Chapter 11Cody
11
Cody
It was the Friday before Mardi Gras week. The sun would be setting over the Bay within the hour, and I was perched on my truck’s tailgate next to the filthiest liar on the Coast.
With a poke of my foot, I told her as much. “You are the filthiest little liar, Cher.”
Bree harrumphed at me and sipped her Mason jar of sweet tea through a neon-pink straw. “I am not. I said I’d show off my tattoo when it’s done. It is not done. Therefore, you cannot see it. Liem said he needed one, maybe two more sessions for it to.... Oh, how did he put it?” She squinted and searched her memory before quoting, “‘Urge the leaves toward their maximum splendor.’”
I couldn’t help my laugh. “He does have a way with words, doesn’t he?”
She smiled fondly as she pushed one of her French-braided pigtails over her shoulder. “Sure does. A few parts of the tattoo hurt more than others, and I always knew when they would because he’d distract me with something outrageous. I even got to hear the full ‘free willy’ story.”
Snorting, I glanced over at the rest of the Lott family where they were all gathered around a giant pot of crawfish on the front lawn of Liem and Vinh’s parents’ house. Bree was beside me but was leaned against the tailgate instead of sitting on it. Her fledgling thigh tattoo was still too tender for that. Liem was speaking closely with his mom, a short, striking woman I’d only encountered a couple of times before. She’d nodded approvingly when I’d used my “yes, ma’ams” and “no, ma’ams” on her those times, and I had done the same today.
I was not afraid to admit that, regardless of how much she looked so much like Liem, she scared me.
I’d be officially moving into the houseboat tomorrow, with Vinh as my new landlord. The boat was now blessedly relocated from the shadow of Fortuna Casino & Resort to a literal dock on the Bay, which of course meant that the song had haunted me all week. When Vinh emailed me the new address, he’d included assurances that this dock had much better safety protocols—cameras, assigned parking spots, and security lights—and implied that that was why he’d decided to move the houseboat.
But I suspected the secret teddy bear had done it for more reasons than satisfying his need for security. Bree did, too, based on the way she’d teared up when he showed her how close the boat was to the cottage now.
There was a lot of change going around. I’d finished registering for several advanced-level business classes for the upcoming summer semester last night and had no art classes this time around. No random classes were on my schedule at all, actually. Only ones that would get me my business degree.
“Does Monny look happy to you?” Bree suddenly asked, her voice pitched low.
I followed her gaze to where Liem’s dad sat in his wheelchair and fussed with the crawfish boil, stirring it with an oversized slotted spoon. The longer I watched, the more I recognized how slowly his involvement in the conversations around him came, how pained his smiles were once formed, and how briefly they remained.
“I dunno,” I answered. “Mostly he seems… tired. And maybe a little sad too.”
Bree nodded, still watching him keenly. “I hate that. But we did have a busy morning at the restaurant, so maybe it is just him being tired. And I know it bothers him when he sees us all worrying about him. It was all hands on deck for the entire time we were open today, and I don’t think any of us got a real break. Lots of people are in town for the parade tonight.”
I slid off my tailgate and casually stood in front of my best friend to study her face, and yeah. She was tired too. “Why didn’t you call me to come help? You know I give good customer-service face when the occasion calls for it. Also, please don’t use ship lingo. You will trigger me into outer space.”
She laughed and nudged me with her shoulder. “Okay, I’ll remember that. And I should have called you. If I’d had a minute to think, I probably would have. We were all pretty fried just a couple hours in.”
I nudged her shoulder back. “Next time.”
“Next time,” she agreed.
A few minutes later, I caught Vinh’s gaze, and he waved me over to help drain the giant pot. We completed the job with minimal fuss, dumping the remaining seasoned crawfish, corn, and potatoes onto the newspaper-covered table.
“Well, dig in, kids!” Monny announced loudly. He definitely looked happier than he had earlier as he instructed, “Use a plate if you’re feeling fancy or just stand close to the napkins if you’re not.”
“Where’s Liem?” I asked as Bree filled her plate.
She paused with a small piece of corn in her tongs and glanced around, but it was Vinh who answered.
“He’s probably made himself scarce,” he said as he took Bree’s plate with a soft smile and started to fill it for her. “I brought him something to heat up in the kitchen, so he might be doing that.”
Frowning, I stuffed my napkin into my pocket, padded toward the house, and slid open the sliding glass door to let myself in. I inspected it warily, then sighed in relief when I noticed it was new and not like the ancient one that had been on the back of Bree’s grandmother’s house.
This one wouldn’t explode in a fire.
Jesus.
I hadn’t even seen it happen, and it still haunted me, which made me wonder if sliding glass doors gave Liem any anxiety. I resolved to ask him one day if the topic ever came up.
Shaking off the morbs, I let my bare feet carry me across the vinyl floor, but I slowed my steps when I saw the collage of framed photos on the living room wall. Like, taking up the entire wall. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the photos, with no two frames alike, but there was one thing that was obvious.
This family was close, and they loved one another dearly. Proudly. Out loud, front and center.
There were quite a few square frames with Polaroids of Vinh as a baby, the orange date stamp giving away which Lott child it was, but there were even more of Liem.
I had never seen any of my baby photos. I wasn’t even sure they existed.
The older, aged photos of Cara and Monny Lott in their youth made me almost smile, especially when I realized how much Liem and his mother favored each other when she was younger. There were photos from what appeared to be a courthouse wedding, and if I looked closely enough, I could probably find one picture from each year of childhood for both Vinh and Liem.
I took a few more steps along the photo wall, and then I saw Liem—real, live, and here Liem. My breathing malfunctioned as I took him in, and then it stopped altogether.
He was sitting at the small, square kitchen table with his back to me, his slender biceps flexing as he worked the long side of his hair into a braid. His black tank top had armholes that were so big, I could see all the way down his bare sides, the ladder of his ribs shadowed and so….
My feet carried me closer, my eyes transfixed. He took deep, controlled breaths as his tattooed fingers deftly worked his dark strands.
My shoe squeaked on the linoleum, and he turned his head with a start. “Heavens!” he gasped as his hands fell away, and the braid that had been nearly finished slowly unraveled.
Grimacing, I met his wide eyes. “Sorry, LL. I creeped.”
He smiled in response and threaded his hand into his hair and combed through the pieces that were still overlapped. “It’s quite all right, Dezi.” He brushed his hair back and gave me a rueful grin. “I don’t even have a hair tie, so it wasn’t meant to last.”
God , his voice. It was like a magical, aural muscle relaxant, melting away the ill feelings I’d carried inside with me.
“Oh, well, I have one,” I said quietly as I worked the thin dark-blue elastic off my wrist. It took a minute, as it’d gotten wrapped up in one of my other bracelets, but he just waited patiently as I extricated it and then held it out to him. “I forget sometimes that I don’t have hair anymore.”
He took the tie with a sweet smile and slid it easily onto his wrist. “Have the crawfish sung their funeral song?”
I huffed a laugh and smiled in amusement. “If you’re asking if they’re done cooking, then yeah. They have. I’m not sure I knew that you were vegetarian?”
He tucked his hair behind his ear. “Hmmm. I guess I am. I haven’t had meat since we moved here.” His brown eyes grew distant for a beat, and then he laughed, smiling wryly after it faded. “You and my brother noticed before I did. He cooked me a separate dinner before we drove over here.” Liem stood up and walked to the fridge door. He pulled out a glass Tupperware dish, shaking his head as he examined it. “I have no idea why I didn’t question him when he told me about it.”
He meandered to the microwave and started heating his food, and my gaze was stuck on him as I replied, “Maybe you’re just programmed to not question food from someone who is basically a professional chef?”
Liem hummed as he turned and leaned against the counter, meeting my gaze and catching me in the act of ogling him. “I think you’re right.”
When he sat back at the table with his bowl of steaming, colorful pasta, I continued watching him intently and asked him bluntly, “What were you thinking about so hard when I came in here?”
He nudged the pasta with his fork. “Aunt Ari wants me to come stay in Gulf Shores with her for a couple of weeks. Maybe longer.”
My stomach fell through the linoleum at his instant and easy honesty. I must have reacted some kind of way, because Liem, candid and keen as ever, paused, studying me. “You don’t like that idea.”
I blew out a breath and ran my hand over the bristly part of my hair and hedged, “I didn’t say that.”
He raised his eyebrow at me. “Your face did. It says quite a lot, Dezi. Just as my brother’s does.”
The door creaked open, followed by Monny grumbling under his breath. Liem started to rise to go help him, but I gripped his shoulder and pushed him back into his seat before hurrying over.
“Mr. Lott,” I greeted as I slipped past him and held the door open with one hand while helping him through the last bit of the doorway with the other.
“Ahh, thanks for that, kid. And please, call me Monny.” As he rolled past Liem, he clapped him on the back and asked, “You good in here?”
Liem smiled at him. “I am.”
“Good, good…,” Monny said absently. “Well, I think I’m calling it. You kids have fun tonight.”
We were silent for a long moment after he disappeared down the hallway, and then I glanced at Liem, my hand twitching at his expression. I wanted to erase the frown lines that now bracketed his mouth, but I had no idea how to. He got up and put his leftovers in the fridge—he hadn’t eaten much at all—and turned back to me, his eyes going distant again, just as his dad’s had been.
“Is everything okay with him?” I asked quietly.
He sighed and twisted my elastic on his wrist. “He’s in a bit of downswing right now,” he explained as he gazed at me, his dark-brown eyes solemn and his voice quiet. “He takes a lot of medication, but I’m not sure if that causes the mood changes or if he was already prone to them.”
We shared a grim look, and my heart hurt for his obvious pain.
“Vinh isn’t sure either,” he continued. “It’s something we’ve discussed a lot this past year. We don’t think there’s much to do about them.” His gaze went distant once more, but there was wisdom in its depths as he added, “And if there’s one thing that won’t put someone in a bad mood in a better mood, it’s the feeling that other people are trying to manage them.”
Liem’s unique variety of straightforward honesty might always surprise me. It really was an experience to ask a question and get an immediate, honest answer.
It almost made even the most basic of conversations with him intimate, and I had to make a note to myself to remember to not ask him a question unless I knew I was ready for the answer.
Vinh found two side-by-side spots downtown for our geriatric vehicles, and once I opened my tailgate and he swung open his back door, we had prime spots to watch the Mardi Gras night parade.
Naturally, he’d come prepared with a camping lamp, water bottles, and some soft pillows and blankets, while the only thing my pickup had to offer was rust stains and inexplicable pieces of pine straw.
Bree stood in the road, which was blocked off to traffic by the Bay Springs sheriff’s office, excitement lighting her face as she turned to me and Vinh. “Wanna go check out the booths?”
Vinh closed the distance between them and took her hand in agreement, and she turned to me expectantly. Liem had melted into the crowd with barely a parting wave the moment we’d arrived.
Fidgeting with a piece of that pine straw from my truck bed, I squinted at the bloated crowd of festival goers, their costumes of purples, greens, and yellows, taking in the way they were yelling over and at each other as well as the general mayhem. I didn’t think I had it in me to sit here for the twenty or so minutes before the parade started, but the idea of mingling amongst the revelers made me equally claustrophobic.
So, I swung my legs in a semblance of nonchalance and waved them off. “Nah, I’ll catch up with y’all later. I might go find a bathroom in a minute before it all starts.”
Vinh frowned at me before asking, “Think you could find my brother when you go? He left his phone in my car, and if he gets stuck on the wrong side of the street before the parade starts, he probably won’t be able to cross back over until it’s finished.”
A directive was exactly what I needed, so I nodded. “Sure thing.”
Bree smiled at me before tugging Vinh toward the central green space, and I was only able to track them for a few heartbeats until they were lost in the crowd.
Then I hopped down from my truck and began my hunt.
It only took a minute of crowd weaving to realize that my scowl was of no use here. Everyone bumped into one another without care, and individual expressions were impossible to discern. Faces of kids and adults alike were painted, the lighting on the street was scattered and multicolored, flashing at random intervals that made the entire experience feel like a walk through a demented fun house.
My skin crawled, and the longer I walked, the faster my heart beat and the slower my reactions and computing of my surroundings came until eventually, I was trudging through the world in slow motion.
When the gazebo in the middle of the town green finally came into sight—the only landmark I could identify—I had a thick band of colorful Mardi Gras beads around my neck and no memory of how or when I’d gotten them.
I soldiered past the food trucks and the booths selling bubble guns, light-up wands, and feather boas. The sounds of a marching band and drumline boomed in the distance, loud enough to pierce the noise of the giant speakers that had been blasting upbeat jazz throughout the town.
Passing the last group of tailgaters before I made it to the center of town, a plastic cup of beer was thrust into my hand followed by a slap on my back, and the ground beneath my feet wobbled.
Dropping my chin, I focused on them as I trudged on, but then my mind opened and reality shifted further, and there wasn’t grass or sidewalk beneath my feet, but patterned carpet. When I tore my eyes away and glanced up, it wasn’t residents and visitors of Bay Springs enjoying a hometown parade, but vacationers at the bon voyage party on the cruise ship.
The plastic cup of beer in my hand was a serving platter full of cocktails, and I was hustling through a wild crowd, trying to remember where I was supposed to deliver them.
I forced my feet to stop, and the liquid dripped down my hand and then my arm.
When I had just about reached the absolute end of my overstimulated rope, I realized I was at the gazebo.
Two figures stood in its opening, and I instantly recognized one as Liem Lott. The other was a stranger to me. A stranger who had his hands on Liem’s face as he leaned into him.
I dropped the beer, reality somehow crystal clear as the liquid splashed against my ankles.