.’ I hand him another ten-dollar bill to cover his costs, but he waves it away.

  ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t be right to leave a girl like you stranded in a place like this, especially when I’ve got to drive back either way. No extra charge.’ I’m not exactly sure what Dick thinks is going to happen to me, but I have a pretty good idea that his mind has gone to the Worst Case Scenario, as though the Grove is a lawless wasteland rather than a trailer park just like one of thousands like it in the country. Yes, the police get called out here on a far-too-regular basis, and yes, sometimes on still summer nights it’s hard to tell whether or not the noises that come echoing over the flat, dry landscape are firecrackers or rifle shots – but then again, that’s Texas for you: Praise God and Pass the Ammunition. If it explodes, we’ll take two.

  You’ll be fine, I tell myself. Hale’s here. Probably.

  It helps, but not a lot. I’m a lot more scared of what Hale might tell me than I am of anything else the Grove might throw out.

  ‘I’ll be a little ways up the road,’ he says. ‘You just wave if you need me to come and drive by. If not, I’ll scoot, OK?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. Even if Hale is here, I still have an immediate out if things go south – or at least, as long as they go south quickly. ‘And Dick?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If you call into the diner, maybe don’t tell my mother about this?’

  He nods slowly; driver-passenger confidentiality is apparently still alive and well. ‘I think I can manage that. You be careful, OK?’

  ‘I will.’ I hope.

  ‘Atta girl.’

  The Grove is technically Heaton Grove, named after the illustrious John J. Heaton of the Texas Rangers, who died at the Alamo and apparently whose death was considered to be enough to give the place a little bit of class – that is, back when it had been a town in the making rather than a backwoods cemetery for rusted-out trucks and trailers to plod through their final days. Once upon a time, there were rumours that a big housing development would be placed here, and then… well, and then the war happened, and somehow other plans took precedence. People who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else moved in on the empty land, and it became the place it is today.

  Even Dick didn’t want to wait just outside. The Grove’s reputation long precedes it.

  This would be a lot easier if I knew where the hell Hale lived, I tell myself. I’ve never been to the Grove before, and it’s bigger than I was expecting; trailers sprawl out in all directions, none of which I particularly want to try my luck at knocking on. There aren’t many people around, but the few I can see don’t seem particularly inviting. To my right, there’s an old man asleep on his porch, a mean-looking pitbull terrier with visible ribs chained up at his side. To my left, there’s a woman standing just outside the door to her trailer, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, watching me with an almost predatory leer.

  It sends a shiver through me, but I decide to go with the woman. Female solidarity, I guess. Nothing to do with the dog at all.

  She keeps her eyes focused on me as I walk up to her, her disbelief only seeming to grow with the realisation that not only am I not lost, but that I’m act
ually talking to her.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, trying to keep the same friendliness I’d honed over a decade of slinging plates for a living. ‘I was wondering if you could help me, maybe?’ The woman doesn’t reply, so it doesn’t seem likely – either willing or able – but I press on anyway. ‘I’m looking for a friend,’ I say. ‘Hale Fischer? Have you seen him around?’

  ‘Who?’ She spits the word out like a rotten tooth.

  ‘Hale Fischer. H-A-L-E. He used to live around here.’

  The woman shrugs. ‘Maybe, maybe not. What’s it worth to you?’

  ‘Five dollars.’

  ‘Pssh.’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Ten bucks? For me to tell you what I know?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Cash up front.’

  I pull out the ten dollars I was going to give to Dick, still neatly folded in the pocket of my jeans – the last money I have on me, except for the contents of Hale’s wallet – and hand it across to her. She folds it up into a neat little square and tucks it inside of her bra for safekeeping.

  And says nothing. Instead, she takes a long, slow drag of her cigarette, the glowing tip burning down almost to her fingers, and then breathes the smoke out up towards the sky.

  ‘Well?’ I ask.

  ‘Well what?’ she says. ‘Ten bucks to find out what I know. Well, I don’t know shit.’ She cackles to herself, as if she’s just pulled the kind of fast one that would have made Houdini proud.

  ‘So what? You just robbed me?’

  She shrugs again. ‘I didn’t do a damn thing. You handed it over for a fair trade. It’s not my fault you’re a sucker.’ She stubs the cigarette out on the aluminium siding of her home. ‘Now, if you want to prove you’ve got any brains in that pretty little head of yours, you’ll get the hell off my property before I decide we have a problem.’