“Your grandmother liked to collect all these little blown-glass animals. She’d get them on all our family vacations. Oh, the little elephant’s trunk is broken! I knew it. I knew the police would break things. They have no respect for anything.”
Just like that we weren’t emptying the hutch. We were taking a stroll down memory lane with occasional side trips to saying really harsh things about the cops. After fifteen minutes of that, I reached past Mom and started taking things out of the cabinet.
“Mom, we need to get this stuff moved inside,” I said. “Anything you want to keep.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Me and my big mouth. Of course, she wasn’t going to get rid of anything. It was all going back in the house.
“Fine, but it needs to go inside. Can we do that without looking at every single thing?”
“There’s no need to get snippy with me,” Mom said. “You’re welcome to go and do whatever you like. I’ll have this all cleaned up by the time you get back.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, because Mom was delusional. It was going to take weeks to deal with what the cops had done.
She put something else into the cardboard box that Gentry had been holding. The bottom was about to give out, and she’d jammed it full of a bunch of random crap including those chipped and stained Snowbabies. The whole thing was so pathetic, I couldn’t stand to watch.
“Oh, here are LaReigne’s baby dishes. Look at how cute they are. It’s the whole set: a plate, a bowl, and the little cup.”
“Mom, I can’t spend all day at this. I need to pick Marcus up from school and find a place for us to stay tonight.”
“Well, you can stay here now.”
“We can’t stay here,” I said.
“Why in the world not? You can sleep in your old bedroom and Marcus can sleep in LaReigne’s room. There’s plenty of space.”
“Just because the police emptied those rooms doesn’t mean we can stay in them. The mouse shit in my room is ankle deep.”
“Well, whose fault is that? You were always leaving food in your room,” Mom said.
“Oh my god. How is it my fault? I haven’t lived here in ten years. I had to leave home, because I couldn’t get to my bed. I was sixteen years old and you buried my bed under all your fucking crap.”
“Don’t you swear at me! You’re responsible for the condition of this house, too. You never help—”
“You won’t even let me take the trash out without checking it, because you think I’m throwing away your treasures!” I hated myself for getting sucked into the same old argument. I knew better.
“You’re always breaking things,” Mom said. “You’re as bad as the police. You’re just a big hoyden, always stomping around and breaking things. You broke that whole box of good crystal, and that can’t be—”
“I was twelve! And you had it stacked on the edge of the fucking bathtub! I was trying to take a bath, and I accidentally knocked it off, which I wouldn’t have done if you hadn’t set a fucking box of fucking dishes on the edge of the fucking bathtub. I cut my foot open, and you’re still blaming me for—”
“Because you don’t have any respect for anything!”
“For this shit?” I grabbed the nearest thing: the box of figurines Gentry was holding. “I don’t respect this because it’s shit. And you care more about this than you do about your family. You’d rather pile this shit up than have Marcus come stay with you. So fuck all of this shit.”
I dumped the box on the sidewalk, but that wasn’t enough, so I stomped on it, too. Right while I was in the middle of trying to annihilate all those little Snowbabies, I realized it was the wrong box. It wasn’t the box of chipped thrift-store figurines. It was Mom’s treasures. The champagne glass Dad won for her. The little animals she’d inherited from her mother. LaReigne’s baby dishes. I bent over, meaning to salvage something, but Mom laid into me. Slapped my head, pulled my hair, the whole time screaming. I didn’t even put up my hands to defend myself, because I deserved it.
Gentry stepped in between us, which I hated for him to do. I honestly would rather have taken my beating than have Mom smack him. From where I was bent over, I heard the sound of her open palm on his back and shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Please stop. I’m sorry.”
“You hateful, selfish girl! All you care about is yourself.”
At least she wore herself out pretty fast. She stopped hitting Gentry, and trying to hit me, because she couldn’t catch her breath. For a minute or so, I stayed where I was, crouched down with Gentry bent over me protectively. When he straightened up, I stood up and tried to apologize again.
“I didn’t mean to, Mom. I thought that box was something else.”
“Get away from me. I don’t want you here.” She was rocking back and forth, taking big shaky breaths, and then in this soft voice, she said, “I want LaReigne.”
I wanted LaReigne, too. I wanted the LaReigne who had held my hand when I was eight years old. The LaReigne who could make Mom listen to her. I wanted her to come and help me figure out what to do, and that wasn’t going to happen. LaReigne wasn’t going to come save me. Maybe I was going to have to go save her.
“You don’t want to be here, and now you don’t ever have to come here again,” Mom said.
It was true that I didn’t want to be there, and I wished the other part was true, too.
Gentry stood between my mother and me, scratching the back of his neck. I could tell he was upset, but after a minute, he put his hands down and said, “Thy nephew, my lady?”
If it hadn’t been for Gentry, I don’t know what I would have done, because I staggered toward the street kind of in shock, and followed him to his truck.
“I’m sorry about my mother hitting you. I’m sorry about all of this. You probably need to sleep before you go to work,” I said, as Gentry opened the passenger door for me.
“Nay. I labor not on Friday even.”
“Oh, I forgot it was Friday. But you’ve been up since last night, haven’t you?”
“Nay, I slept this morn,” he said. By my math, maybe he’d gotten three hours of sleep before he showed up to rescue me again. That was all he said, and I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t another apology, so we didn’t talk on the drive.
At the school, I was late enough that the buses had already left. There were a couple of kids waiting to be picked up out front, but Marcus wasn’t one of them.
In the main office, nobody was at the front desk, so I rang the bell.
“I’m here to pick up Marcus Gill,” I said, when the secretary came out of the back room. “Is he still in his classroom?”
“No, I think he got picked up before lunch.”
“You let somebody else pick him up?”
I didn’t feel calm, and I must not have sounded very calm, because the secretary got the logbook and brought it to the front counter.
“It’s okay. We wouldn’t let anyone who wasn’t authorized pick him up.” She flipped through the logbook until she got to a form with Marcus’ name on it. “See, his grandmother picked him up before lunch. Oh, it says a family emergency. I hope everything’s okay. Is everything okay?”
I stared at the form that Winnie Gill had signed and knew everything was not okay. There was an envelope clipped to the bottom of the form. Zorza Trego, it said. Probably misspelled on purpose.
I tore it open as I walked out of the front office and read it while I waited at the curb for Gentry. The letter from the Gills’ lawyer was only a paragraph long, basically telling me to read the other thing in the envelope, which was a court order from a judge granting them “temporary emergency custody” due to “parental abandonment.”
CHAPTER 18
Marcus
You’re going to stay with us from now on,” Grammy Winnie said.
<
br /> “Until Mommy comes home, right?”
“Maybe you’ll get to stay with us for good.”
“I don’t want to stay for good,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you change clothes and then we’ll have lunch. I have chicken nuggets for you.”
At their house, I was supposed to wear nice clothes, instead of my regular clothes. They weren’t very comfortable because the shirt buttoned all up to my neck, and I wasn’t supposed to get them dirty. If I stayed there for longer, would I have to wear nice clothes all the time?
“Does Aunt Zee know I’m staying here?” I said.
“Your aunt knows. Don’t you worry about her,” Grammy said.
After lunch, Grammy and me went out on the sunporch, and she gave me a new coloring book and a new box of crayons. I never got to have crayons at her house before, because it was messy, she said. It was hard to color and not make a mess.
I was being really careful coloring when somebody rang the doorbell, and Grammy got up to see who it was.
I heard her open the door and say, “I don’t want you to come here again. I left you that letter to explain the situation.”
“I don’t care about your stupid letter. I want to see him.” It was Aunt Zee!
Grammy was a lying liar pants on fire. Aunt Zee didn’t know I was staying there. I got up and went inside the house to see her.
“We’re well within our legal rights,” Grammy said. “My husband will be home from work soon, so you need to leave.”
“I’m not scared of you. People like you always think you can get your way just because you have money.” Aunt Zee was mad and shouting, so I ran down the hallway to the front door.
“We’re good Christian people, unlike you and your family. Marcus should have been with us all along, and now he will be.”
When Grammy saw me coming, she shut the door and turned the lock.
“Aunt Zee!” I yelled. I grabbed the doorknob, but Grammy leaned against the door so it wouldn’t open.
“Let me out! I wanna see Aunt Zee!”
“No, you may not,” she said.
I wanted to hit her, but Mommy says I’m not allowed to hit girls. Even if she was old and bigger than me, I guessed Grammy Winnie was a girl.
I ran back to the sunporch, but the only door outside went into the backyard. I thought maybe I would push one of the screens out. I did that once, kind of on accident, and got in trouble.
Aunt Zee was standing on the sidewalk with Sir Gentry, and she was real mad.
“That bitch. Good people. Who says that? We’re good Christians. If you have to say that, you probably aren’t.”
“Sooth, my lady,” Sir Gentry said. “Those that would recommend themselves by their own testament have no good deeds to recommend them.”
I didn’t understand what that meant, but she laughed.
“Aunt Zee!” I yelled.
She turned around and saw me and waved with both her hands.
I heard Grammy yelling from the front door again. “You need to leave, or I will call the police. You’re trespassing.”
Aunt Zee ran across the lawn and put her hands up on the screen. She smiled at me.
“It’s okay, buddy. You’re gonna stay with your grandparents for a while. You’ll come home soon, though, okay?”
“When Mommy comes home?”
“Exactly. As soon as Mommy comes home, you’ll come home, too.”
“And we’ll be all together?” I said.
“I promise. Cross my heart.” She drew an X on her heart. “I love you, buddy.”
“I love you, too.”
“Gimme a kiss,” she said, and she put her lips on the screen. I put my lips on the screen, too, and pressed them against hers. It was so funny it made me laugh.
“I will call the police,” Grammy said. She came up behind Aunt Zee on the sidewalk next to the house. I stuck my tongue out at her and pressed it on the screen.
“I’m going. But don’t kid yourself. You’re not a good person. Or at least you’re not any better than I am,” Aunt Zee said.
I don’t know why Grammy said she wasn’t a good person. Aunt Zee was my favorite person after Mommy.
“You need to go home and not come back here. If I see you again, I’ll call the police.” Grammy looked at me. “Stop licking the screen and go inside the house.”
I licked the screen again anyway.
CHAPTER 19
Zee
I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so Gentry took me to his parents’ house, where his family treated me like an invalid. I wasn’t doing a good job of pretending to be okay, because they acted like I was made out of glass. Charlene did my laundry, while I took a shower to get the dirt from Mom’s house off me. Then Elana braided my hair while Gentry packed. There was packing required to go to Bryn Carreg, which was Gentry’s keep. His house actually had a name, and that was where we were going. If it had been up to me, I would have gone to bed and stayed there, but I was a guest. So I sat on the front porch with my backpack, while Gentry worked.
It made me nervous watching him load things into his truck. There were Rubbermaid tubs, some kind of tent, and an ice chest. It felt very end-times.
“It’s only an hour away,” Bill said. “If you decide you’d rather come back to town, Gentry can bring you.”
“I think you understand that now, don’t you?” Charlene said. “He’ll do whatever he can for you.” It sounded like a warning, and I could see how with someone as good as Gentry, she’d be worried about him.
They stood out on the porch, waving as we drove away, which made me feel like crying. Sometimes nice people are too nice. It reminded me of this whole fantasy I had when I was younger. Dad would come home from prison and Mom would get better, and we’d be a normal family, like Emma’s family. Right up until Uncle Tim died, the three of them went on vacations together and bowled together. At Aunt Shelly’s house, she had a whole wall of pictures of them together, like Gentry’s family had. The hours I wasted on that fantasy as a kid. Imagining exactly what we’d talk about at dinner. What kind of sheets I would have on my bed when Mom tucked me in at night. How I would have sleepovers with the girls at school. The ones who wouldn’t even sit with me at lunch.
Things had gone so sideways, I didn’t even have a fantasy life anymore.
I wasn’t going to cry. Especially because we drove in total silence. It weirded me out a little, so I worked up my nerve to ask if I could turn on the radio. Gentry said yes, but there weren’t any stations programmed. I hit the SEEK button and it spun through until we got a station playing eighties music.
Bill had said Bryn Carreg was an hour away, but by my phone, it was closer to an hour and a half. We passed through a tiny town called Cedar Vale and, somewhere on the other side, we left the highway and drove north on a county road. Further on, we turned off onto a dirt road and then another, and at that point, the only reason I knew which direction we were going was that the sun was starting to set in the west. When we finally pulled up and parked, it was where the road dead-ended in a bunch of woods and hills. There was a metal garage and a carport, with a little Toyota truck parked under it.
Maybe some other time I would have been nervous about the whole thing, but I was too tired to care. It reminded me of that first day when Gentry gave me a ride home from physical therapy. Sure, maybe he was driving me out into the country to murder me, but his family was so nice, and getting murdered would solve a lot of my problems.
I got out of the truck and pulled my backpack on, while he went around to drop the tailgate and open the topper glass. I watched him pull out all the stuff he’d packed, wondering how much of it I’d have to carry and how far. I hadn’t had any pain meds for my hip all day, so I decided I was going to take a big dose when we got wherever we were going. Enough to knock out a bear.
Th
ere was the big bundle that I’d guessed was a tent—a bunch of white canvas wrapped around some long poles—and two baskets full of everything else, including the ice chest. Gentry pulled the tent out until it was balanced half on the tailgate and half off.
“How much further are we going?” I said.
“’Tis not far, but up the hill.”
He squatted, got the tent balanced on his right shoulder, and lifted it up. Then he squatted again and looped one basket on the end of the poles. He turned and a third squat got the second basket on the poles.
“Do you need me to carry something?” I said.
“Nay.”
“I’m strong enough to help.”
“My lady, I doubt not thy virtue, but thou art weary, and ’tis my custom to bear it thus,” he said.
“I don’t know what that has to do with my virtue.”
He frowned. I was going to at least offer to close the tailgate and topper but he did a slow rotation so he could reach them with his left hand.
“Thy virtue. Thy strength.”
“Is that what virtue means? I thought it meant something else,” I said, but he didn’t explain.
All that stuff must have weighed a lot. Enough that his right arm where he was using it to stabilize the weight on his shoulder was flexed tight.
“I didn’t know you were taking me to the gun show.” As soon as I said it, I could tell he didn’t understand. He turned and tilted his head in that cute, doggy look of confusion.
“My lady?” He was standing there holding all that stuff, waiting for me to explain.
“Gun show, like your arms are your guns. It’s just a saying. I only meant because your arms are so big. Whatever.”
For a few seconds he looked even more confused, and then he smiled and turned back around.
“’Tis nigh dark. Thou must admire my arms and walk in the same while,” he said.
I hoped it was a joke, because I laughed. Walking behind him at dusk, it wasn’t like I could see his arms, but going up the hill it was hard not to notice that he had calf muscles like softballs.
The Reckless Oath We Made Page 12