Building a Family

by M. K. Stelmack

  The bar was the island kind, square in the middle of the establishment. Tables skirted two walls with windows along the front. Regulars sat around the restaurant. Dizzy, always on the go, would be in and out, too. Plenty of witnesses.

  “Hey. Get me a beer.”

  Trevor’s order swung Connie’s attention back to him. “Show me the money first.”

  He tried his one-eyed glare on her again, and despite her tumbling insides, she stood her ground. He slapped down a ten-dollar bill. “I want the change.”

  “Of course, hon, to the penny.”

  “You can’t. The country’s phased out pennies. You work at a bar and you don’t know that?”

  He was actually sneering at her, not realizing how stupid he sounded. “It’s an expression, Trevie.”

  Trevor hated that nickname. Sure enough, his torn-up face reddened. “I know that. I’m just saying that the words don’t apply.”

  “Thanks for the advice.” Connie resisted adding more and got him his beer and change.

  “This isn’t what I wanted,” he said when she set it in front of him.

  What game was he playing now? “This is the only beer you ever drink.”

  “You thought wrong. You didn’t take my order. You need to take my order.”

  “Very well. What is your order?”

  He named a specialty beer he’d likely spit out.

  “Sorry. We don’t serve that here.”

  He named another.

  “Sorry. Not that, either.”

  He glared. She smiled.

  “What do you serve then?”

  She pointed to the beer between them. “That.”

  He told her what he thought of that.

  “Language,” she warned. “And may I remind you that this business reserves the right not to serve customers.” From the corner of her eye, she noticed Ben slip in and take up a spot at the bar kitty-corner to them.

  She left Trevor to figure out his comeback and poured a Coke, no ice, from the fountain. “Everything okay?” His lips barely moved as he indicated Trevor.

  “Oh, yeah. I worked him over but he’s back in line now.”

  “You say the funniest things.” He wasn’t smiling.

  “Hey,” Trevor called, “get me another beer.”

  In the brief time her back was turned, he’d downed his glass.

  “And before you ask, I got the money.” He slapped down another ten-dollar bill.

  “I’ll be back,” Connie said to Ben.

  This time when she set the beer bottle in front of Trevor, he grabbed her wrist. “You didn’t ask how I got these.” He pointed to his face.

  From Ben’s direction, Connie heard the chair being scraped back. Perfect, the last thing she needed was gentle Ben in a bar fight. He was tall and well-built, but he had no idea how to throw a punch. Then again, his opponent didn’t appear to know how to dodge them.

  “Let go of me,” she said, “and I’m all ears.”

  He released her and clutched his wet beer bottle. “They think I should work for free.” Trevor had this habit of talking as if she should understand what was going on in his head. The scary part was she usually did.

  Trevor painted bikes for gang members across the country, though he wasn’t a member of any. He was so good that even rival gangs used him, and he had the nickname Michelangelo. Very lucrative and very dangerous money. Connie had preferred that “career” to his other job of selling drugs for support groups of the gang Trevor’s older brother belonged to.

  “You tried to rip the club off again?” she whispered. Hadn’t he learned his lesson in the summer when he’d tried to double-cross the bikers?

  Trevor carried on at his regular, voice-carrying level. “I wasn’t ripping them off. I didn’t get any money from them, so how could I have ripped them off, eh?” Trevor drew a finger through the condensation on his defrosting mug. “All’s I did was delay delivery.”

  Connie groaned. Typical Trevor McCready. “That’s called theft.”

  He took a pull on his beer. “Only in their world.”

  “That,” she said, “is the only world that matters.”

  “I just want fair compensation for the work I do. I got bills to pay.”

  Trevor never cared if the rent or utilities were paid. Or even if there was food in the fridge. He only attended to one set of bills.

  “Keep your voice down. You used from the supply again and tried to short them, didn’t you?”

  “I can handle it.”

  “Right, I can see how well you are handling it.” Every day for the past week she’d written his name down on her list with a question mark behind it. How to help someone who refused to help themselves? “Have you seen your brother? Maybe he can talk to them.”

  Trevor’s hold on his bottle tightened. “No. I can handle it. Don’t you go blabbing to him again, okay? That other stuff back in the summer was supposed to be just between you and me, but no, you had to go blabbing.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone—”

  But Trevor was on a roll, his voice rising. “Mouthing off to him, mouthing off to everyone about how you were better than me, you weren’t going to have anything to do with me. If you’d left me alone I could have found a way out, but you sicced them on me. You—”

  “Hey!” It was Ben. Connie had never heard him shout before, and his voice only lowered a fraction when he added, “Stop before I make you leave.”

  Trevor’s black and puffy eyes drifted over to Ben. “You’re her old boyfriend? Or her new one?”

  “Not new,” Connie cut in. Trevor was goading him, and Ben was naive enough to fall for it. “He’s a customer trying to enjoy his drink.”

  Trevor snorted. “Yeah, right. Drinking a Coke.” Trevor shook his head as if he’d just been hit again. “Hey, I know you. You always come here. You’re the guy always looking at her. Even when we were together.” He turned to Connie. “He’s stalking you.”

  “No, he is not,” Connie enunciated in a low hiss. She glanced around. No one else was paying attention. “He’s an old friend.”

  “Actually,” Ben said, his voice closer. Connie glanced around to see him rounding the corner of the bar to come up alongside Trevor. Within striking distance. Connie’s insides clenched. “Actually, I am her boyfriend. We’re just not making a big production out of it.”

  “We’re not—” Connie snapped her mouth shut. Denial would just prove his point. She bugged her eyes at Ben, trying to convey her displeasure. He grinned.

  “Some advice, my friend,” Trevor said. “Quit while you’re ahead.”

  “Thanks,” Ben said. “It’s a little too late for that, but I appreciate your words of wisdom. I bet you’re glad I got her off your hands.”

  Trevor smiled, or at least he tried to. “I feel for you, man. You just got yourself a whole world of grief.”

  “Yep,” Ben said, his eyes on her. “Don’t I know it?”

  Trevor rose from his stool. “I don’t have anything against you, but she crossed a line with me and now there’s a penalty to pay.”

  Ben straightened to tower above the other man. That was the thing with Ben. He always worked to be at the same height as others, then when he forgot himself, everyone became small.

  “I hear you, Trevor. I’m a line that she’s crossed, too, and she’ll just have to get used to the fact like everyone else that whoever messes with her messes with me.”

  It sounded like lines from a junior high play. She couldn’t wait to get Ben alone, so she could cross a few lines with him herself.

  Trevor shrugged. “Whatever. Your grave.” He sauntered off, but Connie knew from the way he rolled his shoulders inside his fleece-lined denim jacket that he wasn’t happy.

  And if Trevor wasn’t happy, he made sure everyone around him wasn’t, either.
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  CHAPTER THREE

  BEN DIDN’T LET Connie take control of the conversation for their short drive to her house, as he usually did. Instead, he switched the heat controls to Connie’s preferred toasty levels and let the truck idle at the curb.

  “How much trouble is Trevor McCready?”

  “Trouble? He isn’t trouble.”

  He didn’t take his gaze off her to nudge her into a better answer, and also because he loved her face. For sure, she could transform herself into a magazine model with a little makeup, but it was her expressions that did it for him. When she squinted her left eye a titch or widened them into a glare, or the several hundred ways she shaped her mouth depending on the message she was delivering. Right now, in the shadowed cab, it was a careful neutral line.

  He switched on the interior light. She blinked at the sudden brightness, then quickly shifted back into her constructed poker face.

  “Liar.”

  Out came the widened eyes. “What? You don’t know anything about the situation. And I’m not explaining it, either, because it’s none of your business.” She slipped her hands under her thighs against the heated seats. “Let’s go. I’m freezing.”

  “The truck is warm,” Ben said. “We can talk here.”

  “No, we can’t,” she said, “because there is nothing to talk about. Other than the fact that you are not my boyfriend.”

  “Yeah, it kind of doesn’t work when you get to be our age,” he said, allowing her this distraction because he wanted the issue hashed out, too.

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t work? I’m only thirty-three and you’re thirty-seven.”

  “All right,” he agreed. “Let’s be boyfriend/girlfriend.”

  Out came her squinty eye. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. We are not together. And Trevor is the worst guy you could’ve said that to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—because he’s not worth the trouble.”

  “Just like me.” The words tumbled from him before he could stop them.

  “Yes, you’re worth the trouble. But not my trouble. And not his trouble. You’re worth the trouble that a single woman with a decent job and no debts and a brother who’s not ashamed of her and...and a vehicle, her own vehicle, can bring.”

  The closest to a declaration of love in three years. “You don’t want me to get hurt.”

  She pulled her hands out from underneath her and shaped them into rigid claws. She shook them, as if his neck was in her grasp. “Of course I don’t want you to get hurt. You’re a friend. An old friend. I haven’t told anyone about what happened with Trevor because, trust me, the less said, the better.”

  He was more than an “old friend,” but to get her to admit that was like sawing through a knot in wood—slow-going as all get-out. “I don’t like the fact that he threatened you.”

  “He didn’t threaten me.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong but ‘now there’s a penalty to pay’ sounds like a threat to me. It took all I had not to add more color to his face.”

  “I am correcting you. Promise me you won’t get involved with Trevor in any way, shape or form, okay?”

  Her voice was shaky from emotion. Question was, what kind of emotion? “Motivate me,” he said. “Give me a reason.”

  She growled in frustration and raked her hair behind her ears. “Because the people who left his face like that will have no trouble sorting you out the same way if you cross them.”

  “Tell me what Trevor did so I don’t do the same.”

  She did a bit more growling and raking of hair, and then spilled. “Last summer, he thought he knew better than his client how to paint the bike. Maybe he did, but the point is, the customer is always right, especially with this bunch. Trevor threw a fit and painted the bike with a pink-and-purple unicorn.”

  Ben was pretty sure he wouldn’t do the same. “You got caught in the cross fire?”

  Connie twisted her beautiful mouth into all kinds of shapes. “Well,” she said, drawing out the single word, “you could say I played a more active role.”

  He waited.

  “Trevor drained my account and skipped town. I found out he went to Las Vegas—in July, no less—so I followed him to get my money. I was too late, so I maxed out my card to fly back. So yeah, when the club came knocking on my door the day I got home, steamed and broke and cheated, I was more than happy to share his location.”

  “Cheated?”

  “He took all my money.”

  Oh, yeah. Cheating had more than one meaning.

  Connie cleared her throat. “Anyway, long story short, Trevor was hauled home and forced to make amends, believe you me. I’m not thrilled about my role in that, but from the state of his face tonight, he hasn’t learned his lesson.”

  Annoyance bit through her every word, and if Connie was annoyed with someone it also meant she cared. She was funny with her love that way.

  “Do you still love him?”

  “What?” The single word shot from her mouth and she let fly with a stinging spray of words. “You have got to be kidding me. You can’t think I’m that stupid. No one can love Trevor better than he loves himself, and I never tried to compete.”

  He believed her. At least, that she wasn’t in love with him. “Then why did you hook up with him in the first place?”

  He expected her to tell him that it wasn’t any of his business, and she’d be right. But the question had eaten away at him for a year now.

  Instead, she looked out her passenger-side window. “Mom was dying,” she said. “I didn’t have the...energy to end it, even though I didn’t love him. It was...easier to be with him. I’d come home and he’d be there and...and I wasn’t alone.”

  He’d been alone. Ben gazed out his own side window, where an ownerless dog trotted by.

  He’d been alone in his workshop thinking of her, then alone at Smooth Sailing eating the food she served him. Alone everywhere...wanting her.

  “I feel bad about it,” she said. “I used him.”

  Ben wished she’d used him the same way. “Is that why you care that he’s in trouble now?”

  She pressed her head with its bright hair against the headrest. “He’s deaf in his left ear because they beat him so bad. It should’ve healed but it never did. I think some bones inside his ear were damaged.”

  Ben could guess where she was heading with this, so he cut her off. “Not your fault, Connie.”

  “Yes, it is. I knew he was going to get beaten, and I was so angry I didn’t care.”

  “He broke the rules,” he said softly. “He understood the risk.”

  “I didn’t have to tell them where he was. I had a choice.”

  Placing herself in danger to save others had always been Connie’s weak point—the stunt to save Miranda that ended up with Seth in jail was a case in point. “If you cared to live, I don’t think you did.”

  She shook her head, her hair rustling against the leather headrest. “I was...under protection. From somebody who owed me a favor, okay?” She closed her eyes. “Please. Can you take me home now?”

  Somebody. Another man. Another one she’d gone to for help instead of him. “Are you seeing someone, Connie?”

  You would’ve thought he was pulling her intestines out through her nose from the way she squirmed. “No. I’m not. Satisfied?”

  “Considering I proposed marriage to you, yes. Yes, I am.”

  “I wish I was dating someone. Then you wouldn’t have proposed and things between us wouldn’t be so...confusing.”

  Things between them had always been confusing, at least for him. Giving her the ring had been more like taking a board he’d spent all his adult life moving around and finally cutting into it, giving it shape and purpose. He wasn’t about to argue the point, not now, anyway. Not until the matter of Trevor wa
s sorted. “But I did and they are. You have the right to refuse to marry me, but you also said I’m an old friend. That means I won’t sit on a bar stool and watch you get threatened. And as a friend, I have a certain right to ask questions. Can we agree to that?”

  Her chin came up. “Then you have to respect my concern for you, too. You can’t worry a friend. You have to stay away from Trevor.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll leave Trevor alone if he leaves you alone. If he comes anywhere close to you, if he crosses the boundaries we set with him tonight, then I have the right to make him step back. Agreed?”

  A full minute ticked by on the digital time display before she finally said, “Okay.”

  He’d take it. He didn’t like his relegation to “friend” status, but for the first time since they’d broken up and after forty-seven rides home—yes, he was counting—she’d acknowledged that he had some kind of place in her life.

  * * *

  “AND NOW FOR our last brave entrant in this year’s Polar Dip. Connie Greene, representing the community activity group Lakers-on-the-Go,” the host announced.

  Good-hearted applause crackled through the circle of watchers as a figure emerged from the huge white participants’ tent. The tent was set up on the other side of the snow-covered lake surface from where Ben stood with Seth, Mel, Alexi and her four kids by the ice hole. Ice square, really. The square was about five by five feet, with four rescue divers at the corners.

  “What’s Con done now?”

  Ben had no answer for Seth. To entertain and thank the crowd for their pledges to the various causes, many of the entrants in the Polar Dip dressed up. Connie wore the costume of the mascot for Lakers-on-the-Go. A merperson, she’d described to Ben. A gender neutral, nautical character.

  But he felt far from neutral seeing her in this particular getup. Her blue-green bikini top glinted in the sharp winter sun, and her lower half was encased in a matching fish costume, skintight and narrow at her feet. It became immediately clear that the outfit was so tight she could only shuffle forward a few inches at a time. In flip-flops. In minus-fourteen-degree Celsius temperatures. With a middle bare except for the tattoo of a single green leaf.