Walk (Gentry Boys) Read Free Page A

of times the world over, my brother saw.  And he thought he was seeing something else. 
    “Damn you both to hell,” Conway had sobbed and indeed to hell we had been damned.  Even as we set off to find him and make him understand I didn’t believe we were at a critical point.  I thought everything would be okay. I knew it would.  After all, we were Stone and Con.  We were the Gentry brothers.
    As it turned out I didn’t know a fucking thing.   
    I was driving.  The car, technically stolen because we had taken it without permission, belonged to Erin’s father. Witnesses said I’d been drag racing with crazy Benny Cortez. 
    That hell raising punk Stone Gentry raced around in a stolen car with a depraved indifference that cost a young girl her life.  
    So simple, and so awful. 
    But sometimes what seems to be true isn’t really.  The kid, Benny Cortez, had pulled up alongside us, teasing, goading, when we were stopped on Main Street, trying to figure out where to search for Conway next.  As I accelerated and tried to steer the car away from him, Benny cut me off and somehow I lost control.  I remembered spinning, and rolling, and the gruesome jolt of a crash so powerful that for a few seconds I thought my soul must have shaken loose from my body. 
    When I looked across to the passenger seat I realized immediately it wasn’t my soul that had been lost.  Even now, four years later, I couldn’t stand to flash back to what I’d seen in that terrible second.  I didn’t want to remember her that way.  She’d died on impact.  That never made it any easier to bear. 
    “I promise you,” I whispered passionately to her grave, “that I’m going to find him, Erin.  Whatever it takes, whatever I have to do, I’m going to help our boy heal. Conway won’t be lost.  I swear.” 
    Chase had always been the one I’d handed my letters to.  He had always been the one to answer my questions about what was going on in my brother’s life.  After a while though Chase became more hesitant about answering.  Deck had taken Con into his home and forced him to finish high school but by that time Con was already on a downward spiral.  Always the smart one in the family, he should have been college bound.  Instead, he descended into a world of street racing, gang affiliations, and drug dealing, all in the company of a constant stream of women he used and then discarded.  He’d done several sixty-day bits at the jail in Maricopa County for minor offenses and so far he’d been lucky not to pull down a serious sentence.  At this point it seemed a likely bet he’d wind up either dead or incarcerated for a long time. 
    For four years my brother hadn’t answered a single letter or initiated any contact. Even as it stung I couldn’t totally fault him for withdrawing, even for self-destructing. Erin was his world.  Losing her so brutally had destroyed him.  Maybe if I’d been around all this time I could have done something.  At least I could have made him understand that the people he loved and trusted had never betrayed him.  I could have helped him, somehow.  
    But I hadn’t been around. 
    Not my choice, but that didn’t make a fucking difference and there was nothing I could do about it now but try to pick up the pieces of what was left.  Con was a man these days, not a boy.  He’d been making his own way, shitty as it was, for quite some time and probably didn’t welcome input from someone he’d long since rejected as a brother.  But I owed it to him to try, no matter the cost.  I owed it to Erin. 
    I kissed two fingers and touched them to her gravestone.  As a gentle wind stirred I thought I heard the soft sigh of a young girl inside of it. 
    Goodbye my friend. 
    When I rejoined Deck and Chase I had nothing to say.  I walked between them as we left the cemetery.  Neither of them commented on the tears that weren’t quite gone from my eyes. 
    What I wouldn’t have given to unravel