Chapter 28
Joss
It’s January. It’s freezing outside. Nothing’s rotten, nothing smells bad. The trash strewn across my lawn is mostly from quilting. My biggest concern is Jerry might eat a spool of thread and get an intestinal blockage and have to go to a vet.
Except I won’t know because he’s not an actual pet, so I’m just going to walk out and find him dead on my doorstep.
I pat my knuckle against the corner of my eye. I’m okay with the trash. It’s something to clean up, that’s all. I’m happy I got up early this morning to crank the heat up in the barn for Barb’s early class and saw this before the students did. But I don’t like the thought that this might have harmed Jerry. He’s an innocent raccoon. He didn’t do anything wrong.
“It’s just plain terrible,” Rachel laments as she corrals the recycling bin’s contents with a rake. The receipt paper and thinner stock we use for paper piecing didn’t fare well in the snow, so I’m not sure what else to do there. “I’m starting to think this isn’t ever going to stop unless you leave.”
I want to tell her she’s wrong, but I’m not in the mood to lie. I’m not leaving, so it doesn’t matter. I do have to consider this more seriously, what with the baby on the way, but running away isn’t the solution. More security lights. A fence. A proper security system. I’ve been dragging my heels over a security camera doorbell, but I should start there. In the meantime, I’m happy Rachel showed up half an hour early for Barb’s class and offered to help clean.
I finish my coffee and tug on a set of gloves from the shed. Snow starts to fall as I bend down to pick up the first handful of trash. It muffles the world, makes the task gentler. I’m not being harassed, I’m just doing clean-up. This is fine.
“Can I help?”
I look back at the unfamiliar voice, surprised to see Keira Allore on the walkway, her toddler stumbling in front of her in a puffy snowsuit so well padded that if she actually fell, I’m pretty sure she’d bounce.
I freeze, momentarily a deer in the headlights, and then look around to see if Gabe is hiding somewhere, like this is some comedy and he’s managed to tuck over 300 pounds behind the lamp post.
I take a step back, my nerves fraying. Keira’s not going to attack me or anything, not physically, but she’s certainly proven herself adept at hurting my feelings.
She holds her hands up in surrender. “I just want to talk, I swear.” She frowns at the mess around her. “And help you clean this up. Did a raccoon get into your trash or something?”
“No, he’s a good raccoon,” I say automatically. Jerry’s been getting a lot of bad press lately that he doesn’t deserve. “I’m more worried he’s going to get sick from this.”
Keira finds a clean spot to lead the baby — Shelby, if I remember right — to and pulls out a collection of toys to keep her amused. Shelby immediately starts making snowballs, contained for the moment as Keira scoops up a handful of fabric clippings and brings them to me for bagging.
“I’m sorry.”
I swallow, still feeling skittish, thinking now would be a good time for that flight response to kick in. I feel like I’m back in my high school days, when the movies told me that being pretty would make me popular, but I was the wrong kind of pretty. Keira’s the right kind of pretty, her naturally deep auburn hair and green eyes, her slightly wide-set features just unusual enough to be exotic, her presence bold and commanding. She was a cheerleader, probably already dating local legend Evan. I bet they were prom king and queen.
The mean girls at my high school were monsters. I tried to be kind to everyone and make friends with the other kids who were ostracized for their extra-curriculars. That made the mean girls a special sort of monster with me, fake-befriending me one week just to pull humiliating pranks on me the following week.
Keira’s apology sounds an awful lot like a threat.
She frowns as she deposits the scraps in the bag and immediately takes a step back. “Gabe’s one of my favorite people, and he won’t be my friend anymore.”
I let the words sink in as I study her bright, flawless, entrancing face. Gorgeous. If pageants really were just about beauty, she would have trounced me.
“Rachel, you should go get ready for class. You don’t want to be late.”
She looks between us as though she’s making sure I’m safe, but Keira’s baby’s right here. Besides, I’m sure if she was going to hurt me, she’d have someone else do it. Or she’d go right for my feelings, and my feelings have built up quite the callus. I can take what she’s going to dish out.
I’m in a mood. I know it. I’m being irrational to prove that she is a mean girl, and I hate that she’s prettier than me. I’m going to be petty here, and I don’t need Rachel witnessing it.
At my nod of assurance, Rachel grudgingly heads off.
“You win, okay?” I stomp past Keira to scoop up the pizza box from two nights ago and use it to scrape the chicken wings accompanying it out of the snow. “I’m not going to games and he’s not my boyfriend anymore, so you can have him back. Just leave me alone.”
Keira trails after me with a long strip of batting I’m surprised she even spotted in the snow and a paper bag that likely contains used blades or broken glass. I snatch it from her so she doesn’t try to send me to jail for letting her cut herself on my trash.
“Please, Joss. I promise I’m not here to fight. Gabe is devastated. Evan says he’s actually worried that Gabe is going to hurt himself, whether it’s on purpose or just being reckless on the field.”
“And ruin your precious game.” I stare down at a pile of dirt I’m fairly sure is the contents of one of the shop vacuums. “I’ve ruined everything else in Wilmington. It stands to reason I’ll ruin the Jugs.”
Keira shakes her head and mildly curses under her breath. “You didn’t. You don’t. I shouldn’t have ever gotten in your business like I did. I was just scared you were going to hurt Gabe.”
“Well, he hurt me, so I guess you didn’t need to worry.”
“I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school, okay?”
With the most exacerbated huff, I stomp toward a bag that looks intact, but looks can be deceiving. Mean girls can be deceiving. They can make up stupid lies like I didn’t have a lot of friends in high school.
What a joke.
“I was new in town,” Keira calls after me. “My mom had just abandoned me. My dad was an alcoholic, couldn’t keep a job. I lost my chance at gymnastics and had to do cheerleading, and I was miserable. I only had a couple of friends. And then your hus—him, he killed one of them.”
I stop at that, tilt my head up to the sky, let the snow fall on my face. My lips, my nose, even my eyes. It is unending. Maybe Rachel is right and I do need to leave Wilmington. “Danielle Marsh.”
The girl who my husband killed ten feet below me on a Tuesday afternoon while I was distracting myself reading one of Aiden’s books when I was supposed to be organizing the changing table.
“Mikayla Behrensen, actually. You wouldn’t know about her. She never came forward. Her parents were fundamentalists. They were top-notch victim blamers, no matter the crime. I knew something was wrong, but she wouldn’t talk to me, either. When I pushed, she withdrew from me completely. And then she transferred to a private school. Two months later, her mom called me, told me she died. An accident, she said, but then it turned out she overdosed on her prescription meds. She killed h—are you okay?”
“Yup.” Not even a little bit. Brian destroyed lives. It’s one of those things that lurks forever in the back of my thoughts. When it’s right in my face like this? When I have to see this woman who doesn’t know me but hates me because Brian drove her friend to overdose? When I know there’s nothing I can do to amend this because the people who really need to deal with this are both long gone and we’re stuck holding the pieces?
It sucks.
So I’m squatting on my front lawn in a pile of trash, with my forehead on the hands draped over my knees. I guess I get why Keira can tell I’m not okay.
“And now I’m scared I’m going to lose Gabe.”
I close my eyes and breathe in this little space I’ve made for myself. This space that’s just me and the stupid bloating that my baby’s hiding under, the only safe space I really have anymore. I stare at the pooch in the winter coat that isn’t even bloating, just bunched up fabric, and I think about why Keira hates me. By the time I say, “And that’s going to be my fault, too,” I’m angry all over again.
Stupid, asshole Gabe. Stupid, asshole men. They’re all awful, and they’re always going to take advantage of me in some horrible way.
“No, of course not! God, I mean it, Joss, I’m sorry. You brought up all these horrible memories for me, and I got all caught up in it, and I . . . dammit. I was the one who superglued your locks. I’m sorry for that, too.”
I pop upright, terrified that I’m going to have to have a locksmith come out and break into my own house again. But I’m two steps forward, brushing past Keira, when it hits me that I’ve already been in the shop and the barn today. No one’s tampered with my locks. Not in probably five years.
I laugh incredulously as it clicks what she means. “You mean back then, when you were a kid?”
“I was eighteen. And a bitch. And when you popped up at that fundraiser, with Gabe of all people, it sent my head right back here, dripping superglue into the locks, because all anyone could talk about was how you kept this great big house while all those girls were falling apart.”
I’m as acutely aware as anyone that this house should have been torn down, the earth salted. But I couldn’t afford that, so I remade it into something happy and peaceful and safe. “It wouldn’t have healed them. Nothing would have.”
“I know. I see that now, and how you couldn’t have known what was happening. Gabe loves you so much, and I can’t think of another man who is as good a judge of character as he is.”
“Wow. Okay. Not to call you out or anything, but you have no idea what he really is.”
“I know what he did. The lie.”
I struggle to keep myself from scrubbing my face with my gloved hands that have been all over the trash. It shouldn’t be difficult to resist, but my mind is completely blown by this. Why would he tell people what he did? “Why are you here right now? Why is—what—I don’t understand what this is.”
Keira nods for too long before saying, “Right, yeah. This does seem crazy. I’m sorry I didn’t welcome you like I should have and like you deserved. Everything’s a mess, and a lot of that is my fault.”
“Did you tell him to lie to me to get me pregnant?”
At that, Keira looks flustered, and I finally feel like she’s realizing how uncomfortable she’s making me. “No, but . . . but he loves you, and I promise I get where you’re coming from. This might come as a surprise to you, but Evan has done many incredibly stupid and irresponsible things.”
“It, uhhh, it doesn’t, actually.”
“Right, he’s an idiot. I love him to death, but . . .” She shakes her head. “Evan specifically asked me not to come here when he told me what happened, but I couldn’t help it. And I’m not telling you to be okay with what Gabe did or automatically forgive and forget. I’m asking you to not force him out entirely. Give him that little bit of peace of mind that he’s being a good dad and taking care of what’s his.”
“Counterpoint: he’s not a good dad, and I’m not his.”
“But you miss him terribly.”
I cross my arms over my chest and purse my lips. I don’t appreciate getting read by someone who doesn’t know me, because by her own admittance, she shunned me when I didn’t deserve it.
“You’re crazy about him. I can tell. I could that night at the fundraiser. I wasn’t just protecting Gabe, I was trying to hurt you the way I told myself you hurt me. So I’m coming to you as a person who was awful to you and praying that you’ll see it in your heart to forgive me enough to at least help my friend—” She sighs and shakes her head again. When she looks at me, her eyes are misty. “I just realized how terribly inappropriate it is of me to be here. I’m so sorry.”
With that admission, it seems like she should quietly but rapidly leave. Instead, she takes up Rachel’s rake and coaxes the receipt sludge into the bag. Deciding I don’t have the mental fortitude for this, I kneel down next to Shelby and help her stack her little snowballs. She gives me a big, toothy grin and then erupts in giggles when I say, “Boop!” and poke the stack, letting it fall in her lap.
“Hey, where’s your kid?” Keira asks from the trash can she’s smooshing the leaf bag into.
“Oh, err, I’m currently pregnant. Like, I know you can’t see it now because of the coat, but—”
She chuckles. “No, your older one. I won’t lie, when I glued your locks, I made myself sick thinking your baby was going to be trapped inside if something happened. Which feels even cruddier—”
“Keira—”
“—that you could have also been trapped inside—”
“No but—”
“—if there was a fire or something. You could have—”
“Keira, I miscarried. I was attacked. The day the judge ruled I could keep the house.”
Her words die off as horror takes over her face. She stands there for several seconds longer before she throws her arms around me.
I know I shouldn’t be comforted by this. Hell, if she’s the one who glued my locks — a stupid prank, but one that cost me money I didn’t have — she might know who threw that rock. But there’s no way her shock isn’t real, that the heartache I feel as her arms tighten is fabricated. So I sink into her as a fresh wave of grief, dulled with the passing of time but never gone, washes over me.
“Please let me help you even if you won’t let Gabe,” Keira begs softly. “I’ve hurt you so much that even if you think you don’t need help, I owe it to you.”
I want to say no in the hopes that it’ll make her feel as bad as she’s made me feel, but that’s not who I am. Not really. “I’d like that.”
“The division championship is this weekend. There’s a ticket for you.”
“Thank you, but . . . but I can’t. I do love him, but what he did? I can’t just go and act like everything’s okay. God, I either dress normal and everyone sees and wonders why, or I wear his jersey, and . . . no. I can’t.”
“I get it. I guess you’re probably not a sports fan to begin with.”
I manage to crack a smile at that. “Not really. And, um, if you’re the one who’s been knocking over my trashcans and everything else, just stop and we’ll call it even.”
“God no, I promise I have grown up in the last five years, even if I haven’t acted like it. But I will clean your yard as much as you want me to.”