Chapter 2 #2
It was unusual that I had a week busy enough to keep me away from my brothers, but that happened.
I wasn’t completely out of the loop, because we had a group text.
I was aware that Alisha’s “hold-out” daughter, Bailey, decided that she needed a break from Chicago and finally agreed to give Jackson Falls a try for a little while.
She’d moved into the house Alisha and her daughters Collins and Church used to share.
Now, Perkins lived there with her brood of daughters.
Since she married Bayliss, Alisha had implemented Sunday night dinners.
All of us, the Strongs and Kingsleys met at their house for dinner every Sunday night.
I had no complaints. It helped us connect with one another, keeping our family bond strong even as the family expanded.
Not to mention that Alisha could cook her ass off.
She was such a good cook that even Brewer respected her skills.
I sat at the table facing Bailey. She looked .
. . sad. The vibe was always jovial and lighthearted when the Strongs got together.
And for the most part the Kingsleys had grafted in almost seamlessly.
The laughter and the joking that wasn’t coming from Bailey made it obvious that she wasn’t on the same thing the rest of us were on.
I didn’t know her story, but I knew it couldn’t have been good. I’d heard rumblings that she lost a baby earlier in the year. That alone had me surprised that she was alone. Every time I saw her in the past, she was always loved up with some wack ass, corn-ball dude.
Bailey was a beautiful woman. It went without saying that I noticed her. I just never really paid her much attention. My thought was that if she married a clown dude like him, there was no way we would ever be able to mix.
I’d never been overly friendly to either of them.
She was always with her man. There was no way in hell I would ever engage a bitch like her husband.
Since I wouldn’t engage him, I never engaged his wife either.
It was simply a “hi and bye” situation with both of them.
But now as I sat across from her, there was no way I could ignore the dark cloud hovering over her head.
She was a pretty girl. Beautiful really.
And without him glued to her side, she actually seemed softer.
Less tense. Her face was free of any makeup and she had dyed her once dark hair a mixture of pink and blonde.
That must’ve been something the Kingsley women did when they were in crisis, because when Collins first arrived in Jackson Falls, her hair was dyed a deep green.
The pink hair complemented Bailey’s light brown complexion and her hazel eyes.
Her nose was a little too narrow to be considered wide, and her teeth were straight and white.
But my favorite of her facial features was her lips.
They were full—just pouty as hell for absolutely no reason at all.
Swollen like somebody was kissing them minutes earlier, or like she’d been sucking dick. I shook my head to clear that thought.
I let my eyes sweep over her oval shaped face one last time.
Collins’s face was heart-shaped, but I heard that all of the Kingsley girls had different fathers.
That was one of Alisha’s biggest shames.
She thought we would judge her for it, but my brother didn’t allow her to sit in embarrassment.
He charged it to the game. Told her that she was just looking for love in the wrong places. And with him she had finally found it.
After dinner, Sunday night morphed into a chill session.
Bayliss would put either the football or basketball game on the big screen, and we would hang as a family.
As soon as we finished cleaning up, I watched Bailey disappear out the back door and onto the deck.
For some strange reason my feet carried me out after her.
Jackson Falls was a rainy place, but Spring was considered the actual rainy season.
Regardless of the weather, the view from Bayliss’s backyard was still the shit.
You could see the snow-capped mountains in the distance dotted with hundreds of evergreen trees.
She stood by the deck railing looking at something I couldn’t see.
“You okay?”
“Not really,” she replied softly. “I haven’t been okay since January 21st.”
“What happened on January 21st?”
She didn’t respond. I didn’t push. “How long you think you’re gonna be in Jackson Falls?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Anybody given you a tour of the town?”
“Nah. This is like, the second time I’ve been out of the house since I’ve been here.”
“How long have you been here?”
“About a week.”
I shook my head. “And you haven’t been nowhere? I gotta get you out.”
“Uhm, no you don’t. When I’m ready for a tour, I’ll let my mom or my sisters know. They’ve got me. They’ll make sure I know where everything is.”
“Well, now you have three brothers-in-law . . . and a step daddy.”
She laughed, the lifting of her cheeks lighting up her entire face.
“You have more people in your corner than you know. Be ready at ten tomorrow morning. I’mma grab you and we’re gonna make some noise in Jackson Falls.”
“Why?”
I stared at her momentarily. “You look like you need to think about something other than what you’ve been thinking about.”
“No, thank you.”
“That wasn’t a request. I said what I said. Be ready at ten.”
I wasn’t even surprised that Bailey wasn’t ready when I got to the house. She struck me as the stubborn type. I wasn’t necessarily the patient type, but I figured I would let her make it, since it was obvious that she was going through a thing.
Perkins opened the door for me, and after we exchanged greetings, I spotted Bailey on the sofa in her bathrobe. “Quit playing with me,” I told her before taking a seat next to her.
“Ain’t nobody playing but you, uhm, which one are you again?”
Perkins laughed aloud. “This girl is hell, Bright. You sure you wanna be bothered?”
“Yeah.” I pulled out my phone and texted Bayliss. “I wanna be bothered.”
Me: Big Bro, have your girl call her daughter that just moved here. I’m trying to take shorty out and give her a tour of Jackson Falls. She’s tripping and giving me a major hard time.
Bay: You’re not trying to fuck on my step-daughter, are you?
Me: Be for real. I’m trying to be a good brother-in-law. I got about five minutes worth of patience left.
Before his next text came through, Bailey’s phone rang. She checked the screen. “Which one of y’all is a snitch?” She mean-mugged both me and Perkins. “I don’t care what my mama says, I still ain’t going.” She stood from the sofa and left the living room.
“She’s going,” Perkins assured me.
About forty minutes later, Bailey and I were seated across from one another at Butterscotch Café.
I shoveled a forkful or pancakes into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “I hope you don’t think that you sitting here not talking is doing something to me. It ain’t. I’m the youngest of four brothers, sweetheart. If there’s one thing I’ve been in life, it’s ignored.”
That earned me a giggle.
“Listen, we’re here. We’re family . . . two ways. You’ve got one of my brothers married to your sister and one married to your mama. Technically, I’m your uncle.”
She laughed aloud. “I guess technically you are,” she conceded. “And I was raised to respect my elders.”
I eyed her across the table. “Watch that shit. I’m not your elder. How old are you?”
“Thirty-three. How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
“See”—her shoulders bounced up and down in a quick shrug—“elder.”
I waved her off dismissively. “Whatever, man. Talk to me. What’s your thing? What do you like to do?”
She seemed to think about it for a minute.
“I like running. I was on the track team in high school. Not like Sha’Carri.
I was never a speed runner. I did cross country track.
I liked that even though you’re on a team, it’s also individualized.
Growing up as one fourth of the Kingsley sisters, I felt like my entire life was a group project.
Doing cross country was something just for me. ”
“You still run? Do marathons?”
She shook her head as a forlorn expression covered her face. “I don’t. I stopped running years ago. When I met my ex, I introduced him to it. He would go running with me while we were dating. But as soon as I accepted his proposal that stopped.”
“Why?” I took a gulp of my orange juice.
“He said that running wasn’t really for brothers, unless they were being chased by the police. He thought running for fun or just for the sake of running was stupid.”
“Did you agree with him?”
“I didn’t.” She sighed wearily. “But we had just moved in together and the neighborhood wasn’t that great. It was safer for me not to run alone. Once he stopped running with me . . . I let it go.”
I knew her ex was a clown just from the few times I’d been around him. But I didn’t really understand the depth of his clown-ness. I kept those thoughts to myself, and we finished breakfast in a companionable silence.
We left the café and I took her to Second Street. It was the main thoroughfare in Jackson Falls. The street was bustling with Jackson Falls city workers getting everything prepared for the spring festival.
“What is all this?” she asked as we walked. “What are they doing?”
“Getting ready for The Stream Violet Festival.”
“What is a . . . Stream Violet?”
“It’s like a very popular flower in this area of Oregon. I guess back in the day when they would start seeing these Stream Violets grow, they knew that spring was officially on the way.”
“Never heard of anything like that.” She chortled. “So, what do y’all do at this festival? Pick the flowers?”
I stopped walking and turned to look at her. “Don’t do that. People from big cities always try to act like people from small towns are ass backwards. Why would we call it a festival if all we did was pick flowers? Wouldn’t we call it Flower Picking Day or something like that?”
“You’re right. You’re right. It’s not fair of me to make fun of it just because I don’t understand it. Tell me about the Something Violet Festival.”
“The Stream Violet Festival. It’s your run of the mill small-town festival.
You’re gonna have your carnival rides, your outdoor concert.
You’re gonna have your craft booths and your strawberry pie baking contest. There’s a pet parade that runs right down Second Street.
They have about two or three floats, but it’s mostly owners walking their pets.
Sometimes they dress them up in costumes—”
She interrupted me with a small howl of laughter. “That sounds so cute and very small-town. Pets dressed up in costumes marching down Main Street.”
“Second Street.”
She rolled her pretty hazel eyes at me. “Same difference.”
“Anyway, there’s actually a charity 5k. The route goes right through the Stream Violet fields and ends at the Jackson Falls fire station. You wanna do it?”
“A 5k?”
“Yeah. It’s low pressure. I’ll do it with you, and we can walk or run. It doesn’t even matter if we don’t finish, because I’m gonna make a donation either way. All the money goes to research and support for ovarian cancer. My mom lost her youngest sister to it a few years ago.”
She was hesitant, which I expected.
“Come on, sister-in-law. You need to get back to your factory setting.” I wanted to add that she needed to put that clown ass dude in her rearview for real, but I didn’t.
“My factory setting, huh?” She snickered. “You’re probably right.”
I walked us right to City Hall to sign up before she could change her mind.