First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

“I want to help. Are you sure you’re ok?” I pulled up her sweatshirt sleeve to reexamine the damage. “My aunt got bitten by a cat and she got blood poisoning.”

  “This has happened before,” she said. “I washed them really well. It’s fine.”

  “Izzie? Are you and your friend coming?” her mom called from my car. “Can we go eat now?”

  “Sure,” I told her. “We’re coming in a second.” I frowned at the cuts on Isobel’s soft skin. “Let me call someone and see if he can deal with this car problem.” I got in touch with a mechanic I knew from before, who had a garage and had rebuilt a Mustang for the guy I used to work for. As a favor for some stuff I’d done for him at the time, slightly less than legal stuff, he agreed now to pick up the tin can car. Then I walked to a gas station a few blocks away and got some chips and a drink for Jade, to keep her happy while we waited.

  Isobel couldn’t believe what I was doing, but I didn’t think any of it was something to get crazy over. She kept saying thank you, and I kept answering that it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t, and I was grateful too, happy that I had been the one she had called. Quietly, while her mom was busy stuffing in the chips, she asked me to drive them back to her apartment instead of a restaurant, because she said she wasn’t up to dealing with her mother in a public place.

  “Finally,” Jade huffed, when the little car was dragging off down the road behind a wrecker and we were on our way. Isobel watched it forlornly through my windshield. Her mom had bummed a cigarette off me and she puffed it happily. “Now we can finally eat,” Jade added, having forgotten the big bag of chips that she hadn’t shared with her daughter. “Izzie and I were going to the place where I met her father,” she told me, also forgetting that they were supposed to be sisters.

  “Really,” I commented, and flicked my eyes to look at Isobel in the rearview mirror. She shook her head; no, that wasn’t true.

  “What about your family, Rory? Is your dad as good looking as you?” Jade asked me, and giggled. Isobel made a slight gagging noise.

  “I’m adopted, so my dad and I don’t look at all alike,” I answered, and I saw Isobel’s surprised face in the mirror. “I have a twin brother, though, and we’re pretty similar.”

  “So he’s just as cute?” Jade asked, and giggled again.

  “Jade…” her daughter groaned.

  “Jory and I look alike, but I don’t know if anyone has ever used the word ‘cute’ to describe either of us.” Maybe big, maybe mean. Maybe scary. Probably all three.

  “Handsome. Devilish,” her mom said, flipping her hair.

  “Devilish?” I snorted, but I saw Isobel nodding in the mirror like she agreed.

  “I didn’t know you were adopted,” she said from the back seat. “I guess there’s a lot I don’t know about you.”

  And that was fine.

  “I can’t imagine giving away a baby,” her mom piped up, and then quickly added, “if I ever had one.” She had remembered that they were supposed to be sisters.

  “Yeah, it’s hard to believe that someone wouldn’t take care of her own child,” Isobel remarked, and the words sounded very angry. I turned slightly and she was now frowning and rubbing her arm over her sleeve, where one of those damn cats had gotten her. I wasn’t sure if she was mad at my parents or her own. Starting from when I had first met her sleeping in the dirty hallway, to seeing how her mom was acting now, it sure didn’t seem like there had been a lot of parental care in Isobel’s life, either.

  “Putting us up for adoption was a good thing,” I told Jade, and it really had been the best possible outcome for me and my brother. “My biological mom had us really young and my dad went to prison. She couldn’t deal with the two of us hellions.”

  “If I had a baby, I would always keep her. Always!” Jade said fiercely. “No one could take her, because she would be mine.”

  There was silence for a moment in the car, but then Isobel burst out in anger. “But what if you couldn’t take good care of her, Mom?” she asked. “What if she was dirty and hungry all the time and she had to steal to feed herself? And what if you let—”

  “Shut up, Izzie!” Jade screamed and swiveled in her seat, lunging into the back to paw and scratch at her daughter, just like her damn cats had. I hit the brakes and my car screeched to a stop.

  “Knock that off!” I boomed out. “Jade, turn around and sit down. Isobel,” I said, and stared at her, and she hung her head in shame, or maybe to hide her anger.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, staring at her shoes. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean that. I’m just upset because of my car and how much it’s going to cost to fix.”

  Jade calmed down, patting her turquoise hair pieces back into place. One had flipped up and twisted so that it stood out from her head like an antenna. “That’s ok, I understand.”

  Did she, I wondered? When was the last time she’d worried about money? Or when had she actually taken care of her kid? She sure hadn’t been when I’d found Isobel alone in the hallway in the middle of the night in a place I wouldn’t have lingered myself. I pulled away and drove the last few blocks toward the apartment building.

  “You should ask your boyfriend to pay for the car,” Jade recommended to her daughter. “Didn’t you say that he’s really set up? You told me he has such a nice apartment. Didn’t he let you go there?”

  Isobel kept her gaze down. “Yeah, I’ve been there once. But I don’t need his money.”

  “You should take it,” Jade advised. “Why else do we have boyfriends?” She laughed hard, and then her head snapped around, looking back and forth. “Wait, what are we doing? This is your building, Izzie,” she accused.

  “I’m going to make you something for lunch here. I’m kind of tired,” Isobel said. Jade kept on for a while about a restaurant but we got out of the car and she followed along.

  Rella Ross’s door flew open as we walked in and she leaned out, glaring. “Jade,” she announced. “I thought I saw you getting out of that big car. Hello, Rory,” she greeted me, her voice much more polite. Then she looked at Isobel, very worried. “Is your mother staying here?”

  “So what if I am?” Jade challenged, but Isobel spoke louder.

  “No, she’s just over for a little while. I had car trouble and Rory came to pick us up.”

  Rella gave me a huge, grateful smile. “Isn’t that nice,” she said approvingly. “It’s nice to have people in your life to trust and depend on,” she continued, and gave Isobel’s mom a look that could have dropped her where she stood.

  Jade surged forward toward Rella and I grabbed her. “Let’s go upstairs, Jade!” Isobel said. “Right now.”

  “We’re going upstairs to my daughter’s apartment, you old bat,” her mom yelled, forgetting again that she and Isobel were supposed to be sisters.

  Rella looked disgusted, but she didn’t respond in kind. Not audibly, anyway. “Come see me when your mother is no longer visiting,” she told Isobel, who nodded and linked her arm through Jade’s to pull her toward the elevator. I said goodbye to Rella and trailed behind them, listening as Isobel tried to calm her mom down. Jade practically ran, but her daughter dragged her feet down the hallway.

  ∞

  Isobel

  Jade wasn’t happy in the apartment, because it was so small, and not very fancy, and now, since I hadn’t bothered to replace the chair that Rory had broken, there wasn’t enough furniture, either. I made her some food and Rory ate too, which cleaned out my groceries for the next week. My mom sat on the one chair at the table, peppering him with stories and questions, and he sat on the couch, mostly avoiding answering.

  By the time she was done with her late lunch, I was done with my mom. I couldn’t take one more flirtatious smile to Rory and I especially couldn’t take one more story about some fictitious incident in our pasts. “Remember, Izzie, when we went to California?” she asked, and I just shook my head. “We did,” she told Rory. Since I had gotten mad at her in the car, she seemed determined to convin
ce me (and Rory too) that our life together had been perfect. She went through about six different plotlines from TV and movies to remind me of how I was misremembering what had happened when I was a kid.

  The problem, really, was that I remembered everything, way too well. When she started on a story about some “step-father,” I couldn’t take any more. Maybe she couldn’t face the truth, but I could, and I had a lot of memories about the various men in her life and what they had meant for me. “He was so sweet to her, bringing her candy and treats,” Jade told Rory, and I jumped to my feet.

  “Time to go,” I announced, and herded her down to Rory’s car, where she jumped into the passenger side after asking him if she could drive.

  “No,” he answered, and then ignored all the rest of her pleas to stop at various places to buy her things, to turn up the music, to go faster or slower, to obey every whim she had. He just shook his head, and after a while, she stopped asking and looked out of the window.

  I was exhausted by the time I got her out of the car and back into her apartment, and we had another skirmish as I confiscated the credit card she’d gotten. I slid into her old seat in the front while Rory finished his cigarette, leaning against the hood. “I’m sorry about that,” I told him when he climbed in, too. “I’m really sorry you had to deal with my mom.”

  “It’s all right, I didn’t mind. But she’s something,” he agreed. “How often do you two hang out?”

  “Every Saturday.” I sighed. It was why I never looked forward to the weekends. “I used to stop by during the week, too, but I can’t. I just…I can’t.”

  “I could understand that.”

  “Thanks for driving us around,” I told him. I had been checking my phone constantly, waiting to see if the mechanic had finished up fixing whatever had gone wrong with my car. “Can you drop me by the garage? I’ll just wait there.”

  “No, come back to my apartment.”

  “Really?”

  “I know you thought I was homeless before. I’m not,” he told me.

  “I wasn’t criticizing you,” I said quickly. “I was worried about that, that you didn’t have a place to go.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  But I had been, quite a bit. I had been thinking about him doing “security,” about him finding the person who emptied out his safety deposit box, about whoever had hurt him and left him bloody and bruised. I had been thinking about him way too much.

  His apartment was a lot like mine: blank, with little furniture and even less personality. “It’s nice,” I said, and it was, in a decent building and a good neighborhood. The major difference from my place was that his had a second room, and the entire space in there was filled with a giant-sized bed. “I don’t fit in a regular one,” he explained as he gave me the short tour. “I’m big.”

  “And neat,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, it’s from sharing a room with my brother when we were kids. He had so much weird crap,” he told me, shaking his head. “He spread it everywhere and I used to call him Slop. I would always tell him that I wouldn’t live that way when we grew up.” He looked around, too. “And I don’t.”

  “You don’t have very much. You didn’t in your old apartment, either,” I remembered. But he did have a bookcase, and on it were actual books. I looked at the titles, running my finger along the shelf like the ladies whose houses I cleaned did when they checked up on my thoroughness.

  Rory walked and stood close behind me. “Here’s the one about the constellations that I was telling you about,” he said, and tugged a volume free. It was thick and obviously well-read, the spine cracked and pages folded.

  “Explorations of the Nocturnal Sky: Navigating the Constellations of the Northern Hemisphere,” I read slowly from the cover. Yeah, this book was probably beyond me, just based on the title.

  “This is what I was talking about the other night.” He leaned over me and put his hand under mine beneath the thick book to support it, and thumbed through the pages. “See? There’s a drawing of Orion and the bears.” He showed me a place on the page where all the tiny words appeared to be in another language. I moved my shoulders restlessly, shrugging like I didn’t care, but he kept pointing, explaining, and I did remember from our walk and started to get interested.

  “Want to borrow it?” he asked.

  “Um, yeah.” I stuck the book in my purse which then dragged on my arm, and I tilted my head up to look at him. “Thanks.”

  “Sure.” Rory was looking back down at me, very close.

  I moved myself away from the heat of his body. “You have a lot of books,” I said. Books about everything, from ancient ceramics to a lot on biodomes. I picked one of those up because I didn’t know what a biodome was.

  “I checked out all kinds of stuff from the prison library. As many as they let me take. I read every book I could get my hands on and that’s what I keep doing, now that I’m out. I like to buy them and know they’re mine.”

  I put down My Life Under the Glass Semi-Circle and looked at another volume. “Nature or Nurture, a Continued Quest,” I read on one spine. “What does that mean?”

  He walked over to the couch and lit another cigarette. Now that we were spending more time together, I was realizing how much he smoked. “Nature versus nurture is the debate about how much your genes determine how you turn out versus how you were raised,” he explained.

  I nodded slowly. I had Jade and some random john as my mom and dad and she had raised me, too. Nature or nurture, either way—I was probably screwed.

  “I always wondered why my brother and I ended up like we did,” Rory continued. “He stayed clean, but I smoked, drank, did any drug I could get my hands on, starting when I was about twelve. And our biggest influence was our dad, who never even tried a single puff off a cigarette,” he said, staring at the one he held. “Our adoptive dad, I mean. On the other hand, from what I could find out, our biological dad was bad from just about the moment he was born. He was an addict, a criminal, a real piece of shit up until the day that he got stabbed to death in prison.” He nodded toward the nature versus nurture book. “I thought I’d read about that more, to see if it was genetic. If that was why we got in trouble all the time and that was why I fucked up every opportunity I ever had to do something with my life.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “It seems like people are a mix of both. It definitely seems like I should have been able to overcome whatever crap I had running through my veins, but I couldn’t.”

  “Why can’t you now?” I asked him. “Can’t you make a better life, now?”

  “We’ll see, Isobel.” He blew out another cloud of smoke. “We’ll see what I can do.”

  “I think you could do anything,” I told him. “You’re obviously really smart.” I gestured to the books. “You could totally go to college.” He should, I thought. College was meant for people like Rory, people who wanted to learn. “You’re working with your hands at the woodshop, which I think is so cool. And you help people.”

  He smiled. “Do I?”

  “You helped me today, a lot, with my car and with my mom. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. And thank you for saying all that,” he answered. “It’s good to hear.”

  I nodded and played with one of the genetics books. “So, you think people are stuck? Like, you think it’s genetic, so that we have to do the same things as our parents, right?”

  “I don’t think you’re going to end up like your mom, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Rory shook his head. “No, you’ll be ok. What about your father?”

  “She pretends that she knows who he is, but I don’t think she does. She was already turning—she was with a lot of guys when I was born, so he could be anyone. I never even thought to try to figure it out. I always had more important problems than wondering about, um,” I checked the title again. “Nature versus nurture.”

  “Whereas in prison, I had the luxury of time to consider it
all. Nothing but time.”

  “Yeah right, luxury. But you’re busy enough now,” I pointed out. “You have two jobs. And, um,” I hesitated. “Are you still looking for the person who emptied out the safety deposit box?” I asked. “What was his name?”

  He took another drag and didn’t really answer me. “We’ll see what happens there.”

  “But no one’s coming after you, right, about the money you owe? Because you’re paying them back?”

  Rory looked at me steadily. “I’m taking care of it,” he said, and I guessed that I had to be satisfied with that, even if it told me nothing. I had asked enough questions.

  He started to light another cigarette but paused. “Does this bother you?”

  “Not really. My mom smoked all the time when I was a kid.”

  He looked at the stick in his hand. “I quit drinking, I quit everything else. I figured I could have one vice but I can see on your face that you don’t like it. You want me to stop smoking?”

  I shrugged. It was none of my business and I certainly wasn’t going to try to tell him what to do, no matter what he thought my face was saying to him. “Quitting’s hard,” I commented. “It might be really tough to stop.”

  Rory put the unlit cigarette back into the box, and he pushed the pack away from himself on the couch. “Done.”

  “Really?” I asked incredulously. “Just like that?”

  “Just like that,” he nodded. “For you.”

  Sure, for me. For me, he just gave up smoking. I nodded like I believed it, and then my phone dinged from underneath the thick book about constellations in my purse. “My car is done, too,” I said calmly after reading the text, and I didn’t mention a word about the cost, even if my heart had gone into my throat. I had to pay it, because I had to have a car. I would just have to make that money back.

  “Let’s go get it,” Rory told me.

  “I was lucky that your friend could fix it so fast, on a Saturday,” I said as we walked down the sidewalk toward his SUV. In the distance, an engine roared to life and tires squealed. “I had to practically beg someone when I broke down on the freeway—”