She reached for a tissue and blew her nose. “I’m fine. Now get my makeup bag. The green one with flowers on it.”
He decided to close his mouth rather than say he hardly needed a description. She’d had the same makeup bag since he was a toddler. It smelled like powder and waxy lipstick, and the lining was stained with little bits of color where various things had come open or spilled over the years. “Okay, Mama.”
“And put on a pair of pants, LJ. You look like a hobo.”
He smiled. It was comforting when she had enough energy to boss him around.
Andra was waiting right outside the door, her hair freshly smoothed. His smile broadened. She raised her eyebrows and mouthed, “Makeup?”
He rolled his eyes and held up a finger for her to wait as he disappeared into the bathroom. Considering how he’d left things between them, he couldn’t believe she was in his home, about to meet his mama. He didn’t know whether he was the luckiest man in the world or the most cursed, because if he couldn’t fix things with her, he was going to have to let her go all over again.
There was a choking sound from inside the bedroom, then a light thump. Oh God.
LJ dropped the makeup bag and sprinted back to the bedroom, but Andra had beat him there. She was on her knees next to the bed, holding the trash can as his mother threw up into it. “Mama!”
More vomit splashed into the can, and he grimaced. Gasping, Mama caught her weight on the edge of the bed. Andra set down the trash can and grabbed a clean washcloth from the side table, offering it to her. Mama clutched it in one shaking hand and wiped her mouth. “Excuse me. This flu is terrible. Can’t seem to shake it, and in the middle of summer, too.”
“I’m so sorry,” Andra murmured. “I didn’t mean to barge in. I just heard . . . I can go.”
Something inside him changed shape, watching the two women in his life in the same room, Andra awkward but so compassionate at the same time. Without even an introduction, she’d rushed in to help, like his family was hers.
His mother looked up, her brown eyes shiny with tears as they pored over every inch of Andra’s face. She pulled Andra into a tight hug. “Aren’t you the sweetest thing? Of course you are. Of course you would be.” And then she started to cry. “Oh, thank God.”
“Mama?” His voice cracked.
Andra stroked his mother’s thin back, and he remembered her own mother had died when she was a child. She hadn’t had a properly maternal hug in over a decade. LJ’s hands hung at his sides, his heart thumping hugely. This was a gift he would never have asked for, one so big and expensive that all he could do was turn it over and over, waiting for someone to laugh and take it away from him.
“You go on now, LJ,” Mama said, and sniffed. “She’s finally here. Give us girls a chance to talk.”
Twenty-five
“There you are.” Andra closed the front door behind her, stepping out into the muggy night. “You want me to turn a light on?”
“Nah. You can see the stars better this way.” LJ smiled up at her from his seat on the concrete steps, patting the space next to him. She took a spot two steps down from him, tipping her head against his knees as she looked up at the sky.
There were more stars in Montana, but the ones in the South seemed more content. Her eyes traced over every pinprick of light, something in the air on the porch seeming to suspend the clock so she could sit there forever with no time passing. She exhaled.
There were so many things unsaid between them, but if time didn’t exist, neither did panic attacks. Or the two thousand miles stretching between her home and his. Or everything his friends had said about her this morning.
LJ brushed her hair back, tickling her earlobe. “These still working okay after the afternoon you had? Want me to drive you in to see the doc?”
She laughed. “I can see where you inherited your reserved nature. Rose is a talker, isn’t she? I think she pointed out every single nail you put into this house.”
“Did she throw up again?”
“One more time. But she kept some crackers down. She’s sleeping now.”
“Thanks for being so patient with her. I, ah—” He scratched the back of his head. “It means a lot.”
“Are you kidding? She told me stories about you all day. I loved it.”
He looked down, a smile playing around his mouth. “Shit. You were probably heading to your truck to make a getaway, huh?”
“Actually, I probably should get it. I parked it a few blocks away.”
“It’s parked around the side of the house. I took your keys off the table and got it earlier. I don’t want you walking around alone at night.”
“Uh, okay.” She sat up and frowned at him. “I walk around at night all the time.”
He glanced away. “Yeah, but it’s different in the city. Give it a couple of days, until people know your face and word gets around that you’re staying with me. Then you’ll be fine to go anywhere you want, at least in this neighborhood.”
She glanced out at the dark street, scooting a little closer to his legs. It seemed much less peaceful than it had a minute ago.
“So did Mama tell you all about how I won the second-grade spelling bee with the word ‘promiscuous’? That’s her favorite story.”
“She did, actually. Among other things.” Andra nudged his legs. “You never told me you got shot.”
“That makes it sound worse than it was. It felt more like a bad rope burn, actually. Want to see?” He pulled up his basketball shorts, revealing a line of scar across the outside of his thigh as thick as her thumb. She must have been terribly distracted to have missed that on the one day they’d been naked together in her room.
She trailed her fingers along it, wincing. “She said you were rescuing trapped people out of flooded houses when it happened, but I didn’t understand how guns got involved.”
“When we chopped into the attic, the guy thought we were looters and started shooting.” LJ shrugged. “Things were crazy, and it was an accident. He was pulling people out right alongside me the next day.” LJ pointed to the east. “He lives about five streets that way.”
Andra closed her eyes and laid her forehead on his knee, her hand cupped over the scar. She couldn’t even fathom forgiving someone for shooting her. Much less trusting them to help her chop through roofs while she was standing on a bandaged leg. And yet, because it was LJ, it made perfect sense.
She wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold him so tight all the good in him would start to seep into her, too. But touch alone couldn’t close all the gaps between their two lives.
“You know, I got a scar up a little higher, if you want to rub that one, too,” LJ drawled.
A smile tugged at her lips and she sat up. “You’re terrible, you know that?”
“I know it.” He grinned, leaning back with his elbows propped on the porch edge. “Mama’s been trying my whole life to return me to the stork, but he wouldn’t take me back without a receipt.”
“That’s not what she told me. She said you were lost for two months, and she just about went crazy trying to find you.” Andra shook her head. “How is that even possible?”
LJ hitched a slow roll of his shoulder. “No way to charge a phone, even if you didn’t lose it in the flood. If somebody wasn’t right in front of your face, there was no way of knowing if they were alive or dead. It took them three days to rescue us off the roof, because there were so many other people to get to first, and not enough Coast Guard helicopters.”
Her eyes widened as she tried to imagine the hopelessness of being stuck for that long, not knowing what would happen.
“Once they got us, I wanted to help. It was supposed to be too dangerous to go back out there, but hell, I had just been out there, and I knew folks were stuck with no medicine, no water. Most people were in pretty bad shape, but I had a strong back, eve
n at fifteen. I got Mama to the Superdome, where there were supposed to be doctors and things, and I snuck off with some guys who had a fishing boat. A few days later, we’d hauled out everybody we could find, and we were trolling around looking for more. The cops caught us. They thought we were looking for something to steal and made us evacuate with everybody else.”
He tipped his head back, looking up at the stars.
“When I got back to the Superdome, Mama was gone. They weren’t keeping track of who died or who left—they were just sticking people on any plane that would fly. I was big, and I didn’t have any ID on me, but somebody finally figured out I was underage. They shipped me straight off to foster care.
“Mama’s phone got lost in the flood, and when her number started working again, it went to somebody else. I knew the number to the ranch my uncle managed, but their phone lines were down for weeks, and turned out they’d evacuated with the stock anyway. Without an address to write each other . . . it’s a big world, turns out.” His knee started to bounce a little, but he didn’t look away from the sky.
Goose bumps raked across her skin. “It’s so scary that you can just lose somebody.”
He smiled and stroked her arm with the back of one finger. “It was a good thing. Nothing else would have made Mama learn about the internet.”
She laughed. “You give a whole new meaning to ‘glass half-full,’ LJ Delisle.”
“That was the problem—the Delisle. Mama called social services in every state, but somebody spelled my last name wrong in the database, and of course she didn’t have a single picture of me left after the flood. The woman called the president of the United States.” He grinned. “He didn’t answer, I guess, but a White House intern talked her through setting up a MySpace profile, and she found me in five minutes. She was all the way up in New Jersey, and I had landed in Texas. When she flew down to get me, that was the only time in my life I saw her cry.” He glanced over, bumping her side with his knee. “Until today.”
Andra took a deep breath, so many things swirling through her chest that she wasn’t sure how to talk to him about them all. “She says she’s dying, LJ.”
She bit her lip as she remembered what Rose had told her as soon as they were alone.
My son is a good man, but he feels everything too deep, and he can’t stand it if he can’t fix every last problem he sees. You’re the only girl he ever talked about who wanted to take care of him, not the other way around. And I’m so glad God set you down here before He took me.
LJ shrugged twitchily, leaning forward to rest his forearms on his knees. “The doctor says it might feel like she’s dying, but as long as she takes her meds and doesn’t overwork herself, she can live almost as long as anybody else. It depends on what complications come out of the lupus.”
Andra let out a quiet breath. All day, she’d barely been able to look at Rose without thinking of how much it had hurt to lose her mom. She didn’t want that for LJ. “She’s amazing, you know? You’re lucky to have her.”
The corner of his mouth tipped up. “Don’t I know it.”
She watched him as she turned over what his mother had said. She didn’t want him to be attracted to her only because he wanted to fix her. She kept thinking of his words in her kitchen.
I would have done that much even for somebody I didn’t like.
Of course he would have tried to help her with her cooking and her attacks. He would have been her friend, because he was everyone’s friend. But she wanted to believe there was more between them than that.
Into the silence, she said, “Why didn’t you call?”
His hands clenched together, hanging between his knees. “I didn’t know how to be the man you needed. Didn’t know what to say.”
A thousand rebuttals ran through her mind, but the honesty in his deep voice held her paralyzed. She understood the helplessness of that feeling too well to argue the point.
When LJ spoke again, his words were rough with strain. “I know it ain’t right, but I can’t stand the idea of letting you go so you can look for somebody better.”
“I don’t know what I need,” she said, her voice breaking. “But if it’s not you, I don’t want it.”
Being with him should have fixed her panic attacks. She was more comfortable with him than with any other person on earth. She trusted him, all the way down into her bones. But they could never have a normal relationship with her brain exploding into fear at unpredictable moments and ruining everything. She couldn’t expect him to stay with her when her reactions made him feel like a criminal.
It was an impossible contradiction, but the panic attacks weren’t even the only problem anymore. She’d seen for herself how her presence divided his group of friends and set them against each other. Having her in his life made everything harder, and it was the last thing she would have wanted for him.
His hands gripped each other until she heard one of the knuckles pop. “What are we going to do?” he whispered.
And all she could do was shake her head.
Twenty-six
Andra slipped a little farther down in the passenger seat, the sun baking through the back window of LJ’s pickup as she waited for him. She trailed her finger along a tear in the upholstery, wondering when it had happened. She had so many years of stories to catch up on, and the more she wrangled out of Rose and Ty, the hungrier she got for the few things LJ would share with her. She was afraid the reason he always put her off with a joke was because his past was so starkly different from hers. His present, too.
For a week he’d been sleeping on the kitchen floor while she slept in his bed. She wanted to try to find the same pleasure with him that she’d finally managed to unlock on her own, but he didn’t seem ready to risk it. They’d never talked about what had happened before he left, when they’d tried to have sex. They hadn’t had time to talk about much of anything, actually.
LJ was gone most of every day, stringing together odd jobs and day laborer positions to make ends meet since Rose couldn’t work. Andra had assured him over and over again that she didn’t mind taking care of his mom when he was out. She’d hoped it would give her time to try to fit in with his family and friends, but at least so far, that wasn’t really happening. Ty and Tash seemed to like her, but Reggie and his other friends weren’t warming up. Andra was worried a lot of LJ’s neighbors weren’t comfortable coming over now that she was staying there. Even when they’d made gumbo for the whole neighborhood on Saturday, the pot was still half-full at the end of the day. LJ got all fidgety about how to fit the big pot into the fridge, as if gumbo leftovers weren’t something he’d ever had to deal with before.
Sometimes she felt like a foreigner, and never more than when his friends came over to jam with him. All she could do was sit and listen, when everyone else knew every word to every song.
Her hands smoothed down her little black skirt. When he offered to take her out tonight, the flood of relief nearly left her dizzy. She knew she was awkward. Too quiet beside everyone else’s laughter and easy chatter. Tonight was her chance to try to show him she could fit in down here, in his world that was so different from her ranch. She had to, because she refused to make his life any more difficult than she already had.
The driver’s-side door opened, he slung his saxophone case in toward her lap, and then he jumped back with an inarticulate sound, dropping the case on his gear shifter.
She caught it before it slid down to the floor, and smiled. “Hi.”
He scrubbed a hand over his hair, blinking. “What are you doing hiding in my truck? I almost hit you in the face with my saxophone!”
“Closer to the stomach, actually.” She put the case down between her feet. “I know you said to meet you in town in four hours, but I wanted to come along.” She smiled brightly, determined to show she could be as much fun as his friends. “Besides, Mona came early to hang out with Ros
e, so I wanted to give them some time alone.” Rose’s friend rarely spoke to her directly, but there was always a tension in the room when she was over.
“How’d you know when I was leaving, anyway? You could have cooked yourself like a loaf of bread in here.”
“I rolled the windows down. Also, you check in at Ty’s every time you leave to see if he’s got a lead on any short-term work. You always say it’ll take five minutes, and it usually takes twenty or thirty.”
He chuckled and got in. “Plead the fifth on that one.”
She tugged at the hem of her skirt. “So where are we going?”
He was dressed for the heat, but nicer than usual, in black shorts and a short-sleeved white button-down that set off his gorgeously rich skin tone. He had a newsboy cap on instead of his usual Stetson, and it made his face a whole different kind of handsome. She liked both.
He started the truck and flipped the AC vents to face her. “Well, I have to rustle up some money so I can actually take you out, but you can probably explore around the French Quarter while I’m doing that.”
She pulled her seat belt across her lap. “Doesn’t it kind of ruin the point if you blow a bunch of money on a date, then I never get to see you because you have to earn it again? Why don’t you let me pay tonight? I have a pretty decent job, you know.”
His palm tapped the steering wheel. “Look, I know you can pay your way.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he turned toward her. “Let me show you I can pay mine.”
She sat back in her seat, thinking about the way he was always juggling dishes at mealtime, making sure she got the plate that didn’t have a chip out of it. It wasn’t important to her, but it was to him. “Okay. Yeah, of course.”
He jerked a nod and started to back out.
“So . . . when you say ‘rustle,’ do you mean you’re going to rob a train, or are you going to get in line again or something?”
He tapped the brakes and stared at her. Blinked. “Oh, do you mean a second line?”
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