Chapter 4
“Boyd. Really. Boyd? Really? Boyd! Really!” I tried to control myself, since not only were Willow and I in a bar among strangers, but Everett was also standing just behind me.
There actually weren’t very many strangers here, since this place seemed to be about as popular as Jannie’s.
Its emptiness also could have been due to the terrible weather and road conditions—what we’d just faced getting here, in order to find out that my sister had been with Boyd.
Really? Boyd?
“Can you stop saying those two words?” she spat at me.
She was trying to zip her coat, yanking hard enough that she was going to pull the plastic tab right off.
“Really, I was out with Boyd, and really, it was great.” She gave up on the zipper and crossed her arms over her chest instead.
“I’ve been waiting here forever. Let’s go! ”
She went past me to head to the parking lot, but I checked with the bartender before I followed to make sure that she wasn’t running out on a tab.
Then I shook my head and looked despairingly at Everett, because I was pretty sure that my sister had just blown any chance she might have had with him.
He wasn’t going to be interested in a woman whose affections were split between him and someone else, not since he was just coming out of the situation with his wife. Ex-wife, soon-to-be, or whatever.
“Where’s your car?” my sister asked when I joined her, but I grabbed her arm and wove it through mine before I walked her straight over to Everett’s truck.
When she made a move to get into the front, I directed her straight into the back seat, too.
I had to help a lot to get her up there, pretty much lifting her, and it reminded me of why I really, really should have been going to the gym at the college to work out.
Maybe I could have met someone, too. But that, as well as the idea that I’d have extra time for exercise, seemed as likely as me flying home tonight.
Home, as in the motel where we currently lived.
I turned to find Everett behind me. “Can I help you?” he asked. He must have noticed that, despite the temperature and the snow falling on our heads to cool us further, I was panting and flushed.
“She’s fine!” Willow yelled from inside the truck. She didn’t like that he’d just witnessed her struggle. “Can we go? Please?”
He and I silently returned to our seats in the front, and we started another long, slow ride. “Willow, what happened tonight?” I asked her. I looked in the back to meet her eyes, which she rolled.
“Boyd and I have been talking a little. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d react like this. ‘Boyd? Really? Boyd! Really!’” she imitated me, lowering her voice and growling the words.
I ignored the fact that she thought I sounded like an angry gorilla. “What do you two have to talk about? Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”
“Not anymore,” she informed me. “They broke up. He broke up with her because…”
I glanced back again and saw that now, she was smiling. “Oh, geez. What? He realized that he was still in love with you?”
“Yes, actually! Why would that make you mad?”
She knew exactly why, and currently, I was too mad to answer her.
The three of us rode in total silence besides the sound of the wipers whooshing away the heavy snow, and when I looked back for a third time, I saw that my sister was asleep.
She hadn’t brought any of her mobility aids with her and I wondered how much she’d been walking today, and if Boyd would have helped her at all.
Probably not, the idiot! Maybe his former girlfriend wasn’t, but he truly was.
“Idiot,” I muttered.
“Your sister?” Everett asked quietly.
“Willow is great,” I said automatically. “I’m sorry that she didn’t thank you for the ride, though. Or say hello.”
“So who’s the idiot?”
Me, probably. I was the one who had thought that he and my sister might get together, when she’d been in love with the other idiot this whole time.
“Boyd is,” I said, gorilla angry, but then I realized that I had to whisper if I wanted Willow to get some rest. “Her former boyfriend, Boyd. They broke up five years ago, and she’s still pining after him. As you just heard.”
“You were so happy that she went out tonight.”
“But not with him!” Too loud again. I checked on Willow, who seemed to be deeply asleep.
It was very soothing in this car, with the total darkness outside, the smooth ride on the new tires, and the steady hum of the engine.
I might have gone to sleep myself except that I was now so angry.
“They were dating in high school, seriously dating. She was completely in love with him but he broke up with her and broke her heart. I’ll hate him forever. ”
“I, too, was an asshole to girls in high school. Would you have hated me forever?”
It would have been hard to hate someone who drove me around like this, but if he had acted the same way that Boyd had with my sister?
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, if you had treated her as badly as he did. You know she has trouble walking.” Now I looked at him, and I saw him nod.
“She had an accident and he was awful. Terrible. He reacted like she had leprosy.”
“That disease where people had to live on islands?”
“Exactly, and that was so cruel. Did you know that they had to leave their families?”
“Your sister didn’t have leprosy, though,” he said.
“No, but all her old friends dropped her just like Boyd did. That was why I was glad when I heard that she’d gone out tonight, but not with him. He’ll only mistreat her again.”
“I grew up a lot,” Everett said. “I’m not the same person that I was in high school, which my grandma was probably very glad about. I really was an asshole.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“To girls?” He thought. “I didn’t text when I was supposed to, I didn’t pay enough attention, I didn’t give good compliments, I didn’t stick with one person when they wanted me to be exclusive.
I did other crap, too, just general assholery.
” He told me about stealing a cart at a golf course, except in his story, he and his friends were only “borrowing” it.
They played pranks on each other, they played pranks on teachers.
He had never paid attention in class, he had mouthed off to everyone.
He had been the passenger in a car when another friend had driven it onto someone’s roof.
“How?” I wondered, and he explained that they had built a ramp.
“It took a while. We spent so long doing it and got into so much shit over it. I would definitely say that it wasn’t worth the effort.”
I tried to imagine acting that way myself, or what I would have done in response to those jokes.
He and his friends had organized everyone into letting loose a collective scream in the middle of class, which would have scared me out of my mind.
They had also convinced the other students to sit in total silence, and then he and one other buddy had been the only people to speak and they had been awfully rude when they did.
What if I had been his teacher, or his neighbor with the accessible roof?
It wasn’t really a concern, since I didn’t have my own classroom or my own house, either, but still…
“I don’t think that stuff is very funny,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant. People can grow up.”
Had he really done that? He was the same person who’d gotten married to a woman after not dating her for very long. He was also the person trying to get custody of a kid he hardly knew, and now that I thought about it…
It was strange. Very.
“So you matured,” I said conversationally. He nodded and leaned toward the wheel, watching the road ahead of us. “That’s good. And you’re ready to be a father.”
“What?” Everett jolted upright, like he’d been poked by something very sharp. “Are you saying that you’re pregnant?” he asked loudly.
“What?” I burst out at an equal volume. “Me? No! And if I was, you wouldn’t be involved because we’ve never…”
“That’s right,” he said, relaxing.
“What’s going on?” Willow asked sleepily, and I told her it was fine, nothing.
I waited until I thought that she had conked out again before I continued the conversation in the front seat.
“I meant that you’re going to be a father because you want your stepson to live with you,” I explained in a whisper.
“You must believe that you’ve really grown and improved, since you’re ready to take on parenthood. ”
“Parenthood? No, I’m not sure that I’m ready for that, not at all.”
“Then…is there something really weird going on here? Like you’re trying to get this child for some criminal thing?”
“Like what?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I dream up a lot of stuff, but none of it’s about breaking laws. Except I do think about ways to hurt Boyd. Just severely maiming him so that he’s miserable and in pain, but I don’t want to kill him.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone either, and I’m not a criminal! No matter what kind of an asshole I used to be, I wouldn’t drag a little kid into it. Damn. Jesus.”
“Can you tell me why you want him to live with you, then?”
“I don’t want Eris to have him,” he told me.
Oh. It was just what his ex and her lawyer had claimed: Everett was fighting over her child to try to maintain a hold over her.
He didn’t really care about the poor kid and in my opinion, that was as bad as trying to get custody for the purposes of crime.
And I had thought of one of those: maybe bank robbers could use a child as a distraction by having him cry and scream as the criminals snuck into the vault.
“She’s a really bad parent,” he told me, “and I’m not just saying that because she cheated on me and sent me pictures of herself having sex with someone else.”
“Naked?”