by Ren Benton
“I thought, as long as I was in the neighborhood, I’d see how you’re doing. I heard about Holly. Nothing confidential,” he hastened to assure her.
“My life is an open book.” Roger might be too professional to blab her secrets, if she had any, but Jen had a friend’s access to the same information about the situation and no prohibition about sharing it with another friend. She finally defeated the lock. “And this door is an open door. Do you want to come in and watch me rearrange my purse, or would you rather run back down the block to where the real action is?”
He shuffled his feet as if neither option appealed enough to move him from her stoop. “I want you to know that if you need my help, the offer is still open.”
She paused half in and half out of the house. “What offer is that?”
“We can still get married.”
What the hell was the government putting in the water? “Get in here. I have something to explain to you.”
She led him to the kitchen and commanded him with a point to sit. She dumped her purse on the table and began sorting the contents into two piles. “Jared, you are a great guy. Reliable, trustworthy, loyal—”
“Why do those never sound like good qualities when any woman other than my mother says them?”
She gave him a commiserating smile. “Do you ever want to say, ‘You take that back!’, like you’ve been grievously insulted?”
“Occasionally.”
Her wallet went in the keep pile, but the extra shoes could stay out for the rest of the day. “You’re good looking and make a lot of money, which no one could find fault with.”
“Thank you. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Her smaller purse-within-a-purse could stay behind, but one never knew when a diaper might save a life. “But I hate the person I become when I’m with you.”
“And now we’ve taken a turn for the worse. Ivy, you’re a wonderful woman.”
“That’s what I need to explain.” The keep pile seemed too large, given everything else she wanted to cram in her purse this time. Her mission might require supplemental baggage. “You think I’m pleasant and undifficult. You have no idea that I have to stifle ninety-nine percent of what I’d like to say and do in order to maintain that illusion. And that’s not something you ever asked me to do. I’m not blaming you or anyone else because I’ve made myself a prisoner in my own skin. But I am not that woman you think is so wonderful, and if I pretend to be for one more second, I will snap and make the villain in the next Marvel movie look well adjusted by comparison.”
The poor dear had never seen a superhero movie and had no idea what she was talking about. “I never expected you to be perfect. I just want someone who can run our lives while I concentrate on my career, like Jen does for Roger.”
“Given that Roger would be homeless right now if not for the kindness of friends, you might want to reevaluate that relationship ideal.” He looked so lost and confused, she felt sorry for him. “I’m not going to tell you no woman is interested in managing a workaholic husband, but I’d worry about you if you found one. Please don’t marry anyone for your job. You are a good man. You deserve so much better than that, someone genuinely wonderful who you’re excited to be with.”
“I’m excited to be with you.”
She got a wry crick in her neck. “Really? Because while claiming you’re excited, you sound more like you’re making polite chitchat with a stranger as you slowly decompose in line at the DMV. That’s how we’ve always spoken to each other. Is that how you want to spend the next sixty years of your life?” She didn’t wait for him to say that would be suitably inoffensive for his taste. “I think, when you find the right woman, you will want more from her and your priorities will change. When your eyes meet and you tingle all over and you touch her hand and never want to let it go, being in a position where you have to introduce her to your wife could put a damper on your relationship.”
“Both of them, I would imagine.” He handed her the tampon case that had rolled across the table toward him. “I never knew you craved excitement.”
“Neither did I.” But now that she was a wild woman, she lived for excitement. Accordingly, she took a chance that the morning-after pill wouldn’t make her period early and daringly tossed the tube into the leave pile.
“Is it because of that guy you were with at your parents’ house?”
“It’s because of me.” Griff happened to be in the right place at the exact moment she was ready to make a change, but the change would have happened even without his help. Less sweeping and emotionally charged, surely, but equally irrevocable. “I have never been destined for a life of great adventure. That sounds like a trip to the emergency room waiting to happen, honestly, so I’ll pass. But I want to be excited about the life I do have. I want to be excited about the person I share it with, and I want him to be excited to be with me.”
As Griff had tried to explain to Roger, that excitement wasn’t about danger. Life had more ups and downs than a roller coaster. Whether they inspired exhilaration or fear depended on the strength of one’s security harness. Ivy’s faith in hers was absolute, and like every nauseatingly happy person, she wanted the same for everyone she knew. “You deserve someone who’s excited about you and someone who excites you, too, not someone you settle for because she’s familiar and available when you get to the page in your planner marked ‘Time to Get Married.’ There is no time for that unless it’s the right time with the right person.”
Jared looked at her as if they’d never met. Indeed, there were many parts of her to which he had never been introduced. “Who do you become when you’re with him?”
Griff gave her freedom to explore who she wanted — or needed — to be at any given moment and accepted whatever that was as part of her. Then he assembled all those parts into one beautiful whole, strong and enduring enough to hold his love.
“I’m myself with him. That’s all.”
And for once in her life, that was enough.
Youthful shouts led Ivy to her parents’ back yard. Blake, Heather, and Lily were playing a netless solitaire version of badminton, the victor to be determined by who got the most birdies stuck on the roof. Heather had a narrow lead over Blake, while Lily enthusiastically swatted her birdies into the late-blooming tulips lining the foundation.
Her parents kept score from a pair of lawn chairs in the shade of a maple tree. Cole dozed on his grandfather’s chest.
Ivy waved to the kids and sat cross-legged in the grass near Byron’s chair. “I went to see Holly.”
Violet sighed gustily, her typical reaction to mention of her firstborn. Her words had been used up long ago.
Byron stroked the baby’s back. “How is she?”
“Sober. Otherwise, about how you’d expect. She agreed to give me custody.” Despite Holly’s agitation at the end of the meeting, she would do whatever her lawyer said would benefit her.
“Let me guess.” Violet found some words to aim at her youngest child. “All you have to do is take out a second mortgage to pay her bail.”
“No, Mom. She wants to stay there.” No doubt part of the cooperative-and-repentant scheme cooked up by her lawyer to get a lighter sentence, but regardless of the reason, Holly’s expenses would be covered by someone other than Ivy from now on.
“You have to stop taking care of her. If she didn’t get help all the time, she’d grow up and take responsibility for herself.”
Ivy stared at her mother. “Are you blaming me for the way she is?”
“Of course I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying if she didn’t know you’ll always clean up after her, she wouldn’t make such a mess.”
In other words, I’m blaming you.
Byron frowned at his wife. “Vi. No one is more Holly’s victim than Ivy.”
“That’s her choice. She knows how Holly is, but when she sees her coming, she opens the door and asks how she can be of service this time.”
Like a doormat.
/> Their mother, in contrast, protected herself from Holly by barricading the door, shutting Holly out of her life when she became too unruly to manage as a teenager.
Ivy loved her mother. If they weren’t related and met socially, she would like Violet as a person. But as a parent, she was... indifferent. She performed the duties laid out in the job description, but she handled children as if she were defusing bombs and expected an explosion if she touched the wrong wire. Ivy had always tiptoed around her, trying to appear harmless, but her mother remained distant and wary.
Holly never tiptoed. She exploded, making sure ignoring her was more work than giving her the attention she craved.
Neither approach changed their mother, just as neither approach changed Holly.
Ivy could work with whatever resources she had, but she had to know what they were first. “Will you turn your back on me when I need help, too?”
Violet made a dismissive noise. “You won’t need help. You always manage on your own.”
She had no choice but to manage. Her mother didn’t encourage weakness by offering support, and her sister had nothing to offer anyone. If not for Byron, Ivy would have been fending for herself since she was four years old.
While she could take care of herself now, herself was the least of her responsibilities. “I was able to manage, barely, when I had the kids part time. After three weeks of twenty-four seven care, I’m exhausted and scared out of my mind. I can’t imagine how anyone could do it alone.”
Violet’s expression steeled. “Don’t try to make me feel sorry for your sister. Nobody made her have all those babies. She made it hard for herself.”
She should have stopped after two ill-advised pregnancies by worthless men, like their mother. “And now I’ve made it hard for myself by taking responsibility for them when nobody made me do it, so to hell with me, too?”
Violet flawlessly imitated Jared’s looking-at-a-stranger expression.
Ivy couldn’t afford to tiptoe anymore. The sooner everyone got used to it, the better. “You’ve been saying Holly needs to grow up since she was a kid, and it hasn’t happened yet. She’s not going to grow up. She can’t grow up. I grew up for both of us. I’ve gotten old while the two of you try to teach other some lesson using me and four children — five if you count the one she gave away before I was old enough to take on that responsibility — as your weapons. Forget about what Holly should do. I am grown up. I am responsible. And I am telling you I need your help. These kids, who have already grown up more than they should, need your help.”
Byron rested a hand on her head, just as he had at their introduction all those years ago, when he’d come to the aid of a broken-down station wagon bearing a mother, two little girls, and their meager worldly possessions away from the life they’d fled. He’d protected her from petty tyrants ever since. “We’re here for you, baby. The whole family is here for you, whatever you need. What can we do to help?”
Her chest tightened painfully. She had a network. Time to use it. “Can you watch the kids a little longer? I have to talk to a guy I know.”
22
“Told you. He’s moping.”
Griff taped the end of a sheet of bubble wrap swaddling one of Violet Miller’s curio cabinets. He ignored Wes and Mason gossiping about his emotional state.
“He’s not moping. He’s refusing to be baited by idiots.” Neera shook out one of the moving blankets Wes had brought at Griff’s request. The husband-and-wife act had come along as a bonus. “What is this stain?”
Wes didn’t bother looking up from his phone. “It’s definitely not the stuff dead bodies leak when thrown in the trunk of a car.”
The irregular blotch suddenly looked a lot like the silhouette of scrunched-up body. Griff shrugged at Neera.
She responded in kind. “I suppose the plastic will protect your masterpiece from Exhibit A in Wesley’s trial.” She wrapped the blanket around the cabinet and held it in place while Griff taped and the other two men lounged in lawn chairs like bums. For his ears alone, she whispered, “You’re never this quiet. Are you okay?”
He cut the tape and smoothed the end in place. “I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
He used the rip of tape peeling off the roll as an excuse not to answer.
The noise covered whatever sound made Wes crane his neck toward the driveway. “Hey, hey, if it isn’t Miller-comma-Ivy.”
The tape dispenser squirted out of Griff’s fist and bounced toward the unprotected glass of the second cabinet.
Neera squeaked and chased it.
He didn’t watch the outcome.
Ivy stepped into his garage, her purse bulging at her side as if she’d stuffed one of the kids in it. “You’re about forty years younger than you sound on the phone, Wes. Has anyone ever told you it’s creepy to greet strange women as if you’ve already compiled a dossier?”
“Twice in a slow week.”
“And that’s the least creepy thing he does.” Mase leaned over the arm of his chair to offer his hand for shaking. “I’m Mase. That’s my lovely wife, Neera.”
Neera pointed at Ivy with the tape dispenser. “I know you.”
Ivy nodded. “I sold you a wedding dress.”
Neera chuffed. “You backed my mother down from a traditional Hindu ceremony. I would have married you if the invitations hadn’t already been printed with this goon’s name on them.”
Ivy met Griff’s eyes for the first time, hers crinkling with amusement at another near miss, before veering back to Neera. “Do you know about the donkey?”
“What donkey?”
Mase turned on Griff. “Dude!”
This time, it wasn’t his fault. “Selena brought it up.”
Mase cradled his head in his hands. “Oh god, she swore she’d find a way to get around that promise not to tell my future wife.”
Neera looked at each of them in turn. “Seriously, what donkey?”
Mase decided not to suffer alone. He tugged at Ivy’s sleeve like a tattling child. “Do you know about Griff’s tattoo?”
Big brown eyes swerved back toward him. “That’s come up previously, and I have questions.”
If she meant to stay, he’d tell her anything. He would spend the rest of his life telling her every stupid story he had.
Wes stole her attention. He was welcome to it, since Griff was too choked up to make the most of it at the moment. “How’s your sister?”
“She’s an asshole.”
Wes knuckled an imaginary tear from his eye. “I’m so proud of you.”
Neera reminded them of her presence. “What donkey?”
“Go away.” Griff was looking at Ivy when he said it — because why would he look at anything else when she was in his sight? — and her startled expression told him his meaning had been unclear. “Not you. I want you to stay.”
Wes made himself more comfortable. “I was promised dinner and a show in exchange for moving blankets. I’m not leaving two minutes into the first act.”
Ivy tried her hand at clearing the rabble, starting with Wes. “I don’t suppose I could intimidate you into retreating.”
“With what, tiger, a strongly worded email?”
She moved on to Neera. “Can I appeal to you, one woman to another, for some privacy?”
Neera reserved her compassion for her patients. “I’m a first responder. I have to be on site in case somebody’s heart stops.”
Ivy barely glanced at Mase. “And you’re going to want to put off explaining the donkey you went to jail for, so I won’t even ask you.”
Mase glared at Griff for introducing this plague unto him. “I hate her so much.”
He loved her. They all did. She fit in perfectly, and they would have so many good times together if she wasn’t here to rip Griff’s heart out of his chest.
Her attention finally returned to him. “I wasn’t prepared for public humiliation, but I suppose it will make me a better person.” She took a deep breath and a
djusted the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “I’ve come to negotiate.”
His heart did something rhythmically unhealthy, so maybe it was a good idea to have a nurse standing by. It took restraint he hadn’t known he possessed to avoid grabbing her and agreeing to every condition she wanted to impose if it meant she would stay. “I stated my terms at our last meeting. You have the floor.”
“I’ve prepared a presentation.”
“PowerPoint,” Wes piped up. “Never leave home without—”
A swat from Neera shut him up.
Ivy stepped closer. “Manipulatives. No slides.”
“Good. I’m a hands-on kind of guy.”
The sudden pink in her cheeks had him aching to hear her comeback, but as usual, she did the unexpected.
She looked past him. Her eyes widened, and she cried, “Griffin!”
She dropped her bag. Something inside shattered upon impact.
Griff spun around, expecting to see a guy in a hockey mask driving a screwdriver through his torso, but there was nothing there but the unwrapped curio cabinet.
She brushed past him, the instant of contact with his arm zinging through his entire body. “Oh, look what you made.” She extended her hand to touch the carved border running along one side but snatched her fingers away before making contact.
He picked up her bag. The jingle of broken glass prompted him to check the bottom for leakage — none was evident. “You can touch it. It won’t break.”
Transporting the cabinets from his garage to the Miller household might alter that outlook, but that’s why he hired professionals to do the heavy lifting.
She traced the carving with a fingertip more delicate than his artistry. Violets, lilies, heather, holly, snapdragons, chrysanthemums, nettles, and prickly pear climbed toward the ceiling. A vine of ivy wove through them all.
“I wanted to get a couple lines of Byron in there somewhere to represent the whole family, but his stuff is kind of gloomy.”
“Dad will understand. He prefers Robert Frost, anyway.” When she looked at him, her eyes were full of unshed tears. “I told you it would be perfect.”