Chapter Thirty-Four Bram
Chapter Thirty-Four
Bram
Two days later, and Joey and I are carrying plastic totes of clothes up the narrow stairs leading to an apartment above The Dry Bean, and Sloane is on the phone with a plumber, trying to get Robbie’s DIY shower up and running before Maddie stays her first night.
“So when Robbie said he was renovating up here, he didn’t mean renovating in the commonly understood sense, did he?
” Joey observes, setting a tote down on the kitchen table and gazing around at the shag carpet and faux wood paneling.
The carpet is a shade of orange that I last saw on a couch in my grandparents’ farmhouse before I hosted the estate sale.
“It’s clean at least,” Sloane says, coming around the corner. “I had the same team that does Persimmon Hill come out and give it a once-over.”*
“Well, it looks like they got most of the nicotine residue off the walls,” Joey says cheerfully, and then squints upward at the jaundiced tiles of the suspended ceiling. “Maybe not everywhere, though.”
“It’s too bad.” Sloane does a slow, sighing spin.
“This building is a hundred and thirty years old. Hardwoods, brick, tinplate, all sorts of lovely things just hiding behind layers of bad decisions, and all it needs is time and money. And those are precisely the two things I can’t give it right now. ”
As Joey agrees with her, I go downstairs to get the last of the totes.
I’ve just looked at the latest polling numbers in California and it appears like Gentry is all but guaranteed to win his district, and stomping up and down the stairs is the only release of aggression I have time for right now.
After that, Joey volunteers to run to the store to get a few basics for the kitchen.
Sloane and I watch him lumber down the stairs, meowing the tune of Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” and then we look at each other, realizing at the same time that Joey Fucking Kemp probably thinks kitchen basics are Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Gatorade Zero.
“I’ll go with him,” Sloane says.
“I think that’s a good idea.”
She gets her purse from a questionable recliner Robbie left behind. “I’m really glad I had this unit open,” she remarks. “There’s supposed to be a tenant moving into the second apartment in January, but this one is still unleased, and there’s no reason for it to stay empty.”
“It was nice of you to cut her a deal on everything,” I reply. “Thank you, Sloane. Truly. She needed this.”
Sloane looks at me sidelong, gray eyes curious. “It was a little unexpected,” she says delicately, private school manners on display. “We all assumed she was content to stay with you for the time being.”
I muster a smile. I’ve been doing a lot of that the last two days. “She was ready for her own space.”
“Were you ready for her to have her own space?” Sloane asks, and she says it teasingly, but I know what she’s really asking.
“That obvious, huh?”
She bumps her shoulder against my arm. (Sloane is taller than Maddie, but it’s a rare person who can reach my shoulder with theirs.) “Just a little obvious. The secret group chat was really pulling for you two, you know. Seeing you smiling and relaxed and happy—it was nice. You needed it.”
“I didn’t think it would hurt this much,” I admit. “And it’s stupid. I met Maddie in August. How can I be brokenhearted in November?”
“Oh, Bram,” Sloane says with a sigh, leaning her head against my shoulder. “You don’t give your heart away very often, but when you do, you do it completely. It’s not a bad thing.”
“I’ve done it twice and wound up alone twice, so there might be a flaw in the design,” I say.
Sloane pulls away, and when I look down, I see her flexing the hand that used to have Lucien’s ring on it.
“There are worse things than being alone,” she murmurs, and then subtly shakes her head, as if banishing bad memories.
“I’ll be back with Joey, and hopefully things like bread and milk and not tubs of protein powder. ”
I wave her off and then go down to get the final thing I’d brought for Maddie’s new apartment: the cactus, in the pot she chose.
I pick a windowsill that’ll get some southern exposure and tuck an index card with handwritten instructions next to the pot.
Instructions for how to water it and check the soil for good drainage.
When to move it outside to the little fire escape in spring.
When she can expect fruit and how to tell when it’s ripe.
In the 1700s, the prickly pear was imported to Australia so dye could be produced from the cochineal insects who liked the plant.
But it thrived far too well in Australia’s interior and grew into dense, impenetrable forests, sometimes up to twenty feet tall.
It drove farmers off their farms; it grew so quickly that it crushed houses.
I think of this now, looking at Maddie’s prickly pear. Like the plant, she is remarkably self-sufficient. Like the plant, she is covered candidly, honestly, in her needles and prickles and barbs.
Like the plant in Australia’s soil, she has taken hold in my heart. A twenty-foot-tall forest of Maddie, stabbing and sweet, a crush of clever beauty that I can’t regret even now.
“OKAY, OKAY, PILLOWS can count, but I still think it would be more fun if the game were The Floor Is Pyroclastic Flow,” Asher tells the twins, who tilt their curly heads at Asher and consider this.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Letty declares. “If there’s no lava, then we can be on the floor and there’s no game.”
“I think it doesn’t make sense because a pyroclastic flow wouldn’t only be on the floor,” says Sara as she navigates the couch cushions tossed around Riley and Joey’s living room. “It would be more like The Floor Is Hot and the Air Is Hot and I’m Breathing Rocks While I Burn Alive.”
“Cool,” Berry whispers solemnly.
Sara hands me a beer where I’m sitting against the wall, having died a few moments ago from touching the lava floor, and then she goes to give Asher a quick kiss before returning to the family room.
“Oksana is licking the doorknob,” Letty informs the room. Asher and I look over to see that, yes, indeed, Joey and Riley’s youngest has decided she’s done waiting for Thanksgiving dinner and she will start with a doorknob appetizer.
“I’ve got her,” I announce, and get to my feet.
With the beer in one hand, I scoop up the baby with the other and tickle her while she’s tucked under my arm.
I carry her like a football into the family room, where Fern is patiently playing Barbies with the other two Kemp daughters, Dorothy and Kristi.
* I whoosh Oksana down to the floor like a landing airplane as Sloane and Alessandro sit at the table between the kitchen and the family room and argue about the dwindling public appeal of the symphony while they sip cocktails.
Leo is slouched in a chair in the corner of the room, all lidded eyes and long limbs, a glass of scotch dangling from his fingers and his mouth set in a dangerous line. So, typical Leo.
“I can’t believe you had an entire situationship while I was gone,” Sara complains from the Barbie zone, where she’s settled next to our oldest and the Kemp girls. “You met someone, fell in love, and broke up, all while I was on a fucking glacier.”
Fern glances at the two of us and then back down to the Barbies, trying not to look like she’s eavesdropping.
Maddie and I had been too close for a perceptive young person like Fern not to get suspicious when Maddie abruptly moved out; after I’d explained everything to Sara, we agreed that it would be healthier in the long run to give Fern a brief (and very redacted) primer on the circumstances.
I told her that Maddie and I had dated for a short time but mutually decided to part ways, that it had happened warmly and honestly, that we still liked each other very much.
I could tell the curiosity was burning inside of her, though.
“I acknowledge that it was a faster timeline than everyone is used to from me,” I say, trying to sound fun and jokey and not at all heartbroken. Like the steady, kind dad I’m supposed to be. “But nearly the same ingredients. We’re even at the peaceful co-parenting stage now.”
And that part is true. Maddie and I have the same routine we did before, with school pickups and some dinner help, and we don’t avoid each other, we don’t avoid speaking.
We smile faintly in passing. We eat at the same table, clean up together, commit the occasional extra fifteen minutes of screen time sin together.
The twins barely notice anything has changed, except for Maddie not being there in the mornings and around bedtime for the last two weeks.
It’s all very gentle and respectful and respectable. An autumn, organic and necessary, a much-needed winter coming to freeze the lingering lust and love between us. At least in theory.
I only wish I felt like spring would come again.
“Sloane said it was our youthful, um, shenanigans that did the two of you in,” Sara says, the euphemism for Fern’s benefit. (We’re waiting until she’s older to tell her about our crime era.) “I am sorry about that, Bram.”
“It was a lot of things,” I reassure her. “Not just that Fasse Global still has a picture of me tacked to their wall.”
“Food is almost ready!” Riley announces from the kitchen, as her mother and sisters swarm the china cabinet to stack dishes on the counter buffet-style.
Sara and Fern get up and help Dorothy and Kristi put the Barbies away, and Joey and Sara’s dad come in from the back patio with the fried turkey in a disposable aluminum roasting pan, trailed by a very interested Hester Prynne.
It’s just me and Leo in the family room now, and when I get to my feet, Leo says, in the first words he’s spoken all afternoon, “Did you get the email I sent last night? About our friend Mr. Footlicker95?”
“I did,” I say. Neutrally.
“Which Bram read it?” Leo asks, lifting the scotch to his mouth but not drinking. “Good Guy Bram or Fuck Shit Up Bram?”
I take a swig of my beer, eyebrow lifted.
Leo laughs suddenly, a laugh that is rich and chilling and beckons a person closer even as it promises certain peril.
“What are you going to do about it?” he asks.
“About Gentry Cooper Wade the Third?” A real smile pulls at my mouth.
The only thing better than ruining that piece of shit before the election would be to ruin him badly enough after the election that he’ll need to step down before he’s even been sworn in.
“Got anyone else you’d like to bury this weekend? ”
Leo looks like I’ve just proposed, and beams. “Always.”