A Wrong Turn Towards Love by Pepper Pace Page A

his hands in his hair as he remembered how Keegan would look up at him with wide, worshipping eyes, curious about everything that his older brother did. And most of what Derrick did was nothing worth sharing with a kid that looked up at him like that. And yet Derrick had done just that.
    He was responsible for giving his little brother his first drink and within just a few short years Keegan couldn’t go more than a few hours without downing at least a six-pack. Derrick took pills and so of course Keegan did as well. And soon his brother was scraping up cash any way that he could in order to give his last dollar to a pill pusher.
    Derrick’s stomach crumbled. Sully had pulled the trigger that ended his brother’s life but Derrick knew that it was he that had killed Keegan. His little brother had emulated him. They had hung out with the lowlifes and acted as bad as possible, donning hoods and thinking they were hotshots when they marched defiantly down Main Street screaming about the pureness of their race.
    But in reality, there weren’t many of them fools that he would want to sit down with sober. They were stupid and ornery and just wanted to find some way to cause more misery in someone else’s lives than they had in their own.
    He’d figured that out a long time ago. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see what a bunch of losers they were. But he just continued playing his role as a bad-ass redneck to people who could care less. And then Sully killed his brother over some pills that he hadn’t paid for and he had to face a truth that he had tried very hard to deny; that he and his own kind had done more harm to themselves and to their own loved ones than any black, Mexican, gay or Jew.
    Shortly after Keegan’s death he had looked around at the small piece of world that he had carved out for himself and it sickened him. For the first time in his life he could admit to wishing that he had even half the happiness that Bodie seemed to have with his wife and that little baby girl. He would give anything for just a taste of that happiness.
    He looked at his brother’s grave in shame. “I’m sorry Keegan…” His brother’s bad choices as well as his untimely death lay squarely on his own shoulders and the guilt of it would be his eternal punishment.
    Derek heard the rustle of footsteps approaching and he quickly swiped away at the tears that burned his eyes.
    “Derrick?”
    He frowned at the girl standing there in cowboy boots and an old, worn but freshly pressed dress. She didn’t back down at the unwelcoming look he bore. He finally recognized her. It was one of Benny’s brood. Benny had been a bit older and once upon a time Derrick had thought he was pretty bad-ass. Benny had shacked up with a woman that had a shitload of kids and he remembered this one because she used to always be around the Jameson boy; the one with the horribly deformed face like it was split in half and then sewn up by a doctor high on meth. Chris was his name. Chris Jameson. Derrick had been friends with his brother Walt before he had died in a drunken accident.
    Same thing had happened to Benny a few years later, which in his case might not have been a terribly bad thing. Benny was a mean drunk who enjoyed his role in the Klan more than most. Always wanting to do shit when everyone else was good with just talking shit.
    Derrick squinted at the girl. Well she wasn’t a girl anymore; she was a woman that looked to be in her twenties. She’d grown up to be a pretty little thing, but he averted his eyes because thinking like that didn’t seem right when he remembered her with Band-Aids on her knees and pigtails in her hair.
    “We’re fixin’ to sit down and eat.” She gestured back at the little whitewashed church. There were two churches up on the mountain; the red church was called such because it was made of bricks and then this white one, which was the most popular for the old timers that still resided on Cobb Hill.
    “I saw