Dead End by Stella Cameron Read Free Book Online

clean.
    “I sleep in my room. Don’t stay there no more’n I have to, though. I hang out till their lights go off, then I go in.” His hazel eyes were too bright. “In the mornin’ I pick up the list off the table and do what Mama writes there. I try not to see ‘em is all.”
    One of the things Cyrus regretted about the vows he’d taken was that they meant he’d agreed never to have children of his own. Could be he was the lucky one after all. “Okay. I’m going to let you tell it in your own time.”
    “Can I stay here till…till I’ve fixed something? I wouldn’t get in the way.”
    Cyrus didn’t need a chart to show him he was heading into deep water. “You haven’t explained a thing yet.”
    Wally swallowed, but he didn’t shift his eyes from Cyrus’s until a pea green Volkswagen Beetle pulled onto the verge outside the fence. “Jilly,” he said and didn’t sound happy.
    “You like Jilly,” Cyrus reminded him. “We all like Jilly.”
    “Yep.” The word was the right one, but it sounded like a habit rather than a true affirmative.
    Jilly Gable who, with her half-brother Joe, operated All Tarted Up, Toussaint’s Flakiest Pastry Shop, emerged from her car and left the door open wide so as not to waste the music from inside. A singer with a sawed-off voice squeezed out a version of “Jolie Blonde” as if a harmonica were stuck in his vocal chords.
    “I see you, Wally Hibbs,” Jilly called out. “And you are in big trouble, my friend.”
    “Told you,” Wally said darkly, touching his brown bag beneath the bench.
    “Afternoon, Jilly,” Cyrus said when she drew close enough for him to see her smiling gray-green eyes. Even held back by a piece of black ribbon that was only inches from falling off, her blond-streaked brown hair reached her waist. She carried one of the bakery’s rainbow-colored boxes by a string tie. “You have a delivery to make somewhere?” Cyrus asked, knowing she’d brought him something he’d enjoy.
    “I do,” Jilly said, arriving and sitting down on the grass, her long yellow gauze dress flowing over her body and legs. “Marzipan tartlets.”
    He reached for the box, but she set it on the ground behind her. “This one’s cheese has really slid off his cracker now.” She pointed a long finger at Wally. “If I opened up your head, I think I’d find bugs had eaten your brains.”
    Jilly had a way with words. “Go easy,” Cyrus told her.
    Wally actually smirked and rubbed the back of a hand over his eyes.
    “You hungry?” Jilly asked the boy.
    He said, “Nah.”
    “You ought to be, unless someone’s feeding you somewhere—or you’re stealing food. You aren’t eating at home.” She grimaced at Cyrus. “Your folks say you’re out of control.”
    “They’re arguin’ all the time,” Wally said, his husky voice even more difficult to hear. “They get madder and madder every day.”
    “But not with you,” Jilly said. She kicked off her sandals and practiced trapping grass between her toes and tearing it up. The sun spread a glow over the coffee gold of her skin. “You’re making too much out of everything.”
    Wally clammed up.
    Cyrus considered options and figured he didn’t have any. Wally had to go home, and Cyrus had better be there when he did.
    “Father Cyrus.” William’s bottom-of-the-barrel rumble reached them while the man was still crossing Bonanza Alley from the church where the custodian’s room was located out back.
    “Shee-it,” Jilly said and immediately followed up with, “Forgive me Father for I have sinned.”
    Cyrus put a fist over his grin. “Sin no more and for your penance bake cakes as well as bread for Harvest Festival.”
    “Hoo-mama,” William grumbled, coming across the lawn. He used a large handkerchief to mop his glistening black face and bald head. “It’s hot as a whore’s ass on a griddle, and I ain’t makin’ nuthin’ up. You jest gimme time to get there. I’m an old man and gettin’ older