Luna and the Lie

by Zapata, Mariana

  “Look, I want you to know that I have people I’m related to that might be at the funeral and… things are complicated with them… and I asked you to come with me because you’re the biggest person I know, and I don’t think anybody would willingly mess with you, and I don’t think you’d let anyone mess with me too much if you were around, even if… you know… you didn’t think you owed me one…,” I rambled, trying to think of my words and not sure what the hell else to say that wouldn’t be me admitting just how much my family sucked.

  I squeezed my fingers again. “My plan is to mind my own business, go to the funeral, and head back home. I just want you to know why we’re sitting by ourselves. I don’t want to talk to any of them if they are there,” I told him, leaving out the part that warned him that half the people in the room might end up looking at us like they wanted to kill me.

  There. He couldn’t say I hadn’t warned him. That’s what I was going to tell myself at least.

  The last thing I expected was the smirk-like quirking way the corner of his mouth went to the side.

  Then I waited until he let out a sigh that wasn’t unhappy exactly because… because he was still doing that smirk thing.

  “What?” I asked him slowly.

  He was still making that facial expression when he said, “I didn’t think you invited me to go somewhere because you didn’t want to go alone.”

  I pressed my lips together before grumbling in an almost-whisper, “But you thought I wanted you to pretend to be my boyfriend.”

  That had that smirk of his going away real quick, and I definitely didn’t imagine the harshness in his voice when he replied, “No, I didn’t.”

  I burst out freaking laughing, remembering, remembering him asking if we were going to pretend we were getting married.

  Married. Me and Rip. Pssh.

  Rip, on the other hand, decided to ignore me there in the seat beside him cracking up as he went back to the original topic. But nothing could hide the color on his cheeks or the way his spine went straighter after I’d started laughing. “I figured there was something else you wanted, all right? If it was something important, I figured you would’ve said something.”

  And that had me shutting my mouth. Then it had me biting my cheek.

  The sigh out of his mouth went straight to my heart. “I didn’t, and I don’t give a fuck what you want, Luna. If I could do it, I would.”

  Because of the favor.

  “I’m sorry—” I started, feeling guilty all over again, because no matter how much he might deny it, I could still sense he was put off about something with this entire situation. He was here because of his pride and that white elephant wasn’t going to let him admit anything.

  “Don’t,” he cut me off. “It’s not a big fucking deal. It ain’t even a little fucking deal.”

  Somehow I managed to hold back a sigh. I hoped he still thought that when we were heading back to Houston. I hoped he thought that when we were sitting in the funeral home to begin with.

  “Okay.” I still felt bad regardless of what he said.

  Maybe to him, this wasn’t a big deal, but to me, it was, and regardless of why he was here, I really was grateful this was the case.

  In no time at all, Rip was pulling his truck into a funeral home that looked faintly familiar. From what I could remember, my grandmother hadn’t lived too far from this side of town. Twice, I had ridden my bike—something I had bought by slowly stealing small bills from my dad’s wallet over the course of six months when he’d pass out around the house—to her house when I couldn’t stay at my house a minute longer. While she hadn’t lived on a nice side of town, it had still been way better than where we had lived.

  Then again, at a lot of moments, Hell would have been a better place than where I had lived.

  I swallowed down that memory and did the sign of the cross inside of myself. The lot was only about halfway filled, mostly with late-model cars. I didn’t see the beat-up Voyager my nightmares had memorized, but then again, I wasn’t expecting to.

  Rip pulled the truck into a spot and parked it, his body shifting toward mine, all broad shoulders and huge chest contained within that beautiful dress shirt, before he asked the same question as before. “You good?”

  No. “Yeah,” I lied, hearing it sound weak and full of shit even to me, but you had to fake it till you made it, or something like that.

  He blinked, and at that point, he definitely knew I was full of it. But he watched me with those eyes for a moment longer before he turned off the ignition. “Ready then?” he asked, calling my bluff.

  Now or never, Luna.

  “Ready,” I agreed, giving him a cheerful smile that inside felt way more like a grimace.

  I opened the door a second before he opened his and we both slammed them shut at about the same time.

  I was fine. I was loved. I had everything and more than I had ever wanted. I was choosing to be happy for the rest of my life.

  None of this was going home with me. I wouldn’t let it.

  I swallowed as I made my feet take me one step closer and then another step closer toward the brick building.

  My heart pounded in my chest, and honestly, part of me felt like if I would have really wanted to, I could have passed out. Passing out would have been a perfectly acceptable excuse for not going into the building.

  But that wasn’t going to happen.

  When Rip’s tall, beefy body caught up to walk beside me, closer and closer to the building, I forced myself to let out a deep breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

  I could do this. There was nothing to be scared of. I had survived living in a house with these people for seventeen years.

  Nothing was going to happen.

  I didn’t have a single word to share with Rip as we approached the doors. He opened one and motioned me forward, his face grave but focused on mine when we made eye contact. I managed to give him a tight smile as I stepped inside.

  The foyer was cool and open, and immediately I found a huge photo of my grandmother in a gaudy gold frame with her name on a plaque along with the years she had lived on it. I had seen the blown-up picture before. She’d gone to one of those Glamour Shots what had to have been twenty years ago at least, I guessed… She looked the way I remembered her the best: with her blonde-brown hair that I shared with her styled into short waves, her face full and highlighted by the brightest pink lipstick I’d ever seen. I had gotten my love of lipstick from her. She had never been afraid of some crazy fun color, and she never left home without it.

  The thing that struck me the most though was that she wasn’t smiling. She had never been one to smile, but her lips were pressed together into something resembling one. She looked proud and even a little snobby. It was weird to think that this successful hair salon owner, a single mom who had raised two children on her own, would also be related to two sons who would grow up to be mean, violent men. I had overheard her once say she was ashamed of them. I had been too.

  How could I have gone the last six years without seeing her?

  She had been the only one to show me kindness, even if it hadn’t been warmth and comforting love, but it had been something.

  If it hadn’t been for her offering to take them when I’d finally gotten so desperate to leave, I might have ended up staying for longer in a place that was pretty close to Hell. And who knows what would have happened to my sisters if they had been stuck in that house for longer.

  My grandmother had put the seed to leave in my head one day when we had gone over to her house to shower because our water had gotten turned off and told me Go, Luna. I’ll take care of the kids. But you need to go.

  I had gone when I couldn’t stay longer… after doing the one and only thing that would ensure Lily and Thea and Kyra wouldn’t be stuck in that house any longer.

  I wasn’t sure what would have happened if she wouldn’t have called me when she found out my dad was getting out of jail so that I would go get my sist
ers.

  I had sent her a birthday and Christmas card every year since, but she had never sent me anything back or called when I had left her my phone number in one of the cards. It didn’t change anything though.

  Grandma Gen, I’m sorry. I did love you, and I’m always going to be grateful for you helping me get out of here and taking care of the girls as long as you could.

  Rip brushed against my arm as he stopped beside me. He was looking around the building, and if I wasn’t imagining it, he was back to being tense again. I could see him lingering on the portrait of my grandmother.

  EUGENIA MILLER

  1945 – 2018

  Seeing her last name was… weird. It hit me stronger than when I saw it on the end of my siblings’ names. I hadn’t seen it on my own since I had decided I didn’t want a reminder of it.

  A few people seemed to be hanging around a doorway to the left of the portrait, and I watched them. They didn’t look familiar though.

  Now or never, right?

  I could do this. I was going to. Then when this was done, I was going back to my house to see my sister, and then I’d have a job to go to the following day.

  Breathing in through my nose, I told Rip, “We can go sit.”

  He glanced down at me, at six four compared to my five seven, and nodded. We walked forward, him beside me the entire time, as we headed toward the opened doorway. The man and the woman standing there both gave us a serious nod as we went by them. The room was filled with row after row of pews with a raised dais-like area at the front, where a casket lay. Opened. Like I had expected from the parking lot, only the first three rows of pews were filled, and I couldn’t help but glance from the back of one head to another.

  I stopped. With the back of my hand, I touched Ripley’s loosely hanging fingers and whispered, “I want to go say bye. If you just want to wait back here, I won’t be long.”

  His whispered response wasn’t hesitant at all. “I’ll go.”

  I raised my hand and rubbed at my brow bone with it, not because he wanted to go with me—that wasn’t it at all—but just because… that casket and the backs of those heads made me feel hesitant and bad at the same time.

  I still nodded at Rip, not able to even muster up any kind of facial expression that told him I was okay. Because I wasn’t really feeling that okay. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t okay.

  Ripley tipped his chin down at me, and it was that, that made me keep moving. We headed down the center aisle, where Rip walked to the side as I took a step up onto the raised area.

  It was surreal, looking inside it, and it was more surreal—and honestly sad—to take it all in.

  Thankfully, it was easy enough to ignore the gazes on the back of my head. Maybe I was imagining it, but I doubted it, and even then, I just couldn’t find it in me to care as I looked at a face that looked familiar but didn’t at the same time. It had been a long time.

  A dozen thoughts went through my head, and I told my grandmother a few different things.

  Thank you.

  I hope you were okay.

  Things worked out for me.

  The girls are all doing great.

  Lily is graduating at the top of her class.

  They’re all going to be in college.

  Leaving was the best thing I could have done.

  I’m sorry I didn’t reach out to you more.

  It was only the sound of the doors being closed behind me that made me realize how long I had stood there gazing down at the woman with her eyes closed. The familiar but not familiar face. The first person who had taught me that doing the right thing wasn’t easy and would more than likely never be.

  It was only then that I took a step back and gave my grandmother’s face a bittersweet smile before I eventually turned around and immediately spotted Ripley maybe four feet away, standing with his back to the wall…

  With his gaze on the pews.

  I knew what I was doing as I glanced in the direction of what he was focused on. Some part of me knew that chances were I might not like what I saw. But I did it anyway.

  It was my luck that the first face I landed on was the last face I would have ever wanted to see sitting there. Staring straight ahead. Face blank. Pretending like I wasn’t even there.

  My dad looked twenty years older than he had the last time I had seen him. Like my grandmother, he looked familiar but didn’t. He looked like hell.

  A lot could happen in a decade, I guessed.

  The main one being that I didn’t feel any kind of terror going through me as I took in his face. My knees didn’t shake. Bile didn’t rise up in my throat.

  If anything, this coolness flooded over my skin and through my veins as I took him in.

  When my eyes flicked to the woman sitting beside him, I wasn’t sure what to think when I barely recognized her too. Her face was blank and dotted with sores. She was thinner than she had been before. A lot thinner. But if he looked twenty years older, she looked thirty years older. The years hadn’t been kind to her. Not that they ever had.

  On the other side of her was a man I had grown up with but barely knew.

  My cousin.

  Of course they were here. All of them—minus my older brother and my uncle, who was still in jail—but that wasn’t shocking at all. These were the people who were at the top of my list for those human beings I didn’t want to have anything to do with.

  I didn’t let myself think as I pivoted where I was standing and went to Rip just as a man in a suit walked down the center aisle. I was looking at Rip as his attention went from the people in the pews that I didn’t want to look at for another second to me, then back to them. They finally went back to me just as I stopped a foot away, his jaw doing that tensing thing again.

  Okay.

  I nodded, and he blinked slowly enough to agree with me. We moved together down the aisle along the wall. My heart beat, beat, beat just faster than normal as we passed one aisle after another until I stopped at one only a couple of rows before the exit. Sliding all the way in, I took a seat as the man in the suit stopped behind a pulpit set up just to the right of my grandmother’s casket. Ripley took a seat directly beside me, the material of the jacket he’d put on as we walked toward the building brushing against my bare elbow. I had rolled up the sleeves of the black button-down shirt I had tucked into my skirt.

  The body contact did nothing for me.

  I could see the backs of their heads in the second row, but I made myself focus on the man who started talking about my grandmother in vague, vague words that I wouldn’t remember and that I had a feeling he had to have used generically for others all the time. My face went warm and stayed warm as I sat there, listening but only barely. This hum started buzzing around in my ears, but I did my best to ignore it and the way my heart seemed like it wanted to beat its way out of my chest.

  Rip’s arm moved, brushing against my elbow even more.

  But I kept my gaze straight forward.

  In less time than I ever would have expected, the man stopped talking and explained the instructions for the motorcade that would head to the cemetery where Grandmother Genie would be buried.

  And still, my ears buzzed.

  I didn’t mean to get up so fast, but I did, and luckily so did Rip. We were the first people out and the first ones walking toward the lot. The tension in Rip’s body was something I could have easily tasted. I felt it everywhere, even if I didn’t understand it and wasn’t in the mindset to as we walked out.

  I knew something was wrong the second we got into his truck and he slammed the door shut, my name slithering out of his mouth, ending on a hard vowel. “Luna?”

  I was looking out the window at the side mirror. My cousin was out of the door, his head swinging around the parking lot. Probably looking for me. “Yes?”

  His breathing had gotten loud, but it was steady; I had no problem hearing it. “Is your last name really Allen?”

  Shit.

  This throbbing sensation i
nstantly pierced right through my right eye socket and had me rubbing my lips together. My fingertips even went numb before I winced—on the inside and the outside.

  That was just about the last thing I would have ever, ever, expected him to ask.

  Somehow, somehow, I managed to get the truth out, because there was no way I could lie. This wasn’t the kind of thing I could try and hide when there were a handful of people who knew the truth. “Legally, yes.” The pain from my head got stronger before I admitted slowly, “But it hasn’t always been.”

  Had he recognized my grandmother’s last name? The one I’d had for the first eighteen years of my life?

  This was exactly why I had changed it. This was what I’d been trying to avoid. Only a handful of people—including Mr. Cooper—knew that I hadn’t always been an Allen. No one else at the shop, not even the other guys who had worked there nearly as long as I had, knew about it. They had no reason to know that my siblings had a different one. I was the only one so far who hated it enough to not want to keep it. Lily had mentioned before that she wanted to change it too, but she was still too young.

  Rip had closed his eyes at some point. His forehead became lined as he frowned. I could see that great, big chest inhale and exhale, and his voice was incredibly calm as he breathed out. “Okay.”

  Okay?

  Did he… know?

  Had he read the paper and recognized the name and seen what my family looked like and pieced it all together?

  It hadn’t been a huge bust. Dad had only gone to jail for three years. His brother was a different story. But while I’d been growing up, everyone knew the Miller last name hadn’t been the greatest. Maybe they hadn’t known specifically about the meth, but they had known there was something, and no one ever did anything.

  Until I did.

  I couldn’t even find it in me to be ashamed if Rip knew that part of the truth I had tried so hard to get away from.

  “It used to be Miller.” I tried to keep from making it seem like it was something I had tried to hide. Even though I had. “According to my birth certificate, my mom’s last name had been Ramirez, but when I changed my name, I didn’t want to choose anything that any of them might think of. You know Mr. Cooper’s first name is Allen, and I thought Luna Allen sounded like a nice name.”