In Silence

The porch swing creaked. A figure separated from the silhouette of the overgrown sweet olive at the end of the porch. Her steps faltered.

“Hello, Avery.”

Hunter, she realized, bringing a hand to her chest. She let out a shaky breath. “I’ve lived in the city too long. You scared the hell out of me.”

“I have that effect on people.”

Although she smiled, she could see why that might be true. Half his face lay in shadow, the other half in the light from the porch fixture. His features looked hard in the weak light, his face craggy, the lines around his mouth and eyes deeply etched. A few days’ accumulation of beard darkened his jaw.

She would have crossed the street to avoid him in D.C.

How could the two brothers have grown so physically dissimilar? she wondered. Growing up, though fraternal not identical twins, the resemblance between them had been uncanny. She would never have thought they could be other than near mirror images of one another.

“I’d heard you were back,” he said. “Obviously.”

“News travels fast around here.”

“This is a small town. They’ve got to have something to talk about.”

He had changed in a way that had less to do with the passage of years than with the accumulated events of those years. The school of hard knocks, she thought. The great equalizer.

“And I’m one of their own,” she said.

“It’s true, then? You’re back to stay?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That’s the buzz. I thought it was wrong.” He shrugged. “But you never know.”

“Meaning what?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest.

“Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“No, of course not.” Annoyed with herself, she dropped her arms. “I had dinner with your parents tonight.”

“And Matt. Heard that, too.”

“I thought you might have been there.”

“So they told you I was living in Cypress Springs?”

“Matt did.”

“And did he tell you why?”

“Only that you’d had some troubles.”

“Nice euphemism.” He swept his gaze over the facade of her parents’ house. “Sorry about your dad. He was a great man.”

“I think so, too.” She jiggled her car keys, suddenly on edge, anxious to be inside.

“Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“What?”

“If I talked to him before he died.”

The question off-balanced her. “What do you mean?”

“It seemed a pretty straightforward question to me.”

“Okay. Did you?”

“Yes. He was worried about you.”

“About me?” She frowned. “Why?”

“Because your mother died before the two of you worked out your issues.”

Issues, she thought. Is that how one summed up a lifetime of hurt feelings, a lifetime of longing for her mother’s unconditional love and approval and being disappointed time and again? Her head filled with a litany of advice her mother had offered her over the years.

“Avery, little girls don’t climb trees and build forts or play cowboys and Indians with boys. They wear bows and dresses with ruffles, not blue-jean cutoffs and T-shirts. Good girls make ladylike choices. They don’t run off to the city to become newspapermen. They don’t throw away a good man to chase a dream.”

“He thought you might be sad about that,” Hunter continued. “She was. He hated that she died without your making peace.”

“He said that?” she managed to get out, voice tight.

He nodded and she looked away, memory flooding with the words she had flung at her mother just before she had left for college.

“Drop the loving concern, Mother! You’ve never approved of me or my choices. I’ve never been the daughter you wanted. Why don’t you just admit it?”

Her mother hadn’t admitted it and Avery had headed off to college with the accusation between them. They had never spoken of it again, though it had been a wedge between them forever more.

“He figured that’s why you hardly ever came home.” Hunter shrugged. “Interesting, you couldn’t come to terms with your mother’s life, he her death.”

She jumped on the last. “What does that mean, he couldn’t come to terms with her death?”

“I would think it’s obvious, Avery. It’s called grieving.”

He was toying with her, she realized. It pissed her off. “And when did all these conversations take place?”

Hunter paused. “We had many conversations, he and I.”

The past two days, her shock and grief, the grueling hours of travel, the onslaught of so much that was both foreign and familiar, came crashing down on her. “I don’t have the energy to deal with your shit, even if I wanted to. If you decide you want to be a decent human being, look me up.”

One corner of his mouth lifted in a sardonic smile. “I didn’t answer your question before, the one about my opinion of the local buzz. Personally, I figured you’d pop your old man in a box and go. Fast as you could.”

She took a step back, stung. Shocked that he would say that to her. That he would be so cruel. After the closeness they had shared. She pushed past him, unlocked her front door and stepped inside. She caught a glimpse of his face, of the stark pain that etched his features as she slammed the door.