Chapter 7 #2
Three lonely beers stood at attention on the top shelf, still waiting for my dad to return from a long day that he was never coming home from again.
Beneath them, next to the tray of lasagna dropped off last night, a container of leftover chili and rice sat wedged between seventeen varieties of condiments, including four almost-empty mustard bottles—as if we were preparing for some kind of mustard apocalypse.
Down in the vegetable drawer, a single apple and a couple of desiccated carrots huddled together. This fridge was a graveyard of leftovers and broken dreams.
I wiped the tears from my eyes, which were part grief and part the chili fumes escaping the leftovers container.
Figure out breakfast.
There had to be a clue about what this kid liked to eat. Something. Anything.
The freezer had no frozen waffles, no pancakes, not even the sad off-brand kind that tastes like cardboard coasters.
The pantry offered one box of hearty fiber cereal that no kid in his right mind would voluntarily ingest unless bribed with a new Lego set.
No pastries. No sugary snacks. The cabinet was a nutritional desert, featuring two organic fruit gummy packets and a granola bar.
They didn’t even have real peanut butter. I picked up a jar of sunflower butter and watched the suspicious layer of oil wobble on top. Hard pass.
There was no universe in which I could successfully pull off pancakes or eggs, not that there were eggs in this house.
I squinted at the pancake mix wondering if it required eggs.
Perhaps, there was some mythical, idiot-proof version of pancakes designed for people like me.
It hardly mattered. Even with five YouTube tutorials and if God personally spotted me from heaven, my cooking still had a remarkable talent for turning into something vaguely edible-looking and deeply regrettable.
Toast. It was the only safe option. I uncovered a loaf of whole wheat bread with one lone slice and two end pieces.
I hadn’t realized my breakfast panic lasted a half hour. A return to Vinny’s room found him already up and taking a shower. I sure hoped he could pick his own clothes.
Vinny appeared downstairs twenty minutes later. His brown hair looked like he’d lost a fight with a leaf blower.
“Do you need help with your hair?” I asked as neutrally as I could manage.
“Do you?” He patted down his hair and scowled at me.
“Is toast okay for breakfast?”
“I don’t like butter on it.” He slumped in a chair at the table.
“Good thing there isn’t any in the fridge.” I shoved the lone piece of bread into the toaster. “Do you need a ride to school or is there a bus or friend that takes you?”
“I need a ride.”
“Any afterschool activities today?”
“It’s Thursday.” He looked at me like I was an idiot. “No.”
“I assume same time for pickup as yesterday. Do you need me to pack a lunch, or do you buy?”
He pointed to a soft lunchbox with pictures of cartoon astronauts attached to his backpack.
I slid the toast onto the plate in front of him.
“It’s too dark. You can’t even do toast right.” He pushed away from the table to get jam out of the refrigerator.
“What time do you have to be at school?”
“Don’t you know anything? By 7:45.”
I sat across from him and waited for him to look at me. When he finally did, the expression on his face was anything but kind. His glare said every awful thing in his life, somehow, was my fault.
“I don’t know anything about your day-to-day life,” I said.
He huffed and rolled his eyes.
“I imagine there’s some sort of psycho car line etiquette I’m bound to screw up and some mom in charge of it will fuss me out.
” While simultaneously warning me off Josh Hurst since the women in this town all seem to have a crush on him.
“There’s officially no edible food in this house other than the lasagna dropped off yesterday,” I announced.
“That”—I pointed at the lone slice he nibbled suspiciously—“is literally the only piece of bread that isn’t an end piece.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to put in your lunch box. Do you want cold lasagna?”
“I don’t like lasagna. I’ll grab some things to take.”
I glanced around. “Why don’t you have any pets other than a beta fish on the edge of death? Dad always used to have a few strays here and there.”
“The cat died a few months ago. He was old and his kidneys gave out, or at least that’s what Dad said. We had a poodle for a while, but he got killed by a coyote or something. We used to have a goat, but he choked on a balloon last year.”
“Well, shit. That’s awful.” I leaned back in my chair.
A small smile tugged at his mouth. “Dad used to curse like that. Mom hated it.”
“I’ve got a potty mouth a mile wide. Inherited it legit from Dad. I can try to clean it up if you want, but honestly, life tosses moments that sometimes deserve a solid shit or damn.”
He studied me. “You’re not very good at this parent stuff, are you?”
“I’m not trying to be your parent, unless you do something that forces it out of me. I’m your sister. We’re blood. Like it or not, we’re stuck with each other.”
Someone knocked at the front door.
We both stared at each other.
“Are you expecting someone?” I asked.
Vinny shook his head.
“You stay here.” I paced to the door with Tracker on my heels.
When I opened the door, I looked down to see a petite woman wrapped in a stylish pink wool coat standing on the threshold, her mid-length blond hair pulled into a cute ponytail. She thrust a to-go coffee cup at me.
In a saccharine sweet tone she said, “I brought you chai. Didn’t know if you take it with real milk or soy. I made it with real milk. Remember me?”
“Maybe.” Of course I remembered. I’d never forget the girl who wrapped herself around my boyfriend and kissed him like she wanted to devour him. This was the bitch who blew up everything we had and left me standing in the ashes.
“Milly,” she provided.
“Oh, yeah,” I managed in a couldn’t-care-less tone.
“You’ve changed since high school.” The Milly I remembered had never been my friend.
She belonged with the “in” crowd—the cheerleaders, the girls who dated team captains and walked through the halls like they owned the place.
I was the opposite: more at home with the quirky kids who spent Friday nights rolling D&D dice or arguing over anime plots.
I could still hear her voice from years ago, sharp enough to cut. She’d told me my hair looked frizzy and my freckles made me look cheap. It was the kind of comment that shouldn’t matter, but somehow burrowed in and stayed, resurfacing when I least wanted it to.
“I know we didn’t exactly get along back then.” Milly pressed the cup into my hand. “But I figured you could use a drink.”
Didn’t exactly get along?
The words scraped like sandpaper. She stole Josh from me and detonated my entire world in one reckless moment. Everything had collapsed around me the second she decided she wanted what I had.
I waited for the apology she owed me for kissing Josh in high school, which is why she should’ve stopped by.
She gestured loosely at herself. “I know, I look different. I’m taking online classes to become a paralegal, and during the day I’m working over at the coffee house.” Her expression softened. “I was really sorry to hear about your parents. How are you holding up?”
I tried to figure out if her sympathy was real. “As well as can be expected.”
“Don’t you have to get Vinny to school?” She leaned forward, eyes sweeping the hallway with blatant curiosity.
“We’re working on it. Are you part of a parents’ group here to tell me how to do school things?” I wondered if she was here to warn off me off Josh like all the other women in this crazy place.
“No.” She blushed bright red. “I…uh… Josh and I have been seeing each other. Just started up recently. We’re going out tonight and I wanted to make sure…”
Boom! There it is.
What the hell was wrong with the women in this town? I managed to say in a nonjudgemental tone, “Okay.”
“We didn’t really date in high school or after, but now we have our chance.”
“Are you asking my permission to date him?” I felt like I wanted to throttle him and her at the same time. “Or are you here to warn me away from him?”
“Guess a little of both? It feels weird with you here. I mean, you and he were a thing like…whoa, it’s been over a decade.” Her false shock made me want to roll my eyes. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“I’m here to contend with two deaths in the family.” I wasn’t about to unpack my personal life for someone I hadn’t seen in years, least of all the girl who was here to stake her claim to my ex.
“Right. Sorry for your loss. I’ll let you get going. Just wanted to say hi.”
Hi, my ass. This woman just pissed a circle around Josh. “I appreciate this.” I held up the cup, not that I intended to drink a sip of it. “I’ll try to grab coffee in town at some point while I’m here.”
She waved as she headed back to her gray sedan.
I couldn’t believe Josh had changed so much that this ex-prom queen was his type.
He once told me he’d never end up with a girl who fit in with the senior congregation at church, and Milly looked like she’d be its star member.
Maybe Josh really had changed. Or maybe he’d only said that back then to make me feel better, knowing I never quite fit in at church.
I believed in God and loved the sense of community, but somehow I always managed to do something that earned the judgmental glare of the senior ladies.
Milly called out, “I hope you’ll be careful in town. No one brings out the wild crazy more than you.”
“That’s not true.”
She paused halfway to her car. “When you walk through a grocery store, canned air starts exploding.”
“That was one time.” I held up a single finger. “I bumped into the display, and they started shooting off like fireworks. It wasn’t my fault.”
“People still talk about it. I hope you’re not planning to steal Josh’s clothes again or cause some sort of disaster—that wouldn’t go over well.”
“I’m not staying.” I almost added: He’s all yours, but the words got stuck in my throat.