Brenna, Brat (Detroit ABCs)

Chapter 2

“T hat is so stupid, it hurt my ears to hear it. It’s crazy.”

Sophie looked over at me, exasperated. “Brenna, don’t be a brat!”

Our oldest sister Nicola agreed. She shifted her baby onto her other shoulder and smiled at her but then frowned at me. “You need to apologize,” she informed me coldly.

No, I wasn’t going to do that, because I wasn’t sorry. Also, because I made it a habit not to—if you apologized once, you were stuck doing it forever. I ignored them and continued talking to our other sister, Juliet. “Did I hear you right? You’re really rushing into marrying this guy?” I asked her. “You don’t even know him.”

Maybe not, but she had moved into his mansion and now she was wearing a diamond bigger than the gearshift knob of my car on her hand. She held that up in front of me. “Yes, I’m marrying Beckett, and I don’t want to hear anyone’s negative, jealous crud about it,” she announced.

“Jealous?” I pointed to my sternum. “Me? You think I’m jealous?”

“I think Sophie’s right and you’re a brat,” JuJu answered. She and I were only twenty-one months apart, and our ages would have seemed to set us up for friendship. But we had never really gotten along, because we were so different. Juliet had always been an achiever, a success in sports and with friends—she had pretty much ruled our high school.

As always, our sister Addie stepped in to be the peacemaker. There were so many of us that people seemed to need a diagram to remember our birth order, but it wasn’t difficult. Nicola was the oldest, then Sophie, then Addie. Juliet and her twin Patrick were next, and I followed them. For two beautiful years, I had been the youngest, but then Grace entered our lives via our mother’s thirty-six-hour, drug-free labor that she loved to describe in detail.

I didn’t really remember the time before Grace, but I could picture how nice it must have been for me as (temporarily) the youngest child. She and Nicola were the endcaps of our family and they obviously received a lot of attention because of it. Sophie got it, too, because she was the smartest and our father’s favorite, and Patrick was always our mom’s number one kid. Juliet had been an incredible athlete and she drew a lot of interest from everyone due to her success, and Addie? She was so nice that people loved her, just like the guy she’d married did. He didn’t say much, but he looked at her and it was written all over his face.

Her next statement was totally in character: “You guys, let’s not mark this occasion with fighting. It’s the wonderful moment that our sister told us that she’s engaged, and I’m so happy for you, JuJu.”

They hugged and all of my sisters were smiling, even Grace who was somehow paying attention. But I still had a lot of doubts, which I tried to express in a manner that wouldn’t make them tell me to shut up again. “No one has any objections to this?” I asked, and that was when I saw my three oldest sisters slide glances at Juliet. “What is that?” I demanded immediately. “Why did you just look at her that way? What’s going on?”

“I wasn’t going to talk about it today,” Juliet started off, and Nicola reached over to hold her hand.

“What? What’s wrong, JuJu?” I demanded. We weren’t friends, of course, but if something had happened…

“Beckett is sick,” she said simply and then, to my total shock, I saw her eyes fill with tears. Juliet never cried, never. She stopped talking and visibly attempted to get her emotions under control, but it wasn’t happening. She shook her head.

Nicola took up the story. Juliet’s new fiancé had cancer, she explained. He’d had it as a teenager and it had recurred. He was undergoing treatment and she had so much faith that he’d soon be in another remission, but it made sense for them to hurry their plans. They weren’t rushing, she told us, and shot me a glare. It was just a little more speed than expected due to his illness and we were all going to support them. “We will be supportive,” she reiterated, and she was laser-focused on me as she said the words.

I opened my mouth again but before I could speak, Sophie kicked me under the table so hard that tears filled my eyes, too. “And the other news is something that I’ve been meaning to tell all of you,” she said as I bent to rub my injured shin. “Two days ago, Danny and I got married.”

We turned to her, universally shocked. “What did you just say?” Nicola demanded.

“There’s no waiting period in Ohio after you get your license,” she answered calmly. “We figured we’d better do it sooner rather than later, since I’m pregnant.”

“Holy Mary! So am I!” Addie told everyone, and everything dissolved into congratulations and celebration. It was stomach-churning.

At least we were comfortable here in Juliet’s new house situated on Lake St. Clair, because the place was big enough for everyone (it was big enough to accommodate most of the population of the city of Detroit). Also, she had provided a lot of snacks and I ate those as I waited for my sisters to calm down. These events, babies and weddings, were not so uncommon but they were all acting as if they deserved to have their names in lights.

They went on (for much too long) but the upshot remained the same: Juliet and Beckett were getting married, and it would apparently happen soon due to his illness and despite the fact that they hardly knew each other. Sophie was already married, having snuck around and not caring that her family might have wanted to be in attendance. Addie was pregnant and due a little before Sophie and basically, their kids would be twins. It was all just great because what we really needed in our ridiculous family was more chaos.

I was the only one who saw any problems, though; all my big sisters were overjoyed. I turned to Grace to see what she thought of their nonsense. But her chair was empty and it turned out that she’d gone for a walk and managed to fall through the ice on the lake. Nicola freaked out about hypothermia because Grace had always been like her baby, since our mother absolutely sucked at parenting so our biggest sister had to step in and handle the situation. “She’s a grown woman,” I pointed out, but was told to go find towels and to help instead of criticizing.

Instead, I left. I had things to do besides sitting around and watching them fuss over Grace and congratulate each other on their awesome lives. It wasn’t that I felt angry about all their amazing, uplifting crap. Mostly, they deserved happiness (I wasn’t positive that Juliet did, but definitely Addie, probably Nicola, and I leaned toward a yes for Sophie, too). I was also very, very sorry that JuJu’s fiancé was sick, but the guy had a lot of money to throw at the problem, so he would be ok. Wouldn’t he? I knew he was ultra-rich. The place where they lived, the place that I had just exited, was a French Norman-style estate that was a lot like a castle, and the art inside it was amazing. I’d been over there a few times, once at Beckett’s invitation to look at his collection and again because he had asked for my opinion on his kitchen remodel. It was lucky he’d done that since the colors, cabinet style, and countertops he had picked were terrible, but it hadn’t been too late to make changes.

I actually liked the guy and I thought that even though he was very different from my annoying sister Juliet, they made a good couple. Now that I was driving home and I was digesting the information, I felt even worse that he wasn’t well and I thought of Juliet crying. Even if he did have all that money, I couldn’t imagine…

This just sucked. I banged my fist on the steering wheel in frustration. I had spent my whole Saturday morning dealing with them and we’d accomplished nothing except establishing (again) that Grace was a danger to herself and needed a minder. What a waste of my valuable time, I seethed, when there were so many things that I could have been doing on this dark winter day.

I tried to think of what those things would be.

Well, I might have made the new dress I’d been dreaming about, one that would have been perfect for a New Year’s party. I hadn’t really gone out that night—I’d been at Nicola’s for a while but both she and her husband had fallen asleep around nine. Babies, they’d told me, made you tired. I didn’t have anyone else that I wanted to go out with, because unlike three of my older sisters, I had gone away to college. I’d been in New York for fashion school, which meant that I didn’t have much of a local crowd besides some very lame acquaintances from high school. Who wanted to hang out with them anymore? I hadn’t wanted to do that even when we’d been “friends.”

The result was that I hadn’t had a place to wear that dress so I hadn’t bothered to work on it, or even to start cutting the beautiful fabric I’d bought. It had cost so much per yard that I’d had to close my eyes when the number flashed on the terminal and I put my credit card into it, and I couldn’t waste it…I considered Juliet’s wedding. If she didn’t have to make me a bridesmaid (if Nicola didn’t force her into it), then I would wear it there. I might even outshine the bride, I thought, but then shook my head. No, there was no way. Juliet was beautiful, for one thing, and she had a body that made everything look good, even the horrible clothes that she had bought in the past few years when she’d been on a huge spending spree. I would never outshine any of my sisters for a variety of reasons. Not that I cared.

The idea of going back home didn’t appeal much to me. This day was so sad and unappealing in general, and I kept thinking about Juliet, her fiancé, and their bad news. The other news, that there would soon be two new Curran babies, also didn’t fill me with a whole lot of glee or anything. I was mostly ambivalent toward kids. My sister Sophie was splitting the burden of caring for my brother Patrick’s daughter (a long story) and I didn’t mind that niece. The one that Nicola had was smaller and less interesting but was still pretty cute, especially in the clothes I made. But two more? And that was probably just the beginning. If Juliet was rushing into marriage, she’d be rushing into kids, too, and my mother was going to pass out in happiness. I didn’t believe that she cared much for her actual children, but she really loved the idea of a big family and she was really into the concept of grandkids.

I had my phone silenced because I didn’t want to hear anything more about Grace and her hypothermia or about any of the news we’d discussed today at Juliet’s house. That was why I didn’t see the other message until I got home and was just about to head back upstairs to Cleo and a long afternoon.

“This is Campbell Bates. You wrote your name and number on the business card from the gallery, and I think it was so I’d get in touch.”

He was very sure of himself, wasn’t he? It was a shocking amount of self-confidence. Then, as I sat mulling over what I should do, another message came in: “I’m going ice skating. Interested?”

What? I thought of how he’d left the gallery, when he’d asked me out and I’d turned him down. Why would he have wanted me to go anywhere with him? “Just FYI, I give my information to all the customers who buy art from me,” I typed.

“Maybe,” he said, and I felt like he was smiling as he sent that. “Want to skate?”

I hadn’t been on ice in at least fifteen years, since I was around nine. I remembered wobbly ankles, frozen sticks that you could trip over, and Grace falling on her face and getting a bloody nose. The crimson gore had spattered across the snow and Juliet had almost fainted, and that had been a pretty fun day.

I wasn’t doing anything else right now, so why not? “Where and when?” I wrote back, and he gave me the name of a rink, not a lake, in the suburbs. I hurried upstairs and chose what I believed to be a good outfit for this excursion, although I wasn’t totally confident in it and that was a feeling I didn’t enjoy. Everyone knew that I was the person to turn to for issues of style, which was why I had been over at Juliet and Beckett’s house to give advice on the kitchen design. I wondered how he was feeling…

The trip to the suburbs was slushy and boring, but when I arrived, I had to admit that it was a pretty area. I was used to my parents’ house, which had one of the biggest yards in our neighborhood in Detroit, but it was nothing compared to the places I drove past. Some of them even rivaled Juliet’s mansion where she lived with Beckett. We hadn’t seen him there today, but it didn’t mean that he was off sick somewhere. She always talked about how he was a fiend for work and he was probably at the office. His absence hadn’t signified anything bad.

Anyway, I parked at the rink and as I did, I saw the second car that Campbell had brought to the gallery, the SUV into which we’d loaded the sculpture. Like his other vehicle, it was new and perfect, no dents, no scratches, no ugly bumper stickers or stupid magnets. I rubbed my arms, remembering the strain of carrying that load, and I also remembered running back inside and quickly jotting down my name and number on the business card and then stapling it to his receipt. It was certainly presumptuous that he had assumed I’d meant for him to reach out like he had.

But whatever, I was here and as I’d noted, I had nothing else to do. Was this outfit ok? Was I still so pale? In my mirror at home, I’d been disappointed by my pastiness. I tried to check my reflection in the back window of a car I passed, but it was coated in too much winter dirt and salt to see anything except that my hair was still auburn and yes, my skin still appeared ghostly white. My blue eyes, lighter than Sophie’s and not the cornflower shade that Nicola had, were just smudges and I couldn’t see any of the makeup I’d put on.

The driver’s window rolled down. “Why are you looking into my trunk?” a man asked, and I quickly walked away.

Campbell Bates was waiting right where he said he’d be, near the skate rental counter. He smiled at me as I walked in, and I remembered him doing that when he’d been in the gallery, too. It was because he was so confident, so self-assured. And I was angry at myself when I realized that he was correct to feel that way, because I had jumped in to take my turn in whatever game he was playing with me—I couldn’t immediately understand what it was, but he had to have a reason for wanting me to meet him like this.

Anyway, I hadn’t had other plans, and he’d paid for this outing. He had even rented skates for me, and he held them up as I approached. “Brenna Curran,” he announced. “Hello and welcome to the rink. I got you a size seven like you told me.”

“Hello.Thank you.”

“You’re here right when you said you would be,” he continued.

I wasn’t the sister who ran late—that was Juliet and sometimes Grace, who could have been lost or could have lost her keys or her car. “I’m timely,” I answered.

“Are you also really a size seven?” He looked down at my feet, which were in the black Schone boots that I loved.

“Why would I have lied about my shoe size?”

“I’ll tell you a family secret,” he said, and led the way over to a wooden bench. “My sister says that she wears an eight, but she’s actually a ten. She hates her big feet so she lies.”

“That’s your family secret? That’s as bad as it gets?”

I swore that for a split second, his face changed, but then he shrugged. “That’s all we’ve got, Carrington and the shoes that pinch.”

“Every time you say her name, it reminds me of something.” I carefully took off my boots and put them under the bench. “I can’t place it, though.” Also, why was this skate so stiff? How was someone supposed to get her foot into it?

“Carrington is also a city in North Dakota. It always pissed her off a lot that they had already used her name,” he said. “By the way, she liked the sculpture.”

I stopped trying to fight my way into the stupid skate. “Really? I thought she hated everything.”

“Not everything,” he answered. “She loves me a lot, but who wouldn’t?” He laughed after he spoke. “I wish I’d had my phone out to get a picture of your face when I said that. I never had someone call me an asshole like you just did, without saying the word or even using her middle finger.”

“I know I look like that,” I admitted. “My sisters are always telling me to stop glaring at people and in high school, I won the award for Best Bitch Face. It was an online thing, not in the actual yearbook.”

“I thought it was funny. Hold on.” He suddenly got off the bench and knelt in front of me, and he pried open the skate as wide as it would go. “Now try.”

With Campbell’s help, I got them onto my size seven feet, and he put on his own skates in a second. “I used to play hockey,” he commented as I looked at them. They seemed well-used, and if he’d been a hockey player, then he did know how to use them.

“I haven’t done this in a while,” I admitted as we walked over the rubber flooring toward the ice. It was fairly full of people, some carefully marching and some whizzing around like they were racing.

“It’s like riding a bike.” He stepped out onto the ice and stood there confidently.

Well, I wasn’t good at that, either. I stepped a lot less confidently onto the slippery surface and then held the wall.

Campbell glided backwards a few feet and then returned. “Can you skate at all?”

“Of course!” I told him, and let go. I pushed off with one foot, slid for a shaky yard or so, and went down.

“Whoops! Here we are,” he said, and literally picked me up, off the ice. “You ok?”

Maybe, except for my butt, my hands, and my self-respect. “Great,” I muttered.

“Here,” he offered, and held out his own hands. “You hold on and I’ll go backwards.” Slowly, we started to move. He was just towing me but at least I stayed—

“Holy Mary!” I yelped as I wobbled.

“You’re ok,” he said, and kept me upright. “Hold onto my arms instead. When was the last time you skated?”

“When I was nine,” I answered. “It was on a pond so it was a lot bumpier. How about you?”

“Last weekend. Whoops! You’re ok,” he repeated, because I had nearly fallen again. “I played a lot of hockey, all through high school and college.”

“Really? My sister was a college athlete, too. She was a swimmer.”

“How about you? Were you good at sports?”

I clutched his arms and thought how weird this was for a first date. Although, it wasn’t really that. He hadn’t asked me out more than an hour in advance, which meant that he hadn’t been planning as he would have if this meant something, something other than killing time.

“Good at sports?” I repeated. I was focusing so much on not going down that I didn’t laugh at his question. “No, not at all. I was into art, though.”

“So that’s why you work in a gallery.”

I started to shake my head but then got scared that the movement would throw me off and make me crash again. My eyes were locked on the ice beneath my feet, that hard, unforgiving surface.

“Look up,” Campbell directed. “You’ll keep your balance better that way.”

I did look up, right at the middle of his chest where my gaze naturally rested. He was a lot taller than I was.

“There you go,” he complimented, and I immediately almost fell. “I can tell that you’re athletic. You couldn’t have been doing only arty things.”

“No, I’m not athletic and I wasn’t always doing ‘arty things.’ I had to swim for a long time.”

“You mean, you had to cross a lake, or…”

“I mean that I had to be on a team for a few years, until Nicola let me quit,” I said.

“Who’s Nicola?”

He wasn’t the only one who had a sister, so I explained all the people in my family, Nicola, Sophie, Addie, Juliet, Patrick, me, and Grace.

“Sophie,” he repeated. “That’s funny.”

“Why?”

He was checking behind us again, as he had been every few seconds so we didn’t bash someone over. A chain of little kids went by, shrieking and laughing, and he smiled at them. “Huh?” he asked, but I was busy falling and didn’t answer.

Despite the fact that it was cold, that my feet ached in the skates, that my butt hurt from impact, and that I had no skills whatsoever, I didn’t have a terrible time. We talked about the gallery and about his job, too. He worked for a large company that seemed to do a lot of stuff. Ok, it was more technical than just “stuff,” as he explained it. They were a major landlord here in Michigan and in other states, and they also did financial, transactional things. His division, which he seemed to run, was all about mortgages.

“Is that what you always wanted to do?” I asked him.

He laughed. “Has anyone ever said that they wanted to grow up and aggregate financial instruments? No, I wanted to be a hockey player and also a secret agent. That was the plan for a long time.”

“You couldn’t keep playing hockey?”

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. Movement like that didn’t seem to throw him off-balance. “I was good enough to get recruited for a college team, but I wasn’t going any further. Also, it turns out that I’m about as sneaky as a rhino, so a career as a secret agent wouldn’t happen, either.”

“It would have been dangerous if you’re that loud.”

“Exactly. I’d probably also feel bad about arresting people.” He checked over his shoulder. “Anyway, I was done with hockey.”

“You’re still skating every weekend,” I pointed out. And he was really good at it, too. I could tell that he could have been one of the people flying around if he wasn’t encumbered by me.

“I missed it when I stopped,” he said. “I missed my teammates and I missed getting out and moving. Securitization of non-conforming mortgage loans isn’t actually a physical activity. Maybe you hadn’t heard that.”

Since I was going to have to ask my dad what the securitization stuff meant, I just nodded as if I were in on the joke. “I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about your field,” I answered more honestly.

“Nobody does.”

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“Do you have to like what you do?”

“I think you’re supposed to, but I don’t,” I said. “My boss at the gallery drives me crazy.” I outlined a few things about Alecta that I considered to be the most damning, like her lack of planning, her inattention to detail, and her constant need for the spotlight. I didn’t add that she was also a drug dealer, but that was a problem, too.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m stereotyping, but isn’t that how artists are?” Campbell asked. “Head in the clouds, not so interested in the mundane shit…”

“That’s true about some of them, but definitely not all. And anyway, Alecta isn’t an artist, not really. She talks about herself that way but she’s just so unoriginal and bland, and she never puts any real work into it. She gets to use our building for free because her mom owns it, so she decided to open a gallery to sell her art. I think she was mostly interested in putting her name on the front of it. She never created enough on her own, so she started showing other people’s stuff and that makes a minor profit for her.” Not nearly as much as the drugs, but the gallery also provided a good cover for her illegal activities. “All she does is fritter away money on a lot of haircare and trips to places that she doesn’t really want to go. She only travels so that she can brag about it, not because she’s interested in the destinations.”

I took a breath. My sisters told me that I complained too much, and that I went off on my boss way too often.

He asked the same question that they always did: “Why do you work there if you hate her?”

“It’s an easy place to be, even though I’m mostly running everything. I have enough time to do what I want,” I explained.

“Which is what?”

“Look out!” I yelled. A little boy had skated directly behind him, and we all went down hard, our bodies crashing.

Then the kid’s father was trying to untangle him and Campbell was helping. “Nice hit!” he said to the sniffling child. “You should play hockey.”

“I played for my whole life,” the kid answered. That meant he’d been on skates for about four years. He stopped sniffling and seemed proud.

“Good for you,” Campbell told him, and they bumped fists. Then he noticed that I was still trying to stand, and he went to haul me to my feet, too. “You ok?”

“Yes, but I’m think I’m done,” I said. He and the boy seemed unscathed after our accident, but I had fallen with my weight onto my right side, wrist and butt. They both hurt.

“Yeah, you look a little cold,” he agreed. “I’m glad you’re all right,” he told the boy, and they bumped fists again and he spoke to the dad, too, apologizing even though it hadn’t been his fault. As I knew from watching Grace progress/regress through life, kids were all kinds of dumb.

While Campbell was making new friends, I carefully shuffled to the wall, and then to the nearby exit from the ice. Shivering, I made my way over to the bench under which I’d left my boots with the other winter footwear. But…

I must have been sitting somewhere else. I limped along, looking beneath all the seats and moving other shoes to check behind them. They weren’t there.

“Want my help getting those off?” Campbell asked. He already had on his own shoes and his skates were apparently stowed in the bag over his shoulder.

“I can’t find my boots. Someone took them,” I stated.

“The black ones you were wearing? I’ll help you look.” He did, but the outcome was the same. The guy at the skate rental counter helpfully pointed out that I could have put them into a paid locker and also pointed to the sign that said the rink wasn’t responsible for lost or stolen property.

“Those were really nice, expensive boots,” I told that dumb person. “They were Schone, which last forever.” I chose my stuff carefully and unlike other people in my family, I didn’t overbuy. I had assembled a wardrobe that I loved and those boots were part of it.

He shrugged but the girl working with him muttered something under her breath.

“If they were so great, I shouldn’t have worn them here?” I parroted back to her. “Is that what you just said, you rude—”

“Ok,” Campbell interrupted. “I’m guessing that there are no cameras and that no one watches this area.” The rink employees stared at him and he turned to me. “We’re going to take another look around.”

He walked and I clomped in the skates that were fully killing my feet, but the result was the same. Someone had stolen my Schone boots, the ones that it had taken me seven months to save for in college. I never should have worn them to this nasty place. I never should have come, either, and I couldn’t think of why I had. I sat down on the bench and yanked at the laces of my skates, and then I dropped them onto the rental counter. The two people there had turned their backs and pretended to be busy when they’d spotted me coming.

Campbell had, apparently, already departed, because I didn’t see him anywhere in the busy changing area. Nice! I was even angrier as I left the building. My socks were soaking from going through dirty puddles and my aching feet now froze as I made my way to my car. What a dumb idea to go skating and to have dropped everything for some ridiculous frat boy who wanted to relive his hockey glory days. I would never skate again, of course, and I also considered seeking revenge somehow on the rude employees at the rental desk. But I had done a lot of those jobs, too, where all you got was crap from people like me, people demanding things of you that you had no control over and didn’t care about anyway—

“Brenna!” That was Campbell calling my name. He moved faster and caught right up. “Are you only wearing socks?”

“Yes, because someone there stole my boots.”

“I’m sorry that happened. I should have gotten us a locker.”

I should have done that myself. Why hadn’t I done that? “Too late now,” I commented. “See you around.”

“How far away did you park? Your feet must be cold,” he said, and that was true.

“I’m right over there,” I answered, indicating my vehicle. “Bye.”

“This wasn’t my fault,” he pointed out.

“I know that, but I’m really upset. I loved them and I don’t have extras, like how some people have surplus cars. I only have one of those, and I only have one pair of nice boots. I mean, I had them.” We had reached my spot. “Thanks for paying for me and trying to teach me how to skate. I know I was terrible and it couldn’t have been fun for you to drag me around like that.”

“I did have fun,” he said offhandedly. He was wincing and rubbing his temple as he looked at my car, which admittedly wasn’t in the best shape. Since I parked on the street at my building, it had a huge dent in the fender where someone had hit it and then driven away, and the passenger window had a crack which ran from one side to the other. There was no point in fixing those things, since they would only happen again. Besides, I was saving my money for other stuff…like new boots, which I would have to buy, since winter would suck a lot without them.

Had he said that he’d had fun? No, that was a lie, because I wasn’t the kind of girl that men enjoyed dating. I was the kind that they might ask out once, but then they’d make an excuse and leave after having drinks and instead of continuing on to dinner. I knew it very well, so there was no need to pretend. And if they couldn’t handle me?

Too bad for them. I didn’t care, I really didn’t. Better to be alone than with one of those idiots.

“Bye,” Campbell Bates repeated as I got into my car. I backed out with him still standing there, not smiling anymore at all and squinting, blocking the weak sun from his eyes. When he’d driven away from the gallery on the night he’d bought his sculpture, I’d thought it was the last time I would see him. But this, right now, was the real end.

It was fine. Maybe it had been slightly fun to skate and hang out with him, to do something different and to feel like I had a friend. But I didn’t care about that, either. I really didn’t.