32. Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Two
Then
The day after Mr. Redding came to speak with Mom, I woke up to a gentle rapping at my bedroom window. With a groan, I rolled over and saw Theo on the other side, peering in at me.
“What?” I hissed. He cupped one hand behind his ear, indicating that he couldn’t hear me, and used the other to wave me over.
I hauled myself out of bed, adjusting my tank top and shorts as I went. It was bright outside, and with Theo’s face pressed right up against the glass, I didn’t miss his gaze lingering on my bare legs.
“Back up,” I called, flicking the window where his nose was. He blinked as if coming out of a daze, and I pushed the window up. “What are you doing here?”
“You weren’t answering your phone.”
“Because I was sleeping,” I said. “We don’t all get up at the crack of dawn.”
“Or before ten, either.” Theo propped his elbows on the windowsill and leaned in to give me a kiss. I accepted it, annoyance over my disturbed sleep evaporating.
It seemed like he was holding back, though, not melting into me like he usually did. I pulled away. “What’s wrong? Wait, what time is it?”
“Almost eleven.”
“Why aren’t you at the store? I thought you were opening today.”
Wincing, Theo pulled his phone from the pocket of his shorts. He clicked the screen a couple of times, then showed me a text from his dad. Don’t come to the store today, it said. We’ve got it covered.
“Did they tell you not to come in?” he asked.
I doubled back to my bed to retrieve my own phone from under the covers. Behind me, I heard a grunt, and then the thud of feet on the floor as Theo came into my bedroom.
“Shh!” I spun around, phone in hand. “My mom is home.”
“Neither of their cars are out front,” he said.
I frowned. “Really? She wasn’t working today. I wonder where--” I cut myself off as I read the text waiting for me. “Okay, my dad sent me the same thing. That’s so weird.”
Theo came up behind me. We were quiet for a moment as he peered at the text.
“You wanna go up there?” he asked. “Make sure everything’s okay?”
"Yeah." I nodded, even though my gut already knew that it wasn’t."We should check."
***
“What the hell,” muttered Theo when we drove by the front of the store and saw the ‘closed’ sign still hanging in the window.
“Maybe they decided to close early for the holiday?” I posited without much conviction. We were closed for the Fourth of July every year, but the days before and after were always business as usual.
“If they did, it was pretty last minute,” Theo said, “considering we were both planning on working today.”
We drove around the side of the strip mall and entered the back parking lot, where I immediately spotted both of my parents’ cars. Cecil and Randi’s SUV was there, too.
“Nobody was home when I left,” said Theo. He pulled the truck into an empty space. I unbuckled my seatbelt and flung the door open. “Wait, Sass, maybe we should--”
Ignoring him, I hopped down and slammed the door shut.
Theo’s footsteps sounded behind me, scurrying to catch up as I marched up to the back entrance of the store. As I drew closer, I could hear noise coming from inside. “They're in there talking,” I told Theo.
He came to a stop at my side, keys out, reaching for the door. It clicked open, and he motioned for me to go in ahead of him.
The entrance deposited us in the back hall, right by the single swinging door. Raised voices in the office made me stop abruptly, and Theo bumped into me from behind.
“Whoa,” he muttered, hands falling to my shoulders.
I held a finger to my lips. “Be quiet!”
“You be quiet.”
The roar of my father’s voice startled us, and we both fell deadly silent as he shouted, “God fucking damn it, would somebody in this room tell the fucking truth?”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Frank,” said Randi. “Last I looked, the money was there.”
“And when they tried to withdraw the rent twelve hours later, it wasn’t. How’s that happen?”
I looked at Theo, wide-eyed. “You were right,” I whispered. “They didn’t pay the rent.”
With his mouth set in a grim line, he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and tugged me against him. I set my hands on his forearms where they crossed my chest. He was the only thing holding me up.
“Frank,” came Cecil’s voice, sounding uncharacteristically heated. “You’re right on the edge of accusing my wife of something. I suggest you back off."
“I’m not on the edge of it. I am accusing her. She handles that account. What else am I supposed to think?”
“Everyone in this room has access to it, you dick!” shouted Cecil, voice booming in a way I had never heard before. Judging by Theo’s sharp inhale behind me, neither had he. “Hell, the kids could probably figure out how to get into it if they wanted! Have you spoken to your son lately? I heard he was back here snooping around a few weeks ago.”
“Brock did not do anything.” My mother entered the conversation. Of the four of them, she seemed to be the calmest, which was decidedly outside the norm. “He has a good job. He doesn’t need to steal.”
Someone snorted in response. My mind was spinning. The rent hadn’t been paid because somebody emptied the store’s account. There were only a handful of people who could have done it, and most of them were standing in the building right now.
I glanced at Theo over my shoulder, remembering the day we caught Brock in the office. He had been cranky, refusing to tell us why he was there. “Do you think...?”
“I don’t know,” Theo said.
“Theo told me that Brock was in the office, by himself, looking at things he had no business looking at,” Cecil continued. “Nina was there, too. She didn’t say anything to you?”
“No, because she doesn’t tell us anything,” snapped Mom, voice rising to a more familiar pitch and volume, “especially not concerning Theo .”
For a second, I swore my heart stopping beating. Theo drew me closer, nestling his chin in the crook of my shoulder.
“I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean,” said Randi stiffly.
“You know exactly what I mean. All of you do. Your son, an adult , has been sneaking around with our underage daughter--”
Cecil cut my mother off with a disbelieving laugh. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“No, I am not. I’ve heard from people all over town that they--”
“Obviously something’s going on between them,” Cecil said, and Theo exhaled hard into my ear. “I’m not talking about that; I’m talking about you trying to make Theo out to be some kind of predator. That's pretty fucking low, Kelly.”
My eyes found a black smudge on the wall, and I put my focus on it. I counted the number of sides, the number of angles, noted the way it shifted from gray on the left to jet black on the right. I refused to look away from that smudge. I felt like the world might collapse around me if I did.
“That doesn’t matter,” my mother shot back, “when she is seventeen .”
“Kelly, stop. ” It was my father, his tone commanding. “Not that you asked my opinion, but I really don’t give a shit if Nina and Theo are dating. We can talk about it later. We can figure out who emptied the account later. Right now, we all need to calm down enough to figure out how we’re going to pay the rent.”
An uneasy silence fell. I could hear Theo’s breathing, feel his chest rising and falling against my back. I, on the other hand, felt like I wasn’t breathing at all.
“Hell,” said Cecil. His anger seemed to have evaporated; now, he just sounded defeated. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t what?” asked my dad.
“Pay the rent. Even if we came up with the money, what’s the point? We can all see the writing on the wall. Let’s just close. Let Redding kick us out. Be done with this.”
There was no reply, not that I cared to hear it. I pushed against Theo’s arm. As soon as he released me from his grip, I turned on my heel and walked out the door.
Neither of us spoke as we climbed back into the truck. Theo started the engine, and then we just sat there in the blast of air conditioning, staring at each other.
“Let’s leave,” I said finally.
And because it was Theo, he didn’t have to ask for clarification. He knew exactly what I meant. “You want to swing by your house and grab some stuff?”
“No.” I couldn’t bear the thought that someone might come home and stop me. I had to get out of here, to put distance between myself and whatever was happening to life as I’d always known it. “I just want to go."