McKettrick's Luck Read Online Free PDF Page B

blankets and spread from home, put them on the rollaway that had been old when Cheyenne had left for college. Oh, yes, Ayanna had tried, but the room was depressing, just the same. The wallpaper was peeling, and the curtains looked as though they’d been through at least one flood. The linoleum floor was scuffed, with the pattern worn away in several places.
    â€œWhat’s in Phoenix?” she asked lightly, though she knew. In the low-income housing where he and Ayanna lived, he’d had friends. He’d had cable TV, and there was a major library across from the apartment building, with computers. Here, he had an old laptop and a rollaway bed.
    Mitch merely shrugged, but he shut down the game and swiveled his chair around so he could face Cheyenne.
    â€œThings are gonna get better,” she said.
    â€œThat’s what Mom says, too,” Mitch replied, but he didn’t sound as if he believed it.
    Cheyenne studied her brother. She and Mitch had different fathers; hers was dead, his was God knew where. Ten years ago, when she’d left Indian Rock, he’d been nine and she’d been seventeen. When Ayanna had followed her second husband, Pete, to Phoenix, dragging Mitch along with her, Cheyenne had been in her sophomore year at the University of Arizona, scrambling to keep up her grades and hold on to her night job. Mitch had written her a plaintive letter, begging her to come home, so the two of them could stay in this rundown shack of a house. He’d loved Indian Rock then—loved the singular freedoms of growing up in a small town.
    She’d replied with a postcard, scrawled on her break at Hooters, telling him to get real. She wasn’t about to come back, and even if she did, Ayanna would never agree to let them live alone, with Gram gone. You’ll like Phoenix, she’d said.
    â€œI’m sorry, Mitch,” she said now, after swallowing her heart. It was true that Ayanna wouldn’t have let her children stay there, if only because she’d needed the pittance she’d received for renting the place out, but there were gentler ways of refusing.
    â€œFor what?” he asked.
    â€œEverything,” she answered.
    â€œIt wasn’t your fault,” Mitch told her. “The accident, I mean.”
    I could have come back, gotten a job at the Roadhouse or Lucky’s, waiting tables. I could have paid Ayanna some rent, and probably gotten something from the state to help with the cost of raising my little brother. If I’d even tried…
    â€œIt wouldn’t have happened if we’d been here,” she said.
    â€œWho knows?” he asked. “Maybe it was fate—maybe I’d have rolled that four-wheeler anyhow.”
    Cheyenne closed her eyes against the images that were always hovering at the edge of her consciousness: Mitch, sixteen and foolish, joyriding in the desert with friends on “four-wheelers”—all-terrain vehicles designed for the hopelessly reckless. The rollover and critical spine injury. The rush to the hospital after her mother’s frantic call, the long vigil in the waiting room outside Intensive Care, when nobody knew if Mitch would live or die.
    The surgeries.
    The slow, excruciating recovery.
    Cheyenne had been just starting to make a name for herself at Meerland then. She’d driven back and forth between San Diego and Phoenix, armed with a company laptop and a cell phone. She’d held on stubbornly and worked hard, determined to prove to Nigel that she could succeed.
    And she had. While spelling an exhausted Ayanna at the hospital—Pete, husband number two and Mitch’s dad, had fled when he’d realized he was expected to behave like a responsible adult—she’d struck up a friendship with one of her brother’s surgeons and had eventually persuaded him to invest in Meerland. When his profits were impressive, he’d brought several of his colleagues onboard.
    Mitch had