Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  “Don’t you start,” Dean warned.

  All the kids had gone quiet around the table. Marnie wrung a dish towel, her eyes on her husband’s face.

  Ben could feel his jaw thrust out, the tightness spreading up his neck from his shoulders and down to his fists. This was what he’d tried to tell May—how good it could feel to be angry. It was right that he should have some power in this place, at this table, where he’d never had it before.

  What did I ever start? he wondered. What did I ever do to him?

  The wide eyes of the three boys on the other side of the table answered both questions.

  They’d done nothing. He’d done nothing.

  It was their father who was the problem.

  Ben’s fist relaxed.

  There was no fight in this kitchen worth getting into. Any angry words he exchanged, any violence he brought here would only be visited on these three boys. They didn’t deserve it.

  He resumed his seat and took a polite bite of the scrambled eggs Marnie had placed in front of him.

  “You expecting me to give you something?” his father asked. “Hand you money? Beg forgiveness?”

  “No. I’m … I just wanted to look around.”

  His father dropped his balled-up napkin on top of his plate, signaling that his meal had come to an end. “Look all you want. I’ve got things to do.”

  The kitchen door slammed behind him.

  Through the screen, Ben watched him walk across the yard toward the barn, a stiff hitch in his step that hadn’t been there the last time Ben was home. More than ever, his father was a rigid son of a bitch. A demanding, difficult bully who’d developed high standards and spent most of his life measuring everyone he met against them and complaining when they fell short.

  No wonder Ben hated himself.

  Atticus sniffled and shifted in his seat. Marnie put her hand on the boy’s skinny shoulder. Her wide-set gray eyes met Ben’s.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I only wanted to see the farm.”

  “Take a look around,” she said quietly. “We’ll be going to church before too long. But I think when we get back …”

  “I’ll be sure to be gone by then.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ben finished his eggs and toast. He put his plate by the sink and went outside, clinging to the door handle until it came to rest soundlessly against the jamb.

  He walked straight to the chicken house.

  The building sat on a slope, the back side set into the rise of the land so that a relatively nimble boy could easily climb the bricks and onto the roof. The mortar felt crumbly beneath his fingers. Deteriorating, like the rest of the place.

  His father would have made him patch the mortar.

  He hauled himself up and breathed in the view. Coming off the lake, the air had a bite. He tightened his abs to lock down a cough that wanted to come.

  This had been his place once—this vista out over the farm, the hives to his right at the margin of the patch of woods where they cleared brush, chopped firewood, and found a Christmas tree every December. The neat rows of the berry plants over the rise to the left, put to bed until spring. And far off in front of him, Lake Superior, its vastness answering a yearning inside him for something bigger than himself and this farm. Something so huge as to appear endless.

  When he’d felt too much as a boy—when he’d needed it—he would come here and be diminished, the riot of confusion in his head and the pounding in his blood reduced to a minor human storm in a world built on an inhuman scale.

  The cold of the roof soaked through his jeans, and Ben wrapped his arms around his knees and rested his chin on his folded hands. He let the water absorb all his roiling, all his turmoil, and turn him flat and calm again. Small enough to disappear.

  When he was ready, he looked at himself.

  Thirty-two years old. A giant, compared to those boys. Trained as a chef, he’d become a beekeeper and a farmer, like his father.

  Like his father, he spent too much time angry, and he unleashed it on the wrong people.

  Ben couldn’t know what his father felt about that, but he knew that he hated it, and he wanted it to stop.

  “I’m not him,” he said aloud.

  He didn’t want to be him—not now, not twenty years from now. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life cynical and simmering with suppressed rage.

  He didn’t want to hide inside his own head, either, pressing down on his feelings like those boys, with their cereal and their church shoes and their fear. He could almost taste their fear, that flood of salt-copper that came before bile, before pain.

  He could see, from up here, that he’d never really been all right on this farm.

  That he’d done what he was told and kept himself quiet and small, tamping his feelings tighter and tighter into the pocket he’d made for them.

  That he’d left them there, sweating. Unstable. Primed to explode.

  He was tired of exploding.

  So obvious, but he’d never seen it. Maybe he’d had to feel his own blood beating inside those boys to understand it. To climb onto the chicken house and look at the lake in order to click all the pieces of himself back into place again.

  He wasn’t some fucked-up golf swing. He was just a boy who’d left this farm utterly ill-equipped for life. A man who’d spent most of the years since trying to figure out how to survive.

  And now … now he wanted more than to survive. He wanted to be okay. He wanted to be happy.

  He wanted to be with May.

  Ben took one last look at the lake and swung his legs over the side of the roof. A minute later, he knocked on the screen door again, and Marnie let him in. He could hear the boys upstairs and water running in the bathroom. A toilet flushed.

  “I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve made,” he said. “I was hoping … maybe you could send me an email now and then.” Footsteps thundered down the hall overhead. “Tell me what those guys are up to? I’d like to keep in touch, if you’re willing.”

  “Why?”

  Ben searched for the right words, but all he could think of to say was “They’re my brothers.”

  She thought this over, then tilted her head in agreement. “Sure.” She pointed toward the low table beneath the phone that had always stood in that spot, though the phone had changed since Ben was last here. “Leave me your email?”

  Ben bent down and printed it in block capitals. He flipped the page, tore off another sheet, and asked, “What’s yours?”

  She gave it to him, and he pocketed the paper.

  “Thanks for breakfast.”

  “It was my pleasure.”

  He made a face, and she smiled faintly. There hadn’t been much pleasure in it for anyone.

  “Take care,” he told her.

  “Drive safe.”

  He let himself out, easing the screen door closed behind him. The morning was bright and clear. In the distance, the lake appeared unusually calm. His father emerged from the barn with a veil and gloves in his hands, heading toward the hives.

  He didn’t look at Ben, and that was fine. Of all the people in the world who were disappointed in him, his father was the one whose opinion he cared about the least.

  May was five hours away. If he drove fast and said the right words, he might get lucky enough to see her smile by nightfall.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Ben rang the bell on the front porch of May’s parents’ house, mentally crossing his fingers that the green sedan in the driveway belonged to her and not some random relative.

  She hadn’t been at home when he checked. He didn’t have her new cell number. If she wasn’t here, he wouldn’t know where else to look for her, and—

  Allie abruptly yanked the door open.

  She wore a baseball cap and pajamas, with oversized rabbit slippers on her feet. Sunglasses covered half her face and completely hid her expression. She rubbed her hand over her lips, smearing them into a gruesome shape.

&nbs
p; “No, don’t talk yet,” she said. “I’m trying to decide on my line. Like, do you think ‘Well, well, well’ is good, or do I need to say something more caustic than that to the guy who ripped out my sister’s heart and stomped on it just—” She looked at her bare wrist. “—twenty-six hours ago?”

  Ben decided it was a rhetorical question. “Is she here?”

  “She might be.”

  “How much does she hate me?”

  “I think she would cut your balls off with the kitchen shears if she could manage it.”

  Ben winced. He’d expected that, but it hadn’t prevented him from hoping for a softer reception than he deserved. “You, too, huh?”

  Allie shrugged. “I’m in a more forgiving frame of mind, since I’ve recently treated people I loved abominably, myself.”

  It dawned on him that Allie wasn’t supposed to be here in her pajamas. She was supposed to be on her honeymoon. While he was still processing that, she said, “How about one of the things you do for me is not ask?”

  “I can do that. Listen—”

  “Allie?” Nancy’s voice came from the kitchen. “Is someone at the door? Your waffle is getting cold!”

  “Just a second!” Allie called back. She turned her attention back to Ben. “We’re having breakfast for lunch. In the middle of the afternoon. It’s a hangover tradition.”

  “Can I please talk to May?”

  Allie put her hands on her hips. Her eyebrows lifted above the frames of the sunglasses. “She told you she loved you.”

  “I know.”

  “In a public bathroom.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then you drove away.”

  He straightened to his full height and tried to look confident. “I’m prepared to do anything to get your sister back, but—”

  “But? But?”

  “—but unless she’s sent you out here as her delegate, I’d rather not have you in the middle of it.”

  Allie took off her sunglasses. Her eyes looked small, the skin around them puffy, and the light made her squint.

  “Do you love her?” she asked.

  “That’s not really—”

  Allie flapped her hand, cutting him off. “I know, I know. None of my business, between you and May, et cetera. But I’m the one who cried with her yesterday, and I’m the one who danced with her for two hours straight.”

  “Danced?”

  “We had the reception.”

  “But not the wedding?”

  “Didn’t we just establish that you weren’t going to ask?”

  “Sorry.”

  She sighed. “I called off the wedding. We had the party anyway. Dad spent most of the night grumbling with his brothers about how much money I’d thrown down the drain. Mom progressed from speechless to ‘I’ll have a small cocktail’ to quite thoroughly lit in the space of about an hour, all while playing perfect hostess and smiling at everyone.

  “Matt showed up with six of his college buddies, already half-toasted, told me we would always be friends, and then did the Electric Slide with May’s friend Beth, who, last time I checked, was doing her damndest to pick him up. I had to stop looking because even the thought of it makes me want to cry, so all I’m going to say, moving along, is that May looked like a seriously hot piece of ass and danced to all the songs and flirted with everybody until around two in the morning.”

  Allie paused to breathe. She put her hands on her hips. “At which point she cornered me and made me go outside with her so she could cry and tell me every single thing that happened between you guys, some of which I’d rather not know, so do me a favor and convince me that she’s not making a huge mistake trusting you.”

  Another deep breath.

  “Because I need to know that something good is going to come out of all this shit before I let you in the house.”

  Ben sunk his hands into his back pockets, unsure how to respond. Allie wasn’t the person he wanted to declare himself to.

  But then, in the kitchen, May laughed—that loud, impolite braying noise he’d first heard nine days ago.

  That laugh. That woman. All he wanted.

  Then it was easy. “I love your sister.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s radiant.”

  Allie assessed him for a moment, head tilted, hair fluffing all over her shoulders.

  “Come on back.” She stepped aside and extended one arm toward the kitchen with a flourish. “I recommend the waffles with peanut butter, syrup, and Hershey’s. They’re crazy-delicious.”

  When Ben went into the kitchen, he found May’s father at the table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. Her mother stood by the stove, poking at a frying pan full of bacon while a closed waffle iron steamed on the counter next to a bowl of batter. May had positioned herself between the table and the counter in what Ben thought of as his macaroni salad spot. She was smiling at something her mother must have said and holding a very familiar cleaver.

  He’d left his knives here.

  Amazing. He hadn’t even missed them.

  When she saw him, her smile dropped at the same time the cleaver rose.

  “Careful,” he said without thinking. “That’s sharp.”

  “But if I attacked you with it, I could become notorious,” May returned. “ ‘First The Forking, then The Cleavering. Who will she emasculate next?’ ”

  The cutting board in front of her contained half a bar of baking chocolate and a pile of chunks. “That’s the wrong knife for chocolate.”

  And this is the wrong way to try to make up with the woman whose heart you cleavered yesterday, asshole.

  “Touchy about our knives, are we?”

  Ah. That explained what she was doing with it. Abusing his knives—a small “fuck you” at absent Ben. Was it sick that it pleased him she would even bother?

  “Are you making cookies?” he guessed.

  “Chocolate-crinkle chocolate chunk cookies. They have pretzels,” she said. “Hangover special.”

  May looked like she’d come through last night’s debauchery better than Allie, but just barely. She wore her hair in a sloppy ponytail, an oversized pink T-shirt advertising her participation in a charity walk—or possibly Einarsson’s participation, given how far the shirt hung down her thighs—and red pajama pants with little white hearts all over them. She had dark circles under her eyes.

  “I like your pants,” he said.

  “Thank you. They’re my sad-panda pants.”

  “For when some dickhead screws her over and then dumps her without an explanation,” Allie chimed in.

  “Allie,” Nancy said chidingly. “Language.”

  Nancy looked like she always did. Big hair, sweatshirt with necklace, dress pants.

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Fredericks,” he ventured. “Mr. Fredericks.”

  May’s father grunted.

  Nancy said, “We didn’t expect to see you again.”

  “I owe you an apology,” he told her. “I’m sorry I was so rude to you before I left. I’m not sure if anybody told you this yet, but I don’t work for Dan’s agent. That was a lie. I don’t know Dan at all. I’ve never been antique shopping with May, either.”

  “I’ll admit, I had some doubts about that.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Sorry. I actually am a beekeeper, though. For what that’s worth.”

  “That part would’ve been tough to fake,” Allie said.

  “So how did you—that is, how did you come to be driving May back from New York?”

  “I’d spent most of the week with her.” He glanced at May, unsure what she’d told her mother and what she wanted him to say. The truth? Some part of it?

  She went back to chopping chocolate.

  You’re on your own, buddy.

  “I met her the day after the—uh, after she and Dan broke up. She needed someone to help her out, and I gave her a place to stay. It’s kind of a long story.”

  May’s father had lowered his ne
wspaper while Ben was speaking. “How about you tell us the short version?”

  Ben cast his eyes at the ceiling, trying to figure out how to bowdlerize the story on the fly without being actively dishonest.

  He settled for “I’m in love with your daughter.”

  The knife clattered when it hit the cutting board, then fell to the floor, landing an inch from May’s foot.

  “Oh Christ—” he said. At the same time, Allie said, “Mom, the bacon’s starting to smell done,” and May said, “You’re what?”

  “Can I pick that up?” The knife really was wicked sharp, and if May stepped on it—actually, he couldn’t even think about that. He dropped to his knees and crawled past her, took the knife by the handle, and crawled back to his former position.

  “You’re what?” May had moved. She stood directly above him, arms crossed, whip-mouth activated.

  Ben sat back on his heels, short of breath from crawling. “In love with you.”

  First there was a long pause. Then everyone started talking at once.

  Nancy: “—understand what this is all about. Is he saying that after you had that incident with Dan, somehow you met Ben? And stayed with him? I’m not—”

  Allie: “—tell them the part about how you got robbed, because otherwise it doesn’t make any sense how you were—”

  Bill: “—women really need my help with this? Because—”

  Ben started talking, too, tuning out all the other voices and May’s father’s slow passage around the table, in order to focus on May. “I’m sorry I left,” he said. “I botched that, but I think I needed to, actually, because it was seeing my father that made me realize—”

  May held up her hand, palm out, and said, “Whoa.”

  “—she mean you were robbed? Like by a mugger? I warned you about those men, May, but neither of you ever listens to me, you only—”

  “—not a regular mugger, Mom, he was a specific mugger. Remember how we were getting all those phone calls from sleazy—”

  “—let you all handle this, and if you need me I’ll be down in the—”

  “—a lot of damage that I can’t gloss over, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “EVERYBODY SHUT UP,” May said.