Chapter Eight Bram
Chapter Eight
Bram
The day after Fern decides to run for student body president, I find Leo Saint James in my office yet again.
Last night, Maddie stayed well past her normal hours to help Fern come up with a plan of action for her campaign.
Anytime I checked in on them, Fern waved me away and assured me they were fine.
“Where did you even find that?” I ask. I don’t keep any liquor in here, and the nearest bar is inside the Astra Hotel, at the edge of campus. And I know Leo didn’t carry a glass of single malt all the way up the hill just to drink it in my office.
“A gentleman never tells his secrets,” Leo says. He doesn’t move from my chair or cease brooding at the soil monoliths. “And what does it matter? The world is full of thieves, and anything worth having must be stolen from the stealers.”
“Happy Tuesday to you too,” I reply, and set my satchel on the love seat. And then I pause, look over at Leo’s Italian shoes, his dark expression. He looks like an AI-generated image of unprincipled wealth right now.
A thought occurs to me.
“Leo,” I say carefully. “Do you know someone who can . . . find . . . things?”
Leo’s eyes swing over to me. Interest flickers across his face, driving away whatever bad mood is plaguing him, and he sets his glass on the desk. “Ahem. Mr. FernGully. Aren’t you someone who can find things?”
“Used to be.” I sit on the arm of the love seat and regard him with a steady gaze.
A short, amused exhale once he realizes I’m not conceding anything more.
Not that I have to—Leo already knows all my sins.
“I’m not sure the statute of limitations cares too much about what verb tense you use, Bram, but fine.
Yes, I know someone who can find things.
What or whomst are we finding out about? ”
I hesitate only a moment, although Leo still notices because of course he does. He’s already smiling by the time I admit it.
“Madelyn Kowalczk’s ex-boyfriend.”
He kicks his feet in the air like a pinup girl before swinging them down to the floor and spinning my chair to face me fully, silver eyes sparkling like tinsel on a Christmas tree. “I knew it, old sport, I knew it! I knew it had something to do with the nanny!”
“Childcare provider,” I correct.
“Say no more, I’ll take care of everything,” Leo says with a cheerful wave of his hand. “This contemptible worm will have no secrets from us by the time my friend is through.”
“You have a friend?” comes a voice from the doorway to my office.
Sloane Saint James, in wide-legged trousers and a gray vest with no shirt underneath, and with a vintage leather briefcase that looks like it was originally owned by someone who wore a lot of shoulder pads.
She looks fabulous, but then again, Sloane always looks fabulous.
(Even in messy buns and ripped Copperhead sweatshirts—even while chasing a tiny Fern back in the days when Sara and I used to beg, borrow, and steal any free babysitting we could get—Sloane has always exuded the kind of glamour you think is possible only in magazines.)
“Fuck you, Sloane,” Leo responds fondly. “I’ve got lots of friends.”
“Friends you don’t pay a salary to? Or have sex with?” asks Sloane skeptically.
“My darling cousin, Bram is right here, and he’s very shy about all the salaried sex we have. And may I just remark that you are looking very tastefully divorced this afternoon?”
Sloane comes around the love seat and sits on the other arm, setting her briefcase on the floor and then looking at Leo’s whisky with undisguised envy. “I had a meeting off campus. I wanted to project a certain image.”
“I’m sure the students were projecting several things by the end of the day, at least,” Leo purrs, but he takes pity on Sloane and gets up to pass her the whisky, which she takes gratefully.
“How did your meeting go?” I ask when she lowers the glass and wipes her mouth.
“Dreadfully,” she answers, and then takes another drink.
“Was the meeting at The Dry Bean?” Leo asks. “You should have had me come. I’m sufficiently terrifying when given the chance.”
The Dry Bean? Sloane is a sexual health educator at Astra University, and while it’s not unheard-of for her to do workshops or initiatives around Mount Astra at large, that usually means manning a tent during Pride or helping with the women’s health van in a grocery store parking lot.
Not a meeting at a run-down bar with a creative approach to health code compliance.
I shift so I can look at Sloane. “You had a meeting at our bar? Why?”
Something strange happens. Instead of Sloane answering my very normal question, she and Leo glance at each other, and then look away.* She coughs. Leo gets to his feet.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says.
“Wait, so you know what this meeting was?”
“I may have heard some things,” replies Leo evasively. “But we’re getting off topic. The real topic is you and the nanny.”
“Childcare provider.”
“Having congress and not in a political science way,” Leo goes on.
“Leo.”
“Congress with the nanny?” Sloane turns to me with wide silver eyes. “Bram!”
“No—the—” I blow out a breath and drag my hands over my face. “Look, the congress predates the childcare, okay? There is currently zero congress.” Aside from Sunday, when I’d pinned her against my bookshelf and fondled the soft, wet cunt under her dress.
But that hardly counts, right? It was a . . . a slip. A momentary lapse in control brought about by her bad manners and ridiculous accusations and the adorable jut of her jaw when she admitted she was jealous.
That she wanted me all to herself, even when I wasn’t hers to have.
And Christ, did I know the feeling.
I come back to the moment to realize Leo and Sloane are arguing about my romantic history.
“I’m just saying, and with respect to you, Bram, that I don’t think you ever dealt with the emotional fallout of having Fern,” Sloane is saying, “and your grandparents cutting you off and how traumatic those early years were. You were learning how to be an adult and a husband and a father all at the same time, and then when the dust finally settled around money and your career, you had surprise twins. I just don’t think you ever had a chance to learn what you want outside of scraping together the best life possible for the girls. ”
“My grandparents didn’t cut me off,” I explain patiently.
* “They just said that if I was man enough to have a baby, then I was man enough to pay for it. So I paid for it.” It being a shitty apartment and a car seat and a Pack ’n Play and cloth diapers and bags for breast milk and onesies and a little glowing seahorse that played lullabies and ocean noises.
Sara scooped ice cream for people we’d gone to school with, for students our age completely unburdened by responsibility, for little kids like we were about to have, and I’d spent the summer working on a highway road crew until our first semester started at Astra, and then I transitioned to tutoring and after-hours janitorial work at the student bookstore.
We’d finally snagged married student housing, used a combination of the campus’s subsidized childcare and the goodwill of our friends to get through our studies, and somehow, eventually, clawed enough money together to make a down payment on a derelict house.
“And we were all okay,” I add. “We made it through.”
Leo snorts. “Yeah, I bet you were okay after your grandfather died and your grandmother decided to give you tons of regret money.”
“People change,” I say evenly.
My parents died in a car crash when I was a baby, so my grandparents were all I’d ever had growing up.
They’d never said as much, but I knew they’d been extremely content turning their small plant nursery into a highly lucrative, multistate enterprise, and the presence of an unexpected infant in their lives seemed to have upset them as much as losing their daughter.
I never doubted that they loved me, but their love had always been reserved.
Conditional. Uninterested in the neediness of a child who was scared of the dark and bullied at school.
They wanted me to be worth the work, I think, and when I had to confess Sara’s pregnancy to them in the last year of high school, they realized I’d been a bad investment.
No sense throwing good money after bad, after all.
But after Grandad died, Grandma had changed.
She was older and lonelier and who wouldn’t want to know a kid like Fern?
Fern, who’d been the sweetest baby, who’d been raised underneath library tables and playing with lab goggles at our feet, chasing butterflies through fields while I collected samples, coloring on the floor of the student bookstore while I vacuumed.
Fern, who learned to crochet before she learned to ride a bike, whose prized possession was an ancient Brother sewing machine that we found behind an old microwave at a thrift store.
So for the last few years of her life, Grandma had gotten to know Fern.
She’d finally acted civil to Sara. She’d gotten to hold the twins when they were still tiny little burritos with red faces and lanugo on their delicate shoulders.
She’d tried to apologize with money, and more money again, and when I’d explained that it wasn’t necessary, that all was forgiven, she’d cried into my shoulder until my shirt was soaked.
My grandma had changed, she had tried to make amends and be better going forward.
I can even believe that she’d tried her best when I was younger too.
Her best still hadn’t been good enough, but that’s okay.
I don’t want to carry that kind of resentment—I just want to focus on making sure my kids never feel like my love is qualified by an invisible profit-and-loss sheet that only I can see.