Chapter Twelve #2
“But you didn’t mean to.” Ruby took his arms, turned him around, and pushed him toward the door. “Eventually you’d have done it on purpose. So…it was for the best. Believe that, and get your ass to the bank.”
What else was he going to do, Kel supposed.
Besides, Hell might have decided that his legally issued birth certificate was all the paperwork it needed, but Doncaster was still dragging his heels.
Until the estate was released, or Kel worked out a way to make the ‘smoke’ work online, he needed money.
“Wish me luck,” he said.
“Only losers need luck,” Ruby rhymed off by rote as she cleared the breakfast plates off the table. “Are you a loser?”
“...not the day to ask, Ruby.”
She snorted. Kel started to open the door. He caught a glimpse of his reflection, caught in the smeared glass, and hesitated.
“Did you ever find those photos?” he asked as he looked over his shoulder.
Ruby paused mid-balancing act, one hand braced on top of a stack of chipped mugs.
Her expression was blank as she turned her mouth down at the corners and shrugged her incomprehension.
“The ones from back then, when you and Grandad were friends with Dio. We talked about it the other day.”
Ruby blinked and puffed her cheeks out in a baffled sigh.
“I don’t…” she started to say, then shook her head as the penny dropped. “Photos. No, of course, I don’t know how that slipped my mind. I…I guess I’m so used to having everything on my phone. I remember now.”
She started toward the kitchen. Kel stared at her back.
“Ruby?”
She spun on the ball of her foot. The sole squeaked against the lino. She gave him an exasperated look. “What?!”
“The photos?”
She stared at him. Kel felt the smoke stir, the heat of it rising through his chest and into his sinuses. It tasted different, like licorice and whiskey.
“You were going to look them out for me. Did you find them?”
Ruby gave a scoffing little laugh. “You just asked me that,” she said. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me today.”
Smoke wisped from her mouth. Or it tried to. Threads of shadow crawled out of Ruby’s mouth after them. It was thick and dark, more like cords, and it didn’t whisper to Kel. Instead, it stitched over Ruby’s mouth, through her lips and the tip of her tongue. Like scabs.
She tried to say something, but the words didn’t come out. Her throat worked as she swallowed hard.
…I burned the photos. Why did I do that?
The smoke hissed, its ‘voice’ in Kel’s head broken and cracked.
I should have burned them before. Like the rest of the words/memories/faces.
Why didn’t I? I should have. He wanted me to; he ask...
told TOLD told me to forget, to never remember, to never toldtelltalk
The black threads wormed under Ruby’s skin. Her face twisted painfully as the dark lines crawled up into her eyes and squirmed out of her ears. Her arms trembled. A fork slid off the stack of plates and dropped to the floor with a clatter, spraying bits of egg and ketchup over the lino.
The noise made Kel jump, and the smoke choked him as he tried to tell her to stop.
…burn the memories and the lies, but there had to be a story for the boy, and the photos were all I had. All. I burned them now, all of them…
The rest of the plates hit the ground and shattered. Coffee splattered over the floor. Ruby collapsed on top of it a second later, eyes rolled back in her head and gibberish spluttering from her mouth.
Kel lunged over to try and catch her—already too late—and then went down on his knees next to her. He ignored the jolt of pain in his knees as he pulled her into his lap.
“Ruby,” he said as he tried to keep her from hurting herself. One hand gripped her shoulders as he fished for the phone in his pocket with the other. “Grandma, it’s ok. I’m here. It doesn’t matter.”
He dialled 9-1-1.
The taste of the smoke in his mouth was gone for the first time in days as he stumbled over the address of the cafe.
“Kel,” Harry said as he got up from behind his desk. He held his hand out. The light from the window reflected off his wedding ring. His expression was warm and pleasant. “It’s good to see you. So how can I help you today?”
As Kel gripped Harry’s hand, his gaze was caught by a splash of something reddish-brown on his cuff.
Was it blood or ketchup, he wondered. It could have been either.
It didn’t really matter. Kel tried to put it out of his head, but he couldn’t quite shake it.
It gnawed at the back of his mind with stubborn persistence as he ran through the expected niceties with Harry on autopilot.
What did it say about him, he wondered, that he’d left his grandmother in hospital to keep an appointment.
Nothing, he supposed, that people hadn’t already been saying.
“...Remember when the Hogs played against Windsor?” Harry reminisced. He twiddled his pen—heavy and metal and expensive—as he talked. “We won 31-28, and you pulled off that one-handed grab at…Shit, what was it?”
He swung back in his chair and chewed on his lower lip as he tried to remember.
“62 yards,” Kel said.
Harry snapped his fingers. “That was it,” he said. “Damn. That was the best game of the season.”
Kel nodded and rubbed his knee. He could feel the scars through the rough cotton, the way the cartilage couldn’t pull off holding everything in the right place.
“My last game,” he said.
The warm sentiment on Harry’s face curdled into discomfort as his memory caught up with his mouth. He coughed and rubbed his hand over his buzz-cut head.
“...well, um, at least nobody can say you didn’t go out on a high,” Harry said with an awkwardly knowing chuckle.
“I was drunk,” Kel corrected him. “Not high.”
He should have just laughed along, but he guessed he was a bit off his game.
Harry looked mortified, a mottled red spreading up from under the collar of his shirt. He cleared his throat and grabbed for the file on the desk, visibly glad for the excuse to change the subject. He flipped the file open and tapped it with the pen.
“The Milligan Farm,” he said. “I’m not sure exactly why you have first refusal on the property, but I’m not sure you have the capital to—”
Kel leaned forward and caught Harry’s gaze.
“But I will once I inherit the Madden estate,” he pointed out.
The taste in his mouth was cigars and burned wood, rich and clotted as the smoke rolled over his tongue.
He could feel the rough warmth of it in his voice as he spoke.
“And you’d know that better than anyone. ”
Even he can’t think anyone believes that?
The smoke slipped the words into Kel’s mind.
It was cloying with pity. The actual words that Harry spoke were barely audible, a noncommittal mutter of ‘unable to talk about that until the estate is settled.’ He should have stuck to conning drunks out of their beer money. That’s more his level.
Look at that. There was an asshole under all that good humor and boy-next-door gloss after all.
“Come on, Harry,” Kel said easily. The smoke wriggled into Harry’s ears and caught like cobwebs in his eyelashes.
“We both know that just because you’re all up in everyone’s finances in this town, you probably knew they were going to foreclose on the Mitchell house before the bailiffs did.
It’s a good thing you’re above reproach, or people might have asked questions about your wife’s business partner getting in under that wire. ”
The red on Harry’s throat darkened and crawled up into his cheeks. His mouth twitched as he looked down at the file.
“Actually, they did,” he said. “Ask questions. I answered them. That’s how banking works, Kel. You can’t fast-talk your way into…whatever this is.”
He waved his hand at the file.
At the same time the smoke tightened to his face, tendrils hooked around the corners of his mouth and hooked over his ears. The mask of his mouth twisted around something bitter as the smoke nudged the gossip over to Kel.
He’s just trying to get my goat. She told me she didn’t do it. She told me it was coincidence, and I told me that I believed her. I do. I will. I have to. The old man wasn’t right about her. About me. About us. She does love/want/love/stay me.
The sad thing was, she did.
Jodie might not—as witnessed by a dozen eavesdropped Zoom calls—be happy, but she did love Harry. It was a shame that the fear she didn’t was more useful than reassurance.
“That,” Kel said as he gestured to the file. “Is an opportunity with a guaranteed safety net. The sort of thing that impresses spouses, fills bank accounts, and reassures dads they don’t need to change the will.”
Amusement at the gambit crinkled Harry’s eyes. He snorted as he leaned forward over the desk and…
Tell me more, the smoke mouthed.
“Tell me more,” Harry said.
Kel hesitated as he watched the smoke thicken and curdle. He curled his fingers into his knees, remembering the there-not-there texture of the leathery black cords he’d tried to pull off Ruby’s face.
“Kel?” Harry prompted. “Tell me more.”
The smile hitched up on Kel’s face on autopilot. He shoved the doubt down—qualms were all well and good, but Ruby’s health insurance couldn’t afford them—and reached out to rest his hand on top of the proposal.
“Let me tell you how I see this working…” he said.
The smoke licked Harry’s lips, ready for the cue to say ‘yes.’
Now that he thought about it, Kel was pretty sure the spot on his cuff was blood.
Bernie looked up from a clipboard as Kel ducked awkwardly under the banner strung over the door. Her face twisted between embarrassment and sympathy as she handed the clipboard off to one of the other HOA members and walked briskly over.
“Kel,” she said as she reached him. “Never mind that. It was…ah…someone from the church retired. They had a party.”
They had. Kel tilted his head back to look at the banner. Doreen, apparently.
Bernie started to move into a hug, thought better of it, and folded her arms over her chest instead.