“Yeah? Did she roll her eyes a lot, or did you bribe her, or . . . ?”
“I just asked her nice. Told her exactly what I told you—that it’s important to me that you two find your way to acting civil.” He smirked. “Just had to ask her like, fifteen times, that’s all.”
I sank back in my chair, palming my warm mug. “Okay, then. Guess it’s a date.”
“Good.”
“But I still think it’s going to be a disaster, so you better show me one heck of a good time before tonight.”
* * *
Eric did show me a good time. We drove around his hometown to see the high school he’d dropped out of, the places he used to like hanging out at, a drive-by tour of his old apartments. Nothing thrilling, but it was nice to see all this stuff. He’d been a mystery to me for such a large portion of our acquaintance, even our courtship . . . It was cool to lay my eyes on tangible proof of an ordinary life. And fun to try to picture a younger, more slender version of the man I’d come to love; I imagined his teenage self navigating these streets, or sitting in a booth in the K-Ville Grille, where we got our burgers. After lunch we picked up groceries for Paula, and just strolling down the supermarket aisle with him felt good. It felt like a Christmas present, almost, this little peek at what a life with this man might look like.
Though hopefully our future life might not feature quite so much ice and slush.
Paula made a big, awesome spread of rice and beans and beef and tortillas for dinner, then we sat down in front of the TV for the night. Or Eric and his mom did, as Kris and I had big plans. Girls’ night out! Cringe.
At quarter to eight I bundled up for the peace summit. It was crazy-cold out, but I forewent my wool scarf, wanting to wear the tinselly one Eric had given me.
When we crunched down the walkway to the truck, Kris let me sit in the middle of the bench seat. Weird. Very weird, me the nervous meat in this angst sandwich. Eric switched on the radio, and none of us said anything for the ten-minute drive, not until we pulled into the parking lot of a one-story roadhouse-style bar called The Main Drag.
Then Eric commented, “Busy for a school night,” and pulled over to the side, truck idling.
“Here goes nothing,” Kris said with a grunt, pushing the door open.
I followed.
Eric rolled down his window and lay his forearm along the frame. “Be good.”
“Perfects angels,” his sister sang snidely, leading the way, me following.
“No liquor, Kris,” Eric called. “You know how you get.”
“Whatever you say, Dad.”
I could about hear his sigh from twenty paces. “Call me when you’re ready to get picked up.”
I offered him a wave and a skeptical smile then followed Kris inside the bar.
The place was way nicer than I’d guessed from the facade. Not classy, but cool, with a kind of saloon vibe, bustling but not rowdy. Though it was still early.
“How’s this for a cozy little chat?” Kris asked dryly, waving to a small booth across from the center of the bar.
“Works for me.”
She stayed standing as I slid in behind the table.
“What’re you drinking?” she asked.
I didn’t feel like explaining my usual cocktail to her. “Light beer. Bud or Coors or whatever. Thanks.”
I watched her at the bar as I unbuttoned my coat. The faded redhead behind the taps greeted her warmly, like Kyle did with me. Bartenders like us, I thought, scribbling it down on my short mental list of things we had in common. Bartenders like us. Men have hurt us. We both love Eric Collier. Please let that be enough to get us through this perverse playdate.
Kris returned with a pitcher and two glasses. I poured and she unsnapped her puffy down coat, shoving it into the corner of the padded bench. She wedged herself in after it, her legs so long I felt our knees brush and angled mine to the side.
“So,” she said after a deep drink, folding her arms on the Formica.
“So.”
She smiled tightly. “You hate me, don’t you?”
“A little, yeah.”
“I’m not your biggest fan, either.”
I palmed my glass in both hands but didn’t drink yet. “I don’t know what he expects to happen tonight. But I don’t want to fight with you again. It’s not going to get us anyplace.”
“What should we talk about instead?” she asked, not quite snarky but a touch too sweet. “Clothes? Boys?”
“I don’t know who you think I am,” I said evenly, “but you’ve got me wrong.”
“I bet you were prom queen and worked summers at the malt shop.”
I shook my head. “I tutored. And I went to homecoming, but I wasn’t queen by a long shot . . . And it wasn’t exactly romantic. My date got so drunk he threw up in my parents’ car when I drove him home, then he told me one of the cheerleaders once gave him and his friend head in the school library.”
My deadpan delivery brought the shadow of a smile to her face. “Classy.”
I nodded. “He was, actually, compared to my college boyfriend.” Without meaning to, I gave my formerly bad ear a rub.
“He the one you threatened to sic Eric on?”
I smiled, embarrassed. “Yeah. That’s the one.”
Kris pursed her lips, gaze dropping to her glass. “I shouldn’t have mocked you like I did, last night. About that. Eric called me on it today.”
I couldn’t help but notice she hadn’t actually apologized, but it felt like progress.
I shrugged. “You were pretty drunk.”
“Was your ex pretty drunk, when he treated you bad?”
“Yeah.”
Her brows rose. “Not much of an excuse, is it?”
I shook my head. “No. Popular one, though.”
She smirked and held up her glass to that, then took a swallow. I did the same, then laughed as I set my beer down, registering what we’d just drank to.
“That might be the most ironic toast possible. Cheers to the bad decisions people make when they drink.”
“It’s par for the course, when you’re young and stupid,” she said thoughtfully. “Bit pathetic when you get to be my age.”
Again, a non-apology. Eric must have really worked her over that afternoon. I softened a little in return.
“I was stone-cold sober when I said that psycho stuff to my ex. It was like ten a.m., in the Gap. With Christmas music playing. In the underwear section.”
She snorted at that, dropping her head then coming up grinning. “Oh fuck, that is too good.”
I laughed, studying the foam lingering around the edges of my beer. “His girlfriend was in the changing room. God knows what he told her about me, after I ran off.”
Kris shrugged her broad shoulders. “Fuck them.”
Now that deserved a toast.
We chatted for a long time about high school—the scandals of forgotten friends, the reputations of notorious classmates. Who the kings and queens of our respective schools had been, and how sad it was that those had probably been the peaks of their lives, everything after a downhill slide.
After perhaps thirty minutes of that and two pints apiece, we fell quiet. I turned memories over in my mind. All the things I’d put up with, when I’d been younger. The things I’d shut out. The things I’d let people get away with. Then I thought of Eric.
“Your brother told me what you did for him, when he was a teenager,” I said quietly. “Scaring him away from that girl who ended up being pregnant.”
She shook her head. “Poor boys—they stand no chance. I saw a tornado tearing toward him at a hundred miles an hour, with that girl. All he saw was a long pair of legs in a short skirt. Way I ran her off, you’d think she was a bear. But I’d just lost my son, not even a year before. I was a bear, myself. A mama bear, and Eric
feels like my kid, sometimes. Especially back then.”
I was surprised to hear her bring up her child. The way Eric had spoken about it, and finding the boy missing from the family snapshots, I’d assumed it was verboten.
“When I looked through your mom’s photo album,” I said slowly, then trailed off, nervous.
“What?”
I met her stare and ripped the scab off. “There weren’t any photos of you and your son.”
She blinked. To my surprise and cautious relief, her eyes didn’t glow with anything resembling anger, but rather went a touch glassy and far away. I’d seen her brother’s do just the same, whenever I’d pushed him toward ground he didn’t feel like retreading.
After a long silence, she said, “I hate that she does that.”
Confused, I frowned. “Does what?”
Kristina took a long drink, draining her glass. “She keeps them separate. All the pictures of me, pregnant, and all the pictures of Danny.”
“Danny.”
She nodded then signaled to the bartender for another pitcher. “Named for his father,” she told me. “Shows how dumb I was at seventeen,” she added with a wry smile, “thinking that’d get him interested in being the kid’s dad. He was twenty-five going on twelve, that asshole.”
Good God, a man old enough to be in grad school poaching from Kernsville High? But I could imagine Eric’s reply if he were watching me process the scandal. Just how it goes, around here.
We thanked the bartender when the pitcher was delivered and Kristina sent her off with a twenty. She refilled our glasses, keeping her attention on her drink even after she’d set the pitcher aside. “My mom has all the photos of Danny in this special album—all baby-blue satin with a lacy border and shit. Separate from everything else. Drives me nuts, like he wasn’t a part of it all. All our lives, back then.”
Her eyes were soft and sad, and I thought maybe she was tipsy. I knew I was. If the options with Kris were angry-drunk or weepy-drunk, I was waving pom-poms for the latter. And I was starting to feel sentimental, myself. My posture was slumped and slack, my emotions loose and wide-open, dandelion fluff. It felt good. I hoped Kris wouldn’t turn on me, bat me hard and send all those vulnerable wisps flying.
“Maybe your mom needs to keep them separate,” I offered, “so she can visit those memories when she’s prepared to.”
She swallowed a deep slug of beer, nodding. “I know, I know . . . I get that. But it’s been forever. I mean, fuck. Danny’d be turning nineteen this March, if he’d lived. Nineteen. Older than I was when I had him. He’d be out of high school, but she still can’t remember him the way I do. You couldn’t keep that kid out of anything—wanted to be the center of it all.”
I smiled, her fond grin infectious.
“I wish she’d remember him that way,” Kristina said. “Folded in with the rest of our family’s memories. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had good times. And that kid . . . He made me feel so goddamn rich, while he was around.”
“Yeah?”
She nodded, still not looking at me. “Yeah. Most beautiful thing I ever called mine. And sweet—don’t even know where he got that. Looked just like Eric, when Eric was little. You put their baby pictures side by side and you’d swear they were twins. Big brown eyes, mess of curly hair.” She laughed. “Big fucking heads. Walking around looking like lollipops, with those big heads on those skinny bodies.”
“Is that why you’re so . . . protective of your brother?” I asked. “Why you’re afraid of him taking up with some girl who’s not good enough for him . . .”
She finally met my eyes. “I got every reason to feel that way about my brother. ’Cause he reminds me of the son I lost? Maybe. ’Cause he held my baby more than any other man ever did, while Danny was with us—way more than my son’s father did, more than my own dad did. ’Cause he’s been the one man in my life who ever put me first, and the only one who stuck around.”
A shiver moved through me, like someone had cracked a window at my back. God help me, I finally understood her. I sipped my drink, let her go on.
“Maybe ’cause I half raised Eric,” she said thoughtfully, “the years when our mom worked two jobs. Maybe because he returned the favor, and stepped up as the father we hardly saw, when I needed him to. Maybe ’cause I was sick of watching everyone around us throwing their lives away on the wrong people. I couldn’t pinpoint it for you. But I got a hundred good guesses.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. A lot of sense . . . I’d take back some of the things I said to you last night, if I could. Knowing all that.”
She shrugged, evading my eye contact once more but looking as relaxed as I’d yet seen her. “I was hard on you.” She laughed softly, and for the brief moment, with her cheeks rounded and her eyes crinkling, her mean face was pretty. “I’m hard on everybody. And I know I hold on too tight to him, I do. It’s hard not to, when he’s the one reliable handhold I got, you know? Or maybe you don’t know.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. But I can hear what you’re saying.”
“I’m glad you don’t know,” she said, meeting my eyes for just a second. “I want my brother to be with someone who wants him, but doesn’t need him. You know? Listen to me, sounding like a goddamn feminist. But yeah . . . someone who’s not so dependent on him that they can’t step back and see all the good in him, I guess. Fuck if I even know what I’m trying to say. Think I may be drunk.”
“Me, too. And I know what you mean. And I do see all that stuff in your brother. In fact, the things I’m the most uneasy about with him are probably the things those other girls might want him for. The protectiveness, I guess. The way he puts his loved ones almost too high above himself. And his freedom.”
She nodded, brow furrowed. “You mean me.”
“Not exclusively. He’s shown that side to me, too. It scares me so much, knowing if anything happened to me and he thought it was his job to go after somebody . . .” Knowing how for that bright, burning moment, face-to-face with Justin, I’d wanted to exploit that side of Eric. “Knowing how guilty I’d feel if he wound up back in prison, over me. He’s so black-and-white about some things. I wish I could make him understand that having him in my day-to-day life is so much more important to me than his payback. But he doesn’t want to hear that. He thinks it’s all he has to give.”
She smiled, looking guilty. “Can’t imagine who taught him that.”
I softened further. “I think it’s just who he is, too.” It was in his upbringing, in his genes, in his blood. In the water, around here. Like Kristina’s reliance and protectiveness, there was no single culprit to blame, merely a fact demanding acceptance.
“But you see other things,” she prompted.
I nodded. “I see lots. He’s maybe the gentlest man I’ve ever met . . . which sounds crazy, considering where we met, and how he got there. He’s the most romantic man I’ve ever known, by far.”
Her eyebrows rose at that, telling me that just as I’d envied their bond, feeling like it was out of my reach, there were facets to her brother that only I got to see.
“That’s plenty of information, right there,” she teased, halting my squishy inventory with a raised palm. But I sensed a pride in her, too, as she realized the man she’d helped raise had turned out that way—kind and romantic.
“He got me this, for Christmas.” I toyed with the end of my new scarf, silver strands glinting under the low lights.
She smiled. “It’s pretty. He’s got way better taste than me.”
I let the tail of the scarf fall away and took a deep breath. “I love your brother. A lot.”
Her lips pursed, but she nodded. “I believe that.”
“I want what’s best for him, too. Only the things I want for him look different than the things you want. You want to protect him from getting used by the wrong kind of women. I
want to protect him from getting put away again, when he’s got so much to offer. Not just what he offers me, but what he can offer with his talents, and his hard work. What he could offer as a father someday, maybe. What he can offer you and your mom, as a free man—just his support and his company and his help. We’re both afraid of him wasting his potential. I think we can at least agree on that.”
“Yeah,” she said heavily. “Yeah, we can. But he’s a Collier. What you and I want won’t mean shit, if he’s got his mind made up.”
“Do you think you could let him go, though? Just on this one issue. Give him permission to stay out of this stuff with your . . . your ex, or your attacker, however you think of him.”
She stared into the middle distance beyond my shoulder. “That’s like asking me to face down a bull with no sword.”
“I bet.”
We went silent, sipping our beers, watching the people gathered before the bar. It was getting busy. I excused myself to use the ladies’ room, and Kris did the same after I returned. When she tried to give me a refill I covered my glass. “I think three’s plenty for me.”
She eyed her own glass and seemed to concur. She sat up tall and twisted in her seat to address the two men in the next booth. “Hey, Jim.”
The one named Jim turned, looking delighted when Kris handed them our half-full pitcher. That left just her glass to drain, and the conversation felt complete. We’d reached more than the truce I’d skeptically agreed to attempt. Not quite a bond, but maybe a seed capable of growing one. Maybe with a little nurturing—or the odd pitcher—every time I saw her, it could slowly blossom into something warm and sturdy.
“Shall I call Eric?” I asked, fishing out my phone. “Get us our ride home?”
She nodded and drained her glass. “Yeah, sounds good. I need a smoke. Feel free to wait inside.”
As she bundled up, I dialed Eric.
“Hey.” Man, one word and that voice had me as buzzed as those three pints.
“Hey. We’re ready to get picked up.”
“Cool. Give me twenty minutes? I’m trying to solve this thing with my mom’s DVD player for her.”
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