The Return Of Luke Mcguire. Justine Davis

sounded like a child waiting for Santa Claus, and she wondered if the arrival of the brother was as much a fantasy. She also wondered, as she had before, if the phantom brother wasn’t part of David’s problem, if because some people expected him to be just like his troublemaking brother, it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

      David met her gaze then, his jaw set and his chin up. “You’ll see. So will my mom. She can’t keep him away, even though she hates him.”

      Amelia considered that. Ordinarily her response would have been something soothing, assuring the boy his mother surely didn’t really hate his brother. But she had met David’s mother, knew that Jackie was very conscious of appearances and hated to be embarrassed. Given Luke’s reputation and what the woman had no doubt gone through raising him, she could easily believe there was no love lost between the two.

      “It must be difficult, if he and your mother don’t get along, but you want to go live with him.”

      “She doesn’t know about it. Yet,” he added, his expression turning mutinous.

      “Does she even know you’ve been in touch?”

      “No. Yes.”

      Well, Amelia thought, there’s a teenage response for you. She waited, knowing David would explain if she just waited.

      “I mean she knows I wrote to him, but she stole my first letter before the mail lady picked it up. I found it in the trash.”

      Amelia smothered a sigh; she couldn’t think of anything more likely to make an already resistant teenager downright stubborn. But it wasn’t her place to pass judgment on his mother’s parenting skills.

      “So you wrote again?”

      He nodded, a little fiercely, the blond hair flopping in time with the movement. “Couple of weeks ago. And I took it to the post office myself. I even bought the stamp myself, ’cause I know she started counting the ones in her desk. She puts a mark on the next one on the roll. She thinks I’m too dumb to figure that out.”

      Amelia couldn’t imagine living that way. Her parents might have been older and a bit fussy in their ways, but she had never had to live with this kind of subterfuge and mistrust.

      “And what did your brother say?”

      “He hasn’t answered. Yet.” This time the “yet” was in an entirely different tone, one of stubbornly determined hope. “I think he’s just gonna come and get me. He doesn’t have time for writing letters.”

      “He doesn’t?”

      “Nah, he’s too busy.”

      “Doing what?”

      “I’m not sure, but cool stuff. He’d never have some boring job or wear a tie or nothing like that.”

      “But you don’t know what he does do?”

      “No. But he’s not in jail, like my mom says!”

      Amelia’s breath caught. “Jail?”

      “She just says that. She’s always said it, that he was probably in jail somewhere. She’s always sayin’ bad things about him.”

      Amelia felt an unexpected tug of sympathy for the absent Luke McGuire. “You were young when he left, weren’t you?” she asked gently.

      “I was almost eight.” He sounded defensive. “I remember him really good. He was really cool. He used to take me with him places, unless he was with some girl. And sometimes at night, you know, when I was real little, when I couldn’t go to sleep, he’d sneak in and read to me.”

      And there it was, Amelia thought. The birth of a reader. Somehow she never would have expected the inspiration to be the disreputable Luke.

      Primed now, David kept on, extolling the virtues of his long gone half brother.

      “And he’d bring me stuff, not stuff you buy, he didn’t have much money, but stuff like a neat rock, or a feather, that kind of thing. I’d put it away in my special box—” He stopped suddenly before adding sourly, “Before my mother found it and threw it all away.”

      Amelia sighed again. She herself had had a collection of leaves she had pressed and dried, all the different ones she could find. Her mother hadn’t liked having them around, she thought they were dirty, but Amelia loved to look at them, and that was all that had really mattered; the collection had stayed.

      Thanks, Mom, she whispered silently, as she often did to both the parents she still missed so much. And never had it mattered less than it did at this moment that they hadn’t been her biological parents.

      “People say he was kind of a…troublemaker,” she said carefully; she didn’t want to join a chorus, but she did want to know if David was utterly blind to any faults his brother had.

      “Yeah, he got in some trouble.” The boy said it with a kind of relish that made Amelia nervous; she wondered if this was the key to David’s new friends, who seemed to find—or make—trouble wherever they went. “He was no nerd like my mom likes, he had fun, he went out at night, hung with his buddies, and they did whatever they felt like. Didn’t pay any attention to stupid rules.”

      Or laws? Amelia wondered. She tried to remember any specifics she’d ever heard about the wayward Luke, but all she could call up was the general impression of a teenage boy gone wild. What she did know was that David appeared to be heading in the same direction; there was far too much of a gleam in his eyes when he spoke of the older brother he clearly admired. And while she could appreciate—indeed, she’d been pleasantly surprised and touched by—David’s childhood recollections of another side of his brother, she was afraid it was the wild side he was trying to emulate.

      Perhaps his mother had the right idea, after all.

      “—window broken out, and some of that disgusting graffiti sprayed all over!”

      “How awful,” Amelia agreed as she rang up Mrs. Clancy’s gardening magazines.

      “Those boys are getting out of hand,” the older woman said ominously. “It was bad enough when they would harass people on the street, blocking the sidewalks, riding those awful skateboards so fast they could kill a person if they knocked them down, which they nearly did many times. But now this…somebody should do something!”

      Somebody being somebody other than herself, Amelia guessed. Mrs. Clancy was of the speak-loudly-and-let-someone-else-carry-the-stick school. She was a formidable, large woman in her late sixties, with silver hair she was proud of saying hadn’t been cut since she was sixteen, and if she had ever known what it was like to be young and bored in a small town, she’d clearly forgotten.

      Diplomatically, Amelia changed the subject to one she knew the woman could never resist. “Going for that prizewinning rose again next year?”

      The woman’s eyes lit up. “I’ll beat that Louise Doyle yet, you just wait and see.”

      Mrs. Clancy chattered on as Amelia slipped the magazines into a bag. “I wish you luck,” she said as she handed them over with a smile. “I always love walking by your garden.”

      That much, at least, was true. And Mrs. Clancy left the store happy, and would return next month as usual. Amelia had once wondered why she didn’t subscribe and save herself the trip, but soon figured out that this was the only time the poor woman had away from the recently retired Mr. Clancy, and she wasn’t about to give it up.

      Amelia glanced at the clock; she was five minutes past closing. Not unusual for her, but tonight she was a bit tired; she’d had her kickboxing class early this morning, and this afternoon she’d gotten in several shipments of books to be shelved, and handling it all herself was getting wearing. But she wasn’t sure she wanted to hire someone, she liked her quiet times in the shop when she could actually read herself—it was hard to recommend sincerely a book you hadn’t read—and she was getting by on only Sundays off, even with the long hours. By opening at ten and