I helped him to his feet. “Are you short of breath?” I asked.
“No,” he said, stretching his sore muscles.
“Brady kicked you in the head,” I said, worried.
“I felt it,” he grumbled.
“We should take you to Julianne and let her check you out just to be safe.”
Weston began to protest, but I took his keys. He wasn’t fast enough to stop me.
“You don’t have a choice. I’m driving.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
“Kept them from breaking your ribs?” I asked, helping him to the passenger door.
He slowly climbed up, grunting as he fell into the seat.
“I couldn’t just stand there and watch.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it,” Weston said.
“No, you won’t,” I said before slamming the door. I walked to the other side and grumbled to myself, “I will.”
Chapter Ten
“ANDREW, BRENDAN, AND BRADY, HUH?” Frankie said. “Asshole casserole.” She shook her head as she stared out the window. “Clearly”—she shook her head again, white-knuckling the counter—“prom wasn’t good enough. We need to punch Brady in the uterus and then fill his vagina with sand.”
I snorted. “That would be slightly impossible, Frankie, since Brady is male.”
“He won’t be after I’m finished with him,” she snarled.
“No uterus. No vagina.”
“Yet. That little douche poodle. I dare him to come to my window. I will never put a curl on his dip cone ever again.”
“Oh. Now, he’s going to regret everything,” I deadpanned.
She turned to me. “What is Weston going to do?”
“Nothing. At least that’s what I told him.”
“You think he’ll listen?”
“He’d better,” I grumbled to myself.
She raised an eyebrow. “Look at you, all grown-up and feisty after graduating high school.”
I sighed. “This can’t end well. They can’t keep throwing punches. Someone is going to get hurt. And…Weston was wheezing a little…after. It scared me.”
“You’re afraid Weston will fight his way into another asthma attack?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got a point,” she said.
I was surprised. Frankie always supported me, but she never agreed with me.
“Tyson is lucky he didn’t join in,” she said. She wagged her finger at me. “I know his mother. She doesn’t allow her kids to behave that way.”
“He stopped them. If he hadn’t…I don’t think Brady would have cared that I was between his foot and Weston.”
Frankie seethed, but when we heard a car pull up and she recognized the woman strolling across the parking lot, her cheeks flushed bright red.
“Frankie,” I warned.
Lynn stepped in front of my window and waited, looking smug.
Frankie stood next to me, glaring at her, while I lifted the window.
“How can I help you?” I asked, trying to sound as if she were any number of customers who had stood at that window before. I knew she was up to something, or she would have just gone through the drive-through.
“How is Weston?” Lynn asked.
I stared at her with a blank expression.
She smirked.
“What do you want, Lynn?” Frankie snapped. “Order or leave.”
“Brady has a bright future ahead of him, Easter. Your future, on the other hand,” she said, her eyes looking up the outer wall of the Dairy Queen and then back at me, “fits perfectly inside that little window.”
Frankie snorted. “Did you come all the way over here from the country club to taunt her? How old are you again?”
“I just wanted to congratulate Easter on graduating. It’s a pity your mother couldn’t make it to the ceremony.”
“Julianne was there,” I said.
“Your real mother,” Lynn said without emotion. “The one who lives in the trash can you were raised in.”
Frankie looked to me. “Is Brady’s family tree a cactus? Because everyone on it is a prick.”
I stifled a laugh, and Lynn narrowed her eyes at Frankie.
“You’re the town joke, Frances. You’re going nowhere. You have the same job you had in high school, and so will your children because you can’t afford to give them a decent education.”
“Maybe,” Frankie said. “But I can and will find a way to get them to college. You raised your son to be a cruel human being. And when most of the people from this town think of him, they won’t think of the Beck name or how successful he might or might not be. They will remember only that he was a vile, snide asshole. Live with that.”
Frankie slammed the window down, and after a few seconds of deciding whether or not she would try to say something through the glass, Lynn spun on her heels and stomped back to her car.
Frankie turned, leaning her backside against the corner of the counter. “God, I hate that bitch.”
I took a deep breath and blew my hair away from my face. “I get the feeling she doesn’t like herself either. Veronica said Lynn brags about the mean things Brady says and does to people. Who purposely instills that kind of anger into their children?”
“Lynn Beck,” Frankie said, looking for something to keep busy.
The rest of our day was hectic but uneventful. The baseball field stayed empty, and it was more than a little bittersweet to know that Weston would never hop in his pickup and drive across the street to stand in front of my window again.
I was just beginning to get used to driving to a beautiful clean home that didn’t smell like weed or stale cigarette smoke, but waking up and having nowhere to go but work was weird.
The first few days of our last summer before life in the real world felt like the weekend, but as the days ran on, they seemed to have too much time in them to think about things like the wonderful but strange turn my life had taken, about why it had all happened, how my luck had changed—and if it would change again.
Too much time meant long days, but before I knew it, Independence Day was upon us. Julianne and I spent a lot of time cooking and decorating the house and sidewalk for the block party Sam and Julianne would put on every year.