It was the usual mess. And it reminded me why I’d avoided it whenever possible for the past three years. When I realized my niece AliceLynn, now a surly teenager, was to be a part of all this, I latched onto the poor girl, acknowledging her extreme misery at my father’s announcement that she would officially be moving home with her father. It was about time. But strange timing.
She and I sneaked off after the initial family fireworks and sat on the far side of the pole barn, passing a joint between us in silence.
“You home for a while?” she asked, once we’d induced the necessary buzz to recover from the earlier scene.
“Hope not,” I said, passing the thing to her. I looked up, pondering the sky I’d memorized from pretty much this same spot years ago.
“She’s bad off, Angel,” my sweet little niece, now a pot-smoking teenager, said to me. As if I hadn’t figured that out already.
“I know,” I said, not willing to let on how much I wanted to cry. “When’re your daddy and Rosie Norris getting married?
She sucked in a huge lungful of smoke and let it trail out her nostrils before passing the joint back to me. “My daddy doesn’t exactly confide that level of detail, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” I took the roach, depleted it, and extinguished the remaining spark under my shoe. “That therapy lady sure was fucking him with her eyes.”
“Oh, Lord,” AliceLynn said, smacking my leg. “That’s gross. He is still my daddy, after all.”
“Nice to see Aiden,” I said, by way of subject change.
“Yes. He’s comic relief, and he deflects Granddaddy’s attention a little.”
“I’ll bet he does.” I sighed. “We should go in.”
“We should,” she agreed, leaning her head on my shoulder.
By the time we made it to the patio, dinner was obviously over. I started clearing the plates, a bit frightened by the fact that my mother had left the table without doing it. When Margot the therapist re-emerged, claiming car trouble, and my oldest brother took off after her, I got a clear inkling of trouble of a different sort still to come.
But I had my own little mother-daughter reunion to consummate. Fortified by the pot, I spent a few minutes loading the dishwasher, wiping down all the surfaces as I’d been taught, and giving the kitchen a quick swipe with the broom, before deciding I’d stalled long enough.
“Oh, hey, honey. I wiped off the patio table.” Rosie Norris handed me a wet rag and tucked a lock of her curly hair behind her ear. “Whew. This is gonna be a tough go for your mama.”
“Yeah,” I said, rinsing out the cloth and draping it over the dish drainer that I’d emptied in my zeal to avoid actually talking to Lindsay. “I am so happy for you and Antony,” I said, leaning on the kitchen counter.
Aiden came in then, holding Rosie’s little boy, Jeffrey. Her husband Paul, Antony’s one-time best buddy in the world, had been killed in Iraq before the kid had been born. I caught what I knew damn well was a weird moment between them then … between Rosie and Aiden, not Rosie and the brother Kieran had led me to believe she’d been “with” for the past few years.
I shook my head, unwilling to even contemplate how badly that might go. “I should go see her,” I mumbled, shouldering past Aiden. As I walked up the four steps to the bedroom hallway, my heart pounded so hard it echoed in my skull. The door at the end of the hall was closed. I knocked.
“Come in,” my father said.
I opened it slowly, willing myself far away from this mess. “Angel,” he said, folding me into a huge hug. I held on tight, blinking hard, unwilling to cry. “She’s asleep,” he whispered.
“I declare, Anton Love, if you don’t quit babying me, I will snatch you baldheaded. I am not sleeping. It’s only eight-thirty at night, for heaven’s sake.” My mother’s distinctive drawl made me smile.
My father rolled his eyes.
“Hey, Mama,” I said, from the safe circle of my father’s arm.
She sniffed, tugged the quilt up under her arms and patted the bed beside her. “Come here and let me see you, Angelique. I didn’t get a minute to even breathe earlier. What do you think of Margot?”
Daddy gave me push when I didn’t move. I sat, staring at her, marveling at the strength in her voice and the extreme thinness of her hands and face. “I, um …”
“I think therapy will be just the ticket for Antony and AliceLynn,” she declared. Lindsay making her pronouncements was familiar territory. When she asked for your opinion, it was meant to reinforce her own, not as an actual request for yours.
“Mama, I …”
My mother tilted her head, studying me in a way that I vividly recalled. “You’ve been sick,” she said, taking my chin and turning my head left and right. “And you have hickeys, young lady.”
I slapped my palm over my neck, cursing her sharp eyes. “I haven’t been sick. Only … busy.”
“That school called me last month, but I haven’t had a chance to phone them, what with …” She waved up and down her prone form, dismissing the cancer with an “oh, this old thing” sort of gesture. I touched her leg—broomstick-thin under the quilt—pondering the delicious possibility of disappointing her yet again with my own news flash. But when she smiled at me, her eyes shimmered with tears. Startled by this in a way I couldn’t explain, I pulled my hand away.
“Hmm … well, anyway,” I said, trying to regain control of my voice. “Why don’t you rest?”
She swiped her eyes, even as they narrowed at me. She usually could slice straight through my bullshit way better than she ever could with her beloved boys. I’d seen a couple of them, Dominic most often, tell her such bald-faced lies I had to leave the room to keep from laughing at her naïveté. My favorite was when he wandered into the kitchen one Saturday morning—him about seventeen, me about eleven years old—with nothing on but his underwear. Our mother had noticed something was off within seconds.
“I don’t put your drawers away inside out, young man,” she’d said.
“Huh?” He’d glanced down, then over at me with a frown of “don’t you dare say anything.” Of course, I never did. “We went for a swim in the quarry, Mama. Had to get dressed in the dark.” He’d kissed her on the top of her head, accepted the plate of hot food in one hand, the other over the obvious hickey between his neck and shoulder. “I’ll, um, get my clothes on first,” he’d said, plunking his plate down next to mine.
She’d harrumphed around, muttering, “I’ll declare. That boy.” And, “Thinking he can sit nekkid at my kitchen table.” I continued eating my scrambled eggs, ignoring her.
Now she looked ready to say something. I tensed, prepping my own whopper of a lie, since I’d decided laying the I-dropped-out-last-year thing on her now would be a bit on the unfair side. She sighed and stayed quiet. I got up and kissed her papery cheek, my nose filling with the smells of her … the distinctive lilac-scented lotion she’d worn forever, bleach, starched cotton, and a hint of my father’s malty yeastiness lingering in her hair. “Love you,” I muttered, suddenly at a loss.
She looked up at me, her eyes sharp again. But instead of making a caustic remark, she patted my cheek. “Go sit with your Daddy, now. He’s been pining for you, I know.”
Chapter Six
I woke the next morning to smells of breakfast. Confused for a few seconds, I stared up at the canopy of my teenaged bed, pondering it and all my many memories of mornings spent in this exact position, the exact same odors making my mouth water. I grabbed my phone to check the time, groaning at the big, bright 7:32, and found text messages from a few people in New York, my clingy roommate included. I deleted them. They had no place in this life, in this bed, this room.
I sat up, mystified by my own clear-headedness, until realizing it must be the first time I’d woken up without a hangover in months.