The Big Hit

by Jamie Bennett

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I wasn’t sorry when she died. She didn’t raise me, and she didn’t care about me. Living with her was living in chaos.” His voice was just the same as when he had complimented me on the dinner. Except that every muscle in his body had tensed.

  I kissed him, again and again. “I’m sorry anyway. I’m so sorry. What about your dad? Couldn’t he—”

  “I don’t know who he is, and my mom didn’t seem to know or care. I’m sure he doesn’t know he’s my father because he would have come out of the woodwork long before now. As soon as you get a little money, everyone has a hand out. There were plenty of men around, but not a father, no.” Knox stopped, and looked down into my face. “Daisy, honey, please don’t be so upset. It’s not worth it.” He stood, bringing me up with him, and walked us over to the couch. I kept patting his cheek, kissing him, fixing his hair—trying to make up for years of neglect and lack of love. Eventually he took my face in his hands.

  “Lots of people have it rough,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to have it that way. To have had it that way. For it to be that way, and I want to fix it,” I tried to explain, and he smiled again.

  “You’re tired. Come here and give me some of your sweetness. That fixes it for me.” Knox held me tightly, rubbing my back again. I held him too, still wanting to make it up to him, somehow.

  Chapter 13

  The next morning, I woke up hurting, badly. Stupid yoga. I turned my face into the pillow to get away from the light from the window, and that movement made me stop the internal whining and think. This didn’t feel like my pillow. It didn’t smell like my pillow. I opened my eyes, and no, it wasn’t my pillow at all.

  I was in Knox’s giant bed, lying on top of the duvet with a blanket over me, and there was a note on the pillow next to me in the handwriting I recognized:

  You fell asleep from the pain of yoga, I think. I waited for you to get up but you don’t seem to be a morning person. I’m going to the stadium and I’ll call you later.

  Knox

  PS you burrow like a bunny when you sleep. Right into me.

  See? He wasn’t dumb. That was a funny note, sweet, wonderful. Then I re-read it, and thought about what had happened the night before. I had fallen asleep on his lap in the living room—I vaguely remembered him telling me we were going to bed. And then I slept next to him, burrowing like a bunny? I sat up all the way and looked around the room. Had I snored? Drooled? It was nice of him to only focus on the cute parts of me sleeping. I looked down at my clothes, the giant Woodsmen t-shirt that Knox had given me with the black bra underneath it. He still hadn’t seen it. Did I want him to? I did, I thought, but all this was starting to feel overwhelming. Sleeping somewhere weird, waking up alone there—this was all new to me.

  I buried my face under the covers and huddled for a little, hugging his pillow, before I slowly and carefully got up, my body protesting. Knox had cleaned away all of our dinner dishes and the place was back to looking like an impersonal storage unit, except for my bag and assorted stuff spread out on the couch. I spent some time in the bathroom trying to make myself look like I hadn’t just spent an unexpected night at his house, then snuck out as fast as I could down to the parking lot. I thought about Knox all the way home, memories and ideas and confused feelings running around my head. I considered calling Julia, my brother’s wife, to hash this out with her, but she was on their second honeymoon trip. I did call Tatum, but she didn’t pick up.

  There was a car in my driveway when I got home, a van with a large metal mast sticking out of the top, and a bright orange “67” painted on the side. I stared at it for a moment, confused, and parked at Shelby’s house instead. I started to get out of my car just the doors to the van slid open.

  “Marguerite McKenzie? Miss McKenzie?” I just stared, because it was the teenage-looking reporter, Austin DeJong, but not on my TV screen. In my driveway! And he knew my name? What was he doing here? No. I shook my head hard at him and made a break for Shelby’s house. But the front door was locked, which meant that she and Jerry were…doing it. They’d started locking the door after their friends complained about getting a few eyefuls in the past.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” I told Austin DeJong. It was about the painting. Or Knox. Or Dylan—was there something wrong with my brother? My mind raced and I breathed like I had just run a marathon. I ran toward my own house as fast as my stiff muscles would allow, digging in my purse for my keys. He quickly turned to follow me and bumped my arm by mistake, and I stumbled and dropped the bag, and everything flew out.

  “Sorry! Here, let me help. I don’t want to disturb you, I just have a few simple questions,” the reporter said. He bent down next to me as I scrabbled at my belongings, and he reached for the note that Knox had written. The one signed with his name in the big, dark, block letters. Austin DeJong’s eyes widened. “Is this—”

  I grabbed it out of his hand, remembering the silly comment I had made to Knox about how I wouldn’t repeat anything he had told me about the Woodsmen and their strategies. I had also promised Domenico I wouldn’t talk about the Pisanello. “I don’t have anything to say, about anything!” I told the reporter. “Nothing about the missing painting or the Woodsmen, either.” Oh, crap. That had come out horribly—you didn’t say you had nothing to say, you just didn’t say it.

  His eyes now lit up and moved to the giant Woodsmen t-shirt I wore. “I wanted to talk to you about the Pizza-nello picture, but do you also have information about the team?”

  “No!” I shook my head vigorously and stood up, deciding that whatever I had left on the gravel driveway was just going to have to stay there. “I have no comment! About anything!”

  Austin DeJong put his body in between mine and my cottage. “You can tell me things anonymously. Is it true that Domenico Amico is deliberately hiding the Pizza-nello painting from its true owner, Enrico Visconti?”

  “What?” I answered him in spite of myself. “No! Of course not! The professor wouldn’t do that, and…no! And it isn’t ‘Pizza-nello!’” I pushed around him.

  “Can you explain what you mean by that? Miss McKenzie? Miss McKenzie?” he persisted. His voice got louder but it was harder to hear because there was a low buzzing noise in my ears. I stumbled again as I stepped onto the porch because everything looked different, a little blurry, including the reporter who was still following me. “Marguerite, can we just talk for a moment?” My hand shook as I got the key into my door and then I closed it, locked it, and sank down onto the floor, curling into a ball and covering my ears, but I couldn’t hear him knocking anyway, not above the buzzing sound and the pounding of my heart.

  ∞

  “She made me fill out all these forms about my goals and I’m supposed to download this app that emails me daily affirmations or something…Daisy, are you sure you’re ok? You sound so weird.”

  “I’m fine,” I told Tatum. She had called me back several times, but after I had gotten myself into my bed, it had taken a long while to get myself back out of it to find my phone. And I hadn’t yet gone out into the driveway to see what I had left there when my purse had spilled.

  “Maybe I’ll come over,” she said, and I quickly said no.

  “I’m doing work,” I told her, which was what I was attempting. The books were around me, in any case, scattered on the floor next to my bed. “I need to go study, ok? Bye, Tatum.” I hung up quickly, and huddled back down with my pillow. I still had to call Domenico to let him know what had happened. I assumed that Austin DeJong hadn’t invented the idea that the professor was hiding the portrait—it had most likely come from Enrico Visconti blabbing lies to the press. He was a bigger jerk than I thought possible.

  It was getting closer and closer to dinnertime, and I had told Knox that I would cook before his game tomorrow, the last preseason game. That meant that I had to get myself to the grocery store, which meant that I had to get myself dressed, and at the moment, those things
seemed almost impossible. I made myself take little steps, breaking down the issues into solvable bites. First, get out of bed, walk to the bathroom. It was ok if I went as close to the wall as I could, dragging my fingers along the chair rail. Brush my teeth, I could do that. I managed to get through all the normal things that I usually accomplished in the morning and that was a win, even if it was close to two o’clock. Just little steps, getting myself on track. I could do it.

  Knox had been trying to get in touch, I saw on my phone when I made it back into the bedroom. How long had I stood under the water? I rubbed my forehead. God, I needed to get with it. I pulled on clothes, any clothes, and sat on the bed, trying to put together a list of groceries so that I could make dinner like I had said I would. I wrote to Knox, asking if he would like to come over to my house instead of me going to his condo, because I couldn’t see that drive happening. Then I took another step to keep myself on track. I went to the living room, checked the back yard carefully for reporters, and forced myself outside and across the lawn to Shelby’s house.

  “Hi,” I told a mostly-naked Jerry when he walked to the French doors. He had no pants, no shirt, and just a very, very small bathing suit-ish item covering his major issues. “Um, were either you or Shelby thinking of going into town?”

  Maybe Jerry liked tiny clothing, what Shelby called his banana sling, but he wasn’t a dumb guy. He could see that I had been crying, and I probably still looked like the pale ghost I’d witnessed when I looked into my bathroom mirror earlier. “What do you need? I can get it for you,” he told me. “Want to come in?”

  I shook my head. I wanted to get back home. “I need some groceries.” I put the list and a lot of cash into his hand. “Thank you, Jerry.”

  “Everything ok?”

  I nodded very quickly. “Fine. I’m just having a hard day. Please don’t tell Shelby.” Because she always wanted to come over, to talk, to make me talk. I couldn’t deal at the moment.

  He nodded at me again and I went back home to hide. When someone knocked just a little while later, I thought that Jerry had been fast. Then I thought that he had spilled to Shelby that I had asked for help with getting my groceries, like I used to do a lot when I had first moved into the cottage and had kind of regressed, and not been able to handle going the store myself. I had come a long way back since then and I hadn’t bothered Jerry to do my shopping since last summer.

  The knock came again, about a foot higher than either Jerry or Shelby would reach. I peeked out the window to make sure it wasn’t Austin DeJong before I sighed in relief and opened the front door.

  “Hi,” I told Knox. I tried to look as cheerful and normal as possible. “You’re a little early for dinner.”

  “It was easier to come here when we were done at the stadium instead of driving home.” He was staring at me as he closed the door behind himself. “Can I kiss you hello?”

  I realized I had backed about 10 feet away from him. “Of course!” I answered, and smiled. “How was the game walk-through?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Still the yoga?” He looked suspicious and incredulous, and clearly, I wasn’t hiding things as well as I should.

  “No, of course not the yoga! I mean, I’m still sore and all, but no! So, it’s a little early, yeah, and I’m missing a few ingredients, but I can start cooking something. I’m going to make this really good pasta with lots of vegetables and chicken.” I turned to go into the kitchen but Knox took a step forward, one huge stride, and caught my arm.

  “I still want to kiss you hello, and you’re still acting like something’s wrong.” He pulled me to him and looked down into my face. “What?”

  “I ran into a reporter today,” I said, and shrugged. “It just startled me.”

  His whole face turned scary, scary and frozen. “What reporter? Someone is bothering you about me?”

  “No, it was the guy who did the segment on Channel 67 about the Pisanello portrait. He must have found out that I work for Domenico and he wanted to ask me questions because the professor won’t talk to him. But he knocked my bag on the ground and he saw—”

  “He touched you?”

  Oh God, his voice. I had never heard anything so deep and terrible in my life. It made me fear for Austin DeJong. “No, it was an accident.”

  “Daisy, you’re shaking. What the fuck happened?”

  I yanked myself away from him, more upset than ever. Even I could hear the whistling in my breathing. “Nothing! Stop talking like that! It startled me and I got a little anxious, but don’t talk like that!”

  Knox became totally still. “Am I scaring you? Are you scared of me?”

  “I’m scared for that reporter, and I’m trying to stay calm so you don’t get angry, and you’re doing the face again, and I don’t like it!” I burst into tears but Knox stayed still, away from me, until I held out my arms. Then he took another step forward and hugged me.

  “I don’t want you to be scared of me,” he murmured against my hair.

  “I’m not, and stop saying that! The reporter asked me about the Pisanello, and then he bumped my arm and I dropped my bag. He saw the note you wrote, with your name at the bottom, and I said that I wouldn’t comment on art or football. It just came out of my mouth because I suck at lying, I’m terrible and now he knows that I have something to hide. So then he asked me about the Woodsmen, too.” I sniffed. “I had a panic attack afterwards, but I’m ok, just a little…off. Jerry went to go get the groceries for our dinner.”

  “I could have done that.” Knox kissed my head. “You’re really all right after a panic attack?”

  “I’m fine. I even know when it’s happening that I’m fine. I tell myself I’m not dying, I’m not having a heart attack. It will pass.” I patted his chest. “They’re not a big deal.”

  “It seems like a big deal to me, if you have to tell yourself that you’re not dying.”

  I didn’t want him to think of me like that, the woman who freaked herself into a fit where she thought she was having a heart attack. The woman who couldn’t do yoga without practically giving herself a hernia. “Seriously, it’s nothing. Maybe my first one was scary, but now I’m used to them. It’s fine.”

  “Bunny—”

  Someone hollered across the lawn. “Yoohoo! I have your groceries!”

  I started to pull away from Knox, but he held on. “It’s Shelby, my neighbor,” I explained. “She’s going to call my sister-in-law if she sees me crying. They treat me like a child sometimes.” I shook my head, rubbing my face against his chest. “I guess I deserve it.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re not a child.”

  “Daisy?” Shelby yelled again. Her voice echoed off the door to the back yard, where I was sure she was pressing her nose to the glass.

  “Is she going to have a fit about me?” Knox asked. We heard the door slide open as she let herself in.

  “Probably. Yes, definitely.”

  “Daisy, honey, your car is in my driveway, and Jerry said you weren’t feeling like you could—” Shelby was saying, but then broke off when she came into the living room. “What in Jesus’ name are you doing here?” she gasped.

  It took a lot to make Shelby stop talking. In fact, it took Knox Lynch in my living room. She stood in the doorway with an open mouth, and she didn’t say another word.

  “Shelby?” another voice called.

  “That’s her husband coming now,” I explained to Knox. I hoped he had put on more clothing than the banana sling from earlier.

  “Shelby, why are you blocking the doorway?” Jerry grumbled. “Go put those bags…” He stopped, too, looking over her shoulder. “Well, holy Toledo. Knox Lynch is here in Daisy’s house. Knox Lynch, the Woodsmen.”

  Jerry did have on pants. “Thank you, guys, for bringing over my groceries,” I told them. “Um, Shelby and Jerry, I think you already know who Knox is. He’s my…we’re…he…”

  “I’m her boyfriend,” Knox said.

  “Hot
damn,” Shelby breathed, and she sprang into action, coming to me and giving me a big, smacking kiss on my cheek. “Daisy, I guess you didn’t need my help after all.”

  It was my turn to stand silent. Boyfriend? Was he? I got a huge smile on my face, and when he looked down at me, he smiled back.

  “I don’t see anything ‘boy’ about him,” Shelby said, and checked out Knox from head to toe. “Daisy, you and I need to have a talk about a few little issues.” She eyed him again. “Well, not little!” She hooted.

  Jerry took her arm. “We’ll put the groceries away.”

  “No, we all can,” I said, and the four of us managed to fit into the kitchen and eating area so that Shelby could start to pepper Knox with questions, ranging from when he and I had met and how (he glossed over all the screaming and running and said simply “at the college library”), to his future plans (“I just bought a house and Daisy is helping me decide what to do with it”), to the game against the Cottonmouths the next day (“I think we’ll do fine, but it’s still just the preseason. Do you want tickets?”). And many more, too. He handled her a lot better than I had when my sister-in-law had first introduced Shelby and me: I had ended up going outside to sit in the car during an ice storm to get away from her questions and volume.

  Knox was still worried about me, I could tell. When I looked up from chopping or stirring or whatever I was doing, I would find him staring at me, and maybe it would have been easy to overlook, but I could see a little change in his expression that showed his concern, a funny way he held his mouth. As I finished up our early dinner, Jerry started to steer Shelby out of the house. He silently shook hands with Knox, and Shelby said goodbye too, and thank you for the tickets that he had arranged for them, they were thrilled, and more, and more. Then she elbowed me in the ribs and gave me a big wink, and told me she was going to come by tomorrow because did we ever need to talk. Jerry pretty much forced her exit.

  The house was very quiet without Shelby in it, and I wasn’t in the mood for quiet. I put on music, fiddling with my phone until I found a good song before I went back to the stove. “I’m sorry about that,” I told Knox. “She’s sometimes a little hard to take.”