by Kris Ripper
He didn’t seem all that pleased with my apology, and raised his voice.
“Zane didn’t mean to offend you.” Dred slid into the seat next to mine and held her hand up to her son. “High five, baby.”
Great distraction. James immediately grinned. Unfortunately, I didn’t duck in time and took a little avocado to the face. “Shit!”
“Nice manners there, Jaffe. Way to teach the kid.”
“Oh, like you’re any better.” I glared at Emerson across the table. He smirked back.
“Okay, okay.” Obie took the bench seat across from Dred’s chair. “I think we’ve had enough of messing with Zane, though admittedly when she shows up at breakfast talking about sperm, it’s hard to resist—”
Emerson raised his fork. “Did they offer you Tom specifically? I mean, not that—not that Carlos’s would be bad—” His face twisted. “Aw, fuck, I’m a dick.”
“Yes, Tom’s specifically. Carlos said I should have ‘the bigger man’s seed.’”
“Ha!” Obie handed around glasses of orange juice, carefully out of James’s reach. “Actually I have no idea how, like, little person genetics work. But I’d guess it’s pretty strongly genetic.”
“Yeah. Not that I’d be all ‘Oh, no, I can’t have a dwarf kid’ or anything.”
“I don’t think it’s about that,” Emerson said. “It’s more about general health than dwarfism specifically. As long as you’re genetically engineering your kid, you might as well go for as uncomplicatedly healthy as possible.”
Dred sat back from dangling sweet potato fries in front of James, arm brushing mine. (I didn’t blush or anything. That would give me away.) “I’m done with the Tom’s sperm topic. What the hell are you talking about with this wake thing?”
“Oh. Uh. Well, I think Club Fred’s has been . . . depressing lately. Like, we should be happy that the killer is caught and the mystery’s solved, but people still seem afraid.”
Obie shook his head. “Oh. Damn. I forgot. We don’t have to worry about dying anymore.”
Emerson nudged him. “Speak for yourself.”
“Nah, it’s different for you.” Mildred paused, like she was giving this some serious thought. “Possibly dying is kind of your hobby, Emerson. Everyone else wasn’t so much into it. Isn’t that guy rotting in a jail cell right now?”
“I think so,” I said. “According to the Times-Record.”
“And Ed. We talked to him . . . sometime this week?” Obie glanced at Emerson, who shrugged. “I think it was sometime this week. He said we might all have to give depositions.”
“Not me,” Dred countered. “I never saw the guy.”
Emerson shuddered. “I tried to do him in the bathroom at Club Fred’s. Remember, Zane?”
“How would I remember you doing some guy— Wait, you tried to have sex with the La Vista Killer? No, I don’t remember that!”
“Yeah, the kid who looked like DJ Rixx. You told me to go get laid.” He smiled, but it was clearly forced. “I didn’t recognize him until Ed called him ‘Joey,’ because the papers all refer to him by his full name, but that’s him. Joey. The DJ Rixx look-alike.”
I remembered. It was, what, almost a year ago? We’d been sitting at the bar and the kid had been eyeing Emerson from across the room. “Oh my god.”
“Sorry, Aunt Florence,” Emerson added automatically. “You know, I bet he wanted to kill me. If his thing was purifying the gays. I’m definitely not pure. You think he had his eye on my diseased ass that night? He offered to walk me to my car.”
Obie buried his face against Emerson’s neck for a minute. “Don’t even fucking think about that.”
“Why not? It happened. And you know, I’m not social. I’m no drag king, or what’s-her-name, Honey. They really liked being around people. But he could have gotten me just by offering to walk me to my car, and my leg was all fucked up that night, you know? I wouldn’t have had any defense.”
“Except your cane.” Dred reached over to pick a bit of caramelized onion off his plate. “You should learn how to cut a mother with that thing.”
“You think I should get one with a blade inside?”
“Hell yes. Why wouldn’t you? Maybe we should get a family set.” She tweaked James’s nose. “Not for you, though. You’re too young for a blade, baby.”
“Anyway,” I said, hung up on the word family, and a little jealous that I wasn’t part of it, which was weird for me. Acquire family was not on my list. Have a kid didn’t seem like quite the same vibe. “So Hannah said we needed a wake. A celebration, you know?”
Emerson made a stab at Dred’s wandering fingers with his fork. “Isn’t a wake the thing where you sit around staring at a dead body? Oh my god, Mildred, I made you a whole plate!” He winced. “Sorry, Aunt Florence.”
“Yours tastes better because you don’t want me to have it.”
“What’re you, five?”
Dred grinned.
I resolutely turned away. “An Irish-style wake, with food and booze. And anyway, it’s not like we’re really mourning the people, though kind of. It’s more that we’re mourning how we used to not worry about someone walking us to our car at the end of the night. That’s the body in the room. So to speak.”
“This is a dark-ass conversation.” Obie picked a chunk of cheese out of his omelet and put it in front of James, who immediately grabbed it and shoved it in his mouth.
“It’s not supposed to be dark! It’s supposed to be celebratory. Or something.”
“Yeah, but—” Dread shoved her chair back. “What’s the fucking point? To make everyone feel better about partying with a murderer for months?”
I was still marshaling some kind of explanation when Emerson cleared his throat. “The point is we survived. And for some of us it was a kind of close thing, so I think we get to celebrate. I’ll come, Zane.”
“Thanks.” Wow. Talk about support from unexpected places. I figured Obie would have to strong-arm Emerson into coming to the wake, if he came at all.
“Did you talk to Cameron and whatever-their-names are, the kids with the drop-in center?”
“Josh and Keith, and only a little.”
“Well, they had a closer shave than anyone else, so you should maybe make sure they’re either happy about your wake, or they know when it is so they can avoid Club Fred’s that night.”
Huh. Maybe that’s what Keith had meant, about getting Cam to go. “You think they might want to avoid it?”
Emerson picked at his food, not eating so much as mining. “I think that I had Joey’s hands on me for a split second and I feel gross thinking about it. I’m not sure I’d want to celebrate much of anything if he’d gotten as close to me as he did to them.”
What had Cam said? He’d rather sleep on Josh and Keith’s couch than go home? “Okay, good note.” I tapped Talk to Cam into my phone’s notebook app as a task with a due date and hit Save, tagging it to-do and urgent. “I’ll talk to them.”
Dred began gathering our plates. (Well. Their plates. I wasn’t done poking at my omelet.) “I still don’t get why you’d bother.”
“Because it matters,” Obie said. “I think it’s a great idea, Zane. If you need any help, let us know.”
“Thanks, Obie.”
They cleaned around me while I finished breakfast and chatted with James, who managed to get me with sweet potato before Obie hauled him up to be mopped off at the sink. It was pleasant and domestic, listening to the bustle of the farmhouse. Dred was bitching about her quilt, Obie was telling her to just keep piecing it together already and stop tearing it out, and Emerson was talking—to himself or James—about what he needed to buy at the store.
And I sat there at the kitchen table, thinking about something else Cam had said. Families were built in different ways. I wanted to kiss Dred again. The idea of her kissing anyone else made me slightly homicidal. But I also wanted this: the farmhouse, breakfast on Saturday mornings, the simple bliss of other people’s voices.
I was supposed to stay for more quilting lessons, but instead I ran away like a scaredy-cat and promised to come back tomorrow. I couldn’t deal with how secretly hungry I was to be there. How easy it would be to stay until dinner, to kiss James good night, to linger, in Dred’s makeshift sewing room, with the lamps lit, talking about quilts when we were really talking about our lives.
I had to get my shit together. So I went to the place I had gone to get my shit together for years: Jaq’s house.
Not her apartment, or Hannah’s condo. Her childhood home. Where her dad still lived.
Jaq’s dad was a way better parent than either of mine. When I was about twelve, eating dinner at the Cummingses’ house because no one bothered to cook dinner at my house, Richard had told me I was welcome whenever I wanted to come over. Which I, being twelve, actually had taken literally. Andi had eventually pointed out that he’d probably said it to be polite, but by then I was eating over there five nights out of seven and he was treating me just like he treated Jaq and her siblings.
More than once when we’d gotten in fights as teenagers, I’d forgiven Jaq out of a desire to keep her dad in my life. I knocked on his door Saturday afternoon already crafting a pitch for maybe building a chicken coop, or tackling the back raised beds.
He opened the door. “Thank goodness you’re here. We have a plumbing problem, Zane. Roll up your sleeves. Or no, go find one of the girls’ old shirts. It’s gonna be messy.”
I tracked down a shirt and followed the sound of the local oldies station out to the yard, where Richard had pulled an entire sheet of siding off the exterior wall.
“Um.” I made my voice cheerful. “I’ve never taken a house apart before, so you’ll have to show me how it’s done.”
“Quiet, you. We’re having a plumbing problem.”
“Yes. All right. But don’t you usually autopsy plumbing from the inside of a house?”
“If you’re an amateur. Come over here.”
I obliged and stared into the wall, where, yeah, there it was. Pipes. And water. How much water was supposed to be, like, all over the place? Not this much, I didn’t think. “It’s looking a bit waterlogged in there, Dad.”
“That is the problem we’re addressing, thank you for paying attention, dear.” He took a deep breath. “We’re gonna need to go to the Home Depot. Wait, no, I’ll just send your sister.”
Like that. He didn’t mean my sister. He meant Jaq. Thirty seconds later he had her on the phone and he was cajoling her into coming over, and “stopping by” Home Depot on the way.
“It is on the way, Jaqueline! It is between your apartment and my— I see.” He caught my eye. “You’re not at your apartment. You’re at Hannah’s. All becomes clear. Well, if you don’t have time for your old dad and his old man problems—”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“And you can pick lunch up, too. Get enough for Zane.” He hung up. “That was interesting. Did you know she’d been spending a lot of time over at Hannah’s?”
I know they spent the night together the first time they hooked up and she’s been a big lovesick baby ever since. “No comment. And yeah, they had me over to dinner the other night. At the condo.”
“Now that’s a nice place. I like the layout of your place better, but you can’t beat a Harbor District view of La Vista and walking distance to the pier.”
“Yep. If that building had existed when I was looking to buy, I’d’ve probably moved there. Wait, you’ve been to Hannah’s?”
“You think you’re the only one who gets dinner invites? I’m insulted, missy. Now let me show you what’s going on in here. It all started when Ducky noticed the doors were no longer closing . . .”
I listened to the curious tale of the senile, incontinent dog in the kitchen, who was not necessarily responsible for a puddle simply because he was sitting in one. How that ended up with part of the siding removed from the exterior wall remained something of a mystery, but I didn’t need to understand to hand over a pipe wrench and dump the bucket when it filled up.
“What brings you over here, by the way? Things going all right with that young lady Jaq says you’ve been seeing?”
“Sure. Except we aren’t really seeing each other.”
He shot me a look. “No? Way Jaq talks, it sure seems like you are.”
“Well. I kind of. Um.”
“Out with it. They’ll be here soon, since the mandatory allotted time for foot-dragging is over, and Home Depot doesn’t take that long.”
“It does when Jaq’s involved.”
“Yeah, but I’m calculating for Hannah. Girl knows her way around the Home Depot.” He made an alarming circular motion with the pipe wrench. “Talk, Suzanne.”
I gave in—as we’d both known I was going to do—and sat down on the overturned bucket, which had been replaced by a lower-profile container for ease of plumbing. “I sort of pretended we were dating to make Jaq shut up. And because it was fun.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And now I kind of wish I hadn’t done that.”
“It stopped being fun?”
“No. But I wish it was . . . more than pretend.”
“And she doesn’t?” His tone implied I was being painfully dense.
“Everyone acts like it’s so obvious she wants it, too. But you don’t know Dred. She’s not like that.”
“Exactly how many people have you been pouring out your troubles to, Zanie?”
“Uh. Not that many?”
He shook his head. “This is that thing you girls do, where you think if you talk to enough people, you won’t have to talk to the person you need to talk to, and the group will do all the talking for you. Not to be a pigheaded misogynist, but man up, kid. Talk to this Dred if that’s what you want.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I whined.
“Yeah, you do. You always show up here when you’ve already decided what to do and need that extra boost. Same as Jaq. Consider this your swift kick in the pants. Now hand me that plumber’s tape. We might not need all that stuff I sent her out for.”
We didn’t need it—a fact Jaq repeated no fewer than four times—but food was definitely welcome. And Richard didn’t say anything else until we were all leaving later that night, after beer and a fire in his fireplace.
“Bring that young lady around one of these days, Zane. I want to meet her.”
“And her son,” Jaq added, smirking at me.
“Oh, well, then. A son?” Richard looked around. “It’d be good to have some little ones around again, I think.”
I tried to picture Dred in the house and failed, though I thought James would be climbing all over everything, and Richard would be a great pretend grandfather.
God. What the hell was I thinking? “I hate both of you.”
Hannah took my arm. “I got your back, hon. You don’t have to marry Dred just because Jaq thinks the two of you would look real cute on top of a cake.”
“We’d— She thinks— Cake—”
She laughed. “Oh, she’s got the wedding planned already.”
“True.” Jaq, behind us, lowered her voice. “You’re good for the reception, right, Dad?”
“Unless they want more people than can fit in the yard. It’d be a good excuse to finally do the landscaping I’ve been meaning to get around to since before you graduated from high school.”
“I can’t hear you!” I called while Hannah led me away.
Dred was ripping out her quilt. Again. She was hunched over on her bed, single panel gripped hard in one fist, and was angrily swiping at it with the sharp little tool that cut through the stitches.
“I can’t make it work. I have this idea in my head, but this—” She brandished th
e stitch-ripping weapon at me. “It won’t work.”
“Okay. But you’re not gonna hurt me with that thing, right?”
“I might. Don’t tempt me.”
The baby monitor crackled and an indistinct James sound came from it. Both of us went silent and listened, but he settled again.
“I spend all my time ripping this damn thing out. I hate it.”
I didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t matter that I thought it looked beautiful, that the green fabrics she’d chosen were different enough to be distinct and similar enough to all work together. It wasn’t what she wanted.
Instead of arguing, I poked around in her “sewing closet,” which was her only closet. It was half-empty now, since she’d moved some stuff downstairs. The sewing machine was in its place of honor, on a wall-mounted table she’d probably built herself. The shelves were lightly dusted, with outlines where bins had been, but there were a few left. One of them caught my eye. It was deeper and wider than the others. I couldn’t see inside.
She was still hard at work, so I risked sliding it out and lifting the lid. Most of Dred’s bins didn’t have lids; they were organizational, not protective. But this one had one of those snap-down lids, the not-totally-cheap kind.
More scraps. All kinds of different scraps. From all kinds of different fabrics. These weren’t odds and ends from Obie’s projects. I touched a long, odd-shaped piece, with fraying ends.
These were scraps from her life. One felt like a thin blanket, another a sheet. As I picked through, I saw other things—logos that must have been salvaged from old shirts, a leg from an old pair of jeans with a cut-off cuff, a pocket with no matching pair of pants. This was Dred’s life, all packaged carefully away in a bin with a lid.
“Don’t even bother with that. I’ll never be good enough to make the thing I want to make with all those.”
I turned toward her, offering the bin. “What’s this?”
For a long moment I thought she was going to put it back on the shelf, but instead she took it out to the bed and started sorting the scraps into piles.
“Aunt Florence has this quilt she made when she was seventeen. An actual genuine crazy quilt. She was about to go off on her first missionary trip and she knew she couldn’t take hardly anything with her, but she wanted to make something that would remind her of home, of her memories. So she pieced together all these bits from everything she owned. She went into her grandmother’s boxes and found baby clothes, old dresses from when she was a little girl. And she made this—” Dred paused, smoothing her hands over the jeans leg. “It’s so beautiful, Zane. This quilt she made out of all these different pieces, sizes, shapes. You can feel how much it meant to her, how much she cared about every single stitch. And it’s not— Sometimes people make meaningful quilts that don’t actually look that good. But hers is gorgeous. From far away it looks like a show quilt because of the composition, but when you get up close you can see that these bits are real, that they’ve been worn, and lived in. That’s what I want to make.”