Читать книгу As Bad As Can Be - Kristin Hardy, Kristin Hardy - Страница 11

THE MIDMORNING SUN SHONE out of a cloud-dotted sky as Mallory ambled along the Newport waterfront, sipping at her coffee. She loved it like this, cool and quiet, empty of crowds. White-topped pilings marched along the edges of docks that were lined with boats bobbing on the blue water. Turn-of-the century buildings ran down some of the older wharfs. Along with the brick sidewalks, still damp from the rain the night before, it took her back to another time.

She settled on a bench that let her look along the cobbled streets and at the old post office, itself a historic landmark. Newport was a town that could be easy to love. Maybe she’d finally found a place she could stay.

She’d grown up first in Newark, then in a dilapidated Philly suburb. After turning sixteen and moving in with Dev, she drifted along from city to city, as they followed his itinerant carpenter lifestyle. Somehow, though, even after she’d grown old enough to strike out on her own, she never settled down. After she’d been in a place for a while she’d get restless, find herself looking for something more.

When the itch hit, she knew it was time to move on. It was part of her nature, maybe, the part that was perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo and craved something different. “Selfish girl. You’re just like your no-good mother,” she could hear her aunt Rue’s sour voice as though she were sitting next to her. “Always looking for something else.” Mallory squeezed her eyes closed.

Maybe the reason she moved so often was to get away from the suffocating sense of negativity that she’d grown up with, their already unstable household torn apart. She remembered the day her world flew apart so clearly: coming home from kindergarten, getting off the bus with Dev, walking into the house, knowing somehow that something was different.

Even at her young age, Mallory already knew better than to expect hugs and cookies when she got home. There’d been times when their mother was at work and times when they’d found her passed out on the couch, a bottle at her side. This time, though, it was different, with an emptiness, a silence that rang in the ears.

And a note on the kitchen table.

Everything after that was a blur—Dev on the phone, the sight of her father’s grief and the arrival of her pinch-faced aunt Rue. Then the move, leaving her friends and most of her belongings behind to crowd into Aunt Rue’s shabby bungalow in a suburb of Philadelphia. And the refrain that had echoed in her ears right up to the day she’d walked out the door with nothing but the clothes on her back: “You’re no good, just like your mother.”

Maybe if Aunt Rue hadn’t practically raised Mallory’s father, she wouldn’t have seen the drifter he married as an evil interloper. Maybe if Mallory had gotten her father’s light hair and blue eyes instead of her mother’s dramatic Mediterranean coloring, Aunt Rue wouldn’t have treated her as a stand-in for all that she hated. Maybe if once, just once, her father had stuck up for her, Mallory would have stood a chance.

“Enough,” Mallory muttered, opening her eyes to stare hard at the water. It was the past, and done. Dev had escaped as soon as he could, unable to continue watching their father’s slide into a silent alcoholism. When a freak dockside crane collapse had killed her father, Mallory figured she had two choices—stick around and see how bad it could get or find Dev and hope to God he’d take her in.

The fact that he had, without hesitation, made her eternally grateful to him. Almost grateful enough to get over wanting to strangle him for his great idea about Shay O’Connor.

Shay O’Connor…a frown settled over her features as she watched a boat come into the dock. How was she going to get him out of Bad Reputation? It was hers, she thought. She was the owner, Dev the silent partner, that had been the arrangement. Only Dev’d never been able to break himself of being her big brother. God knew he’d gotten her out of trouble enough times when they were kids that maybe she shouldn’t blame him for thinking she needed to be bailed out of this one.