Those musings yielded anguished thoughts about Mama and how much our falling out hurt. My birthday was coming up—a day she’d always, always made a fuss over. I couldn’t think about her without my eyes stinging. She’d built a nice life for herself, yes, but only after she ascertained I would benefit as well. If Thomas hadn’t been prepared to love me too, she’d have kicked that door shut with no hesitation. I decided it was time I extended an olive branch. I wouldn’t alter my academic course. That was set. But I could open the door for her pride to forgive me for it someday.

Ruthanne’s sidelong looks extended to any time Boyce and I were together, especially when we came in from our new nightly routine—sitting out on the step where we talked about our days while he smoked and I sipped iced tea. I didn’t ask why he’d stopped going to bed before I got home, assuming it had to do with her tendency to watch television until almost midnight from the sofa he slept on.

“I feel bad that you can’t go to bed at your usual time,” I told him one night, stirring the granules of sugar in the bottom of my glass. I also missed watching him pad across the living room in the early dark, sweaty and pumped after a workout and heading for the shower. In the bedroom, I slept until my phone alarm told me to get up. By then he was at work in the garage. “If you’d take the bed, you wouldn’t have to rearrange your schedule. I go to sleep later than you anyway. I can bed down on the sofa after she goes to her room.”

He took a long drag and flicked the ash from the end of the cigarette before answering. “I offered you a room when I asked you to move in, not a sofa.” There was clearly no arguing with him on this point.

“You’re more obstinate than you used to be, Boyce Wynn.” But just as protective.

“Yep.”

Several minutes of quiet followed. We waved to Randy when he pulled into his driveway across the street and watched June bugs hurtling and wheeling drunkenly, attracted to the porch light. Staring up at the sky, I felt as unmoored as the stars appeared to be, though internal nuclear explosions and gravity bound them. I wondered how Boyce figured into the way I’d always felt rooted to this place. Whether he was my internal combustion or my gravity. Or both.

Through the closed door behind us, the murmur of the television snapped off.

“She always gives us the weirdest look when we come in from sitting out here or when we’re making dinner,” I said. “Why do you think that is?”

He turned and stubbed the cigarette out. “I reckon she made assumptions about you and me that aren’t panning out.”

Oh. Oh. “Having to do with you sleeping on the sofa? As opposed to, uh, with me.”

He nodded. “That and the fact that you’re in graduate school and working to support yourself. You’re young and hot, but you aren’t using your looks to bait your hook, lure in some guy who’d take care of you. Pretty sure she thought you’d take off when I no longer owned the garage.”

I sighed. “So she thinks I’m using you.” Which spoke volumes to the worth she placed on her son for everything he’d become, apart from and so much more than what he did or didn’t own.

“I don’t give a shit what she thinks. You shouldn’t either.” He turned to take my chin between his fingers and tilted my face up. “You hear?”

“Yes,” whispered from my lips.

His touch—so unbearably soft—muted everything but the thump thump of my heartbeat. He examined my mouth from inches away, his fingers slipping down my throat, taking the measure of my pulse, his eyes dark, masked by the shadows from the dying day. I swallowed and his grip widened and caressed the margins of my neck, delicate as a warm breeze on damp skin. Goose bumps skittered down my arms and my mouth burned to be kissed.

He pressed his lips to my forehead and said, “Good night, Pearl,” before he rose and disappeared inside.

Mama drilled two things into my head growing up. The first was a goal: that I be able to provide for myself well. The second was an assertion that being alone was better than being with the wrong person. We’d been far from wealthy, but we were comfortable. Thomas—clearly the right person for her—worked hard to get her to admit it. Even when she capitulated, they argued about the size of that rock he slid onto her hand. She worried that everyone in town would think she was a gold digger. He said everyone in town would think he was a cradle robber, so they were even.

She’d taught me two things by example: to crave independence—which had sort of backfired on her when I refused to go to med school—and to fiercely, unapologetically shield and protect any child I might have. But none of that left me with any inkling of what to do when the person I wanted most to defend, to save, was a grown man.

Chapter Twenty

Boyce

Before my mother turned up, Sam had grown used to daily chitchats with Pearl when she came home from class. After dumping her backpack inside, she’d come out to the garage with cold Pepsis and let Sam show off whatever she was working on that day. I tried to put a stop to it once, pretty damn sure Pearl was as uninterested as a non-mechanic could be in the dirty details of a head-gasket repair, but she told me to hush and let Sam finish.

That night during supper, I’d told Pearl there was no need for her to suffer through one-sided conversations about transmissions and oil pumps just to keep from hurting Sam’s feelings. The kid loved cars more than anyone I’ve ever known aside from myself, but she was bright enough to comprehend that most of the time even people who brought their cars in just wanted us to do the work—they didn’t want to hear a speech about it.