“Did everyone leave?” She craned her neck to look into the conference room.
“Ms. Comfort is still here,” I stated the obvious as I motioned toward Cheyenne.
“Oh right. But everyone else left?”
I had a gut feeling that Mr. Cocky might be the “everyone else” in this line of inquiry. I had no proof that was the case, but from the expression on her face, I was fairly certain. It got me wondering if there might be a connection to her not being at the front desk when Mr. Cocky was missing.
A nagging irritation rose up in me that I quickly filed under his lack of consideration for both his family’s and my time, but if I were being totally honest, the source might be more accurately attributed to jealousy. Which made zero sense and was not acceptable in any way.
“Right this way.” I stepped past Daisy and ushered Cheyenne into my office, trying to shake off the lingering thoughts of a certain cocky Comfort brother and his sexy half-grin. It was proving very difficult.
CHAPTER 5
Billy
Heat rose from the asphalt as I walked out to the parking lot with Jimmy and Hank. It was springtime and the weather was changing. Days and nights were getting hotter.
We were all silent. That wasn’t unusual for Hank, but it was strange as hell for Jimmy and me. I wasn’t sure if the cat that had our respective tongues was the finality of the will reading or the reappearance of our long-lost sister.
When we reached the point in the lot where it would’ve made sense to break off in different directions to our cars and still none of the three of us had said anything, we stopped in our tracks and just stood there, awkwardly.
It was a damn strange situation. I’d never been at a loss for what to say to my brothers, and they’d certainly never been short of words around me. It wasn’t like we always talked things out in the most civilized or levelheaded ways. Hell, sometimes we yelled until the walls shook, or worked out our differences with our fists. Pretty normal testosterone-driven stuff, especially for three brothers who’d been raised (more or less) by a drunk who had trouble taking care of himself, let alone them.
Yeah, it was clear from our normal mode of interaction that we’d lost the one civilizing influence in our lives when we’d lost our mother, and that any impact she’d been able to impart had been too early to overcome our more rough-and-tumble instincts after she was gone.
But this… Hell. This strained silence was something altogether new.
“Why the fuck did no one tell me that we have a sister?” Jimmy broke the silence in an uncharacteristically harsh tone.
Jimmy was the most laid-back, easy-going, good-natured human being on the planet. He was the “flirt” out of the Fs used to describe us. He didn’t get riled up easily, but looked downright pissed off now. I didn’t blame him, but I also didn’t have an answer for him. It might sound ridiculous, but I’d never thought to bring it up. The day of the funeral, I’d locked away all my emotions and memories and thrown away the key.
It wasn’t just Cheyenne that we didn’t talk about. We never discussed Mama either.
Hank’s jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. “Family meeting. At the house.”
Family meetings were held in one of two places, the bar or the house, depending on where Pop was holed up drinking. If he was at the bar, we’d meet at the house and vice versa. It was strange not having to take that into consideration.
An unwanted emotion began to fill my chest. To be fair, any emotion other than pleasure was unwanted. I tried to live my life maximizing the good and ignoring the bad. It had worked out pretty great for me so far, but I was beginning to think I might need to start facing some of the not-so-pleasant aspects of life. Still, the last thing I wanted to do was relive any more of the past than we already had today. “I’ve got things to do,” I said.
At the same time, Jimmy piped up with, “What food ya got?”
The phrase the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach was more true of Jimmy than any man I’d ever known.
Hank looked at both of us, his expression flatter than a stretch of Kansas highway. Finally, he intoned, “I ain’t askin’.”
With that, he turned and marched to his truck, never looking back once