Read Online Homespun by Layla M. Wier - Free Book Online

Laura, but you certainly sound like her.”
    Well, at least now he had some inkling of what they’d talked about. Given Laura’s reaction, he could guess how it had gone. “You know you’re part of our family, Ker. I mean, that’s the whole point of—everything.”
    Kerry switched the black paint for red without bothering to clean the brush. Crimson laced with long black streaks crossed the canvas in the other direction. “The part of your family that you hide in the barn when company comes, you mean?”
    “I don’t do that!”
    “Maybe not as such, but you’re not exactly introducing me around at the feed store, are you?”
    For God’s sake, sometimes conversations with Kerry were like a three-legged race with a partner who kept trying to run the wrong way. Owen ran a hand through his gray Homespun | Layla M. Wier
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    burr cut, trying to keep his temper. “What are we talking about here? Just talk plain for once, Ker. Is this about you and me, or you and your dad, or me and Laura—which?”
    “I don’t know! All of it!” Kerry seized a tube of red paint and with a hard, angry squeeze, unloaded half its contents directly onto the canvas, then dragged the brush through it.
    Owen had butchered too many animals not to be reminded of half-clotted blood. “I don’t want to talk about this! For once in your life, Owen, leave me alone.”
    “I try ! Why do you come here if you don’t want to see me?”
    Kerry didn’t answer, painting in furious silence.
    “Why did you come here at all?” he tried again. Words…
    he was so bad with words. Kerry was part of the farm, part of them , and if he couldn’t see that….
    Kerry turned around, his face twisted. “You don’t know why I come here? Why I’ve always come here?”
    “Tell me,” Owen said, his voice little more than a whisper. For once in your life, TALK to me.
    “To get away . This is where I go to get away, Owen, and that’s why I left the city the first time. I came north because everyone I loved was dying, and I thought I was going to die too, and at some point I couldn’t take it anymore.”
    Of all the aspects of his life Kerry never talked about, that was the one he really left alone. The 1990s. The AIDS
    years. “I know—” Owen began.
    “No. You don’t.” The words were sharp slashes, like red paint on canvas. “You weren’t there , Owen. You weren’t in the war. You were safe here in—in fucking Mayberry, with your daughter and your wife and your apple-pie neighbors and your goddamn picket fence. I’m sure you read about Homespun | Layla M. Wier
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    AIDS and thought, oh no, how terrible, just like all of your mom-dad-and-the-kids neighbors, but it never hit you where you lived.”
    “Like hell it didn’t,” Owen said. Nancy always used to say it took a lot to get him mad, but when he blew his top, it blew hard. And he was working his way, very slowly, toward a good mad now. “You think I didn’t know what was going on down there with you, Ker? That I didn’t ask myself if every time I saw you was the last time? I know you, Kerry. I knew you’d die alone in a rat-infested apartment somewhere in the city rather than ask us for help. Do you think I never thought about that? Had nightmares about that, wondering if you just wouldn’t come back one time, and we’d never know? And do you think,” he said, taking a step forward,
    “that I never asked myself what would happen to Laura—if I—who’d take care of her if I caught something off you?”
    Kerry didn’t back down, but he went utterly white. “I’m not poz.”
    “How sure can you be? We both had sex knowing it was a possibility. We always have. We’ve been careful, but it could have happened, and you know it, and I know it. I knew it then.”

    THE words fell like blows, and Kerry wanted to do what he’d always done. Run. Instead he stood and fought back.
    “I’d never have hidden it from you if I was poz, Owen. I’d never have done anything without