Page 50 of The Deadbeat Next Door

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“Ready to go?” Cody asked. He was leaning in my doorway, the setting sun behind him, his face in shadow.

“I’d be more ready to go if you’d given me at least a hint about what we’d be doing and what clothes would be most appropriate.” I picked up my overnight bag, packed with jeans and cute tops, one pair of slacks, a sweater, and one dress.

He shrugged. “I’ve got no idea. My momma makes her own agenda. We’ll find out what we’re doing when we get there.”

I followed him out the front door. “It never occurred to you to ask your mother the plan for the weekend?”

He took my bag and threw it behind the seats of his truck. He opened my door and I stepped up and inside the behemoth of a vehicle. “My momma is not prone to openness with me.” He shut my door and jogged around to his own.

“Why not?” I asked.

He started the truck. “I haven’t been so good about keeping in touch or being the doting son she’d like me to be. And she has good reason to be angry with me.”

“What did you do?”

He shrugged and backed out of the driveway. “Disgraced the family, drove my father into an early grave, and then walked away without a look back. All the sort of stuff a no-good, unemployed party boy would do.”

If I thought he was trying to make me feel guilty for all the mean things I’d said about him, I might have agreed with him or told him to shut his face, but he seemed sincere. Was this really what he thought of himself? And when had I started to suspect it wasn’t who he was at all?

“Passenger gets to pick the music, right?” I said, to distract myself from both questions.

“Music is the driver’s prerogative.” He hit a button on the radio and AC/DC’s Back in Black blared from the speakers.

I reached over and tried to find the volume control, but his dashboard was confusing and I wasn’t sure if I was turning down the music or turning down the heat. Finally, I managed to get the music to a reasonable level. “I’m not going to listen to this all the way to Atlanta.”

He reached over and turned it back up. “It would do you good to expand your musical appreciation.”

I turned it back down. “Then let’s take turns. I pick a station, then you pick a station.”

“I’m not one of your students. You can’t convince me to share and be fair by using that sweet, reasonable tone of yours.”

If he hadn’t been driving, I very well may have punched him. Instead, I put my feet up on his dash and pulled my snack bag out of my purse. I never went anywhere without my snack bag. Harrison made fun of me and suggested it was just one more example of me being an old lady before my time. I thought a snack bag just made good sense. I never knew when I might get stuck somewhere without food and I didn’t respond well to hunger. If I was ever on one of those reality television survival shows, I’d quit after the first hour just out of fear of starvation.

I pulled a donut out of my snack bag and held it up to my lips. “Agree to my deal or I’ll eat this powdery white donut in your beloved truck.”

He laughed. “Do you have any idea what’s in those things, because I’m almost certain none of the ingredients are actual food. I can clean my truck, but you can’t ever undo the damage to your body caused by eating junk like that.”

I took a big bite, which was half the donut, and moaned to demonstrate just how good it was. I wasn’t actually hungry, but hunger had nothing to do with the point I was trying to make.

“Not to mention the sugar content. Do you know what sugar does to your body?”

I stuffed the rest of the donut in my mouth and spoke around it. “It makes me happy.”

He couldn’t manage to hold onto his disdain or his superiority any longer. He laughed, his head thrown back so far I was a little worried he was going to drive us into oncoming traffic. I chewed, trying to not notice how good a laugh and a smile looked on him. “Do you carry donuts with you everywhere you go?”

“They’re my special starvation treats.”

“Your what?”

“In case I get stuck somewhere without food, like if I accidentally lock myself in my car or get lost in the woods or stuck at the DMV. These little donuts are a power house of fat and energy to keep me going, and they never go bad.”

He shook his head, his smile huge. “What caused this fear of starvation?”

“I wouldn’t call it a fear. I just get a little moody when I’m over-hungry. I like to avoid it.”

“I’ll make sure to feed you every three hours.”

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