Club Storyville by Riley Lashea Page B

suspected I was supposed to feel something, that normal girls would, that Jackson’s piercing blue eyes and straight white teeth should be as beautiful to me as Ariel was standing in the rays of light streaming through Nan’s window. “Sorry about your dog,” he added, distracting me from everything I didn’t feel.
    “What did you tell him?” I turned threatening eyes on Scott.
    “Only the truth,” Scott grinned. “How you cried for a week and a half when Max died.”
    “Don’t tell people that!” I slapped him on the arm, and, even after weeks of training at being tough, Scott flinched and raised his hand to the spot.
    “You’re the reason we could never have another pet!” he came back at me, and, though I would have liked to have said something in my defense, there was nothing I could say. Not only was it true, it was proof I had always been the weak one, the one who never had been able to endure life with all its loss and disappointment and fear. I was the last person who needed to be different in any way, to feel things that were abnormal, to have thoughts beyond my control.
    “I’m sorry.” I was utterly grateful when Jackson started talking again and stopped the torrent of painful realizations. “It’s my fault. Scott told me about you, and I just wanted to know more and more. He forgot to tell me how pretty you were, though.”
    Surprised by the compliment, I accepted it with a blushing smile, as a lady should, neither arguing against his opinion, nor surrendering modesty to vanity.
    “Eww,” Scott was happy to throw in his disagreement on my behalf. “Why would I tell you that?”
    “Anyway,” Jackson went on with a small laugh. “Now you can tell me about yourself, and protect all your secrets.”
    The statement a reminder of just how perilous my secrets had become, I was glad Scott was reaching into the car as my smile wavered, because he had a way of noticing those things.
    “Where’s Mom?” he asked, slinging his pack onto his shoulder, and I forced the smile back onto my face.
    “Kitchen,” I replied weakly. “There’s only a few minutes left on the chicken, so she couldn’t come out.”
    “Well, don’t want that to burn,” Scott gave a brilliant grin at the mention of Mama’s cooking. “Let’s go see her.”
    “You should see Nan first,” I said, and, pausing in his happy homecoming, Scott appeared to realize in a single frozen step that the days he had with us, before he shipped off, were the last days he would ever spend with Nan.
    “It’s bad?” he asked, and, not quite able to relay the information I’d collected from all my different sources, I could only nod in response.
    When he appeared suddenly younger, like a little boy playing dress up in a soldier’s uniform, I wanted to be Scott’s big sister, to hug him because he needed hugged, instead of because I did, but, with Jackson standing right there beside him, I knew Scott would hate it.
    “Well then,” Scott blew out a breath. “Let’s go see Nan.”
    Turning to lead the way, because it was the only thing I could do, accept things with grace and try to be a good hostess, I was surprised again when Jackson caught up to me, offering his arm, and, with no real excuse not to, I took it.

 
    Chapter Six
    Though it was held in our own dining room, with it being Scott’s first time home in months, dinner was a special occasion. Putting on a dress midway between my daily wear and the dresses I kept in pristine condition for public events, I thought I knew what it meant to dress for dinner. Until I walked into the dining room and saw Ariel, and she looked like so much more of a lady than me, so elegant and so perfect, different somehow than normal, but exactly like herself.
    The flowing burgundy dress she wore sweeping the floor, I envied its fabric, wondering what it felt like to the touch, what it felt like for her, where it lay against her body.
    At the table, I sat between Mama and Jackson, with Nan and