Read Online Keeping Promise Rock by Amy Lane - Free Book Online Page A

goddamned town.
    That hadn’t been his intention. His intention had been to go and pay his respects to the guy who used to goof off during lunch with him, and Deacon was at his elbow, just for good measure. He walked up to the coffin and saw the pallid, dead flesh doing a poor imitation of his friend and murmured, “I should have taken you up on that kiss, Brian,” just loud enough for Deacon to hear, but no one else. Deacon took his elbow then, and they turned around to find themselves face to face with Brian’s mother.
    She looked half-crazed.
    She was a licorice-thin woman with big blonde hair and a big bust line who had spent most of Brian’s life looking for a daddy to replace the one who hadn’t stepped up. Brian had thought she was beautiful, but she didn’t look that way that night, because people in pain, people grieving, often had red eyes, a red nose, big bags under their eyes from being sleepless, and an air about them that was more than a little bit insane.
    Crick could respect that. He looked pretty much the same.
    “I’m so sorry, Ms. Carter,” he mumbled, and her face twisted into something ugly.
    “Is it true?” she asked. “Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me you and my boy weren’t… being all perverted this whole time. Tell me you weren’t riding around this town, doing the nasty behind my back! The whole town is saying it… tell me it isn’t true.”
    Crick looked helplessly at Deacon, who gaped like a fish back. Of all things….
    “Jesus, lady,” Deacon said. “Of all things to be worried about, this is what you grieve?”
    “I ain’t talking to you, Deac!” she snapped with so much venom that Deacon blinked. “I’m asking this dirty little Mex kid if he touched my baby!”
    “No,” Crick said numbly, wanting to give her whatever comfort he could manage. If her problem was that Crick was Mexican, well, he could put her mind at rest. “Brian and I were friends. We had the same classes, Keeping Promise Rock

    and we both liked art, and we had to be gay in this dumb town, that’s all.
    We were never… you know, together.”
    He was unprepared for the crack of her hand across his cheek, or for her to scream “Faggot!” in his face with full force and spittle.
    But by the time Deacon pulled up in front of his house after a tense, sorrowful, and silent drive, the numbness had worn off, and he was a little bit prepared to find all his belongings slagged on a blanket on the front lawn.
    “You stay in the car,” Deacon said quietly. “I’ll start packing. Here.” He pulled out his cell phone and handed it over. “You call Parish and tell him to get your room ready. He’s been waiting for this to happen since you were nine.”
    Crick made the call and left a message, watching distantly as Deacon started to stack his books together. He saw a white flutter, and Deacon lurched after it as it flitted across the yard like a hurt bird. Crick realized what it was and belatedly threw himself out of the truck to get it before Deacon did—and before it became public property in general.
    Deacon got to it first.
    He stared at it blankly in the glare of the headlamps and then blinked. A faint smile touched his square-jawed face, and he put the paper gently in Crick’s hands.
    “That’s real good, Crick,” he said, his voice kind. “Goddamned beautiful, in fact—but you’ve got to know, it’s not really me.” It was a picture of Deacon, sitting on Promise Rock, from Crick’s perspective, sitting below him. He was looking out over the water, his chest bare, his shell necklace—the one that Crick had given him for Christmas five years ago—making him look vulnerable somehow. Crick had drawn what he saw—he couldn’t be responsible for the aura of kindness, of strength, of beauty that seemed to surround Deacon without his knowledge.
    “Of course it’s you,” Crick said, puzzled and a little relieved.
    Deacon thought it was good. “You remember that day.” Deacon looked