Chapter 24 Lorna Now
“Hey there, big spender,” Mr. Contreras said the next morning when Lorna made herself return his call. “How’s that offer coming along? I got a developer knocking at my door.”
Already? “It’s coming, Mr. Contreras.”
“Yeah, this guy, he’s going to raze the house and build an eight-unit condo complex. He can make bank with that.”
A spark of rage shot through Lorna. She couldn’t trust the man to tell her the truth. “There’s not enough room for that on this lot.”
“Sure there is. You squeeze them in and up. But if you don’t like that idea, get me that offer, sweetheart.”
She hated that he called her that. He seemed to delight in making her uneasy. “You will have it,” she said firmly.
“When?”
She glanced at the clock, as if that would tell her anything. She would just have to speed up her apology tour. “Two weeks,” she said.
“Sooner’s better,” he said, and hung up.
Jerk. Lorna looked at the codicil list. Mr. Cho, her first employer, was next.
He’d owned Cho’s Drugstore, where Lorna had worked when she was seventeen.
Brett Miller was listed after that, but those two regrets had technically happened at the same time.
She figured Mr. Cho was the more complicated apology for a lot of reasons, and Brett was. .. Well, Brett was the easy one.
In Lorna’s junior year of high school, she’d had her first boyfriend.
Not Brett. If she was being honest, she probably wouldn’t have looked at Brett had it not been for Luke Brown.
Luke was her first love, the senior Lorna believed would be the last guy in all of Austin to fall for her.
She was as tall as he was. She was not popular and was considered too brusque by some.
Luke had blond hair, a dimpled smile, and a baseball physique. All the girls drooled around him.
“He’s totally into you,” Lorna’s friend Mariah had whispered one day, her voice full of surprise.
“Why me?” Lorna had asked nervously, not knowing what to do with this information. It defied all teenage logic. But Mariah was right—Luke kept coming around and flirting, suggesting they go to her house after school.
It hardly took any persuading for her to take him home.
She reasoned it was safe enough—the house was big, and the chances of him running into Nana were almost nonexistent since she rarely left her rooms those days.
Mom was working. Kristen had been recently discharged from county jail, which she’d been sentenced to for public intoxication, but was rarely home. And when she was, she kept to her room.
Or so Lorna had thought. Because Kristen did manage to slink around when Luke was with her, sliding into a room like a cat.
She liked to make fun of the “lovebirds” or tell Luke he should comb his hair.
Luke would say she should comb her hair (he was not the best with clapbacks), and they would continue to banter back and forth until Kristen slid out again, on her way to a job or to meet yet another guy.
In the heady three months that Lorna and Luke were an “item” (at least according to Mariah), Lorna believed things were finally turning around for her.
While it was true Luke avoided her at school—he said he had to hang out with his friends or they’d be mad—he came to her house almost every day.
In her mind, that made him her boyfriend.
That year, she had Luke, she got a job at Cho’s Drugstore, and she made the volleyball team. All was right with her world.
But then Nana died. They found her in her chair, stone-cold, an unopened bottle of vodka at her feet.
“Wow,” Kristen had said, her voice full of shock. “She died before she got to drink it.” Only Kristen would see that as the tragedy.
After Nana’s death, which was probably more shocking than it should have been, given her health trajectory, Lorna had moved in something of a fog.
She went to school, went to work, laughed with friends, hung out with Luke, pretended like nothing had happened.
In a way, it felt like nothing had happened.
She’d mourned the loss of Nana long before her death—in the last two years of Nana’s life, she was usually too drunk to be present for her grandchildren.
Lorna tended to stay away from home when Luke wasn’t there, and especially when Kristen was around, because Kristen and Mom still argued all the time.
Kristen took Nana’s death the hardest. Lorna remembered Kristen cleaning out the front salon for the memorial.
She vacuumed and polished the furniture and brought in flowers and displayed framed pictures of Nana as a young woman and a young wife.
There were other pictures, too, photos of the family from a happier time.
Kristen, Lorna, and Nana under the oak tree in the backyard.
Kristen and Lorna doing gymnastics on the lawn while Nana proudly looked on.
Mom, Nana, Kristen, and Lorna arranged on the stairs, dressed in their Easter finery.
The four of them again, but with Dad, too, gathered for Christmas around a dining table that was groaning with ham, potatoes, cranberries, and green bean casserole.
Lorna as a toddler being held by Nana and beaming up at Kristen.
The house had filled with people paying their respects.
Lorna didn’t know any of them—most seemed to be people who had known Nana when she was a university man’s wife, or people who knew Lorna’s mother.
Lorna had stood stiffly as people passed her by and commented, “My, you’re tall, aren’t you?
” and “So sorry for your loss, young lady,” and “Where is your sister? She was so pretty.”
Where was her sister? The question had eventually penetrated Lorna’s brain fog, and she’d gone in search of poor, grieving Kristen.
She found her, all right, and in so doing, the occasion of Nana’s death became known as the time Lorna discovered that Luke had used her.
Because there he and Kristen were, making out in Kristen’s room, the smell of pot so thick it was a wonder the entire bereavement party hadn’t come upstairs to investigate.
It became apparent, in the arguing that followed over the next few days, that not only had Luke used Lorna to get to Kristen, but Kristen had allowed it.
“I didn’t even like him,” Kristen insisted one day when she had Lorna wrapped in a bear hug, trying to make her listen. “He’s a dick, Lolo, no good for you and no great loss, okay?”
Except that it was a great loss to Lorna. Of her first boyfriend, of her pride, and even of the naive belief that people were who they showed you they were. It wasn’t up to Kristen to decide that for her. “If you didn’t like him, then why did you do it?”
Kristen let go of Lorna. She shrugged and looked away. “He had money to get some weed,” she said simply.
That was it. Money for weed was all it took for Kristen to betray her.
The pain had been terrible. Gut-wrenching. Lorna hated Luke for what he’d done. But she owed an apology to Brett Miller, who had come after Luke.
Brett was a guy who was even lower on the school social ladder than she was.
He had a weird sense of humor that was off-putting to other kids.
But he seemed to truly like Lorna. And she had strung him along, pretending she liked him, then treating him poorly, inventing hoops just for the sake of watching him jump through them, then taking him back.
She’d kept that up until the shame she felt for treating him the same way Kristen had treated Luke drowned out her shame for having been used by Luke and betrayed by her sister.
The feeling of control she’d craved had not come without harm. So she dumped him.
Brett had seemed crushed, because Brett was a nice guy.
She owed him an apology. She was not a mean person, contrary to what they said at Driskill.
One morning she googled Brett and found he was the owner of Miller Tire Barn in nearby Round Rock.
Lorna called the number listed on the website and asked for Brett. The woman who answered told her he’d be in at noon. “That ulcer is acting up again, so he’s at the doctor’s.”
At half past noon, Lorna walked into the front lobby of Miller Tire Barn.
Through a glass door she could see the auto bay and cars up on risers.
Tires were stacked in and around the bay, and the scent of rubber and grease was heavy.
There seemed to be a coat of dust on everything.
Lorna glimpsed a woman’s head behind the counter. “Excuse me... may I speak to Brett?”
The woman behind the counter hardly looked up. “Brett! Customer wants to see you!” she shouted.
A moment later, a man with a paunch, wearing a sweat-stained shirt emblazoned with the Miller Tire Barn logo, walked out of a back office.
He was smiling, wiping his hands on a paper towel, like she’d caught him in the middle of lunch.
“How can I help you?” he asked, but the moment the words had left his lips, the spark of recognition shone in his eyes. “ Lorna ?”
“Yep. It’s me,” she said nervously, and gave him a nerdy little wave. “Hi, Brett.”
He tossed the paper towel aside and came forward, his hand extended to shake. “How the heck are you?” She reluctantly took it, noticing his wedding ring. He was grinning, still the happy galumph he’d been in high school, only bigger.
“I’m okay. How about you?”
“Doing good.” He looked past her, presumably for her car. “You need tires?”
“No, I came here hoping to talk to you.”
“Oh. Why?” He let out a laugh. “We don’t have a love child out there, do we?”
Lorna was so startled she gaped.
“Kidding,” he said.
The woman behind the counter was suddenly all ears. Brett noticed her interest too. “Just joking around, Teresa. This is Lorna. She was the love of my life.”
Lorna’s mouth dropped even more.
“Kidding!” he said again.
“Still a jokester,” she said, pressing a hand to her belly. “Maybe we can go in your office?”
“What’s the matter?” Brett asked, sobering. “Did someone die? Was it John Turweiler? I heard he had cancer or something.”
“No. I mean, I don’t know anything about John. I don’t know anyone who has died. This will be quick—nothing bad.”
Brett looked over his shoulder into his office. “I guess. It’s kind of a mess.”
“Kind of?” Teresa muttered.
“Come on,” Brett said, and ushered Lorna into the office.
He moved some papers off a red leather chair and gestured for her to sit.
Lorna didn’t want to sit on that chair, but she also didn’t want to be rude.
She perched on the edge of it. Brett leaned against a desk that was stacked with even more papers, a small tire, some framed photos that faced away from Lorna, several used coffee cups, and some tubing.
The room smelled of sweat, coffee, and rubber.
“What’s going on?” Brett asked. “I feel like I’m about to be punked.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I came to apologize for the way I treated you.”
Brett said nothing, but he frowned uncertainly. “Okay.” He rubbed his chin. It looked like the gesture of a man who was trying to recall.
“Do you remember?”
“Oh, I remember all of it,” he said. “You really hurt my feelings.”
Lorna swallowed. She knew she had, but to hear him say it made her feel queasy. “I’m really sorry, Brett.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m here—I’m trying to understand things about myself, about why I did things.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“I know,” she said. “But you didn’t deserve that. I used you.”
He snorted derisively. “Yeah, I got that,” he said impatiently. “But why? I really liked you.”
Lorna’s queasiness turned to acid. “The why was my sister. She and Luke Brown betrayed me in the worst way, and I was lashing out. At least that’s what I think I was doing. I’m so, so sorry, Brett. I was awful to you.”
He looked at her a moment, then shifted his gaze to his feet, crossed before him. “I hope you’re sorry, because you ruined my life. You’re the reason I’m selling tires instead of doing something like accounting.”
Lorna’s heart skipped a beat. “What?”
“You broke my heart, Lorna. I couldn’t get it together to apply for college. Hell, I couldn’t even make myself get a job after high school. I had no confidence.”
“Oh my God.” She felt sick. “Brett, I—”
He suddenly laughed. “Just kidding.”
Lorna’s anger gauge began to flicker. She had come here with a sincere apology. Maybe it wasn’t fair of her to expect him to take it, but he didn’t have to make her feel worse than she did.
Brett’s smile faded as he studied her. “Come on, it was a joke. Don’t you remember how I used to tease you back then? You used to be so much fun.”
And just like that, the anger left her. She’d been fun? “No one has ever told me that.”
“Seriously? You were a lot of fun. We laughed all the time. Why do you think I had such a crush on you?”
She smiled sheepishly. “I’ve been trying to figure that out.”
“So, whatever happened to Kristen, anyway? I saw her once, you know. I got popped for a DUI in Georgetown, and there she was in court with the female inmates. She kind of waved at me. I mean, as much as she could, because she was shackled. But she acknowledged me. I was surprised she remembered me.” He seemed pleased that she had.
“She’s in Florida now.”
“Awesome. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m kind of surprised she’s not dead. She was one risky chick.”
“I’m surprised too,” Lorna said. “So listen, Brett. I’d love to make it up to you somehow.”
“What, like a twelve-step program?”
“Not exactly, but—”
“If you really want to make it up to me, I guess we could bang it out.”
Lorna’s mouth gaped again. That was decidedly not what she had in mind. “I don’t know if—”
“Kidding!” He laughed uproariously at her shock. “Girl, I’m married.”
She inwardly breathed a sigh of relief. Because she wasn’t sure what she would have done had he insisted. “There must be something I can do.”
It happened that Brett did have an idea for how she could make her amends. She left with a new set of tires. When they were installed, he walked her out to her car. “Who are you going to apologize to now?”
“Mr. Cho.”
“The pharmacy dude? We used to get milkshakes there, remember?”
“I do,” she said, and smiled fondly at the memory. “Take care of yourself, Brett.”
“You too, Lorna.” He turned and walked back to the lobby of Miller’s Tire Barn.
And Lorna drove to Peggy’s house with her receipt for new tires.