Brenna, Brat (Detroit ABCs)

Chapter 13

“W hat the…”

His voice trailed off into silence as he eased his foot off the gas and his car, which hadn’t been moving very fast anyway on this narrow road, slowed and stopped.

“It’s a party,” Dion stated. “I didn’t know you were having a party.”

“I’m not. No one should be here,” Campbell stated, but judging from the number of vehicles in the driveway, there were plenty of people at his family’s vacation home. There was also plenty of room to park outside, because this was nothing like my grandparents’ cottage, the place we’d visited as kids during the summers. This was a huge, modern home, angular and sparkling in the sun that was just beginning to set over the lake. It did look like a fun place to have a party.

“Come on,” he told us, and we got our bags and walked to the front door. I could hear music before he opened it, but the big living room we entered was empty of guests. There was definitely a mess, though. Beach towels were strewn everywhere, as were clothes and flip flops, and there was sand all over the floor and also on the furniture. Bottles of alcohol covered the kitchen island and someone had tipped over a wine glass on the coffee table and had left it there on its side. A dark, sticky puddle had formed and fruit flies clustered around it and lazily circled above. A white spatter across the rug came from a smashed bottle of sunscreen, one that looked stepped-on. And there were purses, shirts, bikini tops and bottoms, someone’s retainer, a pack of birth control pills, and way too much other crap scattered around.

“Are there squatters here? Who would do this to your house?” I asked over the sound from the speaker.

Campbell looked around, and shut that off. Then he yelled a name: “Carrington!”

And a few moments later, a beautiful woman in a turquoise bikini—almost exactly the same shade as the one I had packed and brought with me—descended from the upper floors. She stopped on the bottom step and stared at the three of us.

“Wow,” Dion said. “Is heaven at the top of those stairs? Because you’re an angel.”

If that was one of the lines he usually used, I was surprised he’d slept with one woman, let alone hundreds or thousands. She didn’t seem impressed, either; her focus was on her brother.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Campbell?”

“I came for the weekend. My lawyer said that the place was empty.”

“Obviously, it isn’t!”

And that was exactly why personal communication, without opaque layers of legal representation, was best. I congratulated myself on being right.

Carrington stared at Dion for a moment, and then at me. “What’s she doing here?”

To my surprise, Campbell put his arm around me. “Don’t start on Brenna. How long are you going to stay?”

“Until Sunday afternoon. You’ll have to leave.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I told her. “He has as much right to use this house as you do.”

“There’s no space for you,” she snarled. “I’m in Dad’s room and two of the girls have yours.”

“We’ll make space,” I announced. “Don’t worry for a second about us.”

She opened her mouth to respond, but then she glanced toward her brother and closed it. We got a good view of her backside as she stormed upstairs, and Dion sure enjoyed our vantage point. He crouched down low to admire more of her ascent and to prolong the experience. Then he stood and nodded appreciatively.

“I don’t mind staying here at all,” he told us. “Where’s my room? Must be up there.” He charged after Carrington, and Campbell turned to me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This isn’t what I pictured for the weekend away.”

“I’m the one who let my adoptive brother tag along. Remember the guy who had to stop seven times to use the bathroom on our car trip? I don’t care if your sister is here, too.” I did care, however, that we were going to be twins in our bathing suits. One of us was going to look stunning, and the other would not. I was very clear which twin I was.

We heard a shriek from upstairs and decided that it was a good idea to see what Dion was up to. He was checking every bedroom to find one that was unoccupied and he was also introducing himself to the women he encountered. He’d met all of Carrington’s friends by the time we arrived on the second floor.

“Great house,” he told Campbell. “I’ll go here.” He tossed his bag into one of the bedrooms.

“Is there a woman already sleeping there?” I asked sternly, but it was empty.

“Which other rooms are available?” Campbell asked. He, apparently, didn’t want to open every door to do the meet-and-greet, and luckily, Dion already had the answer.

“That one,” he said, pointing.

Well, there was a problem, which we confirmed by knocking on all the doors again. Due to the over-abundance of guests, there really wasn’t enough space. There were two rooms available for the three of us, two rooms and two beds total.

“I can bunk with Dion,” Campbell told me.

“Sure, I don’t mind sharing,” Dion said. “I snore, and I kick. Also, I may sleepwalk, but that hasn’t been confirmed. And I need a lot of snacks at night, and water, and I use the bathroom more than other people. So I’ve been told.”

Between those things and Campbell talking in his sleep, neither of them would get any rest. And we were here for him to relax and unwind, not get kicked and hear toilets flushing all night. “I don’t care if you and I share,” I announced to our host.

“We were fine after the wedding,” he recalled.

“It was fine,” I agreed, and went into the remaining bedroom. I may have looked calm and stoic, but inside, I was wondering how I could do this. It was bad enough to be close to him and not touch him, not kiss him and do all the other things I’d been imagining—but to be in the same bed and not do them? And it was humiliating to know that he would be lying next to me and not thinking about anything except sleep. Like the men who had come before him, he just wasn’t interested.

The first thing for me to do was to stop focusing on the bed situation, something that I couldn’t immediately change, and the next was to clean up the shared living spaces, which needed immediate changes. Campbell and I accomplished that with Dion’s assistance—yes, Dion. He was remarkably helpful and that shocked me enough that I found myself standing stock-still and staring, several times, as he performed mundane tasks like wiping the counters without whining and taking out a bag of overflowing trash without complaint.

“I also didn’t invite you here to clean,” Campbell told me, but I said again that I didn’t care. I really didn’t, except that it made me angry how Carrington and her posse had treated a beautiful home. Yes, the rug in the living room was slightly undersized and no, I wouldn’t have chosen that particular hardware for the kitchen cabinetry, but there was no reason to mistreat everything.

The women who had caused the damage wandered through, singly and in small bunches, and they said hello to Campbell, eyed Dion, and ignored me before heading toward the beach. They certainly didn’t say anything about how the condition of the residence had improved since we’d been working on it, so I let them know that the words they should have said were “looks great” and especially “thank you!” They ignored that, too.

“Do your sister and her friends always act like this? So thoughtless?” I asked as I picked up a handful of large pills, ones that wouldn’t have fit in the birth control case. I didn’t care what they were and how valuable Dion claimed they might have been. They were going in the trash.

“Yes,” Campbell answered. “Yes, this is exactly how they act, and this is how our parents act, too. It’s like they can do anything they want and they don’t give a shit about the people who come after to fix it.”

Like, they could commit fraud and not even blink at the damage they caused, I thought, but I didn’t say that part aloud. He always defended Carrington, and I would have done the same thing for someone in my family. Except, in private I would have given them a piece of my mind. Maybe something needed to happen to make him mad enough to do that, like striking a match or like throwing a firebomb into a pile of rags and flammable chemicals.

Their argument did happen later that same night, but I wasn’t sure what sparked it. The three of us, Campbell, Dion, and I, first went out to get dinner. Dion’s stomach was calm enough to eat because he’d insisted on sitting in the front seat, yelling, “Shotgun!” and pushing me out of the way just like he was one of my actual siblings. He took down three burgers, a side of fries, and a chocolate shake while I picked at my meal and thought about myself on the beach the next day, wearing my bikini.

Campbell was unnaturally quiet throughout the dinner and also as he took us on a ride to show us around. It was as dark as I remembered from when I’d visited this area before with my family, without the lights of the city and with only the moon above us. Up here, that had always seemed bigger.

Dion was entranced. “I love it,” he kept repeating. “The air smells so good!”

Campbell didn’t say much on the way back to his vacation house, either. Then he stayed inside, explaining that he needed to talk to his sister, but Dion and I went out to sit on the raised deck, admiring the moonlight view of the water and getting more of that fresh air. We chatted for a while, mostly gossiping about the girls that he had intruded on while he’d searched for his bedroom, but suddenly we heard shouting. It was Campbell, and I’d never known him to raise his voice like that. He sounded furious.

“Whoa,” Dion said, his eyes wide. “What’s happening?” We stared at each other for another moment and then in silent consensus, we went inside in order to eavesdrop better.

“Treat her well or you’ll deal with me, and she’s no pushover either!” Campbell yelled. They had gone into what he’d said what his dad’s office and closed the door, but the words were perfectly clear outside it. “What are you doing, Carington? You came up here without letting anyone know and you invited those same women. You know I think that they’re—”

She cut him off, so we didn’t get to hear his opinion of her friends. I felt that it couldn’t have been good because Carrington immediately jumped in to defend them. “Fuck you, Campbell! I’m lucky that they’re even talking to me after everything that happened!”

“They’re only talking to you because they’re using you for a vacation party pad.”

“No, they’re my friends! You know, all of this is your fault, right?” she asked him. “Our family wouldn’t be in this position if it weren’t for you!”

Uh, no. If any law enforcement ears happened to be listening, I wanted to make it clear that Campbell had nothing to do with any illegal activity. I opened my mouth to yell that, but they made the point for me.

“You weren’t in on the fraud, but you knew what Dad was capable of!” she told him.

“I had no idea at all that he was a criminal, not like this,” he said. His voice was lower, but Dion and I could still understand since we had crept forward several paces and leaned our heads toward the door. We definitely heard him add, “I didn’t know, but I think that I should have.”

“Yeah, you should have been the one watching! You should have been smart enough to see! This should never have gotten so bad. We could have hushed it up—”

“Hushed it up? It’s a hundred sixty million dollars, Carrington. There’s no escaping or pretending when that much is on the line.”

“We could have handled it better. It’s so fucking awful, all of it.” She sounded disgusted, and also sad.

There was a short silence, then even more quietly, he said, “It’s been hard how you stopped talking to me.”

“That’s what the lawyers advised.” She had lowered her voice too, and now we had our faces practically touching the door in order to hear everything.

“But it made me doubt you,” he told her. “I want to hear from you now that you really weren’t in on it with him.”

Apparently, those were Carrington’s magic words. “What? You don’t fucking trust me?” she yelled. Then I heard a slap, the sharp sound of a hand striking someone else’s skin. I recognized that because it may have happened a few times in our household when I was a kid, a few slaps between me and my siblings—and that was a big no. No one was going to hit Campbell, not when I was around!

Dion grabbed my arm before I could reach the door knob, and he was a lot stronger than he used to be. I couldn’t even pull away! “Let them talk,” he hissed, and after a moment it was clear that Campbell was ok. I stopped fighting and returned to listening.

“No, I didn’t know what he was doing!” we heard Carrington say, and then she paused and sounded a lot less certain when she continued. “I keep thinking that I could have stopped him. I only had a bad feeling, and what was I supposed to do about it? He wouldn’t talk to me when I tried to ask, but he was acting…there was something…”

“Yeah,” her brother told her. “I wish I’d done something, too, but I’m not sure what that would have been. Hire outside auditors? Ghregg never would have allowed them to access anything of significance. Should I have called the SEC, the US Attorney’s Office, the FBI? Maybe. It’s too late now.”

“No, you couldn’t have done any of those things,” she answered, quietly enough that we had to strain to hear even with our ears pressed hard to the wood slab. “‘Hi, FBI, my dad is giving me a bad vibe,’” she suggested, and they both laughed a little, sounding just the same. “I thought about that, too. I tried to look into things but it was so complicated. That was part of his scam, right? It was all compartmentalized and confused, so that no one except for him could get a clear picture. I didn’t have one and I knew that you didn’t. I wish I had talked to you, though.”

“You were scared of him, just like I was. Just like I always have been,” her brother answered, and I couldn’t catch her response. Then, in a clear voice, we heard him ask, “Can people hear us talking?”

Dion and I jerked back and scurried away, out onto the deck and into our seats. We tried to look casual, him by playing on his phone and me by looking at the stars and making wild guesses about the faint constellations that were visible despite the moon.

After a while, when Campbell hadn’t appeared, I stood up and stretched. “Well, I’m tired,” I announced, although mostly I was nervous. “I guess I’ll go up to bed.”

“Have fun. Did you bring enough condoms? I have a lot if you need more.”

“Dion, why did you bring those?”

“I also brought toothpaste and other essentials,” he explained.

“Were you expecting to have sex this weekend? With whom?”

“You never know and you should be ready,” he said. “It’s like wearing your seat belt in the car because there could be an accident.”

“Like some woman’s hoo-ha might accidentally take in your penis?” I asked, and he laughed hard enough that he couldn’t answer at first.

I left but as I did, I heard him call, “I gave a box to Jackie, too!”

Holy Mary. I shook my head, unwilling to think about my parents and Dion’s prophylactics, and I went upstairs.

Campbell was lying on the bed, the one we would share and the one that was smaller than the bed in Beckett’s guestroom. He stared at the ceiling but turned his head to look at me when I came in. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I answered. “Are you going to sleep?”

“No, I’m just thinking.” He watched as I gathered up my night things, which did not include the sexy outfit that Addie had suggested. Instead, I had made a little tank top with coordinating shorts, and on the spectrum of sexiness, that outfit rated somewhere near “crumbs in the bottom of a toaster” and “snowplows.” I decided that it was like Grace had said: I made things that suited me, just for me. Sexless Brenna.

“What was that sigh for?” he asked, and I realized that my distress had been audible.

“Nothing.” Nothing important, just a sad reality. I changed the subject. “Why is your sister friends with such terrible people?” I asked him.

“They’re not her friends,” he answered. “They’re a group of competitors who hang out together. Everything between them is like a race or a game. Carrington was the queen.”

Of course, since she’d been the prettiest, the richest, the one with the best body, and possibly the meanest. I wasn’t sure about that anymore because she had sounded very human when we’d been eavesdropping.

“All they did was try to knock her off her throne, with their individual digs and then sometimes by banding together like hyenas. It’s ugly and it’s not a good situation for her, mentally. Things have probably been bad enough without that crowd around. I wish I’d been around for her instead.” He closed his eyes.

I went quietly into the adjoining bathroom. First, I flossed and brushed very carefully, and then came the dilemma. To remove the makeup, or not to remove the makeup? If I left it on, I looked better now. If I took it off, I’d look better in the morning. But he was going to see me at the beach in my turquoise bikini that was almost exactly like Carrington’s, so there was really nothing that I would be able to hide. I removed the makeup and came out of the bathroom.

I had taken long enough that Campbell was now asleep. I quietly walked around the room, closing the curtains so that the sun wouldn’t wake him in the morning and flicking off the lights, all of them, so that it was completely dark. Now, after getting to know him, I was aware that he preferred to sleep this way. I could deal, even if I didn’t like it.

Just as quietly, I got into the bed, trying not to jostle the mattress at all. I couldn’t have totally succeeded because he said, “Brenna,” very urgently, as if something was wrong.

“What?”

But then he mumbled some words back that I couldn’t understand, and I knew that he was talking in his sleep again. It made sense, after the upsetting conversation he’d had with his sister.

“It’s wrong,” he told me. “What can we…no, no!”

“It’s ok,” I answered. I reached across this bed that was really not as big as the one at Beckett’s where we’d slept before, and I patted his shoulder. Campbell was very close, except that he was sleeping on top of the covers and that did give us some separation.

It did, until he rolled over suddenly toward me. “Don’t do it,” he said, just as urgent as before, and he grabbed the hand that I’d put out to him and used it to pull me in. I was now tightly clasped against his body.

“Brenna!”

“I’m right here. It’s ok,” I said, my voice muffled against his chest.

My words, or maybe my presence so close, worked to calm him. His breathing slowed into the usual rhythm he had when he slept, steady and easy. Mine began to match his. It felt comfortable and safe in his arms like this.

But then he stirred a little and I opened my eyes. “No olives,” he announced. He shook his head, burying his face in my hair, and I thought that he was really asleep. I fell asleep too, despite the darkness of the room.

When I woke up, I felt refreshed. And unsettled. I went downstairs and saw Dion, who also looked refreshed but perfectly content. He had made himself at home in the kitchen where he was cooking with some of the groceries that Campbell had brought.

Wait, cooking? This was the person who had previously struggled to understand why people stored food in their homes. “Why would I have it if I don’t know how to combine it in ways that taste good?” he’d asked me, numerous times.

It appeared he had learned how to make the combinations. “Mom—Jackie taught me,” he said when I asked about that. He deftly flipped an egg without breaking the yoke and then buttered two pieces of toast. “Your breakfast order is coming right up,” he told his customer.

I looked at Carrington, who looked back at me with disgust. I was glad that she was eating, since I knew that her brother worried about her, but I didn’t have anything to say to the woman.

To my surprise, she spoke to me. “Campbell went for a run.”

Ok. That was why I’d woken up alone this morning, curled in a ball on the side of the bed where he’d started out the night on top of the covers.

“The rest of the girls are still asleep,” Dion informed me. He slid her egg onto the plate with the toast. “They’re going to be unhappy today.”

I remembered all the liquor bottles decorating the kitchen when we’d arrived. “I’ll have an egg,” I told him, and he showed me the carton and said to help myself.

By the time Campbell came back, I was prepared for the beach: coated in sunscreen, cover-up covering the bikini, hat in hand, his sunglasses on my head. Dion and Carrington had already disappeared and her friends hadn’t yet shown their hungover faces downstairs. Campbell told me to wait for a minute, that he’d be right down. It was about twenty seconds later when he reappeared, in trunks and trunks only.

“Ready?” he asked.

No, because I was very busy at the moment. I was staring like my eyes were coming out of my head and also preventing myself from having a fit of vapors and swooning onto a fainting couch. Him, shirtless, was a sight that every woman needed in her life.

It was a sight that I encountered for the rest of the day, and although I didn’t get used to it, I did regain my ability to speak in his presence. We hung out on the beach under the umbrella that he carried down for me, and it was beautiful and relaxing here. I thought it was exactly what he needed.

He didn’t even blink when I bravely threw off my cover-up and went into the water. I didn’t think that he particularly looked at me in the turquoise bikini, so the many extra yoga sessions I’d done hadn’t been worth it (except I was almost doing the crow pose, so that was an accomplishment). For several hours, Carrington didn’t appear to twin with me, a major relief.

We had a lot of fun, despite my worries. Neither of us remarked on our major cuddle of the night before, and maybe he hadn’t even remembered it. We swam, read, and played some of the many, many beach games that his family stored at their house. They were into sports, and it showed in their selection of gear: frisbees, a cornhole set, footballs and other balls, and a rope for tug of war.

“No,” I’d said, when he picked that up.

We didn’t have enough people for teams, anyway. Dion never came out and neither did Carrington and her friends. Campbell reported, after he went inside to get us lunch, that most of the other women had arisen from their beds and were deciding how to pregame and where to go out for the night. They had recovered from emptying his father’s liquor cabinet on Friday and were raring to start up again.

“We could go out,” he suggested, and I nodded. I had the dresses I’d made, and I knew they were just right for me. As Grace had said, I had designed and sewn them only for myself, just like I did with everything that came out of my workroom.

“If you don’t like that idea, we don’t have to,” he said.

“No, I want to. If I was making my brat face, it’s because I was thinking of something else,” I explained. “Remember how you and I were going to develop a plan for my future business?”

“Yeah, but you keep telling me that you’re too busy,” he answered.

Well, I had been. After the wedding, I’d gotten the new job at the hospital, I’d been working on designs for this trip…and I’d been putting it off. “You know how I think that most—I should say, a lot of people don’t dress well or have good taste,” I began.

“You’ve probably mentioned that before.” He grinned at me.

“Grace said that I only design for myself,” I told him. “I’ve been thinking about that, and she’s right. I want to make things that I like, in the fabrics and colors and cuts that are best. But other people may not agree that they are. Look what happened to Chic Cathay when the public fell out of love with her style. Her daughter ran away to Laos and she’s cooking in a cauldron.”

“Somebody should write a book about Chic Cathay, because how she designed that name is an achievement just by itself. Ok, I understand what you’re saying,” Campbell answered. “If you want to be successful, then the clothes aren’t about you. They’re what other people want.” I nodded. “Can you do that? Are you interested in trying?”

I was silent, because I didn’t know the answer to either question. “I don’t like compromise,” I noted.

“But you do it all the time. You ate olives on your pizza for years because that’s how Nicola likes it, and green peppers for Juliet. Can you do that with fashion?”

“I’m going to change,” I said, and I meant that I was going inside to take a shower. But I didn’t explain and left it at that.

The other women were apparently showering too, so even in this fancy house, the water pressure was low and the temperature was chilly. I got in and out fast and I decided to let my hair go more natural, rather than enforcing Juliet-style straightness. Despite the sunscreen, hat, and umbrella, I had gotten a little color so I left off the contour and blush that I usually applied. I looked into the mirror and didn’t mind what I saw.

We had a fun night. We went to a little town that was familiar to me from coming to see my grandparents, and we had dinner and then a lot of fudge for dessert. I held the last piece to his lips and he laughed and took it, then checked my fingertips…and to my surprise, he kissed them. We walked on the streets with the other tourists (and probably some annoyed locals) and I thought that I was really and truly enjoying this—I was loving it. I hadn’t been thinking about my bikini, not once. I hadn’t been thinking about more serious things, either, like Campbell moving to Texas, my sister’s sick husband, my parents’ divorce, my career doubts, or anything else that made me upset.

“This is a good vacation,” I said, and he smiled.

“I agree. I was worried when we showed up, but it turned out well.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “I’m going to say again, it was a lucky thing that I walked into the Alecta Alberne Gallery that day. Although, to be honest, I couldn’t really read the name outside since the sign was missing so many letters. But I saw you through the window.”

“What?”

“It was getting dark already but it was bright inside there. You were standing behind that black table and when I drove past, I looked over and my eyes caught on you. Just for a second. And then, I had the idea that I should stop. I needed the birthday present,” he explained.

“Is that a true story or is it like when you told me that hockey players wear Kevlar suits under their uniforms so they don’t feel the other guys crashing into them?”

“You believed that for at least an entire period of the game,” he recalled. “You seemed worried that I’d taken hard hits and I wanted to put your mind at ease. It’s also fun when you get that expression like something’s confusing you.” He looked down at me and laughed. “That’s it. That’s the one, that cute, mad face.”

I was more than a little confused about many things he’d just said. Like, he’d stopped at the gallery because he’d seen me? I had a cute face? What? I was quiet on the way home, thinking, and Campbell was, too.

The party was on when we returned, and Dion and Carrington were in the middle of it. Apparently, they were still getting ready to hit some bars.

“Who’s driving?” Campbell asked his sister.

“I’m in charge of one car,” Dion answered. He raised his drink. “This is straight-up Vernors and I’m not going to have anything stronger. I’ll make sure she’s with me.”

Campbell looked at him and nodded slowly, like he was agreeing but also assessing. When they made their loud exit, we did some clean-up and then went out to the deck. It was another beautiful night.

“If you’re cold, you can sit here,” he offered from the teak couch (I wasn’t a fan of most outdoor fabrics but I didn’t mind what they had on these cushions). He opened his arm like when we’d been walking together and I did sit against the side of his body, cozy there. It felt perfect and I remembered sleeping close together, too.

“You were hugging me so much.”

“What? When was I doing that?” he asked.

Well, I’d been talking to Cleo again, that thing of speaking out loud instead of keeping my thoughts to myself. “I meant last night,” I explained. “You were upset, so you hugged me in your sleep.”

“Did you mind?”

“No,” I answered quickly, and he pulled me even closer and dropped his head to rest his cheek against my hair.

“Good.”

I must have fallen asleep out there; the beach, with the sun and the swimming, always made me tired, and we had also played a lot of Campbell’s very athletic games. The next thing I knew, I was awakened by screaming, women’s voices raised in what sounded like terror.

I sat up in pitch darkness. “What’s wrong?” I asked, so confused about where I was and what was happening. “Nicola?Sophie? Addie?Juliet?Grace?”

“No, it’s Carrington and her friends coming in from the bars,” Campbell’s sleepy voice told me. “It’s ok.” He tugged my arm until I lay back down, but their noise didn’t stop. “Stay there. I’ll tell them to shut up.” I heard him crash into something in the room. “Fuck! I forgot to leave a light on for you.” He flipped a switch in the bathroom and then partially closed that door so that only a sliver of brightness remained.

He left and I did stay, wondering how I’d ended up in the bed, and if he might have carried me? There were more raised voices downstairs before feet started tramping up to our floor. He also tramped into our room and shut that door firmly.

“They’re done,” he told me, and just like it was the normal, usual thing to do, he got into bed, turned on his side, and settled against my back, his arms around me. “Go to sleep.”

I didn’t, not right away. I lay listening to the noises of people talking, and I definitely heard some giggling and deeper, male laughter. Some of the women must have brought home friends. I wondered what they were doing together and my imagination made me feel a little restless. Like, I felt a little…excited. It was hard to be in this bed, cuddled against Campbell, without thinking exactly the kinds of thoughts that he wasn’t having about me. I moved my hips. He couldn’t have—

“Go to sleep, Brenna.”

I thought about other things, like mortgage-backed securities. That worked every time.