Sweet

by Tammara Webber

  “Shut the fuck up, Thompson,” I said, looking into Pearl’s dark eyes, which were almost obscured by glasses so large they hijacked her face. Her hair was wild—free of the braids or hair ties she’d always worn. “Stay,” I told her. “It’s okay.”

  She nodded and sat. Every day for two school years, she sat at the end of our table, shoulders hunched, hair partially obscuring her face, silently eating her lunch and reading a novel or doing homework. No one bothered her unless they wanted to pass through me. I didn’t get in many fights in middle school. Brent had made me swear to stay out of trouble when he went to boot camp, and my dread of Dad getting called to the school went deep. But I was bigger than Rick’s big brother, Randy, who was old enough to drive, so most kids just weren’t that interested in pissing me off.

  Pearl

  “Evan arrived last night with his mannequin-to-be in tow.”

  I was almost reacquainted with the way Melody launched into impassioned conversations the second she slipped into my car, before she’d even fastened the seat belt or asked where we were going.

  She yanked the door shut on my GTI, and I flinched at the force of the door slamming into the frame. “She’s a Barb Dover replicant! All Yes, honey and Whatever makes you happy, Evan, like she has no damned opinions of her own and no intention of forming any.”

  Now probably wasn’t the time to point out the hypocrisy in her judgment of her future sister-in-law.

  “But hey—my parents are thrilled shitless. They’ll finally have the daughter they always wanted. Evan even proposed with Grandma Bea’s three-carat emerald.”

  I gasped. “What? But she bequeathed that ring to you in her will!” Melody’s outspoken force-of-nature grandmother was the only member of her family who’d ever encouraged Mel to stand up for herself. She’d also suffered no qualms encouraging her favorite grandchild to rebel more often, claiming that her parents deserved it.

  “Right. And what am I supposed to do? Sue my parents, my brother, and his Mom-clone to get it?” She choked up, and I didn’t know what to say.

  Mama and Barbara Dover had been in the same social circle since Mama married Thomas. Mama took pains not to gossip, but sometimes she’d come home from lunch or a Junior League meeting muttering in Spanish, and even if she spoke too quickly and softly for me to translate, I’d caught the word Barb on a few occasions.

  “They know I can’t do anything about it. This is how they punish me for breaking up with Matt instead of extracting a marriage proposal out of him.” Her mother actually expected Mel to be engaged by twenty-two. Who did that?

  “I thought Matt broke up with you?” After your mother gave you a bridal magazine subscription for Christmas, I didn’t say.

  She huffed a sigh. “No. He just didn’t want to get married in the near future, or maybe ever, so I broke up with him. Mama had convinced me that if I did it right, he’d propose. But instead I spent two weeks with Ben & Jerry and Jose Cuervo, and nothing to show for it but an extra inch on my ass.”

  “So he didn’t want to break up—he just didn’t want to get married? Oh, Mel.”

  “Yeah, can we not discuss what a moron I am? I had a good relationship with a decent guy and I blew it. Again.”

  When we were in high school, Melody—and half the town along with her—caught her boyfriend cheating on her. Clark Richards and three of his varsity baseball bros had a visiting-college-girls orgy in a beach rental his father owned. One of the guys took video clips, which made the rounds of the student body like a lit fuse. It wasn’t the first time Clark had cheated on her, but it was the only one caught on film, witnessed by just about everyone. I was never more proud of her than when she broke up with him.

  She started going out with Boyce’s best friend, Landon Maxfield, which I warned her against doing because I was afraid she was just going for a bad boy and she might get hurt again. But then she told me about their conversations. How he wanted to know her opinions and cared about her feelings. How he made her laugh. How his kisses did things to her that Clark’s had never done.

  Clark found out immediately, of course. No matter how sizable the population of this island becomes during tourist season, it remains a small town to those of us who live here, and nobody keeps anything private for long. He had batches of roses delivered to her house. He gave her a diamond-studded charm bracelet in a pink satin box, begging her to take him back and swearing to never screw around on her again. Her parents approved of him; his daddy was a big developer, even richer than they were. He was a year older, popular, and hot in a conventional, old money sort of way.

  He was also a rat bastard cheater, but I couldn’t convince her that even if once a liar, always a liar might not be a surefire judgment, it was a damned good presumption.

  She didn’t even tell Landon herself. In the west hallway the following day, her boyfriend informed him he’d been a rebound and nothing more. I didn’t know Landon well then, but I knew he didn’t deserve my best friend staring at the floor while her boyfriend told him he was trash.

  Then Clark graduated and dumped Melody like their two-year relationship and all his promises meant nothing. I hadn’t wanted to be right. I hadn’t wanted proof that what goes around comes around.

  “So, about you,” she said as I pulled away from the curb. “You said you notified your mama that med school was a no-go, and you’re still alive. So how’d that conversation go?”

  “She’s in full-blown denial. I’m pretty sure she’s setting her sights on one of the waitlisted programs coming through. Like getting into Harvard or Michigan would make any kind of difference to me when I was sitting right there telling her what I want to be and what I don’t.”

  She grunted a soft laugh and mimed blinders on either side of her face. “Mothers are good at ignoring what they don’t wanna hear.”

  There was no reason to point out that blinders block peripheral vision, not the ability to hear. It came to the same conclusion either way. I’d described my vision of the life I wanted to live and who I wanted to be, and Mama wasn’t having it.

  I’d always thought my mother was superior to all other mothers because she’d sacrificed everything for me—the love of her life, her family and friends, the place she was born and raised. I assumed she’d forfeited these pieces of herself because she believed in me, because she meant to provide me with every chance to dream and reach and become. I assumed that what I dreamed and reached for and became would be my choice.

  Until today, I hadn’t understood that I was the one wearing blinders, and she was the one who’d put them there.

  Boyce: Meet up tonight?

  Me: Good timing. Dropping Melody off in a few minutes.

  Boyce: I’m all about timing, baby.

  Me: *insert eyeroll*

  Boyce: ;)

  chapter

  Six

  Boyce

  Brent died when he drew enemy sniper fire. On purpose, according to the final report we got. To divert attention from half a dozen fellow Marines bent on storming a building where intelligence had pinpointed a nest of insurgents. A year later, he was posthumously awarded the Silver Star Medal for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity.” The day he died, though, we knew nothing more than the fact he’d been killed.

  It was June. Without a word, I walked past my father in his mute shock, through the open doorway. I got on my bike and pedaled to the Merry Mermaid, the tattoo parlor where Brent’s girlfriend worked. Flying down the side of the road—past colorful stores and restaurants, imported palm trees, and out-of-towners laughing in rented golf carts that were street-legal in town—I was numb. The sky was cloudless, the sun straight overhead. The shadow my body cast was a shapeless, fluid blob, caught beneath the fat tires block after block. Without Brent, I was a formless, unconnected outline.

  “I need to see Arianna,” I said to Buddy, the guy who ran the place. My voice cracked on her name, like I was a squeaky preteen with a crush instead of a stand-in for the angel of death.


  Buddy, silver-haired but lean and muscled, was the color of wet sand wherever he wasn’t covered in ink. He pulled a pocket watch from the front pocket of his black Dickies, flicked it open and glanced at its face. “She’s finishing up with a client—be done in five or ten.” He squinted at me then, his forehead a canvas of baked-in creases. “You Brent’s little brother?”

  I nodded and tried to swallow, nearly choking on my own spit. I’d been to the shop a few times with Brent. Brent, who was dead. His last breath exhaled in a foreign country. His blood spilling out there. His heart stopping there. His eyes closing there for the last time. My fingertips went so cold I couldn’t feel them. I could barely breathe. My eyes burned. I was like water trying to choose a suitable form—ice or vapor.

  “You okay, son?” Buddy asked.

  I shook my head, or thought I did. I wasn’t sure. Maybe I didn’t move at all.

  Buddy’s expression altered then, his pale eyes wide and piercing from the other side of the counter. He wasn’t often startled, and his face wasn’t familiar with the shape it took. “Brent okay?” he whispered, two words barely audible over the classic rock blaring from speakers set into the back corners near the ceiling. The vocals repeated the same line, louder and louder—Do you wanna die? Do you wanna die?—while the bass thrummed, keeping pace with the pulse in my ears.

  Buddy turned as Arianna parted the threaded seashells strung on lines from the lowered ceiling, separating the front room from the corridor where the tattooists did their work. Unlike Buddy, her visible tattoos were confined to one arm, which looked like an incomplete puzzle. A blue-haired mermaid was pinned to the curve of her shoulder, sitting on top of an albatross I’d once made the mistake of calling a pelican. Brent had laughed until tears filled his eyes. A hodgepodge of patterns were scattered from her elbow to her wrist—outlines, empty of color. Unfinished.

  Her tank and jeans concealed the tats on her abdomen, lower back, calf and hip—I only knew about that last one because Brent had slipped and told me and then made me swear never to say a word to her or anyone.

  “She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever known,” he’d said then, a sort of awe to his voice. Staring up at our ceiling, he lay on his bed with an arm behind his head, across the thin stretch of dingy carpet from my bed.

  “So you don’t want her to get mad?” I’d asked, turning to watch him. It was the summer I turned eleven. The last summer we’d shared the cramped bedroom on the side of the trailer that leaned into the brick exterior of the garage—a setup that completely blocked two of the three windows. The lone working window was shoved all the way up, and a fan swung back and forth from a short dresser under it, pulling damp air from outside and blowing it around in a useless attempt to cool the room. We both stripped to our underwear and slept on top of our sheets every night. None of these efforts made much of an impact.

  “No. Because I don’t want to hurt her,” he’d answered, and I wondered aloud why he would worry that someone he thought was strong could be hurt so easily. “She trusts me now. I swore I’d never hurt her, and I mean to keep that promise.”

  Four years later, he was dead, and I was the one who’d come to hurt her.

  Whatever Buddy had seen in my face, Arianna saw it too. “No,” she said. Her hands fisted at her sides like she could hold herself away from what I’d come to tell her.

  Her client was some lady I didn’t recognize—a tourist maybe, or someone from a nearby town who’d heard about her artistic skill. The smile slid from her mouth as she looked back and forth between Arianna and me.

  “No,” Arianna said again, a sob emerging with the word, sneaking out and grabbing at the thread uniting us—love for my brother—and jerking me awake when I wanted to be unconscious. The pain I hadn’t really felt, blunted by shock until that moment, drilled through me like a lightning strike, fixing me to the ground before dividing me into a million scorched fragments. The tears didn’t rise up. They gushed. My body didn’t care if I was trying to be a man, trying to be tough and strong for my brother, for the girl he’d worshipped. A wail forced its way from my core and emerged, raw and ugly, from my throat. I went to my knees as Arianna rushed forward and sank to the floor with me.

  “Are you sure? Are they sure? There’s no hope? There’s no—”

  I shook my head, silencing her attempt to wake from this nightmare and make it untrue. “He’s gone. He’s gone.”

  Her slim arms surrounded me and her tears joined mine.

  The day he turned eighteen, Brent had gone to the Merry Mermaid and requested the words Semper Fi be inked on his left delt, signaling his intention to join up as soon as he graduated high school. Arianna had done the tattoo, but it’d been far from love at first sight for them. Twenty-one and full of fire, she’d decided my brother was an idealistic goody-goody who was all talk and no action. “You’ll probably just say fuck it by the time summer comes around, Boy Scout. You’ll tell yourself there’s no reason to go get yourself shot at. You’ll head off to college next fall with all the other armchair crusaders.”

  He’d been goaded into angry silence at her presumptions, but that only lasted until he got home, at which point he was just plain angry and none too silent.

  “Who does she think she is?” He tore his T-shirt over his head and tossed it on the floor, pacing. “Just ’cause she’s all tatted and pierced and hot, she thinks she’s so cool? Just ’cause she’s older than me, she thinks she knows everything? She assumes she can size me up with one look? Judgmental bitch.”

  Brent rarely cursed, and I’d never seen him lose his temper over a girl. Which was why I was surprised when he went back a week later for another tattoo—and requested her.

  When he got home that time, he was quiet. The bandage wrapped around his bicep, just under the scripted Marine Corps motto she’d put on his shoulder the previous week. When he unwrapped it an hour later, I saw that she’d added the Marine emblem—a hostile-looking eagle sitting on a globe with an anchor through it.

  “Thought you said she was a bitch?” The tattoo looked pretty cool, but still. I wouldn’t let some obnoxious girl stick a needle in my arm. Not like I’d want a nice girl sticking a needle in my arm either. I shuddered just thinking about it.

  “I was wrong,” he said, examining her work in the bathroom mirror. “Be hesitant to judge people too fast, little brother. I know I’ve told you to trust your gut…” He caught my eyes in the mirror. “But sometimes what seems like a gut feeling is just pride pretending to be instinct.”

  • • • • • • • • • •

  I was about to head out the door when I got another text from Pearl, asking if she should just come to the trailer. I stopped, glanced around. She hadn’t come here while my father was alive. Not once in the fifteen years I’d known her. I wouldn’t have let her if she’d wanted to—but she wasn’t a stupid girl, and she’d never asked before.

  The trailer was mine now, piece of shit that it was. I texted back: Sure, come on over. And then I tore around like a jackass, picking up trash and dishes and clothing and embarrassing junk mail I’d never given a first thought to, let alone a second. Minutes later, the front door rattled from her knock, and I was standing in the kitchen holding the cardboard box I’d just gotten from the crematory. Inside the box was a clear plastic bag holding Dad’s remains, which looked like the gray stuff inside a vacuum cleaner. My father, reduced to a bag of dust. When I’d signed the paperwork, the crematory guy had figured out pretty quick that I wasn’t interested in paying for some fancy decorative urn to house Dad’s ashes. But what the hell was I supposed to do with this shit?

  Pearl knocked again and I dropped the box on the table (hello—dead guy on the kitchen table), then picked it up and moved it to a chair. Maybe later I’d clear a space for it under the sink, next to the bug poison.

  “Dumbass,” I mumbled at myself. Dammit. That asshole was dead, and here I was still using his preferred nickname for me. Some parts of my life, I hadn’t been
sure he even knew my given name anymore.

  “Boyce.” Pearl smiled up at me when I opened the door. “It’s a good thing your house is next to the garage, because it’s too dark to read the house numbers, and they all sort of look the same.”

  I smirked. “C’mon now—the trailers in my neck of the woods may look the same, but they can be told apart by their distinctive landscaping designs. The Echols’ place has that big cactus out front. The Olneys have that dead tree with a couple dozen birdhouses hanging from the branches. And of course, the Thompson house has that pool and snack bar.”

  Stopping in the doorway, she glanced at my darkened neighborhood and then turned back, head angled and giving me a narrow-eyed look like I was pulling her leg and she knew it.

  I took her arm and turned her, pointing. “See that discarded bathtub and commode next to their driveway? When we were kids, Mrs. Thompson filled the john with dirt and grew strawberries in it. Summers, we’d pull the garden hose over to that tub and fill it with water—it had a slow leak from a crack in the porcelain so we left the hose on a slow trickle—and we’d take turns swimmin’.”

  She laughed and so did I. A lot of my life had been crap. It would be easy to look back and only see the asstastic parts, but I couldn’t look at Pearl’s face or hear her husky little laugh and do that. I’d had a superhero for a brother. I’d had neighborhood friends, a beach in walking distance, a best friend I hadn’t deserved but got anyway, and memories of this girl that I’d take to my grave. I’d survived my dad, and whether he meant to or not, he’d taught me a skill and left me with the ability to make a living from it. All in all, I was a lucky son of a bitch.

  Pearl

  The thought of Boyce and Rick “swimming” in that discarded bathtub—and eating strawberries out of a toilet!—should have been the saddest thing I’d ever heard, but I couldn’t stop laughing and he didn’t seem to mind. Unlike just about everyone else in my circle of friends, Boyce Wynn had no qualms about being blatantly inappropriate and ridiculing himself for it.