by Various
“Charlotte is running a fever.”
Pat made the announcement the moment she stepped into the cramped little house. That house was another thorn in Patricia’s side. She’d raised her daughter in a proper Southern home, and here she was, living in a two-bedroom lean-to stuffed floor to ceiling with what could only be described as “the bizarre.” Aimee was a fan of antiques, collecting everything from tarnished mirrors to oversized furniture, and that was fine and good; it was an aesthetic Aimee had picked up from her mother who, naturally, had impeccable taste. But Jack was partial to strange artifacts—ancient books and weird family portraits. He liked taxidermy, which struck Patricia as perverse and disgusting, gravitating to the likes of dancing squirrels and grinning cats. He owned a ferret mounted in a tiny pine coffin, a miniature bouquet of dried flowers clutched in its pint-sized paws. To Patricia’s horror, Charlie found the dead ferret—which she named Dead Frank—completely hilarious. It all made for a gruesome collection of home décor.
Patricia diverted her gaze from the stuffed fawn curled atop Jack’s crumbling piano to Nubs, the Winters’ shaggy black and white border collie. She wrinkled her nose in distaste as the dog approached her, taking a cautionary step backward in case the fleabag decided to jump all over her new skirt. But Charlotte distracted him when she slunk into the house, her eyes rimmed in a sickly red, dragging a bright yellow SpongeBob SquarePants backpack behind her. Nubs’s interest in Patricia was instantly withdrawn, and he trotted behind his usually exuberant owner like the loyal dog he was.
“She was complaining about feeling sick earlier,” Aimee said from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a gingham-checked dishtowel. “I figured she was just making it up.” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “Guess not.”
“You should get her to bed,” Patricia advised, approaching the kitchen counter to inspect her daughter’s in-process cooking.
Patricia Riley was practically a gourmet chef, an expert at the culinary arts. She’d once overheard Jack say that she fancied herself an expert at absolutely everything, especially the art of rearing other people’s children—an easy comment to ignore coming from a guy who collected voodoo dolls and skipped out on his family every other weekend.
“Give her some Tylenol and run a cool bath if her fever doesn’t break by tonight.”
“Will do,” Aimee said.
“And I’d consider keeping Abigail on the couch for the night if I were you,” Patricia continued. “Or you’ll have two sick kids instead of one.”
“Thanks for driving her,” Aimee said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about a car.”
“Well, I have my bridge club every Wednesday and the garden club on Fridays,” Pat said. “Your father and I have committed to those dance lessons, and those start next week. I can drive the girls every now and again, but I’m no chauffeur. A family can’t survive without a car.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Aimee said. “We’re only a few weeks from a down payment on a new car anyway. We’ll just settle on a cheaper model, get it sooner.”
“A new car?” Patricia raised an eyebrow. “You could probably buy two used ones for the same amount of money.”
“Jack has his heart set on a new one. He’s been talking about it for years now.”
“What for?” Patricia asked with a smirk. “So he can flip it down a few more roads?”
“It was an accident,” Aimee murmured. She had been hard on Jack herself and the guilt was creeping in. “We were planning on a new car and we’re going to get a new car. There’s no reason for us to change our plans.”
“Suit yourself,” Patricia said with a shrug. She knew the more she protested, the more satisfaction Jack would get from making such a ridiculous purchase. “But you’ll be wishing you listened to me,” she warned. “I’d have expected that by your age you’d have learned that your mother is always right.”
Aimee busied herself by chopping a stalk of celery a little too forcefully.
“Either way, I’ll check with Daddy to see if he’ll let you borrow the Oldsmobile for a few days. That is, if it’s OK with Jack.”
“If it’s OK with Daddy,” Aimee said. “We’d appreciate it.”
“I hope so,” Patricia said. “Because you know how much your father loves that car.”
Aimee nodded.
“Thanks, Momma,” she said. “And thanks again for taking Charlie today.”
Patricia forced a curt smile and pivoted on the balls of her feet, moving toward the front door.
“Don’t forget the Tylenol,” she warned. “If you don’t remedy the problem now, you’ll be sorry later. And don’t sauté that celery to death. It’ll lose its crunch.”
As soon as Patricia stepped outside she took a deep breath of fresh air. That house was utterly stifling. She had no idea how Aimee did it, and she hoped that sooner rather than later, she’d come to her senses and make a major change.
• • •
Jack’s job was far from ideal. He spent his days patching up flat-bottomed swamp boats and resoldering metal joints to keep his customers afloat. These customers came to the shop because they got hammered with the shop owner every other night, and they ranged from crawfish fishermen to bona fide gator hunters. Jack spent half his day listening to stories about “the big one that got away,” about the monster that nearly chomped a finger or two.
By the time he came home that night, the familiar itch of a headache was tickling his brain, and the tension that had settled over the house didn’t do much in the way of letting him unwind.
Abby sat on the couch, watching television while doing her homework—something she hardly ever got away with. When Jack peeked his head into the girls’ room he found Aimee perched at the foot of Charlie’s bed looking pensive.
“One-oh-three,” she said as soon as she saw him in the doorway. “She came home with a fever and she’s up to one hundred and three. I think we need to go to the hospital.”
“Did you give her a bath?” Jack asked, approaching his shivering daughter. Charlie was bundled beneath a pile of blankets, her teeth chattering in her sleep.
“Every time I try to move her she starts to cry.”
Jack took a seat next to Charlie, pressing his palm to her forehead. Aimee was right; if they couldn’t get her fever down they’d have to go to the ER—something they sure as hell couldn’t afford.
Peeling the blankets away from her coiled-up body, Jack stuck an arm under the girl and hefted her up into his arms. Charlie whined, squirmed, tried to get away, but Jack didn’t give in. He held her tight and walked to the bathroom, Aimee at his heels. Taking a seat on the toilet lid, he ran the bath while Aimee stripped off Charlie’s sweat-soaked clothes.
A worried Abigail appeared in the doorway with Nubs at her heels.
“Is she gonna be OK?” she asked.
When Aimee failed to answer, Jack looked at his eldest and offered her a reassuring smile.
“Everything’s going to be fine, sweetheart. Charlie just needs to cool down.”
As if on cue, Jack lowered Charlie into the tub. As soon as the frigid water bit her skin, the shock of cold made her buck and thrash. She exhaled a high-pitched scream, clawing at the sides of the tub, desperately trying to escape. Abby slapped her hands over her ears. Nubs let out a frightened yelp and cowered in the hall. Jack held Charlie down while Aimee clasped her hands over her mouth. She looked away, unable to watch her baby flail and writhe like a frightened animal.
“Abby!” Aimee twisted toward the bathroom door. “Get out. Go to your room!”
Abby blinked at her mom’s unexpected bout of anger and bolted out of the doorway.
“Let her go,” Aimee demanded, turning her attention back to Jack. “Let her out; you’re scaring her.”
But Jack didn’t give. Each passing second rendered Charlie calmer. She eventually exhaled a pitiful wail and gave up, going limp with a sob.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with her,” Aimee whispered
later, after Charlie was back in bed, having drifted back into a fitful sleep, a damp towel pressed to her forehead.
“Nothing’s wrong with her,” Jack assured. “She’s got the flu or something. She’ll be fine.”
Aimee nodded and left the room to heat up the dinner Jack had missed yet again. It had been another long night of overtime.
Only after she left him alone did Jack look to his daughter with genuine concern. There was something off about the way she had fought him, something that made him uncomfortable. Had it been Aimee who had held her down, he was sure Charlie would have leaped from that tub and rushed past her like a feral, wild-eyed child. It had been too much fight for a six-year-old.
• • •
“I gave her Tylenol, but it isn’t doing a damn thing,” Aimee complained, watching Jack eat his jambalaya. She’d sautéed the hell out of that celery. “If I hadn’t sent her to school this morning she wouldn’t have gotten so sick. She told me she felt bad.”
Jack gave Aimee a look.
“What?”
“She’s a kid. She’d have gotten sick whether she was here or at school, or anywhere else.”
“Well I’d rather it have been here,” Aimee said. “At least that way I could have had my eye on her.”
“You’ll have your eye on her tomorrow. And most likely a day or two after that.”
“It was probably one of those kids at the pizza place,” Aimee mused. “It’s just like back-road Louisiana hicks to take their sick kid to a place crammed with other kids. I swear to God…”
Jack grinned. It was one of the things he loved about her; Aimee was sweet and put-together on the outside, but once you cracked that outer shell she was a pillar of brimstone. She’d been raised a strict Catholic, and it seemed that the constant Sunday sermons had infused hellfire into Aimee’s blood.
“What?” Aimee gave Jack’s smile a suspicious look. “I swear, sometimes I wonder why we even bother living here.”
“Where else would we live?” he asked. “New York? You want to move to California and get ourselves a condo out on the beach somewhere? Think we’d fit in?”
“What do you mean ‘fit in’?” Aimee looked genuinely offended. “Is there something wrong with us?”
“Sure,” Jack said. “We’re Southerners.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we were born here, we live here, and we die here.”
Aimee smirked with a shake of her head. “You weren’t born here.” Of the intricate web of mistruths Jack had told about his past, he was honest about not being a Louisiana native. It was easier to keep the lies in line if they closely resembled the truth.
“The South is the South.”
“I don’t mind the South,” she said. “It’s the dirty South I can’t stand.”
It was the dirty South that made Jack who he was and Aimee knew it, but it was something she liked to think he’d grown out of—like growing out of an old pair of jeans. She knew that he’d grown up in Georgia and made his way to Louisiana after he left home. She knew he had been young—seventeen, as the story had been told, not fourteen—when he’d left. She knew that Jack’s mother was unstable, that his father had been more interested in protecting her rather than his own son, that the situation eventually “got bad,” which was when Jack decided to fly the coop. She was left to assume that there was abuse, which was why Jack had never expressed any interest in seeing them again, not for their wedding or the birth of their kids, and she was fine with that. If there was any reason to suspect they might hurt Abigail or Charlie, she didn’t want anything to do with them. Other than that, his childhood was a cipher, and she loved him too much to press the issue. It made him uncomfortable, and at the end of the day it didn’t matter. The past was the past. It was behind him.
That didn’t mean that Jack didn’t wonder how Aimee would react to knowing just how much of the dirty South he had in him. The Rileys were shocked when their daughter announced she was engaged to a roughneck—a nobody who had come from nowhere, like a ghost that had gotten stuck in the bayou. But the thought that got to him most was how shocked, and perhaps disgusted, his own parents would have been to discover he was marrying into gentility. It was hard to forget just how rough Gilda and Stephen had been when it came to “the riches.” Everywhere they went, whether it was the market or the movie theater, his parents would scope out the place, pinpointing the people who looked the most refined, tallying up the most expensive cars in poorly lit parking lots. Jack was too young to know for sure, but he had a suspicion his folks lived off more than government checks. Every now and then his dad would show up with a new leather jacket or a necklace for Gilda, but there was never a mention of how he afforded such things.
The Rileys were the type to swear by genetics—after all, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. If Patricia and Arnold knew the truth about the family Jack had left behind, the fact that he had run away, run for his life… it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference.
Exhaling a breath, Aimee slumped in her seat and sighed.
“I forgot to tell you, Daddy’s going to let us borrow the Olds until we get another car.”
Jack grimaced. He hated borrowing anything from the Rileys. The last thing he needed was old Arnold’s pristinely waxed Oldsmobile parked in their unpaved driveway.
“They’re doing us a favor,” Aimee reminded him.
“Sure,” Jack muttered. “I’m sure they are.”
• • •
That evening Jack woke to a tug on his T-shirt sleeve. Charlie stood beside the bed, her hair plastered across a sweat-beaded forehead.
“Daddy,” she whispered hoarsely. “I think there’s someone in my room.”
After pulling himself out of bed, he got her a drink of water and walked her back to her room. Charlie pointed at the closet from her bed, clutching the glass of water in her free hand.
“Here?” Jack asked, approaching the door that was open a crack. He swung it wide to reveal nothing but a bundle of clothes—two girls’ worth; one girl too many for the size of that closet. “There’s nothing here, honey,” Jack told her. “I don’t think anyone could fit in here even if they wanted to.”
“I saw it,” Charlie whispered, unsatisfied with her dad’s diagnosis.
Jack closed the door and approached her bed, tucking her in after placing the glass of water on her bedside table.
“Well, there’s nobody there now,” he told her. “Besides,” he leaned in, whispering a secret into her ear, “Abby’s bigger. It’ll eat your sister first.”
Charlie’s face blossomed into an uncontrollable grin. She covered her mouth against her laugh, trying not to wake her sister.
• • •
The closet door swung open an hour later.
Both girls were fast asleep.
• • •
The next morning, Abby came dragging into the kitchen for breakfast. Aimee turned away from the stove, balancing a pancake on top of a spatula, and inspected the girl from across the room.
“Please tell me you aren’t getting sick like your sister.”
Abby shook her head no, then slouched in her chair like a rag doll.
“What’s wrong then?”
“Tired,” Abby murmured.
“Did Charlie keep you up?”
Abby shook her head again.
“I think it was an animal,” she said. “There was this scratching on the wall outside. All night.”
• • •
Reagan took a seat next to Jack at the picnic table that served as their lunch area outside the boat shop. Jack met Reagan the day he found himself in Louisiana. Dropped off outside a five-and-dime by an unknown driver in a beat-up pickup, Jack caught Reagan trying to sneak a smoke around the side of the building while his mother did the shopping inside. Reagan didn’t have a much better upbringing than Jack had; his mom supported her fractured family by dancing, and he’d never even met his dad. But what Reagan’s
mom lacked in companionship she made up for in brains. It took her a single night of Jack sleeping over to put it all together: he was a runaway, and because she had been a runaway herself, she took him in despite her meager income. Jack half expected the cops to show up and haul him away, but they never came.
Reagan had always been tall: gangly with long limbs that reminded Jack of a spider if a spider lifted weights. He was the type of guy who liked to buck the norm by fitting his Charger with an exhaust that woke all of Live Oak during his late-night drives. He wore eyeliner and gauged his ears and bought intentionally offensive T-shirts off the Internet, which he would then wear to the shop, betting Jack that today was the day he’d get punched in the mouth by a swamper.
“This Saturday is booked,” Reagan said, drawing a cigarette from its pack. “Should be a good night.”
Music was another reason the Rileys never took to Jack. Reagan and Jack were the backbone of Lamb. The band had been Reagan’s dream before Jack ever picked up a guitar. When they discovered that Jack could write music as well as lyrics, Jack was thrown into the limelight—at least what little of the limelight they had. Reagan’s act of selflessness paid off in spades. Lamb became a hit at a few local bars and clubs before they could legally drink, and the boys eventually took to Bourbon Street, where, miraculously, they gained a following that filled the Red Door to capacity every time they played their brooding, bluesy rock-n-roll.
Jack stared down at his bologna and cheese sandwich. It sat there, boring and humorless on a square of wax paper.
“Man, I don’t know,” Jack said. “This weekend is really bad timing.”
“It’s already a done deal. I e-mailed you. I called you to make sure it was cool, but you didn’t answer. I left a voice mail, which was pointless, I know. You never check it anyway.”
“This is going to get me into some serious shit.”
“What’s the problem?” Reagan asked. “You guys having a fight?”
Jack shoved the bologna sandwich back into the paper bag it came from. Having two kids, Jack got sack lunches along with the girls. Aimee hated wasting money; Jack adored her for it but felt partly responsible. Aimee had been expected to go to college and work on a degree while waiting for an appropriate suitor, preferably a handsome young man working toward a PhD. Someone by the name of Ashley or Leslie or Rhett would have been preferable. When Aimee agreed to marry Jack, the Rileys decided it would be best for their daughter to get a taste of “real life.” Tossed from the nest and into Jack’s arms, she quickly realized just how little money they had.