“I figure I forgot about that money a long time ago,” Daddy said.
Please, Daddy. Please just get up from that chair and hug me.
And then he did; he got to his feet, the aluminum chair sliding across the old linoleum with a screech. Ryan set her bag down. Dad took a step and so did she, and then she was flying across that kitchen into his open arms. His familiar Old Spice-scented hug.
“I’m so sorry,” she breathed, over and over again.
“I know,” he said, stroking her hair like she was ten again. “And … I am too. We all are. It’s going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.”
It wasn’t. Maybe not ever. Not after Harrison and the election. Her heart broken in that suite in Atlanta. But it felt so good to hear her dad say it after all this time.
“What’s going on?” another voice asked from the back steps that led into the kitchen from the second floor.
Ryan whirled to see her little sister, Olivia, standing in the doorway.
Not so little anymore, she thought with a pang.
Olivia was a beautiful young woman. Tall and thin, with wet brown hair sliding down her back. Her wide brown eyes glanced from her to Daddy to Nora, taking it all in.
“Hey, Liv,” Ryan said.
“You’re back.”
Ryan nodded, and Olivia slowly stepped off the last stair and crossed the kitchen. “Nora let you in?”
“I didn’t really give her a choice.”
That made Olivia smile, and Ryan stood in a kind of breathless wait. A painful limbo.
“Thanks for the dress you sent on my birthday.”
Ryan smiled. She’d been sending Olivia tee shirts and dresses from vintage shops in the Village since she’d left Philly. And they emailed each other fairly often.
“Did it fit?”
“It’s far too tight and way too short,” Nora said.
Olivia, to Ryan’s nearly anguished delight, rolled her eyes and Ryan didn’t wait for Olivia to come to her, she just pulled her sister into her arms and hugged her. Olivia, after a minute, hugged her back. Hard.
“Nora told me about the college fund,” Olivia whispered. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long,” she whispered, feeling the weight of all the things she’d missed in this girl’s life. Boyfriends. Friendships. Broken hearts. All the concerts and practice.
“Come on, Olivia,” Nora said. “Eat some breakfast; I’ll get dressed and get you to school.”
Nora walked past Ryan, dodging the hand Ryan reached out for her. Glaring at her over her shoulder, making it very clear that Ryan could come back in the house but Nora would not be so easily won over.
Two down, she thought, her arm slung over Olivia’s shoulder, while Daddy stepped behind the stove talking about making his girls some toads in the hole.
After breakfast, Nora took Olivia to school and Ryan nearly fell asleep at the table.
“Go on up to bed,” Daddy said, kissing her forehead.
“Where are you going?” she asked, wanting to linger in the warmth of his smile for as long as she could.
“Had a little fire down at the hall; we’re going to start fixing it up,” he said, referring to VFW Post 2. Dad’s home away from home.
“I’ll come with.”
“You look like you’re about to fall over. Go on up to bed.”
There was no point in arguing, so she climbed the old steps, skipping the second one and its squeak, out of habit, too exhausted to count the memories buzzing around her. Her room was dark but still impossibly smelled like Jean Naté and mothballs. The boxes got shoved onto the floor on the other side of the mattress by the window, and she fell face first and dreamless into the worst of the sag in the middle of her old bed.
Hours later, she woke to her sister shaking the mattress with her foot.
“Hey, get yourself up, sleepyhead.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No. It’s six o’clock.”
“In the morning?” Had she been asleep for almost twenty-four hours?
“No. At night, and I’ve got to get to work. There’s meatloaf downstairs, but you need to make sure Olivia does her homework and doesn’t just practice all night.”
“Practice … right.” She rolled over and pushed her hair out of her face.
Nora, in blue scrubs, her hair held away from her face with a thick silver barrette, stood in the tiny space between the bed and the old beat-up dresser with all the Roxy Music and The Cure and Morrissey stickers on it from her emo music phase.
For a moment, the sight of her sister right there shrunk her lungs down to nothing.
“You got these?” Nora asked, tossing a bottle at her. Ryan didn’t react fast enough and it hit her shoulder.
“Prenatal vitamins? Yes.”
“Have you had an ultrasound? Because you can come into the ER later and I’ll—”
“I’ve had an ultrasound. I wasn’t due back at my doctor in Atlanta for a month. Everything is fine.”
“You planning on staying for a month?”
The accusation was painfully clear.
“My life literally imploded, Nora—”
“Your life is always literally imploding.”
“Look, I’m sorry everything about me is too damn messy for you. But I’m not a kid and you can’t wound me anymore. You’ve hurt me all you can hurt me. So stop wasting your energy.”
For a second they just stared at each other. Years and miles and more hurt feelings than should be held in a lifetime between them. But they were sisters. And that still mattered to her.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” Ryan said. “We’ve wasted so much time doing that.”
Nora laughed and wiped her lip with her thumb, looking like a boxer getting ready to go back in the ring. “We’re Kaminskis—that’s all we know how to do.”
Oh if that wasn’t a crutch, she didn’t know what was.
“Well, I’m a Kaminski,” she said, throwing off her blankets and getting to her feet. God, this room was tiny. Why did it seem so big in her memory? She opened her bag and pulled out some yoga pants to pull on. “And I’m giving it up.”
Nora laughed deep in her throat as if the idea were a joke, and Ryan sighed. “I am not the girl I was,” she said. “I’m not picking up men and letting them tell me who I am.”
“Really?” Nora asked. “You’re telling me you showing up here, pregnant and broken-hearted, has nothing to do with a man?”
“It’s me and the baby right now. That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
The doubt in her sister’s voice made her want to punch her in the nose, but she was rising above those instincts.
Downstairs there was a pounding on the door, and Nora swore and turned on her heel. “If that is the Davies boy from down the street coming back here to sniff around Olivia, I am going to kick his ass,” she said, stomping down the steps.
Ryan threw on a tank top and ran after her sister. Because watching her sister kick a boy’s ass was still a pretty good time around the Burg.
Ryan got to the bottom of the stairs just as Nora pulled open the door.
“Listen, you little shit—”
But it wasn’t the boy from down the street.
It was Wallace.
Chapter 27
“You brought him here?” Ryan asked, following Wallace out the door to his rusted hatchback. She was wearing Olivia’s bunny slippers but no coat, and the November wind off the Delaware cut right through her. “In that?”
“Can we leave my car out of this? And yes, I brought him here, because for two days he’s been doing nothing but drinking and talking about you. And I can’t take any more of it. So you get him.”
“What if I don’t want him?”
“This is your husband?” Nora asked over her shoulder.
Wallace nodded.
“Weren’t you just saying none of this was about a man?” Nora asked, and she could hear the smirk in her si
ster’s voice.
“Wallace, this is my sister Nora. Nora, this is Wallace.” They exchanged cool nods. Oh man, it suddenly occurred to her why she’d liked Wallace so much. He and her sister were so much alike.
“Ryan,” Wallace said. “He wants to make things right.”
“Then he shouldn’t have made them so damn wrong.”
“Bring him in,” Nora said.
“Nora!” she protested.
“Let’s get him inside,” Wallace said, ignoring her. Nora and Wallace worked without her to get Harrison out of the car and into the house. They dropped him on his back on the couch and Wallace pulled the afghan over him.
“There you go,” he said. “One husband delivered. I left Noelle at the hotel, so I’m going to get back to her.”
“You can’t just leave him here,” she said.
“I can,” Wallace said. “I am. He’s in bad shape, Ryan, and I think he needs you.”
“Well, I’m sick of being what he needs when he’s in bad shape!”
Olivia was on the stairs and Daddy came in from the kitchen. Nora was barely keeping a straight face.
Wonderful, it was now a family affair.
“Whatever,” Wallace said, throwing his hands in the air like it was that easy. “Work it out. I gotta go—I’m just about asleep on my feet.”
Nora shut the door behind Wallace.
Harrison was wearing his suit pants and a white shirt that looked like he’d spilled either bourbon or coffee on it. She leaned down to sniff him. Bourbon. Definitely bourbon.
When she’d said come and find me, she’d never expected him to come in person. She expected one of those jump-out-of-the-bushes guys who deliver envelopes and say “you’ve been served.”
But he was here. On the couch. Grandma’s crocheted American flag blanket tossed over his shoulders.
“What are you doing here?” she breathed.
He snored in answer.
“That’s your husband?” Olivia asked, seemingly fascinated and grossed out as only a teenage girl could be.
“Sort of,” she whispered.
“Sort of like Paul was a sort of husband?” Daddy asked, his tone incredibly clear. Has he hit you? Does he hurt you and make you think it’s your fault? Does he demean you and take from you?
She shook her head. “Whole different realm of sort of.”
Daddy took off his glasses. “Well, you better come on into the kitchen and explain it to us.”
Harrison tried to scrape away the metal band around his skull without opening his eyes, but somehow it wasn’t coming off. It just kept getting tighter. And disturbingly, he couldn’t really feel his hands. And it was so hot in the condo. Like super hot. Had Ryan turned off the AC again? She liked to make these stupid penguin jokes and they’d been waging a stealth war over the thermometer.
“Is he waking up?”
“I think so.”
He pried open his eyes only to find five people staring down at him. He blinked, thinking he might be dreaming, but no, it was real. In a surreal twist on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he was lying down on a couch, surrounded by one girl and four old men with various amounts of hair on their heads and faces and in their noses, wearing what looked like head-to-toe camouflage outfits.
The Dwarfs were going on a military mission.
“Where am I?” he tried to say, but it only came out as a creak from a throat that felt like asphalt and gravel.
“You want coffee?” the girl said.
He tried to say no thanks but it came out like “blergh firfe.”
“He foreign?” one of the old guys asked.
The one with wild white hair and reading glasses perched on the end of his nose shook his head. “No clue.”
“What do you know?” another man asked.
“I know he’s on my couch and we need to get going.”
“We taking him with?”
Harrison tried to say “no,” but it came out as sort of a “gaaaaahhhh” sound. He had no idea where they were going, but he wanted no part of it.
“I’m not hunting with foreigners.” One of the old guys walked away.
“You gonna be all right with him?” the leader of the Dwarfs asked the girl.
He realized she was sitting on the arm of the couch he was lying on and he was hot because he was practically swaddled in an American flag.
What the hell?
He found his hands and rubbed at his eyes. Not a flag, a blanket that looked like a flag.
“Sure,” the girl said. Something about her seemed really familiar. The smile. Or her eyes.
How do I know her?
“If I have trouble, Ryan’s upstairs,” she said, and he sat up. Ryan?
“Where am I?” he asked.
“Philadelphia.” The girl stuck out her hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Olivia. You’re my brother-in-law.”
Brother-in-law. Olivia. Philadelphia.
Holy Christ, that wasn’t a dream. Wallace and Noelle had driven him here to try and win back his wife.
“This … isn’t the best first impression.” He tried to sit up and get unswaddled at the same time, which made him lurch right into a beat-up coffee table, sending an empty coffee mug onto the rug. He tried to pick that up and nearly bashed his head on the corner of the table.
God. Please. Kill me now.
“And I’m Robert Kaminski. Your father-in-law,” the white-haired man said, glaring at him over the reading glasses.
He finally fought free of the blanket and sat upright. His father-in-law stepped back to give him room with the two remaining Dwarfs, who weren’t actually Dwarfs at all but clearly former soldiers, if the camo was authentic.
“I’m Harrison,” he said. “Harrison Montgomery.”
His sister-in-law winced and waved her hand under her nose. “You stink, dude.”
Awesome.
“Mr. Kaminski,” Harrison said. “It’s good to meet you.”
Robert ignored the hand Harrison held out to him. He was short and square, his white hair giving him a certain Einstein mad genius look, and it was very obvious he was not impressed with Harrison.
“I … ah … how long have I been here?” Harrison asked. It was dark outside the windows.
“It’s five a.m.,” Olivia said, jumping off the couch. “You’ve been passed out for about twelve hours.”
Harrison scrubbed a hand over his face. The last thing he remembered was a truck stop in Virginia; he’d wanted to go home, having sobered up enough to realize that showing up on Ryan’s doorstep unannounced might not be the best idea. But Noelle got him another fifth of bourbon and they continued north.
One of the older men in camouflage stuck his head around the doorway on the far side of the room. “We better get going, Robert,” he said.
“Go wake up your sister,” Robert told Olivia. “I don’t trust this man.”
“I’m not—” He didn’t quite know how to finish that thought. I’m not going to hurt anyone?
He’d already done that to Ryan. He’d hurt her so badly, she’d had no choice but to come back here to people who’d shoved her out of their lives as effectively as he had.
Guilt and shame rippled through him again. For the last two days since she’d left for Philly, anytime that happened, he’d tried to numb the pain with alcohol.
Just like his father must have.
“We’re going hunting,” Robert said. “I’ll be back by dinner. Olivia, wake up your sister and get yourself to school.” He lifted a gnarled finger to Harrison’s face. “Don’t steal nothing.”
And then he was gone, taking the rest of the men with him, leaving Harrison feeling about three inches tall.
“Don’t worry about him,” Olivia said. “He’s just like that.”
“I’m not … I’m not here to hurt anyone.”
Olivia nodded, looking so much like Ryan it hurt to imagine the days when Ryan was that young and that trusting. “You’re here to get Ryan back?”
; That had been the plan, if he remembered correctly, that he and Wallace had cooked up, around dawn the day after the election. He’d realized that losing the election didn’t hurt half as bad as losing Ryan. As losing what they had been building, as losing the hope of a future different than his past.
Something better.
He’d told Wallace that and Wallace, the secret romantic, had called Noelle and convinced her to drive them to Pennsylvania so Harrison could woo back his wife.
It seemed impossibly stupid now, sober and sick and foul smelling.
Woo her back, what a joke.
“What have I done?” he groaned, burying his aching head in his hands.
“Look, you’re here,” Olivia said. “You showed up. My piano teacher says that’s half the battle. Just showing up. So, next what you’re going to do is shower, because you stink. And then Ryan’s bedroom is the second door on the right. Go say hi.”
“She’s not going to want to see me.”
“Nora says the day Ryan isn’t interested in seeing a guy is the day we win the lottery.”
“Nora doesn’t know your sister,” he said, anger cleaning out the sludge in his veins. Along with this father of hers trying to give him grief for hurting Ryan, when he’d spent the last six years hurting her.
If this was where Ryan came when things got bad, she needed a softer place to land.
Olivia’s mouth twisted in some unreadable expression of doubt or agreement, he had no idea which.
But then she handed him the mug of coffee in her hands and pointed to the stairs. “We won’t know unless you try.”
In his hung-over state, Olivia was totally the boss of him and he did as she told him, climbing the stairs up to a narrow second floor and the bathroom at the top of the steps. It was old-fashioned, covered in pink hexagonal tiles that matched the sink and the tub with the black-and-white-and-purple shower curtain.
He imagined Ryan growing up in this bathroom, doing her hair, putting on lip gloss. Figuring out her beauty. He wanted to hear about it, about all of it. Those stories she told him, they were funny and sweet, but there was a darker side, and he wanted that too.
All of her, that was what he wanted.
Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop) Page 28