Damon by Vanessa Hawkes Read Free Book Online

decreasing amount of time left before I had to be back at work. It was already happening, this lag in familiarity, where we noticed we really didn’t know each other and had been running solely on hormone-induced delirium.
    “How often does your mom go out?” he asked, shaking me from my pestering thoughts.
    I hurried to munch some fries so I could get eating out of the way and enjoy my lunch hour. “Not much. She doesn’t like to leave the house. She thinks everyone is staring at her. And they do, the sorry pigs. She sits out in the gazebo some.”
    “What does she do all day?”
    “She paints by numbers and watches TV and cleans a little. Or scribbles in a notebook. Mostly, she sits and stares at the TV.”
    “It’s probably her meds,” he said. “I saw what all she’s taking. They’ve got her bombed out of her mind.”
    True, but he didn’t have all the facts. “Without it she’s uncontrollable. She’s tried to kill me more than once. She thinks I’m conspiring to have her murdered.”
    I didn’t know why I felt I could tell him that, but it just popped out so naturally. I’d never told anyone, not even Bella and Chester.
    He didn’t recognize the significance of what I’d said. “If what I think is true,” he said, “they’re way off base on her diagnosis.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He stuffed all the trash into the bag and set it out of the way. Then he turned and held my hand. His gaze was disturbingly serious. “That old man in the store. What’s his name?”
    “Chester? Chester Brewer. But I want to hear about my mother.”
    “Did you notice him in that picture from the saltbox house?”
    “Yeah. He had hair back then. Remember when I said that? Bella was in the picture, too. They knew my grandparents from back when they were all kids. They grew up together.”
    Damon bounded off the table and jogged away, leaving me wondering what he was up to now, if maybe he planned to leave me there. I never expected people to be normal. I always expected them to do something completely surprising. They rarely did, though.
    He leaned in the window of his car and jogged back. He had the picture with him. He’d ditched the expensive frame somewhere.
    Glad that everything was fine, and normal, I smiled at him as he climbed back up to sit beside me. “Here, look,” he said.
    I took the picture, immediately focusing on my grandmother, and her man . Damon pointed to Chester. His brown hair had been styled in a severe crew cut. Nowadays, he only had a ring of white hair around the base of his cranium. He’d worn large black square glasses then. Wire frames now. He stared into the camera with no expression, just an almost-familiar face free of wrinkles.
    Bella stood beside him somehow looking older in her early twenties than she did now, with that short, salon-curled brown hair styled close to her scalp and that weird hat.
    “They look like they’re dressed up for a wedding or something. Or, a funeral.”
    “Look at their faces.”
    That was when I noticed how they were all standing, and staring.
    With no personality, no expression.
    They looked like mannequins. Especially my gram, who I always remembered as being vivacious, even in old age.
    “She used to do a great Bette Davis routine.”
    “Look at them,” Damon said, too insistent to hear my comment. “They’re like… I don’t know.”
    “I know what you mean.” I took the opportunity to lean against him and rest my head on his shoulder. “I’m guessing funeral, not wedding.”
    I was exhausted from lack of sleep and physical exertion but hadn’t noticed until now, with my stomach full and the sunshine warm on my skin and the water trickling so gently past. Damon’s comforting body beneath my head was like a drug.
    But I couldn’t afford to get sleepy, so I sat up and slapped my cheeks and held my eyes wide for a few seconds. Damon continued to shake his head at the picture.
    I loved the way he sat, how his shoulders were so