by Claire Adams
I looked up into his brown eyes as I felt the strength of his arm holding me against his firm body. I gasped as he lowered his head and quickly brushed his lips across mine before setting me securely on my feet and backing away. I stared at him with wide eyes, unsure whether to slap him or grab the front of his shirt and drag him back toward me so that I could kiss him again, this time harder.
"That's what I thought," he grinned as he turned and headed back inside without another word.
I stood there, staring at the empty space, wondering if I'd imagined it all or if Jack Yates had actually kissed me. If so, what I was going to do about it.
Chapter Seven
Jack
I'd walked away from the moment with Leah Walsh wondering why she hadn't given in to my seduction. Granted she was not the usual type of woman I pursued, but there was something incredibly sexy about the way she stood up to me and laughed at my lame pickup line when most women would have swooned. I liked her honesty and the way she'd felt, pressed against my chest. But I also knew that she worked for my father's company, and that our little encounter would be limited to the flirtation at my father's wake. I was disappointed, but I told myself that there would be others. There always were.
After the wake, Jimmy drove my mother and me back to the house in Brooklyn. We both spent the drive staring out opposite windows. Fighting back tears, my mother sighed and reached out to take my hand while I simply watched the familiar landscape pass by. I wondered how much longer I'd have to endure this hell.
"I've got your room ready for you," my mother said as she unlocked the door and turned on the entry lights. My brother and his wife pulled up in the driveway several minutes later, and I could hear them open the door and send their two small children running toward the kitchen.
"Grandma! Grandma!" the small boy shouted as he threw his arms around my mother's waist and hugged her tightly.
"Well, now who is this?" my mother said smiling down at him as she patted his head. "I don't think I remember you. You've gotten so tall!"
"Grandma, it's me! Joey!" the boy laughed loudly as he hugged her tighter.
"Ah yes, Joey. I believe I remember you," she grinned as she bent down and kissed the top of his head.
"Who is that?" Joey asked pointing at me.
"That's your Uncle Jack," Lincoln's wife, Jessie, said as she bent and picked up the little girl who'd been lost in the action and was now crying. Jessie smoothed the child's hair and soothed her saying, "Don't cry, Mimi. Uncle Jack is Daddy's brother. See? He looks like Daddy!"
"Hello," I said holding out a hand to Joey. "It's nice to meet you."
"You're tall," Joey said, staring up at me and completely ignoring my hand. "How did you get to be so tall?"
"Dunno, I grew, I guess," I said looking down at him. "How did you get to be so short?"
"It's because I haven't finished growing yet!" Joey shouted. "I'm not done growing! I need more nutrients!"
"Where did he pick that up?" I asked my mother. "Kind of precocious."
"Stop it, Jack," she said. "Joey goes to a Montessori School. They teach them advanced concepts according to their own learning styles."
"Wow, guess we missed out on a few things, eh Linc?" I said, looking over at my brother who practically looked murderous.
"Can it, Jack," he said, "Hey, Joey, I bet Grandma has some cookies out in the dining room for you. Want to go check?"
"May I have a glass of milk to go with them?" Joey asked.
"What's the magic word, Joey?" his mother said in a sing-song voice, making me want to vomit. The whole family routine was already getting on my nerves, and this little act was the last straw.
"Cookie!" Joey bellowed in a voice that sounded like it was designed to shake the foundation of the house.
"No, that's definitely not the magic word," Lincoln said. "Try it again."
"Linc, ease up," Jessie said, shooting him an irritated look. "He's 4."
"Never too early to learn proper manners," Lincoln shot back in an equally irritated tone.
"Come with me, Joey," my mother said, taking the child's hand. "I'll take care of the cookies and the milk."
"Thank you, Gamma," Joey said with solemn sincerity. My mother leaned down and hugged him tightly before leading him into the dining room.
"Long time no see, Jack," Jessie said as she held her daughter and smoothed her hair. The child had stopped crying and was staring up at me with wide, blue eyes rimmed in red. "How have you been?"
"Not bad, Jessie," I said. "Not bad at all. But then again, being away from this place often does a person good."
"Dammit, Jack," Lincoln said throwing his hands up in the air in premature defeat. "Can't you ever just let it go? I mean, seriously. Our father hasn't been dead two days, and you're already digging at old wounds."
"Who says they're old, brother dear?" I tossed back at him as I opened the cupboards, searching for a bottle of something that could take the edge off.
"It's out in the living room," Lincoln said pointing toward the drink cart my mother had set up in anticipation of guests. I walked to it and poured myself a healthy glass of scotch as Lincoln muttered, "Can't do anything in this family without drinking."
"And why, exactly, do you think that is?" I asked as I raised the glass to my lips and drank deeply. I had no desire to get into this mess with my brother, but if he was going to drag me into it, I wasn't going to fight him too hard.
"You haven't been home in almost a decade, and you're the one who is complaining?" Lincoln hissed as he poured himself a drink, following my lead. "You escaped. You're the lucky one. Why are you so resentful?"
"Why am I resentful?" I hissed as I moved closer to him so that my mother wouldn't hear us. "You've got to be fucking kidding me, right?"
"No, I don't get it," Lincoln muttered. "You got out and never looked back. I had to stay here with him. I got trapped in this hell hole, and now you come back acting all victimized by a situation you left almost a decade ago?"
I opened my mouth to argue with him, but my mother intervened before I could say any more. The look on her face told me that she wasn't going to allow this discussion to take place in front of the children.
"Do you boys want some of these cookies and a glass of milk," my mother asked. There was a sternness to her voice, and I knew better than to challenge her.
"I'd love some," Lincoln said, looking over at Joey who sat coloring on one of the big sheets of butcher paper that my mother kept stocked just for his visits. "I'm sure Uncle Jack would love some, too. Right?"
"Can't think of anything I'd like more," I said with a fake bright smile. My mother gave us both a warning look and then went into the kitchen to pour the milk.
"After the funeral, we'll meet with the lawyer and settle this," Lincoln said.
"And once that's over, I'm out of here for good," I said. "I want nothing more to do with the mess that man created."
"So, you're going to leave us behind again?" Lincoln said. His face showed anger, but his eyes were deep wells of pain. "Great. Just fucking great."
"Gamma! Daddy said a bad word!" Joey yelled.
"I'm sure your daddy didn't mean to say a bad word, did he?" my mother said as she carried a tray of full milk glasses into the dining room and set it on the table. "Did he?"
"No, Mother, I certainly did not," Lincoln said bowing his head slightly. I caught Jessie's disapproving look out of the corner of my eye and knew that there was something else going on.
Lincoln took a glass of milk and one of the cookies my mother offered, and shot me a look that let me know this was far from over.
*
After Lincoln and Jessie and the kids finally left, I said goodnight to my mother and went up to the room she'd assigned me. It had once been the room that Lincoln and I shared, but after we'd gone to college and moved out, my mother had renovated and turned it into a permanent guest room.
I hated the room. It reminded me of an ice cream parlor, with the
peach striped wallpaper running halfway up the wall ending in cream wainscoting. The upper half of the walls was painted a frothy peach color, which matched the bedding and all of the accessories. The room made me feel like throwing up.
I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, trying to conjure the image of the room before its makeover—back when Lincoln and I had still been close.
We'd begged my parents to paint the walls navy blue so that we could hang bright, space-themed posters on the walls. We had ordered glow-in-the-dark stars from the back of a comic book and wanted to fix them to the ceiling. My father had ignored the requests until we finally drove him over the edge. He'd taken off his belt and punished us for having annoyed him then told us to take our request to our mother.
My mother's mouth had formed a thin, grim line when she saw what Father had done to us with his belt. She agreed to have the bedroom painted a dark blue. The painters came the next week and laid down tarps before they coated the walls in darkness. Lincoln and I had watched from the hallway as they worked, discussing the various ways we were going to arrange the posters and mapping out a pattern for the stars. The punishment had happened almost two weeks before, but Lincoln was still limping a little from it.
"You okay?" I asked as we descended the stairs in search of snacks in the kitchen.
"Yeah, I'm good," Lincoln said over his shoulder. "I just forgot not to stiffen my legs when he hit. It'll be fine in another few days."
I nodded and wondered why our father felt the need to punish us so severely over things that seemed so trivial. Once we'd gotten our snacks and taken them out to the patio, I worked up the courage to ask Lincoln.
"Why do you think Pop does what he does to us?" I asked as I took a bite of a peanut butter sandwich and followed it with a swig of milk.
"Dunno," Lincoln mumbled through his sandwich. He chewed for a few moments, swallowed, and said, "I think he's stressed out about something, and we're the way he works out that stress. Either that, or he's one sadistic son-of-a-bitch."
"What's sadistic?" I asked earnestly. As my older brother by two years, Lincoln was both my encyclopedia and dictionary.
"It means you like seeing other people in pain," he replied as he took another huge bite of his sandwich.
"Oh, yeah, that makes sense then," I said. "But he doesn't seem to be happier after he punishes us. Does that count?"
"It's not that it makes people happy, dummy," Lincoln said with a full mouth. "It's that he likes it."
"That's just weird," I said, popping the last bite into my mouth and chasing it with the last bit of milk. I liked it when things evened out just right.
"I didn't say it made sense," Lincoln said crossly. "I'm just saying …"
"Boys," my mother called from the kitchen window. "Did you leave this mess here for me to clean up, or were you planning on coming back and doing it yourselves?"
"We'll do it, Mother!" I yelled. "We were just really hungry."
"That's what I thought," she called. "I knew you didn't want your father to come home and discover your carelessness."
Lincoln and I looked at each other wide eyed as we quickly grabbed our dishes and headed inside to clean up the mess we'd made. By the time we were done, the painters had finished with our room and were cleaning up.
We surveyed the job in a state of awe as we looked at our plans for decorating the room. It was overwhelming to think that our vision of the room was about to become a reality. Lincoln stuck his hand out and touched the wall. When he drew it back, there was a print on the wall the size of his hand and his palm was covered in dark-blue paint.
With fear in my eyes, I looked at my brother who shrugged and stuffed his hand in his pocket.
"Dad's gonna kill you if he sees this," I whispered.
"Then we need to figure out a way that he doesn't see it, don't we?" Lincoln said in a way that struck me as oddly defiant. Up until then, we'd been partners in punishment, but Lincoln seemed to be rejecting that narrative. It seemed risky to me but, since he was the older wiser brother, I followed his lead and helped him plan how to hide the handprint.
Our plan had ultimately worked, and no one had been the wiser. However, Lincoln's pants had suffered the consequence of him shoving a handful of wet paint into the pocket, so he'd buried them in the bottom of his dresser drawer. We never spoke about it again.
Now, 20 years later, I opened my eyes and looked over at the wall where Lincoln's handprint had been and wondered how many layers of paint it had taken to cover the memories in this room—and how long it would take for me to leave the memories behind.
Chapter Eight
Leah
After the wake, I headed over to the office to take care of a few orders that were pending in our warehouse. I knew I didn't have to work. But I also knew that, death or not, customers were still waiting for their orders. Our ability to survive the loss of our leader was dependent on the rest of us doing our jobs. I waved to a few of the warehouse workers and handed over the orders that were waiting to be filled.
"Get this out as soon as you can, okay?" I said to the shift manager. "I know they know about Mr. Yates, but let's keep the orders rolling out as close to schedule as possible."
"Will do, boss!" Burt nodded as he took the paperwork and surveyed the order. "How was the end of the wake?"
"The usual: lots of crying and mourning and gossip," I said.
"That's how it always is, isn't it?" John said. "The rich go out rich, and the poor get tossed in a pauper's grave."
"I don't know about that," I said shaking my head. "I mean, Mr. Yates came from nothing and worked his way up, you know."
"Sure, but he had all the money in the world to go out on," Burt said as he checked off boxes on the order, making sure he had everything in the warehouse. "His family is going to be just fine, but what about the rest of us? Who's going to lead the company now? Are we going to lose our jobs when the new guy comes in and decides that what we've been doing no longer works?"
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?" I said, trying to stem the concern I heard in his voice. "I'm sure Mr. Yates had a good plan in place in case something like this happened. Let's give it a few weeks before we start to panic."
"I'm just saying that I've seen it before, and it doesn't end well for those of us on this end of the equation," Burt warned.
"I promise I'll let you know what's going on as soon as I hear something," I said, turning to go back to my office. I couldn't show it, but I was worried too.
I'd started working at Baby Steps in high school, and over the past decade I had worked my way up to warehouse manager. Mr. Yates had been a mentor and a father figure to me as I'd made my way through the ranks. I was now making a good living managing the warehouse. But I wondered how that would all change if a new CEO came in and took over.
I said goodbye to the warehouse staff and headed home to make dinner for Riley. When I got to the house, I found Mama asleep at the kitchen table with a half-empty bottle in front of her and a lit cigarette in the ashtray. This was getting dangerous, and I needed to do something about it.
"Riley!" I called up the stairs. "Are you home? What do you want for dinner?"
"Up here, Leah!" Riley called down. "Pizza!"
I grabbed the phone and dialed the pizza place around the corner and ordered a large to be delivered. Then I shook my mother awake and helped her to her bedroom.
"Mama, you have to get help," I whispered as I tucked the blankets in around her. "You can't go on like this."
"I'm fine, girl," my mother slurred. "The last thing I need is you nagging me about something you know nothing about."
"Mama, it's not safe anymore," I said as she looked at me with watery eyes. "I can't leave you here alone, and Riley is too young to take care of you. We have to change this."
"Get the hell out, and let me get some sleep," she said pushing me away as she rolled over and curled up. "I don't need your high and mighty attitude, missy."
"Mama
. . ." I pleaded to her back. I waited but soon heard the sound of her snoring. I knew she'd be out for hours.
I walked back into the kitchen and dropped down into the chair my mother had occupied. The walls were stained a dull yellow from her years of smoking. I knew that if the alcohol didn't get her, lung cancer would. The problem was I didn't know how to stop her.
"I'm sick of this," I said as tears welled up. "I'm sick of being everyone's keeper."
"What's wrong, Leah?" Riley said as she entered the kitchen, holding a sheet of paper. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," I said wiping my eyes and trying to put on a smile. Riley was having none of it.
"Gram's a pain in the ass, isn't she?" she said without judgment. "I get sick of her being drunk all the time."
"She's just sad," I said, trying not to unload my personal feelings on the twelve-year-old.
"Oh give me a break, Leah," she said, rolling her eyes dramatically. "Gram is a major downer, and I'm tired of her constantly being drunk. It's embarrassing. Why don't we just throw her in rehab and be done with it?"
"Riley, what's gotten into you?" I exclaimed.
"So, what are we going to do about it?" she asked. Her jaw was clenched, and I could see that she was itching for a fight. Sometimes she reminded me so much of Molly that it hurt. "I mean, this can't keep happening, can it?"
"I don't know," I sighed as my shoulders sagged. I leaned against the counter. "Gram won't go to rehab and I can't make her. She's never going to stop drinking, so I don't know what to do."
"One of the counselors at school gave me this," Riley said as she held out the sheet of paper. I took it and scanned the page. It was a detailed outline of how to stage an intervention.
"Did the counselor say anything about this?" I asked as my face burned with shame. Someone at school knew what was going on in this house, and they were reaching out to a twelve-year-old. How much worse could this get?