Page 72 of Drive
Rendered mute, at first Jacques could only nod. “Thanks. I’ll get that,” he finally managed. And he made stops at aisle three, seven, and nine before checking out. Growing up around Floyd had taught him not to dismiss what he couldn’t understand, but that didn’t mean that his encounter with Lila the Albertsons’ stocker didn’t give him thefrissons.The trip was going to be an interestingone.
He pulled into Rainey’s driveway to find her descending the porch steps with a red portable ice chest in one hand and a backpack over her shoulder. The moment he saw her, the apprehension in his gut vanished. Whatever happened, his aim was clear. All that mattered was that he helped Rainey. If he focused on that, he couldn’t gowrong.
Chapter 18
Rainey’s4mm hook flew through the third row of half-double-crochet stitches in what would soon become a beach tote in Lily Sugar n’ Cream Country Stripes. The project looked nothing like a beach bag yet, but in her frazzled state, the thing would be completed before they got to the Mississippi stateline.
This ismadness.
Every five minutes or so, Rainey’s stomach would seize with the thought — that she’d never done anything as crazy in her life as driving seven hundred miles with a guy she barely knew in search of a brother she’d nevermet.
And it wasn’t just crazy that she’d only known Jacques a little over a month. What was insane was that she knew him enough to know that she should avoid him as an act of self-preservation. She knew him enough to know that he was kind and funny and smart and talented — not to mention beautiful to a heart-stopping degree — and if she let him in, he’d completely annihilate her. Rainey had foolishly agreed to friendship with him, but she never imagined that as friends, they’d be thrown together for days onend.
Rainey reached the end of the row, turned the piece, and started half-double-crocheting her way back, chewing her lip as shedid.
Then there was the madness of their quest. If Gloria Lopez-Craine didn’t like hearing from Rainey on Facebook, she wasn’t likely to break out the champagne when she and Jacques drove through four states to show up at her salon. And even if she did agree to talk to them, and she actually listened to Holi’s story, what was the likelihood she’d even consider having young Ray Charles tested for a bone marrowmatch?
Jacques was giving up days of actual paying work and putting close to fifteen hundred miles on his vehicle, and it would probably all be fornothing.
Archie was snoring softly in the back seat. Jacques had put on Spoon’sGimme Fictionwhen they pulled out of her driveway and let it play through. They were driving over the span of the Atchafalaya Basin — with nothing but marsh and cypress trees for miles — and it should have been a perfect moment. A spring day, the sun high and glinting on the water, turning the Spanish moss and the cypress knees black with its brightness. A crochet hook in hand. A sleeping dog. Good music. A gorgeousguy.
And it was everything Rainey could do to hold the panic atbay.
So when Jacques spoke, she would have shot out of her seat if she hadn’t been beltedin.
“Hey, you wanna—” He caught her jolt out of the corner of his eye. He would have had to have been blind not to see it. Even Archie startled awake. Jacques spared her a concerned glance. “Youokay?”
“Yeah,” she lied. “Just…nervous.”
He scanned her quickly before putting his gaze back on the interstate. “Crossing the basin can do that.” Rainey found this comment generous, and she didn’t feel it necessary to correct him. “On the one hand, it’s beautiful. The water and the trees that go on forever. On the other hand, it’s nineteen miles of marsh, and we’re trapped on a bridge in the middle ofit.”
Rainey looked out her window at the basin, the water’s brown, murky surface scarred with tree stumps. She gripped her crochet hook as though it were a lifeline. If the girder bridge beneath them gaveway…
“I hadn’t really thought about that,” shegulped.
Next to her, Jacques chuckled. “Didn’t mean to freak youout.”
“Well, you sort of did.” She shook her head, wadded up the still unrecognizable beach tote, and stuffed it into herbackpack.
He cleared his throat, and Rainey looked back to find him mastering his grin. “We’ll be out of it in ten minutes. Let’s play a game for tenminutes.”
“A game?” How could she play a game when she was a nervous wreck evenbeforeshe pictured plummeting to her death in an alligator-infestedswamp?
“Yeah, when I was a kid, my grandparents used to drive me to Gulf Shores every summer,” Jacques said. “And riding in the back seat listening to Cajun music was not my idea of a good time. When they thought I’d spent enough hours on my Nintendo DS, they’d turn off their music and make me play a game withthem.”
The thought of a young Jacques Gilchrist moping in the back seat of his grandparents’ car made her mouth twitch and piqued hercuriosity.
“What did youplay?”
“Oh, the alphabet game or some such hell.” Jacques flashed her a rueful grin. “But my favorite game was one my Grandma Lucille called Unlock theLyric.”
Rainey found herself smiling. “What’sthat?”
His face alight, Jacques said, “It’s when you recite lyrics to a song without any singing or humming. Pretty much the opposite of Name that Tune. The more obscure the lyric thebetter.”
“You played this with yourgrandparents?”
Jacques grinned at her tone. “Admittedly, most of the lyrics we knew in common were to Cajun songs, but they were still pretty good with classicrock.”
