Page 1 of Ace of Spades
PROLOGUE
“Take us with you, Mama,” Nate Gentry said. She couldn’t just walk away and leave them with the old man. He would blame them when he found her gone, and that meant a beating.
She put her hand—rough from hard work—on his cheek. “This is the hardest day of my life. If I take you, he will find us and kill us all. This he has sworn to do if I dared such a thing. There is a reason I must go, but you are strong boys, and you will grow up to be men I can be proud of.”
She kissed each of them as tears streamed down her face. “Nathan, you will see that you and your brothers study hard and get good grades. Court, you will help your older brother protect Alex.” She knelt. “My baby. This will be the hardest for you, but be brave and strong for your brothers. Can you do that, Alex?”
Seven-year-old Alex burst into tears. Nate fisted his hands, hating that their mother was making his baby brother cry. Even Court’s lips were trembling, but for some reason he refused to look at her. Therewas something in his middle brother’s eyes, almost like hate, that Nate didn’t understand.
“Please, Mama. Don’t leave us with him.” Nate hated begging, but he had to make her take them, too. She stood, the tears still coursing down her face, and he was sure that meant she would agree.
“I’m sorry, son. If I did, he wouldn’t stop until he found us.” Suddenly, she pulled him to her, hugging him hard. “Always know that I love you, Nathan.” She let go of him and glanced down the dirt road. “I must go before he returns.”
She picked up the garbage bag holding her meager belongings, gave the boys one last sad smile, and then walked away, her shoulders slumped. A few steps down the road, she stopped and turned, and openly sobbing now, blew them a kiss before continuing on. Nate squeezed his eyes shut. He was eleven years old. He was too old to cry.
“Go do your chores before he comes home,” Nate told his brothers. They shuffled away, Alex’s sobs fading as the boys rounded the corner of the two-bedroom house, badly in need of a coat of paint and a new roof. As soon as they were out of sight, Nate slipped into the trees lining the dirt road and followed his mother. In his young mind, he thought if he knew where she was moving to, he could gather up his brothers and just show up one day. She was their mother. She wouldn’t turn them away.
His parents had had a fight earlier, and the old man had knocked her around. Nate didn’t know what it was about this time. Most days, his father didn’t need a reason, especially when he was drunk. They’d all been on the receiving end of those fists far too often, especially their mother. He didn’t blame her for leaving, but she should have taken them with her.
At the end of the dirt road, he stopped behind a tree, and watched in disbelief as Harmon Baker opened the passenger door of his old pickup truck. After Nate’s mother got in, Harmon glanced up anddown the two-lane country road, then ran around the front of the truck, jumped in, and took off. Harmon occasionally did odd jobs for their old man. Sometimes Nate had wished that he were their father because he was nice to them, but now he hated the man for taking their mother away. He hated his mother even more for choosing Harmon over her sons, and for that he would never forgive her.
Nate heard his father’s truck—which had needed a new muffler for as long as he could remember—coming down the road. He ran as fast as he could back to the house. By the time the old man walked out to the pigsty, Nate was busy mucking it out.
“Where’s your ma, boy?”
“In the house, I reckon.” He kept his back to his father, afraid he’d see the lie on his face.
“No she ain’t.”
“Then I don’t know.” He narrowed his eyes at his brothers, signaling them to keep their mouths shut. When the old man stomped off, Nate said, “We don’t know nothing, okay?” Alex nodded, his eyes filling with tears again, but Court’s gaze shifted away.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nate asked Court. He knew his brothers, and there was something going on with Court beyond their mother leaving.
“Leave me alone.” Court threw his shovel across the pen, almost hitting the pig, then took off, running for the woods.
Nate watched him for a minute, then picked up Alex. “Hey, little man, what say we go for a swim in the pond?”
“Okay,” Alex said around the thumb he sucked on. Until now, it had been five years since his baby brother had last sucked his thumb.
They were going to get a beating when the old man finally realized their mother was gone, and whether or not they finished their chores wouldn’t matter. They might as well do something to deserve the coming punishment.
The next day when his teacher asked about his black eye, he said that he’d fallen when he’d gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. She never asked why he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt on a hot Florida day.
The beating from the old man had been the worst yet—and there had been many over the years—since he was the only one in the house during his father’s drunken rage. Nate had hidden his brothers in the woods that night so their father couldn’t get his hands on them. Nate never told them their mother had run away with another man.
