Chapter 5 #3
“Like what? What do you think I might have in there?” he asked me, and I could come up with any number of things but stuck to the most basic.
“Everybody’s hiding something. I don’t think you have any weapons or drugs,” I assured him. “I was mostly thinking about political materials or sex toys. That was how I found out about my dad.”
“What sex toys?” He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“That was how I found out about my dad’s girlfriend,” I expanded. “It wasn’t electronics, though. I saw some texts on his phone that made it pretty obvious. She was talking to him about her gutters.”
“How did you make the jump from sex toys to messages about gutters?”
“They’re both romance stuff.”
“Really?” Now he got a funny smile. “You have different ideas about romance than most of the women I’ve known.”
Several of my sisters would have been swept off their feet by a man offering to clean their gutters, and apparently it had worked on my dad’s girlfriend, too. But now I had something else on my mind. “How many women have you known?” I asked.
“Maybe the evidence is in my room somewhere, and you’ll find out tomorrow,” he suggested. “Good night, Grace.”
Both of us were up early the next morning, but I stayed in bed as I heard the door close in the front. I was trying to do some of my mom’s yoga moves to ease the aches I was feeling in many, many different parts of my body, but the stretches didn’t seem to help me very much. And then I had problem.
“You’re stuck?” Nicola answered after I was finally able to reach my phone.
“I don’t think my leg is supposed to go this way and I can’t get it back to where it used to be.
” I tried one more time, but it hurt. I’d been practicing yoga on my own because I really wanted to get into the crow pose, but I had never twisted myself into this particular position.
“Yes, I need help,” I told her. “But don’t call 911! Not again.”
“Hold on. Let me see who’s available,” she said, and it wasn’t too long before she told me that someone was coming. It would take a while, though, because Theo’s house was far away, so was I going to be able to make it?
“If not, I’ll call the police,” she informed me.
“No, don’t. I don’t want them to start thinking of this as the trouble house.”
“Like the place you used to live, where all the paramedics knew the address by heart because they’d been there so many times?” I heard a voice over a loudspeaker; she was at work in the emergency department right now with those same paramedics. “Sugar, I have to go. Are you sure you’re ok to wait?”
I was, pretty much. Luckily, she’d picked a person who drove fast and luckily, he was also adept at breaking and entering because the front door was locked. Additionally, he did yoga with my mom, so he took my problem in stride.
“Hey, Grace,” Dion said casually as he breezed into the bedroom.
“You’re stuck? Mom—I mean, Jackie traps herself sometimes, too.
” I’d heard him call her “mom” before, and it made a few of my sisters angry but I didn’t care too much.
Anyway, I was more interested in him returning my leg to its normal position.
“Ready?” he asked me, and he wrapped a towel around my foot and grabbed both ends of it. “One, two—”
He moved on two, and suddenly I was free. I lay on the bed breathing carefully as the pain of the stretch subsided and blood reached parts of my body that had been empty of it before.
“You ok?” he asked, and looked around. “Fuck, this house is awful. It’s worse than how I grew up, and that was bad enough that I got removed by the city of Detroit a few times.”
“There are no kids here,” I said. My voice sounded weak and my leg didn’t feel strong either.
“You shouldn’t live like this,” he advised.
“It also reminds me of my aunt’s old art gallery, the one that burned down.
Did Brenna ever tell you about how the gum sculptures melted?
” He went on to talk about his former job where he’d worked with my sister, and he tried to open the closet door as he spoke.
He tugged several times and suddenly, it gave way and a torrent of papers and dust flooded into the room.
It got him moving and it got me up and off the bed, too. “Fuck,” Dion coughed in the hallway. “What the hell is in there?”
“I think it’s at least eighty years of crud,” I said, also coughing and then also sneezing.
I waved at him to follow me to the kitchen, where I handed him a bottle of water.
Theo had brought them home in bulk since he was afraid of what came out of the taps.
“The newspapers stacked in the oven were from way before my parents were born. They might have been important parts of history and worth saving but a rat had pooped on them. Or more than one rat, most likely.”
He peered around the empty kitchen. “I hate rats,” he said with a lot of feeling, and I agreed. “What are you going to do with this place?”
I walked him through the rest of the cabin, the parts where I wasn’t forbidden to go, and showed him many of the things that needed work.
That took a while because there were so many of those things.
I started to think that he must have been getting bored, like how I felt when Juliet talked about her job.
Unlike me, he wasn’t trying to get away but I decided just to ask him.
“No, I’m interested,” he answered. “You know that I work for an architecture firm, right?” No, I hadn’t, but he went on to explain how much he liked it and how he was getting pretty interested in designing stuff. “I could go to college for it. Maybe,” he said, and glanced in my direction.
“Why couldn’t you?”
“I did bad in high school,” he told me, and that made two of us.
By the time I’d reached my junior year, I was the last Curran sister in the house.
Nicola had been struggling with stuff, my dad was always at the office, my mom had never paid attention, and neither did anyone else.
Looking back, I thought I could have used some.
Dion thought the same thing about himself.
“I wish someone had gotten on me about school. My mom didn’t give two shits and I had a crazy grandma and aunt, but that was it.
I won’t act like that with my kids. I’ll be a dad who’s there, right on their asses.
And loving them,” he added. “I want to make a good life for them, too. Maybe I should go back to school.”
“Are you worried about paying for it? Do you have a secret money stash? I can help you grow it.”
“What are you talking about, Grace?” He rolled his eyes.
“Show me more of the property.” He didn’t have work today because his office was being fumigated (I got the name of that company so I could also call them in the future) and we talked together for a while, sipping water while we toured.
He also helped me move a few things in Theo’s room, like a big dresser that partially blocked a door and a chest that was the perfect height for tripping over.
I’d found that out the hard way, three times.
“The closet’s over there, so where does this lead?” he asked after we’d moved the chest and examined the door that we’d uncovered. Mindful of the last time he’d opened something in this cabin, he didn’t try again.
“I don’t know. I’ll work my way over there and when I find out, I can send you pictures. I want this to be nice for Theo.” I glanced around. There was a lot to do in order for that to happen.
“But he’s not your boyfriend,” Dion stated. “That’s what Brenna said. Sophie thinks that you’re sleeping with him in order to stay here and she and Nicola got into a fight about that, about whether they should try to talk to you again about boundaries.”
“Is there some kind of group chat happening without me?” I asked, and he said yes, but it wasn’t anything special.
“Everyone just starts a new one when there’s a particular issue. I’m in the group about Juliet’s baby, too.” He seemed happy about both those things, but I got very, very nervous.
“What’s wrong with Juliet’s baby?”
“Nothing,” he said, and patted my shoulder. “They’re worried because she’s so worried. She’s thinking that something is going to happen to it. Him,” he amended. “I think it’s a boy.”
I nodded, glad that there was nothing bad going on. “Why wasn’t I included in that chat?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they think you wouldn’t be interested or that you wouldn’t do anything to help.”
He stayed a little longer and moved a few more pieces of furniture, which he bragged about and explained by saying that yoga was making him so much stronger.
I didn’t pay too much attention, though, because I was still considering what he’d said about why I hadn’t been involved in the discussion about JuJu’s baby.
“Are you pissed off?” he asked as he left.
“No. Watch out for that puddle.”
“It’s five feet from me,” he said carelessly and then waved as he drove away, totally dry.
I wasn’t pissed off, but I stood there on the porch for a while, thinking more, before I went in to tackle the bedroom. And I kept thinking as I did that, and also sneezing due to my immune response to the Dermatophagoides farinae. There was certainly a lot to tackle.