Chapter 38
TRIPP
“Don’t worry about it,” I say into my phone’s receiver. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”
Clicking to end the call, I let out an aggravated sigh. Water pelts the front window of the shop hard enough for the beating of it to drown out the music playing overhead. Wind howls through the trees at the street corner to send a few loose leaves flying across the pavement.
Light rainfall, my ass.
Do those weather dudes ever get it right?
Blowing out a breath, I put a hand against the reception desk in front of me and give a hard push to send my chair into a spin. No one is going to make it into the shop today, and there’s no fucking way I’m getting on my bike in this weather, so it’s just me, myself, and I until it finally clears.
“You gonna entertain me?” I ask the image of a femme-faced demon peeking through the hole in my jeans. She doesn’t respond. “Didn’t think so.”
Of course the torrential fucking downpour had to wait until I’d just gotten all of the mind-numbing, time-stealing tasks done that needed to be handled. Now, my only company for the day is day-old Chinese takeout and a nicotine patch that I’m not sure is worth how much it costs.
I’m going to lose my mind in here.
Get me a volleyball and some red paint, and I’ll be great.
Reaching for my sketchbook, I flip it open to a clean page. There aren’t many of those left; I’m going to have to get a new pack of them soon. I brutalized the last three pages with pen and marker in the first week of using these stupid patches.
You know what would work a lot better than a sticker?
A fucking cigarette.
Pencil dusted along the surface of the paper offers the bones of the piece, set into place with pen after the fact. In some areas, a watercolor marker fills in soft color, a deeper shade lending their shadow to finish it off.
After an hour of drawing and shading, I’m left with the image of a cow’s skull, a hole blown open at one side of it and a luna moth perched on the other.
A minute with a carefully-brandished pair of scissors frees the image from the page, and I tape it onto the wall with a handful of my other pieces.
In the window ahead of me, a body moves through a wall of white toward the shop’s door, and I bolt up from my chair to pull it open.
CJ steps inside, brushing water off of his soaked-through coat, and I help him out of it as quickly as I can. Outwardly, he seems unharmed, but the sparse pieces of flint-colored hair glued to his face with water make something sink in my stomach.
He’s never seemed old to me, but the shiver in his bones as we peel off every drenched layer of fabric and the exhaustion behind eyes that are starting to cloud hit me like a slap in the face of mortality.
For a long time, we don’t say a word to each other. Every glance toward the raging storm outside sends that feeling back into my gut, and I can’t seem to talk over it.
My eyes flick between CJ, the square patch stuck to my bicep, and the cabinet at my station, where an emergency pack of cigarettes is waiting for me.
Instead of answering their desperate call and fucking up all of the work I’ve done to only use these stupid patches, I push off of the couch and head for the back office to heat up the leftover Chinese food sitting in the fridge.
The old man chooses the set of chopsticks in my hand as his utensil, leaving me with a plastic fork as I pop open the containers of our reheated lunch. I don’t even know who left it in the fridge. I’ll pay them back for it tomorrow, if the weather’s decent.
“I did the gum.” The first words either of us have spoken to each other in the hour he’s been here are accompanied by a chopstick pointing toward the patch stuck to my skin.
In a smooth motion, he rolls the end of it to rest between his index and middle fingers.
“Having something to hold onto and chew on helps.
I was quite happy with a straw. ‘Course that was, oh, twenty years before I came outside.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever asked you how long you’ve been out there,” I admit as I stab my fork into a spring roll.
If I said that I didn’t feel like an asshole over that, I’d be lying.
His hand shakes as he sandwiches a roll between his chopsticks, and I can’t help my body lurching forward when it teeters in his grip. He’s careful as he pulls the roll toward himself, and I find myself inching toward him, worrying that his knotted fingers may quit on him.
I wait while he munches through the roll, mulling over each thought in his head or maybe pulling together a timeline. When he finishes, he reaches for the other container on the table and pulls it into his lap.
“It will be five years, come February,” he finally tells me.
“Your daughter didn’t offer you a place?”
Lowering his chopsticks into the container, he pulls out a healthy portion of the noodles, stuffing them into his mouth before resting the now-emptied vessel onto the table in front of him.
“She asked me to stay with her,” he explains, “but I can’t leave my wife.”
“Oh. Sorry,” I say. “I thought—”
“My Lucy passed fifteen years ago,” he tells me with a chuckle as my eyes shoot toward the window in search of a woman I’ve never seen or met before.
“We shared thirty years in this city. I couldn’t leave her behind.
” A wrinkled hand gestures toward the ring wrapped around my finger. “You understand it.”
Outstretching my fingers with a flick at the corner of my mouth, I concede with a nod.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I get it.”
I haven’t even been able to give up this one building because of someone who matters to me.
I can’t imagine being asked or expected to leave behind an entire city.
After everything Jules and I have lived through in only a little more than half of the time that he had with his wife, it would be an impossible ask.
The worst of the storm seems to pass with the ending of our meal, leaving only spattering drops of rain slapping against the concrete as the system starts its path away from us.
That seems to signal to my friend that it’s time for him to leave, and before I can stop him, he’s standing to pull his still-drying clothes over his arm.
“You can stay,” I offer. “Get some sleep, wait for it to dry up a little.”
“No,” he chuckles, full of nostalgia. “Go home to your Lucy. Give her my love.”
A hand drops onto my shoulder with a gentle squeeze as he offers me his unnecessary thanks. Stepping past me as he slides the worn strap of his backpack over his shoulder, he takes hold of the door handle to push it open.
“Hey, CJ,” I call out. The old man stops at the threshold and turns toward me with an expectant smile.
“How would you feel about helping us clean up around here a couple times a week? We can’t put you up in a penthouse or anything, but we can get you a phone and a bus to see your daughter every once in a while. ”
The window, the door, the shoes on his feet; he looks at everything but me, his lips shaking as he presses them together. When his head lowers and he gives it a shake, I worry that I might have offended him with my offer.
“I can’t take your money,” he tells me.
“Only one of these guys knows how to pick up a fucking mop; you’d be doing me a huge favor, honestly,” I tell him with a scoff. “You shouldn’t have to miss your kid so much. So let’s help each other out, alright?”
A bob of his chin is followed by his arms snapping around my body as he gives me one of those hugs.
The kind that you’re supposed to get when you get straight A’s – not that I ever did – or when you finally reach a goal that you’ve been working toward for years, and your parents can’t contain the pride they feel.
I never got one of those. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in my family get one.
This one is nice.
“You’re a nice boy, T-Mo,” he says, clapping me on the back. “Your parents should be proud of you.”
“Tell ‘em that, will you?” I say through a forced laugh, patting him on the shoulder as we part.
I remind him twice on the way out of the door to come back in the morning.
On my way home tonight, I’ll stop for a prepaid cell phone and see if I can find some clothes that might fit him.
I don’t know why it’s taken me until tonight to realize that his daughter probably spends most of her days worrying about her dad; probably because it would never occur to me to worry about Abaddon and Beelzebub.
I’d worry about CJ, though.
I don’t remember the last time that I rode home, as Jules would describe it, ‘like a normal person.’
I don’t know that I ever have. But tonight, I did.
Watching the garage door roll itself upward, I chuckle at the light shining above it. The one that Connor got sick of flickering and decided to swap out himself, because it was taking me too damn long to get out here and get it taken care of.
If I had to guess, there’s probably a new set of batteries in the carbon monoxide detector in the garage, too.
Rolling my bike to a stop in the garage, I pull off my helmet and swipe a finger across the screen of the phone still clipped to its mount to answer the incoming video call.
My brother’s face fills the screen, his focus on the road ahead of him, save a spare glance in my direction as I offer him my greeting.
“Why am I looking at your face?” I ask him, pulling my helmet to rest on my lap.
“Because you failed to respond to my text message,” he tells me.
Shit. I guess I did.
“Sorry,” I tell him, “I got busy. We’re good. We’re really good.”
At least I didn’t say ‘fine,’ I guess.
The look on his face seems to suggest much of the same, but he drops it where I leave it, opting instead to ask for an update on the shop. We’ve gone back and forth with this so many times, I know it’s really a veil intended to hide the question of ‘do you need money?’
The last time that he was in my shop, it was a wasteland; empty of bodies other than ours, and it worried him. Everything fucking worries him. I’m able to brush off his concern with a white lie about booming business, but as he reaches toward his phone to end the call, I stop him.
“Listen, while I have you, I wanna talk to you about something, and I don’t want you to get pissed,” I tell him.
Why am I worried about what he thinks? He’s a weirdo sex freak with a fucking dungeon in his house. If anyone doesn’t have space to pass judgment on another person, it’s my brother.
“Would this have anything to do with a change in your relationship?” He asks.
For only a split second, he meets my gaze with an arch of his brow.
“You haven’t texted nearly as often since your stay here, when you do, you don’t offer me much information, and Dad has strayed from his usual ‘blasphemer’ description of you to say that you’ve ‘filled your home with sin.’ The math lends its own answer. ”
“So how long until he tells you to stop talking to me?” I ask with an empty chuckle.
My body feels hollow when his tenses on the screen, his chin angling away from me as his jaw clenches.
“He already has,” he tells me plainly. The bottom of my chest opens up, and I can feel the weight of something dropping straight through the empty space left there. “I told him that not speaking to my brother is not an option.”
Air trapped in my lungs finally leaves by way of a heavy sigh, my eyes falling closed as the heavy pounding of my heart calms, and before I have the chance to say anything to him, Brody’s focus shifts back to me.
“I’ll ask you the same question that Edie asked me: are you happy?”
With a glance toward the door which leads into the house, a smile pulls at my lips.
“Yeah, I am,” I nod. “I know it probably doesn’t make sense, but if I try to think of a life where we aren’t a package deal, that doesn’t make sense to me anymore.”
“It makes perfect sense,” he assures me.
As his car comes to a stop on what I can only assume is the driveway in front of his house, the ignition stops.
Pulling the key from it, he crosses his arms over his chest, studying me.
Take off the glasses and give the beard a closer trim, and in this lighting, I could be convinced that I’m looking straight at Nash, right now.
I won’t tell him that, though, even if it puts a knot in my throat. I’m not an asshole.
“I just spent the better part of four hours listening while a five-year-old girl relived the worst thing that she’ll ever see in her life,” he tells me.
“So I am going to go inside and make dinner for my family, help Katie with her homework, and order a larger mattress for your bedroom. Assuming that all of you share a bed, of course.”
“I—” I hesitate, tapping my fingers against the front of my helmet. “Yeah. We do. You don’t have to do that. If they don’t want me to go out there, I mean…”
“Your family loves you and we want to see you,” he tells me as he begins to climb out of his SUV. “However much of our lives they like to believe that they get to dictate, they don’t have any say in where you travel or who you see, and they certainly don’t speak for the rest of us.”
“Alright,” I concede with a grateful smile.
When I got on that plane all those weeks ago, I wanted…more. One last chance to try to connect with a dad it never felt like I had. A pat on the back. A fucking hug, maybe, for the first time in my life.
I don’t know if Brody and CJ know that together, they’ve formed a franken-dad for me. I know that I could never tell either of them that, because neither of them take compliments very well. I’ll just have to hope that what I show them is enough.
As we say our goodbyes and my brother goes into his house to decompress, I step into mine, met with a hard swish of a wiry tail and the jingling of a bell as Drumstick excitedly runs toward me for our daily catch-up.
Julia is bent over the dishwasher, pulling the last of the plates from their rack to rest them onto the counter. I reach forward to let my hands trail up the curve of her ass, forcing her to jump as she pivots to face me, her face melting into a warm smile.
“Hi Lovey,” she says. “Were the roads okay?”
My only response is to let my arms snake around her shoulders, pulling her tight to my body as my lips rest against the top of her head.
Her palms slide against my back as she returns the embrace, my fingers finding their way into her hair as I tighten my hold on her.
Thirty years wouldn’t be enough.
With either of them.
I want so much more than that.