His Best Friend's Baby. Molly O'Keefe

it.” Jesse struggled to find that cold dark center of himself, that place where simplicity reigned. “I was a kid when you left. You don’t know me and I don’t want to know you. Just leave it alone.” He watched all that hope crumple in her, like wadded-up paper.

      Good. Now, stay away.

      He moved past her to his beat-up Jeep and she didn’t try to stop him.

      “Where are you going?” she asked.

      “San Diego,” he told her. He winced as he swung his aching leg into the vehicle. Damn bum knee. “After I take care of Mom’s house.”

      “So you’re just gonna run again?”

      Everything in him went still.

      “Running’s your deal, not mine. I stayed until the old man died. What did you do?”

      They both knew the answer all too well—she’d left, when he’d needed her most.

      She was a little late if she expected forgiveness now.

      Wainwright, the ancient black Lab he’d somehow inherited in the last two weeks, lifted his head from the duffel bag he’d been using as a bed.

      Take the dog, Artie McKinley’s folks had said. He’s old and we’re moving to an apartment in Nogales. We can’t have pets. Artie had been their only son, so there had been no one else to take care of Wainwright and they refused to put him down.

      What could Jesse do?

      So he’d taken the aging dog and now, every time he looked at the animal, he remembered why Artie hadn’t come back to claim his dog.

      Wainwright spied Rachel and barked. She flinched.

      “I hear you, boy,” Jesse muttered. He turned over the engine and peeled out of the parking lot without once looking back.

       DAMN IT.

      Jesse braked at the deserted intersection of Goleta Road and Foothill after having driven around aimlessly for an hour. He leaned forward in the driver’s seat and looked right down the long stretch of road that would lead him down to the coast and Highway 101.

      He could drive to San Diego, be there by tonight.

      He turned and looked left down the length of asphalt that would lead him back to New Springs.

      “What do you think, Wain?” The dog struggled to his feet and climbed over the console to sit in the passenger seat. He barked once at a passing bird. “That’s not much help, buddy.”

      Jesse’s knee throbbed from all the walking and driving he had been doing the past week and even though he was steering clear of the pain meds in his bag, the relief they offered seemed pretty good right now.

      Jesse eyed the waves of heat rising off the blacktop and Wain nudged his thigh with his snout. Jesse patted the dog’s head and wished again, as he had a million times in the past, that his genetic makeup was different.

      It would be so damn easy if he was the kind to run away like his sister.

      But no, Jesse took after his mother. He had Eva’s black eyes, dark hair and the same stubborn chin. Despite heavy drinking and hard living, his father had looked like a young man when he died, but Eva had looked every one of her fifty-six years, as if all her disappointments and heartaches had been pressed into the lines on her face.

      Jesse wondered briefly what was written across his face. What details of his past were visible?

      He and Eva were the same beasts of burden, carrying everyone’s troubles and responsibilities like stones around their necks. When everyone else had deserted they had both stayed—in that house, in this town—long after the time they should have left.

      Just do what you are supposed to do, he told himself. You’re in this little shithole for a reason.

      He pulled his cell phone out of the faded green duffel and dialed Chris’s number.

      “Inglewood Construction,” Chris answered after two rings and Jesse’s dark mood lifted at the sound of his friend’s voice.

      “Hey, Chris. It’s Jesse.”

      “Jesse, when the hell are you going to get down here? I am up to my pits in work.” A saw buzzed to life on Chris’s side of the line. “Watch the damn floors!” Chris yelled and Jesse could practically smell the sawdust; he could almost taste it. “Seriously, man,” Chris said. “I need you here, like, yesterday.”

      “Yeah, I’m sorry, Chris, but it looks like I’m stuck in New Springs for a few days.”

      “Well, the sooner you get here the faster we can drink some cold beers and start making some money.”

      “Sounds good,” Jesse said. It sounded like heaven, like the furthest possible thing from the life he’d lived for the past three years. “Sounds real good.”

      “Keep me posted,” Chris said. “I gotta run. The guys are pouring the basement floor and I swear if someone doesn’t watch them, they’ll make a swimming pool out of it.”

      “See ya, Chris.” Jesse hung up and threw the phone back in his duffel.

      Wishing was for fools, something he learned the day his sister walked away from him, so he stopped wasting his own precious time. He was who he was and he had to take care of his responsibilities.

      He gave Wain a pat on the snout.

      “See what you’re getting me into?”

      Wain farted and sighed.

      Jesse jerked the wheel to the left and kicked up a lot of dust heading toward New Springs. He took the winding mountain road too fast. Wainwright put his nose in the air and howled and Jesse knew exactly how he felt.

      He drove through Old Town, past the Royal Theater and the Dairy Dream ice-cream shop. He took the left after the Vons grocery store, toward the south side. With every twist and turn through his old neighborhood, the pressure in his chest built.

      There weren’t any railroad tracks in New Springs, but Jesse never questioned which side of the proverbial tracks he was from. There had been a grit and a filth that came from this part of town and sometimes he could still feel it.

      When he was a kid, this particular street had been made up of single moms with kids they couldn’t control. Big, once-beautiful old homes—the first built in the town—had been falling to ruin or divided into apartments while people with money had chosen to live in the newer homes by the rec center on the other side of town.

      He shifted gears as the pressure in his chest started to feel like panic.

      The turning point of his life had come when Mitch and his family had moved into the neighborhood. Mitch’s mom liked old houses and apparently she’d never noticed the filth until her son had come home after school with Jesse in tow.

      Then she’d noticed.

      Since those days, however, the old neighborhood had clearly changed. The lawns were now green and nice, the tiled roofs repaired, the houses painted.

      It freaked him out. He wiped one sweaty palm on his thigh. He felt like the boy in the fancy shop who security watched—a feeling he hadn’t had since he was a kid.

      The old house must be the eyesore on this street.

      Mom had died three years ago and the house had been a nightmare then. Jesse could only imagine the damage raccoons and high-school kids looking for a place to get drunk had done since then.

      Truth be told, the idea appealed to him—the old homestead a broken-down disgrace among these refurbished houses. All the neighbors once again cursing the Filmore family over their repaired and whitewashed back fences.

      Just like the good old days.

      But