4. Charly #2
“Dad.” The word breaks in half, and I have to stop and breathe before the rest will come. “I’m okay. I’m safe. I just need you to listen for a second.”
“I’m listening. I’m right here, baby.”
“I can’t come home yet. And I need you to not let Mom spin this into something I did. Because you know she’s going to try.”
“Charly June.” His voice drops somewhere I’ve only heard maybe twice in my life, and it puts a lump right in my throat. “Your mother can go straight to hell. And your sister does not exist to me right now. You hear me? As of today I’ve got one daughter. One.”
The sob comes up out of nowhere and takes me with it. Then Clarence’s hand is flat between my shoulder blades, rubbing slow circles, steady, while I fall apart into the phone.
“I love you, Daddy.” It comes out somewhere in the crying.
“More than anything in this whole world, kid.” He clears his throat, rough with it.
“You call me tomorrow, you hear? And that boy better pray the next time I see him is never.” There’s a pause, and then his voice goes softer, almost sheepish.
“Oh. And listen, I’ve got the dog. He followed your aunt right out of the church and she drove him over to me.
He’s on my couch as we speak, eating my good cushion, and I don’t have the heart to stop him. ”
I laugh, wet and wrecked, dragging my wrist under my nose. “Thank you, Dad. For all of it.”
I hang up and the phone drops onto the blanket, and then I just go. I cry like I haven’t since I was a kid, ugly and loud, three years of it all at once. Clarence doesn’t say anything. He keeps his hand right where it is and lets me get through it.
When it finally winds down to hiccups, I scrub my face with the heel of my hand and sit up a little.
“You can’t go back to your apartment. His name’s on the lease.
” He says it carefully, easing into it, like he’s been sitting on it waiting for the right moment.
“I’ve got a place behind my house. Old garage, converted.
Its own entrance, its own everything. Nobody’s using it.
” He shrugs, like it’s no big deal, like he isn’t watching my face for any reaction at all. “It’s yours. As long as you want it.”
I pull the blanket tighter around me.
“I’m not going home with you.”
“You’re not. You’d be in your own space, on the far side of my yard, and you wouldn’t have to see me unless you wanted to.
” He stands, and the warmth at my back goes with him.
“I built it out a couple years back and never did anything with it. You don’t have to like it.
You don’t have to like me. The offer stands either way. ”
I want to say no. I have said no to easier things. But I have eight hundred dollars and a shift on Monday and nowhere on this earth that isn’t full of people waiting to tell me how to feel “One week. I pay rent. And the second you act like you’re owed something for it, I’m gone.”
“One week. We’ll fight about the rent later.” He holds out his hand, doesn’t push, just leaves it there between us and waits.
I look at it for a long moment. I think about the last hand I shook on a promise, in a kitchen, over a folder.
Then I think about this same hand catching me on the church steps before my head could hit the stone.
I take it.
His fingers close around mine, warm and steady and nothing at all like his brother’s, and that right there is the part that scares me.
My phone goes off against the blanket.
Not a name on the screen. The venue.
I almost let it ring out. I pick up anyway, only because some leftover reflex in me still thinks there’s a wedding to run.
“Hi there, am I speaking with Ms. Scott?” She’s bright, chirpy, a clipboard practically in her voice. “Just confirming a couple of details for the Carrington wedding, the garden room. We’ve got the deposit transferred over and the new date locked in, I just need a final headcount from you.”
“There’s no wedding.” My voice comes out flat and far away. “It’s off. You can release the room.”
There’s a pause, and the sound of papers shuffling.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, I think I’ve got the sisters crossed.
” She does an apologetic little laugh. “Happens all the time with the same last name. No, this is the new booking, Ms. Rebecca Scott? Same garden room, same vendors. They just moved the date, said there’d been a mishap and to switch the name on the file.
The twenty-first now. Same garden room, all your same vendors. ”
The glass shatters all at once.
They canceled my wedding and they made it theirs. They swapped me out and kept every other piece of it.
I sit there with the phone against my ear and let it sink all the way in.
They’re getting married. Not eventually, not someday when the dust settles.
They kept the whole ceremony and shoved it back three weeks.
My garden room. My vendors. My sister walking down the aisle I was supposed to walk down.
They moved into my wedding while I was still unconscious on the church floor.
“Ms. Scott? Are you still there?”
I don’t answer her. I’m still just holding the phone when Clarence says my name.