by Raven Scott
Leaning on the doorway to the living room, I crossed my arms over my chest and was content to be forgotten for now.
“No, I’ll be here for 8 days, including today. Um…the reason I’m here no,w is because I was worried if we saw each other at the fair over the weekend. I don’t know if you still go, but...”
Despite Delilah’s previous words, her mother was quiet, simply staring at her daughter through wide eyes. Obviously, time had filled the poor woman with regret. It was written all over her face, the way she sat, how she picked at her soft, pale shirt. Taking a deep breath, she licked her lips heavily before gathering up the courage to open them. “I know I’ve been terrible to you, Delilah—about your future, and my expectations of you. I thought they were good ideas at the time, but I know that there’s no real excuse, and you shouldn’t accept them anyway. I shouldn’t have pushed you to be a teacher when I knew you wouldn’t really like it. I should’ve accepted that you wanted to defer a year and figure out for yourself what you wanted to do.” When Delilah went to speak up, her mother held up a hand.
Just then, I glanced behind me absently. Above my head, there was some stomping, some angry, risen voices.
“Just let me apologize, okay? I drove you away as much as you pushed back.”
“...Okay. I appreciate your apology, Mom. To be honest, I never actually became a model…I just couldn’t tell you what I was really up to because—I was afraid that—you know, I mean it’d be a bigger fight than we had.” Delilah straightened as interest picked up her mother’s face. “I’ve been a huge bum. I haven’t done anything these last five years. It wasn’t necessarily because of you, but I was just...I never found anything I wanted to do.”
“Oh, Delilah...at least you’re not a drug addict.” She looked really sad that her own daughter had to lie to her for the ‘lesser evil…as far as she knew, at least. Delilah’s mom’s green eyes flickered to me, and she blushed as embarrassment flashed in them. “I’m sorry….I never introduced myself. I’m Jamie.”
“Darren.”
Standing up, Jamie took my hand for a shake.
I covered her wrinkled palm gingerly. “You raised a wonderful girl.”
“Oh—well, thank you.” Taking her hand from mine, Jamie huffed a breath to stable herself.
I could see where Delilah got her hardheadedness and striking looks, and I smiled.
Jamie wandered to the stove. “You guys hungry? I was going to start dinner, but your brother showed up in hysterics about something.”
“I am, yeah. What were you making? What happened with Kyle?”
“I honestly didn’t catch it. Your father is upstairs talking to them right now. I was going to make a meatloaf, but now there’s not enough time. How about burgers?” Jamie cast Delilah a curious glance.
I couldn’t help but smile a little. This is going better than expected, which is nice.
15
Delilah
I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face if I tried and I pressed down my ground beef into a patty form with trembling hands. This was great! The world could be ending, but I’d made up with my mom. In this moment, everything was perfect. She liked Darren, and she’d apologized to me, and...
Sighing in pure bliss, I glanced over at my mom out of the corner of my eye. Her face glowed, a stark contract to the stressful lines that’d marred her mouth when she opened the door. She looked as happy as I felt, and my smile widened a little as we formed burgers side by side over the stove.
“Mom, I just want you to know that I may not have been able to come here by myself, but I never hated you or anything. I was a little bitter about the college thing, but I never hated you.” My voice didn’t waver.
My mom stopped manhandling her ground beef to grip the rail of the oven door tightly.
Blood drummed in my ears, but her sniffle cracked high above it like lightning. Clenching my jaw, I turned my gaze to my own patty and blinked back the sting against my eyelids.
“Well ” Sucking in a sharp breath through her teeth, my mom cleared her throat roughly and set her shoulders back with a jerk. “I’m not going to make the same mistake again. From now on...” My mom trailed off, casting me a cautious side-glance.
I bit my bottom lip hard against the fire climbing up my throat.
“If you want my advice, just ask...and if you don’t like it, I’ll try not to push it on you. I’ve wasted enough time, and you’re 27 years old, now, Delilah. You’re my age when I had your brother, you know.” She nudged me with her elbow.
a warm, fuzzy feeling enveloped my body then I sniffled with a sharp shake of my head.
My mom scrunched up her nose. “Sometimes, I wish it was him I pushed away. With all his troublemaking...I mean, I’m no saint, I know, but Kyle...Kyle is 31 and still working at the same Burger King for 13 years.”
“At least he’s got a job, right?” My question never got an answer as angry footsteps tromped down the stairs. Pursing my lips thinly, I slapped my patty on a cookie sheet before reaching to grab another chunk of ground beef.
“Mom, when’s din—” Kyle stopped short in the entryway, his brows disappearing above his shaggy hairline when I looked over. I could tell it took him a second to recognize me, but he looked exactly the same as he always had. He could never grow a beard but refused to shave clean, so his cheeks and jaw were brushed with awkwardly angled whiskers. His blue eyes flashed brightly with recognition, a frown twisting his face almost as fast. “What’re you doing here?”
“Nice to see you, too, Kyle.”
Kyle’s frown morphed in a scowl as he scanned me through narrowed eyes.
His Burger King uniform fit well, but his lack of any nametag meant he was still working the fryers.
“Still working the fries at Burger King?”
“Shut up…there’s no job not worth working. If people didn’t work there, you’d be out of luck.”
Is that really what he tells himself? I mean…Kyle had a point, but he was also wrong at the same time. Making a lifelong career of churning out fries and chicken nuggets wasn’t what someone should aspire to. Not that I’m one to talk. I haven’t done anything for years.
“Mom, when’s the meat loaf gonna be done? I got work in an hour.”
“I’m making burgers instead. Maybe, if you and your dad didn’t fight for two hours, I’d actually like cooking again. For that matter, if you said ‘thank you’, it’d probably taste better, too.” I could hear it in my mom’s tone that she’d had this conversation before. Shooting Kyle a pointed look, her profile became annoyed when he didn’t react. “Speaking of dinner…I’m not feeding your friends again. They don’t say ‘thank you’ either.”
“You’re making enough burgers to fool me…so you are.”
My jaw fell at Kyle’s snarky comment, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. All of those terrible memories from high school, being embarrassed to be Kyle’s sister ‒ being told all the time of all the crap he did and how my teachers were so glad I wasn’t like him ‒ came rushing back. One time, my math teacher explicitly told me he gave me extra points for not being like Kyle, which was as incredulous as it was kinda insulting.
“Well, I’m not,” my mom stated. “They can go to their own homes and eat their own food. Don’t do this right now. This is the first time in years that Delilah has been home, and I’m not going to let you ruin it, Kyle.” The snap reverberated around the kitchen, off the fridge and the tiles on the floor.
Kyle’s glaring at me intensified.
“What’s wrong with you today?” she asked him. “You’ve been in a horrible mood all afternoon.”
“Yeah, I guess I just had a gut feeling Miss Goody Two-Shoes would be back, and you’d fall over her like she’s the damned princess of the universe again. Like she didn’t ignore you for five years and go be a party slut with no care in the world.”
Gasping at the dig, I dropped my ball of burger meat as venom dribbled from Kyle’s tongue. Bitterness brightene
d his eyes when I whipped around as anger seared my veins.
He kept glaring at me. “Is that why you’re here? Did you find out your pregnant or something and want to dump it on Mom, so you can go back to L.A. and just keep doin’ what you’re doin’?”
“You wanna go there, Kyle? Because I’ll go there.”
His expression tightened noticeably at my threat even as I debated making it. I could feel my mom and Darren glancing between us, one cautiously curious, and the other curiously cautious. My mind whirred, weighing the pros and cons and talking my peace—especially considering what Kyle had just said. “You’re the one with that experience, aren’t you? You got an English teacher pregnant after you graduated high school and then you and your friends beat her up until she had a miscarriage. Then, you threatened to kill her if she blabbed, so she told police she got robbed.”
Kyle’s face reddened deeper and darker as I revealed his most horrible secret maybe. Who knows? The vein in his forehead bulged wildly when his trembling shifted his hair, and beads of sweat dribbled down the straining muscles in his neck.
My mom’s horrified, shuddering gasp rippled palpably through the air.
Pounding hard against my ribs, my heartbeat rang loudly in my ears as I glared back at Kyle. “Yeah. That’s what I thought. If you’re gonna attack someone, make sure they can’t do worse to you.” Smugness thickened my tone.
Kyle looked ready to blow a gasket.
I wasn’t at all threatened by him, even if Darren wasn’t sitting at the table. Any trouble he ever got in, Kyle always had his friends with him. He couldn’t do anything by himself. “Go slink off and somehow make that my fault because I’m better than you.”
That pushed Kyle over the edge, and goosebumps blanketed my chest and down my arms when he took a threatening step forward. Jutting out my chin, I held my breath. A pin could drop across the world, and we would hear it in the silence.
“...You did what...?” Everyone seemed to forget that my dad was home.
Kyle whirled around fast enough to get whiplash.
I couldn’t see my dad beyond Kyle’s body in the doorway, but I could feel the heat of his rage and disbelief.
Kyle had done a lot of less than stellar things in his life, but my dad usually gave him a lecture. Nothing more. But not this time. Honestly, I didn’t know how my parents never found out about what Kyle did when he was 18. Everyone knew about it, as it happened right before the beginning of the school year. Going into high school, I’d get asked all the time about what really happened to that teacher. As if I was supposed to know the wretched details, classmates and teachers alike never believed I had found out second hand. From the little sister of one of his friends, who I was friends with at the time. Now, I couldn’t even remember her name.
“Dad—that’s not what happened!”
But it didn’t matter to my dad, I knew. He’d always been a hot head, and the truth never mattered. Whatever he heard first, he went with. Besides, it’s not like the truth is far off. That teacher told me to my face about midway through the year because she just couldn’t take the gossip anymore.
Honestly, it was really sad and disgusting to know at 14 years old that my elder brother, who I didn’t have a great opinion of anyway, was a baby killer.
“Get out.” Like a weighted blanket, my dad’s growl settled on my shoulders.
Kyle started shaking his head.
“I said get out!”
Kyle jumped at the booming, apoplectic shout and ran like Shaggy from Scooby Doo out of the kitchen.
Beyond the entryway to the kitchen, my dad was pale, shaking, with a white line around his mouth from grinding his teeth so hard. His salt-and-pepper hair was all fluffed, like a cat about to get into a fight. Blue eyes sharpened as he stared at where my brother had just been.
“...Is that true, Delilah?”
At the sound of my mom’s voice, the guilt of revealing such devastating news began to eat away at me. Nodding curtly, I balled up my hands by my sides.
“Oh, my God.”
“After a couple of months of kids coming up to me asking about it, the teacher told me that’s what happened. I never told or confirmed anything to anyone because she asked me not to.” Exhaling shakily, I turned my burning eyes to my mom as she covered her mouth with her hand, horror twisting her features. “I’m sorry—I was just so mad and didn’t think.”
“No—no. Don’t apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong. Um...” my mom trailed off. “Ron...are you okay, honey?”
I didn’t see my dad storm out, only hearing his heavy, slow footfall, and my mom sighed softly. Ducking my head, I scowled ugly at the floor as emotions battered my chest. Flexing my meat-slickened fingers taut, my lungs burned when I managed a shallow breath. The front door slammed with a terrible bang, and I winced as the whole house shuddered.
16
Darren
“So...Darren, right? Do you work together?”
Sitting up as I hastily picked my jaw up off the floor— I cleared my throat roughly. Disdain for this whole situation stained my tongue, and I kept one eye on Delilah as she grimaced at the floor.
Her mother looked rattled but not exactly surprised, as if the woman knew her son was capable of something like that.
“Ah yes, ma’am. I recently was transferred from international to domestic, and Delilah and I really hit it off.” Delilah’s eyes whipped to mine at what I’d said, but I didn’t want to make things more complicated. The past five years had amounted to nothing, anyway.
She puffed out her lips, sucking in her cheeks before taking a huge, stabilizing breath.
Turning to Jamie, I sat back and clasped my hands under the small, circular table. She’d piled up all the bills in the corner, against the wall. “I wasn’t actually invited to this thing. I guess our boss figured Delilah would bring me along, regardless.”
“That’s nice, yeah. When the kids were little, the farthest we ever went was Disneyland Florida when Delilah was 7 and Kyle was 11. It was our only trip. He was such a terror, and Delilah was afraid of all the characters. Honestly, it was a bit of a disaster.” She turned back to the stove, but it was obvious in the set of her shoulders that she no longer had the will to even make burgers. “So—”
Her words never left her lips when the front door smacked against the wall again, and Delilah’s father’s angry footsteps echoed through the house once again. The atmosphere prickled with tension, and the aged, haggard face of the man poked into the kitchen. He didn’t even glance at me as he set two paint cans on the floor with a clatter before heading to the refrigerator. Stealing a six-pack of beer, he juggled the bottles and the cans of paint before wordlessly heading back upstairs.
“Um...So...Delilah, sweetheart, what do you want on your salad? Just tomatoes and cheese?” Jamie asked her.
She shuddered a little at her own name, and my knee bounced under the table. Soft, green eyes met mine, the light in them slowly flickering through the shadows of what had been revealed. “What about you, Darren? Do you eat salad?”
“Yes, please. However you make it is fine.” I had been through some shit, but nothing had ever made me feel so uncomfortable before. Nothing in my experience had taught me how to deal with family.
As if snapping to reality, Delilah stuck herself back at the stove to continue forming burger patties. Her tight ass and legs rippled under her jeans.
I cleared my throat of its hesitancy. “I appreciate you letting me stay for dinner, ma’am.”
“You can just call me Jamie. Delilah had a lot of flings, but not really a boyfriend. It’s nice to see you’re not a scumbag...” Jamie trailed off, shaking her head viciously. “Anyway, I’m glad to feed someone besides Kyle’s horrible friends. They never so much as say ‘thank you’ for cooking for them, but they act like they’re entitled to my cooking.”
“Your cooking is the best, Mom.” Roughness softened Delilah’s tone, but her mom cast her a smile regardless.
I
instantly felt like an outsider peeking in on something I wasn’t supposed to watch.
In slow motion, her mom nudged her with her elbow before walking to the sink to wash her hands.
“I tried so many times to make your meatloaf, but I could never get it right,” Delilah admitted.
“And you probably never will.” The slight, teasing lilt in Jamie’s voice chased away the heavy atmosphere completely. Turning off the tap to wave her hands, she went to the fridge before pausing to glance at me. “Do you want a beer, Darren?”
“No, thank you. I don’t drink.”
Surprise twitched her slender brow.
Delilah quipped up at the offer I’d turned down. Honestly, I didn’t drink often anyway, but Delilah and I had walked here. I didn’t know this city, and I didn’t like it, to be frank. Knowing with a good amount of certainty that her brother was probably sulking and was a no show at work didn’t help make me feel secure.
“I may just make these on the stove.” The platter of raw burgers was just sitting there, and Jamie dug into a slender, top cabinet beside the fridge.
Outside the front of the house, a terrible shattering of glass sounded, and
I stood up as Jamie raced for the front door. Delilah and I followed, her dark green bottle in hand, and we emerged just in time to see a dresser drawer flying from the second story window.
“Watch it.” Holding an arm out when Jamie tried to leave the small step leading to the walkway, I didn’t bother to hide my frown. A large television already lay on the grass face down, the back warped and contorted from the fall.
The distinct crack of wood splitting shot through the air like lightning from the open windows above. Delilah’s dad just started throwing shit out onto the front lawn really nice shit, like speakers and even an ornate, glass bong that was a few hundred dollars, at least. There were paint stains on the expensive clothes that came tumbling from the second story.