Chapter 8
8
RYLAN
There’d always been a trick to getting the front door open at my mom’s house. Back when I was a kid, she told me you had to stick your tongue out the right side of your mouth and squint your eyes just so in order to get it to work.
She’d laughed at me when I tried it, but it had worked, and it took me years to realize it’d been a joke. Years that she continued to let me make that silly face, thinking it was the only way to get in. So many years that, even now as an adult—after frantically searching for my wife followed by an exhausting cross-country flight home alone—I found the tip of my tongue slipping out of my mouth and my eyes narrowed at the door handle as I twisted the metal and let myself in.
The house was small—smaller than it used to feel due to how much I’d grown in high school, how much muscle I’d put on since. It felt like walking into a kid’s playhouse.
Something I’d long ago outgrown.
As if my walking in the door was a preprogrammed thing, a flipped switch that set off the same sequence of events as always, a whirl of energy swept toward me.
My mother.
Her dark hair, now with more streaks of gray than were there the last time I saw her, was pulled up in a half-ponytail. She was wearing the uniform I swore she lived in because I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw her in anything but the black pants and white, stained button-up from the diner she worked at.
“Rylan!” There was genuine surprise in her voice, but it didn’t keep her from swiping her jacket off the back of the recliner and tugging it on. “Didn’t realize you’d be dropping by.”
She lifted onto her toes, grabbing my arm to drag me toward her. I caught a whiff of her favorite floral perfume as she pressed a quick kiss to my cheek.
“Hi, Ma.”
“Sorry I can’t stay.” Same thing she always said. Might as well have been a recording. “Shift starts in five minutes.”
“Ma.” It took at least ten to get to the diner from here. And that was if her car started on the first try, which it rarely did.
“It’s fine, it’s fine.” She squeezed past me and opened the door, stopping only when she had one foot out the door. “I’ll catch up with you later, okay sweetie?”
She didn’t bother waiting for my response. She was outside and into her car before I even recovered from the whiplash of her barely-there greeting. Her car engine whined, but just as I reached for the handle on the screen door, it rolled over and she sped away.
The pit in my stomach felt like it opened up and swallowed the ache that now lived in my chest. I put my hand on the glass of the screen door, watching the taillights of my mother’s car as she drove away.
Just like always.
Just. Like. Always.
With a sigh, I turned around and walked into the living room.
“Hey, kid.”
That pit in my stomach twisted into a knot.
Just like it always did.
In the chair in the far corner, my stepdad, Ray, reached for his prosthetic leg, something like a grimace tugging at his lips as he pulled it toward his stub. I waved him off and saw relief in his eyes as he settled back in his chair.
“Hey, Pops.” I plopped down onto the couch, putting my feet up on the coffee table, despite the fact that my mom never wanted me to.
Served her right.
“Didn’t expect to see you here so soon.”
I lifted one brow. “You were expecting me?”
Ray scrubbed a hand across his scruffy face. “Isn’t that what always happens after money mysteriously shows up in our account?”
I looked away. Scrubbed my finger against a grease stain on my pants. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That right? You don’t know anything about the ten thousand dollars that showed up in our bank account yesterday morning? You know the one. The account you set up to help Susie pay our bills?”
“It’s not Susie’s account,” I mumbled, unable to meet his gaze.
“Just cause your mom doesn’t know it exists doesn’t mean the money’s not there for her.”
I rubbed at the sore spot in my chest, wishing I could make it go away.
“I take it you had some luck out in Vegas?” Ray asked, undeterred by my silence. As usual. “That’s the only time money shows up like that.”
“A little.”
“Seems like a little more than a little. Ten thousand’s more than you’ve ever deposited before.”
I shifted on the couch, my gaze drifting toward the front door, to the wall with the age-yellowed wallpaper, the framed photo of me when I was a baby, and the only picture we had of Ray and Ma’s wedding.
“Take it, you got something else on your mind?”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Spit it out, Rylan,” he drawled. He picked up his glass of Coke beside him and raised it toward his mouth. “There’s no use keeping it inside. You know you came here to tell me.”
I came here for nothing and got exactly what I expected to find.
“I got married.”
I probably could’ve waited to say that until after Ray finished taking a drink of his Coke. It probably would’ve been better for the carpet.
As Ray coughed and sputtered, I jumped up and grabbed a roll of paper towels half-under a stack of magazines on the corner of the coffee table. Ray accepted a towel from me and wiped his chin and shirt as I cleaned up the sticky liquid that sprayed all over his chair and dribbled down to the floor.
“You alright?” I reached for his used towel, but instead of handing it over, he put a hand on my arm.
“Are you alright?”
My heartbeat throbbed in my throat. I swallowed hard, trying to clear away the thickness there, then tried to blink away the blurriness in my vision. I gave a minute shake of my head, snagging Ray’s towel before turning back to the couch.
As a child, I used to curl up on it and cover myself with a blanket. I could hide there for days, and no one would have known. Make myself a little meal of stale bread or crackers, a glass of tepid water from the sink, and if I was lucky, one of the mints Ma sometimes snagged from the jar at the diner and forgot on the kitchen counter.
The blankets were packed away for the summer, and I was far too large to curl up on that piece of junk anymore, especially with the pile of laundry and papers on the other cushion.
“Rylan.” After all the years of not living here, being out on my own, being an adult and making my own choices… Ray’s voice still made me feel like a helpless child.
“I met the girl of my dreams, Pops.” I almost dragged my attention to him, but instead I searched the spotted carpet for a hint of Joss’s eyes. “She was perfect. Everything about her, from her smile to her laugh to the tears in her eyes when we first met. We did everything together. Dinner. Shopping. Even took her gambling and ziplining, and I fucking fell in love with her and asked her to marry me, and she did. She actually did. She was the most beautiful bride in the world, and she was all mine. But I woke up the next morning and she was just… gone.”
For once, Ray was silent. It took forever to gain the courage to look up at my Pops, because I didn’t want to see my disappointment reflected in his eyes.
What I found wasn’t quite disappointment, but he certainly wasn’t jumping for joy. His silence made me itchy. Made me feel like I had to speak.
“I never thought I’d fall in love. Never planned on getting married. But when I saw her? Crying tears that her abusive ex-boyfriend put in her eyes?” I shook my head and averted my gaze. There was no way I could continue.
With my eyelids squeezed shut, I clutched at the ache in my chest I couldn’t get rid of.
Maybe I should go to the doctor, get this pain checked out.
Was I too young for a heart attack?
Ray shifted in his chair, the ancient recliner giving out a groan. “Look, kid.” My shoulders climbed toward my ears. “I know your mother fucked you up with the way that she handled raising you as a kid. And I’m sorry about that. That I didn’t know. That I didn’t step in sooner than I did.”
“Pops—”
He held up his hand, stopping me. “Sometimes, marriage is the one thing that can save someone. That’s what I had to do with Susie. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened.”
My achy chest caved in. This wasn’t the first time Ray confessed to me that he hadn’t married Ma for love, but instead to keep her from going back to her good for nothing, on-again off-again, abusive asshole of a boyfriend.
“Sometimes, that’s what you have to do,” he said, just as he had the first time. “Sometimes, you have to put your own wants and desires on hold so that you can make the world a better place. I did that with your mom. I hope I did that with you.”
Had the world gotten better since Ray married Ma? The answer to that was a resounding yes .
I could still remember the day Ma sent him to check on me when the attendance secretary called to say I hadn’t shown up for school. If I closed my eyes, I could still see the horror on his face when he found me at the kitchen table, feverish and hungry and unable to hear, tears slicking my face and blood dripping from one ear.
He’d bundled me up and rushed me to the hospital, where they treated me for a double ear infection, a ruptured eardrum, and dehydration. He’d convinced Ma to leave work long enough to come to the hospital so I could be discharged into her care, then took me home while Ma raced back to work so she wouldn’t lose her job.
When he tried to get me to eat something when he got me home, he became privy to my biggest secret: there was no food.
The stale bread had gone moldy, and though I didn’t like the taste, I’d finished it off two days before. I’d already climbed the step stool to get at the expired can of beans that sat on the top shelf in the cupboard, and had long since finished the bottle of ketchup, which had been the only thing in the fridge for the past few weeks.
Everything had changed after that.
Ma was so thankful, so Ray came around more often, and soon he and Ma got together again. Within a year, I was walking down the aisle at the church, carrying the simple gold bands that both Ray and my mom still wore to this day.
“This woman,” he said, capturing my attention and making me look that way. Her name was on my tongue, but I couldn’t bring myself to share. Speaking it only made it hurt more. “She was being abused?”
Nodding, I told him, “She had bruises on her throat and a huge one on her thigh. And she was jumpy with loud noises, like Ma always was.”
“And you married her because of that?”
“I married her because I love—” I bit my tongue. My mind spun, because… isn’t that what drew me in? Her tears. The bruises. Before I learned how funny she was or found out how her being up for anything was the perfect match for my love of adventure.
She was my greatest adventure.
My greatest temptation.
My lucky charm.
“And she left you?”
My chest clenched. I pressed the heel of my hand against the ache. “She was gone when I woke up in the morning. Took her things but left all the clothes I bought her and her diamond ring.”
Ray was quiet again. He rubbed his hand across his scruffy jaw. Then he asked, “What are you planning to do?”
“I don’t know.” I let out a sigh. “That’s why I came here.”
“If you really love this woman, you need to find her. You need to make sure that this ex-boyfriend doesn’t hurt her the way he has in the past. You need to make sure she’s okay, because there is nothing worse than losing the ones you love.”
Didn’t he know? I had already lost her.
I’d never felt pain like this.
I closed my eyelids and Joss’s face was there. Beautiful eyes. Gorgeous smile.
“If you could go anywhere in the world, live anywhere other than where you do now, where would you go?”
The corners of her lips turned up as she sucked on her straw. “I’ve always wanted to go to Chicago.”
“Yeah? What’s there?”
She shrugged. “Nothing really. I just thought it would be fun. Somewhere I’ve never been. The big city. All the food and drinks and things to do. It’s gotta be more interesting than North Dakota or Minnesota. What about you?”
“Chicago,” I said with a laugh.
“What’s there?” she asked, her smile growing until her blue eyes sparkled like gems.
Reaching out, I took her hand and strung my fingers between hers. “You.”
Ray watched me as I stood. “Where are you going?”
North Dakota. Minnesota.
Chicago.
“Gonna see if I can find my girl.”