Page 15 of When the Stars Fall
It had been two weeks since Patrick got custody of Brody and he hadn’t said one single word about it. I wanted to ask how he was doing, and what he thought about it, but I wasn’t sure how to do that.
Wrapping a string from my cut-offs around my finger, I pulled it so tight it cut off the circulation as my eyes bored a hole in Jude’s back. He was sitting on the top porch step, poking holes in the lid of a mason jar with the Swiss Army knife he’d gotten for his birthday last week.
“Here you go,” Jude said, handing the jar to Jesse. “Your very own firefly catcher.”
“Cool.” Jesse grinned at his big brother, a look of adoration on his face like Jude had just handed him the sun, the moon and all the stars in the sky. At eight, Jesse was still the most adorable and lovable McCallister. “Thanks, Jude.”
“Anytime.”
“You gotta set them free though,” Brody said, his voice brusque. “After you’re done looking at them, you need to open the lid and let them fly away.”
“Why?” Gideon asked, pointing his remote at the Formula One car he got for his tenth birthday. It raced across the porch and he hit stop before it flew down the steps.
“Because no living creature should ever be put in a cage or a jar. It ain’t right. How would you like it?”
“That would have to be a really big jar,” Jesse said, snorting laughter and slapping his thigh like that was hilarious.
“You keep your horses in a stall.” Gideon pointed out as his remote-control race car crashed into the railing, its wheels spinning.
“Yeah, and I don’t like that either. Someday I’m gonna have wild horses and a lot of land for them to roam free.”
Gideon wandered into the house, the screen door slamming behind him which had Kate hollering from inside the house, “How many times have I told you not to slam that screen door? Sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall.”
Clutching the jar like a football, Jesse jumped off the top railing of the back porch and landed on his butt.
“How many times have I told you not to jump off the top railing,” Kate said from the other side of the screen door. “Use the stairs.”
Jesse grinned and waved at his mom then raced across the back yard in search of lightning bugs even though it was too early for them to come out. The sun was just setting over the field, the late summer sky streaked pink and orange. The air was already starting to smell different. Like freshly sharpened pencils and apples from the orchard. We only had one more week of freedom before school started and I was already feeling sad to see it end.
Summertime meant long, hot days and all-day baseball games. Staying up way past our bedtime. Jumping off the rocks into the cool, bottle green water at the swimming hole. It was the three months of the year when I had my boys more or less to myself. And that was the way I liked it.
“Keep an eye on Jesse,” Kate told us. “We’re about to start a movie. It’ll be a miracle if we get past the opening credits before your father falls asleep.”
“If you picked an action movie, I’d stay awake,” Patrick grumbled.
Kate laughed and their voices got muffled as they headed into the family room to watch a movie.
I side-eyed Brody, thinking about what he’d said about the wild horses. “Sounds like a good dream,” I said. “The wild horses and the land.”
Brody cracked the sunflower seeds between his teeth and said nothing. Some days it was a chore, trying to navigate all these ‘boy hormones.’
“What’s yours?” Jude asked me. “You know mine. You know Brody’s. What’s your dream?”
My dream was that everything would stay exactly as it was. I didn’t want anything to change. I didn’t wantusto change. But I couldn’t say that. It sounded stupid. Besides, that wasn’t a dream. It was a wish. And we were already changing. I saw it in the way Jude sometimes looked at Ashleigh. I saw it in Brody’s swagger whenever girls were watching him, and the way he’d wink at them as he passed by, causing them to blush and giggle.
“I don’t know. I guess I want to do something with nature. Like... a landscaper or something.”
“That’s cool,” Jude said, and for a change, he wasn’t even teasing me about anything.
“Why do you want to be a Marine so much?”
“I want to fight for our country. I want to do my part to protect our freedom.” When he talked like this, he sounded older than thirteen, like he had the future all figured out.
“I want to feel like I made a difference,” he said quietly.
“You just want to fight,” Brody said, throwing down his cards face up. I glanced at his hand. It was a full house. “Stop acting like you know anything about war or what it would be like to have a gun pointed at you. You know nothing about the real world because you live in this perfect little world and that’s all you’ve ever known.”
Having said his piece, Brody jumped off the porch and stalked away. I stared at his back, dumbfounded, and tried to figure out what had just happened and why Jude’s words had made him so angry.
