“I’ll move in with Jessie.”
Jessie’s husband was a chemist, he worked at Lilly and he got paid a shitload. They didn’t have kids because that would cut into Jessie’s affinity for having fun whenever the hell she wanted and doing whatever the hell she liked whenever the hell she felt like it. They had a three bedroom house. One bedroom Jessie converted into a workout room. One had been decorated by some interior designer that Jessie hired when she’d got a wild hair up her ass. It had a double bed with a big, down comforter on it and lots of toss pillows and I knew Jessie put mints on the pillows when her Mom and Dad or her sister and her sister’s husband would come to visit.
I could do mints while I was displaced because some creepy, sick psycho had fixed onto me and was murdering people I liked and sending me notes from high school and forcing me to spend time with Alec, time where he touched me.
“No offense but Jimbo is a dweeb and he doesn’t own a .45,” Morrie dismissed my suggestion by slightly insulting Jessie’s husband who was, unfortunately, a dweeb but he also wasn’t a pushover.
I changed the subject. “Please tell me you don’t have a gun in your house with kids.”
“I do. I’m an American. I know how to use it, my kids know to avoid it and it’s locked in a safe anyway so they couldn’t get it even if they wanted to make trouble.”
I let it go and tried something else. “Al’s not a dweeb and it’s highly likely he owns a gun.”
Meems’s husband Al was anything but a dweeb. He’d been the center on the football team, on the line, right next to Morrie. Time had made him a little soft but it hadn’t made him a slouch. And he was a hunter, I knew he had guns. And he loved me, I knew he’d blow the brains out of anyone who tried to hurt me or got near his wife and kids.
No, that wasn’t true. Anyone got near his wife and kids, Al would not use his gun, he’d go in with his hands and rip them apart.
“They got no room for you, Feb. Theirs is a full house.”
This was true, they had four kids and Al wasn’t a chemist at Lilly. He worked on the highway crew. It was union, it paid well and the Coffee House was nothing to sneeze at because Meems could bake. Her muffins were orgasmic and her cookies and cakes were so good, you’d sell your soul to the devil if she made you do it just so you could have one. Still, they had four kids and Meems had a fondness for catalogue shopping. Bob, her postman, blamed her for the hernia he suffered last year and he wasn’t joking.
“Colt works a lot. You wouldn’t have to sleep on the pull out. He’d probably let you use his bed.”
If Morrie was being funny, I wasn’t laughing.
“If he’s gone all the time, what purpose would it serve me staying there?”
I watched Morrie’s face change, resistance drifting through it in a hard way, and I knew part of the bucketload of shit that sifted through my brain while I wasn’t sleeping last night was going to come spilling out just then.
I wasn’t wrong.
“We gotta talk about Colt.”
I shook my head.
His coffee cup came down with a crash and I jumped back a foot. I looked down, seeing the mug had split right down the middle and coffee was all over the place, spreading, spilling down the side of the counter, dripping in a coffee waterfall to the floor.
I looked at my brother. “Holy shit, Morrie.”
He turned and with an underarm throw he tossed the handle to the coffee mug, a jagged section of mug still attached to it, into the sink with such force it fractured again, bits flying out everywhere.
I didn’t jump that time but I took a step back.
“Morrie –”
Morrie leaned forward. “You’re gonna talk to me, February, talk to me right, fucking, now.”
I lifted my hand in a conciliatory gesture but Morrie shook his head.
“You spill now or you spill when Mom and Dad get here. Your choice but it’s been too fucking long. We all let it go too long. We shoulda made you spill ages ago, before Pete –”
“Stop!” I shouted.
No one talked to me about Pete. No one.
Not Meems. Not Jessie. Not Mom and Dad.
Not even my brother, who I loved best of them all which was saying a whole helluva lot.
I thought that’d work, it had worked before many times. Everyone knew I couldn’t talk about Pete.
But it didn’t work. Morrie moved fast. Before I knew it he had his hand curled around my upper arm and he gave me a shake. It wasn’t controlled, it was almost brutal and my head snapped back with the force of it.
My breath started coming fast but thin. Morrie got Dad’s temper which could flare out of control, though neither of them ever hurt anyone who didn’t need to get hurt. I got Mom’s which also could flare out of control but we were women and our hurt came from words rather than actions and those, unfortunately, lasted longer.
“What the fuck happened?” Morrie was in my face. “What made it go bad? What made you do what you did?”
“Let go of me Morrie.”
“Answer me, Feb.”
“Let me go!”
Another shake and my head snapped back. “Answer me!”
“You’re hurting me!” I yelled.
“I should knock some fuckin’ sense into you!” he yelled back.
I made a noise like I was going to vomit, it was involuntary and it sounded nasty. Then I wasn’t breathing anymore, not even thin, useless breaths – nothing, no oxygen.
Morrie’s face changed and he let me go, stepping back. He looked whipped, injured, the expression hideous on his face, the knowledge of what he’d done and what he’d said attacking him.
“Baby Sister,” he whispered but I shook my head.
He couldn’t go back to beloved big brother now. Not after that. Not after that. No way. No fucking way.
“I’m moving in with Jessie,” I announced, turning away.
“Feb, don’t. You need to be protected. You need someone lookin’ after you.”
I turned back. “A couple of hours in, Morrie, fine job you made of it.”
He flinched, his head jerking back with the weight of my blow. Just as I said, my anger came out in words and they hurt far worse than my arm was stinging just now.
I nodded my head to the bar that separated his kitchen from the dining area. On it, probably doused in coffee, was the list I spent most of the morning writing.
“Give that list to Alec, he wants it.”
I left it at that. I had to. And I walked away to pack.
“You’ve got a nerve,” Pete’s Mom, LeeAnne, said in my ear.
“LeeAnne –”
“I’m not giving you his number, you bitch.”
“This is important.”
“Nothin’s that important.”
“Someone’s dead.”
LeeAnne fell silent and I lifted my gaze to Meems and Jessie who were both crunched into Meems’s back office at the Coffee House. Both of them were watching me, both of them looking pissed and harassed, both of them knowing what this cost me and both of them wishing they could pay the toll instead of me.
“Her name is Angie. Evidence came out last night that she was murdered because of something that happened between her and me. There’s a possibility that anyone who…” Christ, how did I say this? LeeAnne was a bitch, the worst mother-in-law in history, but still, good manners prevented me from saying it straight out. “Anyway, anyone who didn’t get along with me might be in danger.”
“You’re poison,” LeeAnne spat, “always were.”
I didn’t get that, even from LeeAnne. She was a bitch but she’d seen me in the hospital and she knew her son did that to me.
She knew it wasn’t me who beat the shit out of Pete. It wasn’t me who came home that fucking, shitty, awful night and attacked me far worse than any of the times before. Times which could be brushed away as too much drink or what Pete called “our passionate but volatile relationship” (I thought it wasn’t much the first and too much of the last). It wasn’t me who tried to rape me, who I had to fight back, scared silly, losing the fight, only somehow to escape and drive over to Morrie’s house.