Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Henry
I slide a hand over Zach’s head. He thumps his tail once and goes back to relaxing. Outside the windows, the world is all wet green and pale light. Inside my head, it’s drywall dust and sirens and a door I can’t seem to close.
I tell myself to work. Control the controllables.
My gaze falls on my phone.
Why wouldn’t Tabitha talk to me about the attack?
She needs to talk to someone. God, I should know.
Then I stifle a laugh. The irony. I put off talking to Aunt Melanie for so long after the shooting. When I finally let her in, truly let her help me, I realized I wanted to go after Tabitha.
Then the accident…
I pick up my phone and look at my recent calls.
Francine.
I hear her laugh from the last call. You and every man who ever bought a ticket, sugar.
She has nothing for me.
But maybe that’s who I should talk to. Someone who doesn’t know anything about me…other than my genetics. A mother who isn’t really my mother. Not in the way that matters.
But a woman who might just care enough to listen and offer some advice after what I imagine wasn’t an easy life.
“I’m going outside,” I tell Tabitha as I rise.
She smiles weakly.
I go through the back way, Zach at my heels. The rain has stopped, and the sun is coming out just in time for it to go down in an hour or two.
I call.
Two rings. Three. Four.
“Palm Springs is hot this time of year,” she says instead of hello.
Her words are slightly slurred. Has she been drinking? Her voice is the same. Raspy.
My mouth is suddenly dry. “Hey. It’s me. Henry.”
“I know that, sugar. I miss the days before caller ID.” A lazy exhale. “You sound less concussed.”
I fight the urge to hang up. “Yeah.”
“I’m surprised to hear from you so soon,” she says. “What’s going on in Colorado?”
“Work. Family.” I clamp my fingers around the porch rail until my knuckles pale. “You?”
“Oh, you know. Aqua aerobics with three women who think disco never died. Bridge on Tuesdays. We argue about whether SPF has a smell.” She cackles lightly. “That sort of glittering retired life.”
It’s a bit. The kind designed to keep strangers an arm’s length away. I’m not a stranger and also I am.
“Have you—” I start but then stall. What? Have you ever thought about me for more than five minutes? “Have you ever been to Colorado?”
“Once,” she says quickly. “Didn’t stick.” A clink of glass against a counter. “The dry air made my skin feel all tight.”
“But you worked in Vegas. It’s as deserty as Colorado. Is deserty even a word?”
Damn, what the hell am I saying?
“Sure, it’s a word.” She laughs. “Makes sense. I never said I made any sense, though. And you’re right. Vegas is just as dry. But Vegas paid the bills. Next question.”
O…kay. Moving on.
“Did you ever meet my grandparents? I mean, on my father’s side. Your in-laws.”
“Sure I did. I was married to your father for about five minutes, after all. But I told him we had to live in Las Vegas, and he agreed. Then, of course, I met your grandfather again when he came to me after the divorce, and…”
She doesn’t have to finish. I know what she’s saying.
When she sold me to my grandfather for a hundred thousand dollars.
I won’t make her say it. And I won’t dwell on it.
Silence for a few moments, until she continues.
“Did you call to talk about your grandparents and the dry weather, or are we going to do the mother-son thing where you tell me things I can’t fix and I say ‘uh-huh’ a lot and we both feel shitty about it?”
A laugh escapes me. “You’re direct.”
“Sugar, young girls get to be coy. Old women smoke and tell the truth.”
“Have you always been old?”
“Inside? For a long damned time.” She inhales. “Outside? Just for the past ten years or so.”
“The Vegas life is hard, huh?”
“Hard?” she echoes. “Vegas doesn’t do hard. It does cruel. It does bright lights and bad men and mornings where you can’t tell if you’re hungover or just ready to end it all.”
I flinch. End it all? Did she have it that bad? Or is she just being hyperbolic?
I choose to believe the latter.
“It was rough, huh?” I finally say.
“That’s no lie,” she says. “You don’t last out there if you don’t learn how to bluff God Himself.”
“And you did?”
“Once or twice. But He’s got a better poker face.”
God. All these canned jokes. She really doesn’t want to talk about anything serious, does she? She couldn’t be making it any clearer.
But still I want to keep the conversation going. It’s nice to talk to someone who has no stock at all in my problems. Who can take an unvarnished look at me, maybe inject some much-needed perspective.
“Did you ever think of leaving?”
“Sure,” she says. “Every night around three a.m., right before I lit another cigarette.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“I did. I met your father. I had plans.”
“But you self-sabotaged when you screwed the pizza man.”
She rasps out another laugh. “I guess I did. I liked the view from the edge, I suppose. When you’ve danced with the devil long enough, heaven just feels dull.”
I watch a bead of water gather at the end of the porch rail and fall.
“So what do you want, sugar?” she asks.
I sigh. “I don’t know. I thought hearing your voice again would…do something.”
“Like a key in a lock?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“It feels more like I knocked on a door and no one was home.”
I regret the words as soon as they come out. I may not know this woman, but she’s still my mother. She’s still a human being with feelings.
“Ah.” She doesn’t apologize. “You want me to say I’ve thought about you every day? That I pressed my hand to a window and wondered if you were warm and fed?”
“No,” I say honestly. “But in case you’re wondering, I was always warm and fed.”
“I know that.” She sighs into the phone. “I knew your father would take better care of you than I ever could. As for thinking about you… Most days I didn’t. I couldn’t. Thinking of you meant thinking of the life I could have had with you and your father. I blew it.”
I swallow, my throat tight. “I’m not calling to make you feel guilty.”
“I know.” A beat. “Do you laugh like him? Your father? Do you laugh at all?”
“Sometimes.”
“Good. He had a great laugh.” A pause. “Are you mad at me?”
“Yes.” It comes out quicker than I plan. And I’m not sure I even knew I was angry until just now.
“That’s fair.”
Wind lifts the damp hair at my neck. I look out into the trees. “Do you—” I try again. “Do you regret it?”
“I’m too old and tired to have regrets,” she says.
I press my lips together. That’s not necessarily a no.
Something in my chest twists. “You could have called. Checked in on me. Dad had custody, and Mom adopted me, but you could have tried to see me, Francine.”
“Frankie.”
“Right. Frankie.”
“Let me ask you this.” Her voice develops an edge.
No longer is she hitting me with one-liners.
“Do you think your life would have been any more complete if some ridden-hard-and-put-away-wet woman had come around asking to see you? Pulling you out of your white-picket-fence life? I did you a favor, Henry. I stayed away.”
“You were paid to stay away.”
“I was paid to give up my parental rights. Nothing in that agreement said I couldn’t try to see you.”
I let out a breath. “This was a mistake.”
“It was a phone call,” she says. “You’ll survive it.”
“Right,” I say. The word tastes like copper. “Goodbye, Franc— I mean Frankie.”
“Goodbye.”
The line goes dead. I stare at the phone until it fades to black, and then I stare at myself in the reflection until that fades too.
Why do I keep thinking this woman holds all the answers? That getting to know her will fix everything wrong in my busted-ass head?
She’s been a crutch. My Hail Mary in the final quarter. The thing I held on to even though, deep down, I knew it wouldn’t put me back together again.
The only person who can fix me is me.
And maybe I can do that with the support of the woman I’m sharing my family’s cabin with.
Inside, Tabitha is still at the table with her tablet and notes. “Work?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I lie.
I return to my laptop and fill the last few hours until dinner with grants and financials.
I try to read after. She pretends not to watch me pretend to read. The fire pops. Zach snores. The day stretches thin and tight as old elastic.
By late afternoon, the cabin feels too full. I chop wood I don’t need to chop just to make something split. Sometimes there really is no substitute for good old-fashioned manual labor. When I come back in, Tabitha is on the couch with her tablet.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she says without looking up. “Whatever it is. Not yet.”
I mentally drop my jaw. Am I that transparent? To her, apparently.
“Thanks,” I say, and I mean it.
An hour later, I fry some burgers and open a can of corn. Hardly gourmet fixings like my mother would make, but it does the job. I don’t mention the phone call I made to my past. In fact, we don’t talk much at all.
When the dishes are loaded and the fire is steady, we go to bed by the hearth again.
I slide closer. She doesn’t move away. Her palm lands on my chest.
“Henry,” she says into the dark.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to be fine here.”
“I know. And you don’t have to be either.”
“Okay.” She presses a kiss to my shoulder. “Sleep.”
I don’t want to sleep.
I want to lose myself in her body again.
But I close my eyes.