Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
I’ve crashed on more than my fair share of couches.
Actually, in my glory days, a couch was a luxury.
Cold Sweat might have had the Bank of Ricky Pierce backing our tours, but accommodations still ranged from crinkly beanbag chairs to deflating air mattresses on a distant cousin’s basement floor.
Needless to say, I logged a great night’s sleep last night beneath a fuzzy red blanket on a deep chenille couch.
Renee’s couch. A month ago, I would’ve mistaken this for a nightmare.
God knows what time it is when I stir awake, squinting into the light pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I shift to sit up beneath the fleece blanket—the good blanket, Renee called it last night when she set me up in her living room with sleepy tea and more pillows than any one person could need.
She showed me how to work her TV, asked me one last time if I had everything I needed, then gave me plenty of space to cry.
She didn’t hover or supervise, but she kept me safe from myself, and in the light of a new day, that’s a larger gift than I know how to unwrap.
I fold up the blanket and find my phone on its charger.
I didn’t see much of the apartment in the dark, but its industrial feel, the high ceilings and exposed ductwork, reminds me a little of Gentle Giant.
I would have imagined Renee living inside a modern-art museum, all stark-white lines and hard angles and color-coded everything.
Instead, her buttercream walls boast a mismatched gallery of art prints and pictures that hang seemingly at random, although it’s too visually balanced to be accidental.
I imagine her plotting and measuring each frame, her nose scrunched up in concentration.
Plenty of familiar faces smile back at me from the photo wall.
There’s a picture of Gin and Renee at a Cubs game and another with Gin, Renee, and Chrissy kneeling on the back of a boat with windblown hair and tipsy smiles.
In the center of the wall, a gaudy gold leaf frame surrounds a photo I have memorized: Renee posed with that blond Ken doll at her office holiday party.
Merry, Bright, and Blomquist, I recite in my head, wondering why I committed her caption to memory.
At eight o’clock on the dot, the coffeepot gurgles to life.
Cars hiss down the wet pavement, off to their Monday-morning meetings, and it occurs to me that Renee should be doing the same.
She hasn’t made a peep, and I won’t be making the mistake of letting her sleep in again.
Down a hall lined with framed playbills, I rap a knuckle against her bedroom door.
“Renee? Are you up?”
No response. Cautiously, I push the door open, revealing a tidy, feminine bedroom with a four-poster bed in the center.
Renee sits up beneath a lavender quilt, wincing into the daylight with her blonde hair falling every which way.
My pulse flutters, and in my mind’s eye, I’m in bed beside her, Renee’s smooth, sculpted legs tangled with mine. I cough, shoving the thought away.
“Shouldn’t you be getting up for work?” I ask.
Renee blinks at me, confused, as she finger combs her bed head back.
An enormous gray T-shirt hangs loose and lazy off her shoulder, and panic stretches her sleepy eyes as she paws for her phone on the end table, checking the time.
“Sorry.” She coughs. “Had to remember what day it was.” Her voice is a low, sleepy rasp.
“Monday, right? I, uh. I took today off.”
“Oh. Sorry to wake you.”
“It’s fine.” Renee rubs her eyes, then reaches for her nightstand again and slides on a pair of round wire-frame glasses. “You want coffee?”
“More than anything on this earth.”
In the kitchen, Renee digs two mismatched mugs out of the cabinet—one big bellied and teal with a chip in the lip and another with a twirly-lettered roastery logo on the side.
She fills both to the brim and gives me my pick of the two.
I choose the teal one, worrying my thumb against the chipped porcelain.
It feels lucky somehow—or maybe it’s just the grand luck of the last twelve hours, that Renee happened to be passing by right when I needed to be found.
I follow her back to the couch, still collecting details of the apartment like souvenirs. Renee’s home is so much more normal than I expected—the basket of unfolded laundry, the brown-spotted bananas in the fruit bowl, the abandoned stack of mail cluttering the small oak desk in the corner.
“Great apartment, by the way.”
“Thanks.” Renee brushes her fingers along the giant waxy leaf of a thriving elephant ear plant. “Enjoy it while you can. They’re raising the rent, so…we’ll see.”
“Well, it’s a great space.” The next thought is meant to stay inside, but it flies out anyway. “Not at all what I was expecting.”
She squints at me over her shoulder. “What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know. You’re just so organized and clean cut, but your apartment is…eclectic?”
Renee lifts a brow. “Am I allowed to contain multitudes, Alice?”
We settle on the couch, backs against the khaki armrests, toes almost touching on the center cushion. We’re a set of matching bookends, each holding our mug steady in both hands.
“So,” Renee starts. “Last night.”
Right. I fight through a swallow, then a deep inhale that pours out as a wavering sigh. “Yeah. Last night. Thank you for letting me stay with you.”
“Of course.” Renee’s voice is slow and measured, like she’s trying to suss out exactly what drove me toward a late-night staring contest with my old favorite bar.
She sips her coffee cautiously, eyeing me from behind her mug until the steam fogs her glasses.
When her lenses clear, Renee’s eyes lock on mine.
“So what’s going on?” she asks outright.
“I was…a little shaken up.” An understatement but not a lie. “It was a hard night. I’m glad you found me.”
Renee’s lips tick up on one side. “I did sacrifice the good blanket for you. That was very big of me.”
I grunt a laugh. “At least you’re honest.”
“Yes, well. You can be, too, you know.”
“I can be what?”
“Honest,” she says.
My stomach folds itself in half.
“You don’t have to,” Renee amends. “But know that you can if you want to talk about it. Whatever it is.”
It feels like I have mosquito bites on my stomach lining.
I’m not sure whether it’s safe—or even possible—to scratch.
Do I want to talk about it? With her? Probably not.
She doesn’t know my family. She never knew my dad.
But I know I can’t feel this way anymore.
All bottled up. My texts to Dad are devastatingly one sided, and based on my interactions with Gin as of late, I’m not sure she has space to discuss anything besides the wedding.
I close my eyes and try to smooth my nerves like a blanket over my lap.
“So you know how my dad was in a band?”
“The Handful,” Renee softly supplies. She remembers. That feels nice.
“Right. So. Last night…” Immediately, the words jam in my throat. I lift my mug for a sip of the only liquid courage I’m allowed these days. “My mom is dating the drummer.”
A wave of nausea rolls through me, and I ride it out with my eyes squeezed shut. When I open them, Renee is studying me closely. It’s like she’s holding me up to the light, seeing me from every angle. I shiver.
“How are you feeling?” she finally asks.
A puff of air escapes my lips. “Shocked, I guess? I swung by my mom’s to surprise her last night, and Kurt…well, he was just…there.”
“Wait.” Renee blinks. “This just happened?”
“Yeah.”
Another long, trembling silence. I run my thumb back and forth along the chip in the lip of my mug.
When I’m brave enough to lift my gaze, Renee’s eyes catch mine so gently, the way my pillow catches my head at night.
She’s never looked at me like this before, soft and warm.
The good blanket can’t hold a candle to this.
“Thanks for telling me,” she finally says, and by the low, even timbre of her voice, she may actually mean it. “Do you…know him well? The drummer?”
“Yes. Kurt.”
“Kurt,” she repeats with the exact right amount of disdain in her voice. A warm prickle of solidarity.
“I haven’t seen much of him in the last few years,” I admit, “but we spent every summer together in Galena. He was one of Dad’s best friends, and…” My head begins to spin. “I don’t know. He’s Uncle Kurt, you know? He’s not literally my uncle, obviously.”
Renee nods. “I get it.” She blows a breath over her coffee, and the steam momentarily fogs her glasses again. It’s impossibly cute.
“So you’re close, then?” Renee asks, and my throat goes dry. What were we talking about?
“Kurt?” Renee prompts, reading my expression. Hopefully not too well.
“Right. We were close, yeah. Especially when I was little. He was like…the human embodiment of flip-flops.”
Renee’s lips curl up.
“He’s funny, too,” I go on. “He used to recycle jokes from old stand-up comedians, but I didn’t recognize it as George Carlin or John Cleese or whatever.
I just thought he and my dad were comedic geniuses.
And Kurt was sort of permanently single, so…
” A chill zips through me. Warning lights, flashing red in my mind.
“Do you think there was something going on with him and Mom before my dad died?”
Renee’s face twists up. Maybe that thought should’ve stayed inside.
“I…I don’t know your mom,” she says.
“Right. Of course. Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Hey.” Renee extends a leg to brush her fuzzy sock against the arch of my foot. Just a poke. A tap. An acknowledgment that I’m not alone. “I don’t know your mom,” she repeats, eyes steady on mine, “but I do know that I’ve assumed the worst before and been…a little wrong.”
In spite of myself, I laugh. “Renee Roberts, willfully admitting to being wrong? Well, now I’ve heard everything.”