Page 161 of Beneath the Stain
Mackey had been the lucky one.
“Oh!” Grant said excitedly. “There’s my girl!”
Samantha had put on weight, but more than that, she’d put onlines, deep, deep, bitter ones in the sides of her mouth. She looked thirty-five instead of twenty-six, and she walked with the kind of aggression Mackey had seen in the women in town. The women Sam’s age who had to buy their eight- or nine-year-olds recorders in the music store but who had to sacrifice their own shoes to do it—those women walked like Sam did. Like she’d given too damned much already and she was going to begrudge the whole fucking world until she got her some back.
“You said you wanted to see her,” she said, her voice hard.
Grant smiled hopefully into her eyes. “Yeah we did. Here, let me hold her a minute.”
She was barely a toddler—still tiny, less than a year and a half old. She was dressed in a little pink sweat suit, with her curly brown hair mercilessly scraped into two corkscrew pigtails on the top of her head.
“Daddy! Kisses!”
Grant took her, his arms visibly trembling a little with the weight. “Y’all, I want you to meet Katy. She’s gonna be trouble, and she’s my baby, so y’all need to watch out for her or I’m coming back to haunt you, you hear?”
“That’s morbid,” Sam said. “Grant, I wish you—”
“Sam,” Grant said, looking at her beseechingly, “you haven’t even said hi to the guys.”
“Hi,” she said resentfully. She didn’t even look at Mackey. Her gaze lingered on Blake for a moment, and Grant introduced them. “You don’t look gay,” she said suspiciously.
Blake caught Mackey’s eye and grimaced. “I’m not, mostly,” he said. “I leave that to Trav and Mackey. They’re good at it, so it’s okay.”
Mackey chuckled deliberately. “Well, I’m getting better with practice,” he said with false modesty, and his brothers laughed.
“Well, I think it’s disgusting,” Sam said with venom. She reached out for the baby, and Grant angled his body protectively. “I don’t want her out here with these people,” she said, like she hadn’t grown up with all of them.
“Well, that’s not your choice anymore,” Grant said levelly. “That’s why the lawyer’s here, and that’s why Mackey brought Trav. She’s a part of their lives, Sam, and she’s gonna be after I’m gone.”
“You’re hateful,” she hissed and then turned and stalked away, leaving the air frigid and toxic.
The baby snuggled into Grant’s arms for a second and then struggled to be let up. “Damn,” Grant said, setting her down. “Jeff, Stevie, could you guys chase after her? Blake, could you help? I gotta talk to these guys for a second.”
They were walking after the little girl even before Grant finished speaking, and Grant breathed a sigh of relief. “She likes watching the horses work!” he called and then fell back coughing.
“You need to come inside.” The voice was unfamiliar, and Mackey looked back toward the house. The man with the curly hair and the cowboy hat—Grant’s dad—was walking from the front yard with a purposeful stride.
Grant kept coughing, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and coughed into it. When he pulled it away, it was flecked with red, and Mackey closed his eyes.
“Dad, you need to take Mr. Ford inside and talk to the lawyer, okay?”
Mr. Adams narrowed his eyes. “Grant, you know your mother and I don’t like this—”
“And I’m dying, and I hired my own lawyer, and he drew up the papers, and they’re my last will and testament, and Mackey needs to know. Trav’s going to be there to keep it all aboveboard.” Grant might have been closer to dead than alive, but damn, he’d grown a backbone in the past two years. “I want this, Dad. I gave up everything, my whole life, for the things you expected me to be. But I want this—and for once, I’m going to get what I want.”
“Fine!” Mr. Adams snapped. He glared at Mackey and Kell. “You boys should be proud of yourselves. Man, all the things my boy had, and the only thing he wanted was to be white-trash faggots like you.”
Mackey was going to say something, but God. Grant looked so sick. He didn’t have the heart.
Kell looked Grant’s dad in the eye, though, and damned if Mackey’s brother didn’t say, “Our house is bigger than yours. And it’s in LA, so the property values are higher. And more than a million people screamed my brother’s name last year. If you’d been any less of a bastard, just think—your boy coulda married up.”
Grant’s dad actually took a stump-legged step toward Kell, but Trav left Mackey’s side and stood in the way.
“Grant said I needed to talk to a lawyer? Why don’t you show me the way.”
It wasn’t a question. Not really.
Mackey stood back and watched them go, missing Trav’s warmth at his side already. He and Kell turned back to Grant, who smiled in relief.
