Delicate

by K. L. Cottrell

  Once I’m buckled into my car, I call her on speakerphone. She’s out of The Chocolate Shop by now since she’s supposed to collect Theo from her parents’ house around six.

  “Hey!” she answers with an audible smile. “Did your day get any better in the last couple hours?”

  “Nope, ‘twas a true Monday from start to finish.”

  “Aw, Beck, I’m sorry.”

  I get ready to hit the road. “Thanks. It sucked. I’m only just now leaving the office.”

  “Hey, I left work just a minute ago too. Two more of my interviewees were late this afternoon. My lineup got derailed like crazy.”

  Oh, wow. She’d already told me about a dude being late earlier this afternoon. “Three people in total? Are you for real?”

  “Yep. I guess one guy wasn’t enough.”

  “Guess so. I’m sorry for you right back.”

  She tells me about how the interviews went, and I’m glad a few of them sound promising. I can’t easily describe all the tasks my department had to pick up for Derek, but she sympathizes nonetheless.

  Then we fall into silence since we’re driving, and it’s fine with us. Having each other on the call is comforting on its own.

  I’m almost home when she says, “Hey, I’m not far from your apartment.” I hear a smooching noise. “I just blew you a kiss since I can’t stop and give you a real one.”

  Even as I grin about that, I have to groan too. “A real one sounds so damn good.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  I return the blown kiss. “Hey, better than nothing.”

  She agrees—and then she bursts into excited chatter about a car full of animals she has just driven past. It gets her laughing, which improves my mood further, as does the mental image of a backseat’s worth of dogs trying to stick their heads out the same two windows.

  “That can’t be legal, can it?” I ask as I park in front of my apartment. “Doesn’t it hugely obstruct the driver’s visibility?”

  “That’s what I was thinking! Even if the animals aren’t in the front seat, I wouldn’t say anyone needs to be hauling so many around like that.”

  As soon as I’m out of my car, I take the phone off speakerphone and put it to my ear while I start thumbing for my house key.

  “Okay, I have to look it up,” I decide. “I just got home. Leaving work so late cut down on my free time before the retirement dinner, but I simply must spare a minute to see what….”

  Movement close to me has me glancing up from my keys—which I drop as my steps jolt to a stop.

  The weak gasp I manage doesn’t do justice to the shock violently slamming into me.

  Noelle seems to hear it, though, because, “Beck?” floats into my ear.

  But…oh my God.

  Oh my God, I can’t even find the air to respond to her.

  All I can do is stare at—at—

  “Beckett,” she says, “are you okay?”

  From too few feet away, my mother raises her eyebrows at me.

  My mother.

  She’s here, standing right in front of me, looking as callous as ever.

  “Beckett, answer me!”

  Noelle is starting to freak out.

  I blink hard and finally choke out, “My—Ellie, my mother is—she’s—”

  My mom snaps loudly, “Yeah, I’m here, and you’re doing a piss-poor job of greeting me after all these years! Stop staring at me and get off the phone!”

  “What?” shouts through the phone now. “She’s there with you?”

  I don’t know why I’m nodding when she can’t see me.

  I don’t know what’s going on or what my mom wants or how she knows I live here—I’ve long since moved out of the last place she knew to find me.

  My head is spinning.

  Spinning with Noelle talking in my ear.

  Spinning with painful flashes of old memories.

  Spinning with the fact that it’s been, yes, years since the last time I had to worry about being bothered like this.

  I can’t get a grip on whether I feel more lingering fear or disorienting shock…or swelling resentment.

  I’m a whirlwind on two frozen feet.

  “Get off the phone,” my mom orders again. “I’m not gonna say it another time.”

  She keeps telling me what to do like I’m still a child, her brown eyes every bit as harsh as I remember.

  “Beck,” I hear Noelle saying, “I’m gonna be there in just a minute, okay? I’m so close by, babe, so just hang in there! You don’t have to be alone with—”

  My mom’s rushing steps distract me from those wildly welcome words. I block her bold grab for my phone and take my own steps back from her, frowning hard.

  The fog of my shock clears a bit.

  She glares at me like I’m being disrespectful by not wanting her in my space.

  It’s nothing new that she feels like she’s not in the wrong—like she has the right to treat people any way she wants to.

  But the Beckett she’s looking at isn’t the Beckett she remembers.

  “What are you doing here?” I finally ask her.

  Her expression slackens into more of a sneer as she looks over me.

  “I’m here to collect some of what you owe me.” She crosses her arms. “Times haven’t been easy for me since your father passed, and I haven’t known where to find you. Was a most pleasant surprise when I got a call the other day from an old friend who said she found out you live here. She doesn’t know which unit you’re in, but she told me you live in the eight-hundreds building, and that was enough for me.”

  I stare at her.

  I don’t know what she thinks I owe her, and the longer I ponder the rest of her response, the harder my gut clenches.

  Which old friend is she talking about? Has someone been watching me without me realizing?

  The lady from the mailbox pops into my head—could it have been her? She said she knew me and I gave her my name, but what are the odds that she called my mom and led her to me? I swear she wasn’t familiar to me at all. How good of a friend could she even have been to my mom?

  Actually, it doesn’t matter.

  I don’t like any of this. At all.

  I don’t want my mother anywhere near me, don’t want her knowing where to find me, don’t want to ever hear from her again.

  “Leave me alone,” I huff out.

  “Sure,” she replies, “after you give me some money. You’re obviously doing well. It’s time for you to take care of me the way I took care of you.”

  It dawns on me that she rather looks like she drank hard last night, slept all day today, and ran a comb halfway through her hair before rushing out the door to hunt me down. Her eyes are heavy and her clothes would be in pretty good shape if they weren’t rumpled. She doesn’t seem to be in a terrible way, but she doesn’t look like she’s doing well, either.

  ‘You’re obviously doing well.’

  ‘Give me some money.’

  She hasn’t gotten any better since my dad died. She really does still think my life is hers to loom over.

  It was for a long time, but I am doing better now. Her problems aren’t my problems anymore. I don’t have to carry her attitude around with me anymore.

  “A thousand should do it for now,” she prompts me.

  I shake my head. “No, I’m—I’m not giving you anything.”

  Her eyebrows shoot up again. “The hell you’re not. I brought you into this world. I kept clothes on your back and food in your—”

  “You didn’t take care of me.” My voice isn’t as steady as I want it to be, but the words keep coming. “You—you kept me from dying just so you and Dad could be cruel to me in other ways. When you take care of someone, it means you love them, and you never did that.”

  She takes a menacing step at me. “Don’t you talk to me that way!”

  Her tone sends a familiar chill down the back of my neck.

  But only for a second because, I deserve bette
r than this, is promptly bursting through my mind.

  And the slam of a car door is bursting through the air.

  I look over and find Noelle striding up to us, her hair and dress and open sweater fluttering behind her, worry and anger sharp on her face.

  My mom is still focused on me, though.

  “—don’t know shit about parenting,” she’s saying. “You’re not supposed to be friends with your kid, you’re supposed to make sure they grow up knowing their place and how to act. You think we were mean to you? Then you’re as stupid now as you always were! I feel damn sorry for any child who ever depends on you if you’ve been going around thinking it’s cruel to lay down rules and—”

  “‘Rules’?” I echo, my pulse going skyward and taking my resentment with it. “Our household wasn’t structured! You and Dad were just unhappy and screwed up and you took it out on me every chance you got—I have scars from it!”

  She actually scoffs at me.

  “If that’s even true,” she says, “you did something to deserve it. A kid does something wrong, you punish them! Actions have consequences! Welcome to the real world, Beckett!”

  Once again, all I can do is stare at her.

  I don’t know if I feel like throwing up or erupting with fury.

  She believes that if they ever did hurt me—as if there were any doubt about it—then I must’ve asked for it? She thinks I deserved the gash I got from being shoved into the table in our front hall simply because I was walking past the door when my dad stormed through it after a bad day at work? And the scrape I got from the bricks on the outside of our house when I accidentally blew a twig against her car with the leaf-blower after yardwork? And the other marks they left on me, including the one right here on my face from when my dad randomly beat the hell out of me in a public parking lot because he was mad I didn’t want to talk to him?

  How can anyone be so…so…?

  “You,” comes Noelle’s harsh whisper, “are disgusting.”

  I turn my still-stunned gaze to where she stands at my side. I find she’s shaking her head at my mom, looking as heartbroken and furious as I feel.

  My mom finally pivots to her. “I don’t know who you think you are, but—”

  “I don’t know who you think you are,” Noelle slices through her. “You’re not welcome to show up and attack Beckett like this.”

  “Our conversation isn’t your business,” my mom says, voice rising.

  “Yes, it is, seeing as how I’m one of the people who helped him get out from under the mental bullshit you and your husband piled on him. If you think I’m gonna abandon him to it, you’ve got another think coming!”

  Cold brown eyes swing back to me. “Now you need a girl to stand up for you? You really are weak and a disappointment. Where the hell did we go wrong with you?”

  What I am is officially done with this.

  I point at her. “Leave it to one of the most pathetic souls I’ve ever known to not recognize a show of love when they see one. I feel sorry for you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I finally sweep forward and get my keys off the ground. Since I don’t want her to know which apartment I’m in, there’s no way I’m heading indoors right now, but Noelle and I can still drive away.

  “Get out of here,” I add after I straighten back up.

  “I’m not going anywhere until you give me what I came here for!”

  “Nothing I’ve earned for myself belongs to you—not my money, and not my peace. I’m leaving, and if you’re still here when I come back, I’m calling the cops.”

  “You think I’m afraid of you?”

  She’s suddenly here and shoving me roughly, advancing further as I stumble in shock. One of her hands rears back—

  —and as it comes down, Noelle rushes between us and blocks the blow with lifting arms.

  “Ellie, no!” Horrified, I try to pull her away.

  But she’s firmly in my mom’s sights now, being advanced on instead of me, being shouted at as her arms get attacked—and then one gets grabbed and jerked down, leaving her open to a cracking backhand to the face.

  As her gasp spears into me, I snap.

  With all my strength, I fully whirl Noelle into my arms and ram the side of my body into my mom, sending her staggering. “No! Back the fuck up!”

  As she tumbles to the ground, my bellow rings in the air, my ears, my bones. And even being down, she listens to it. She keeps skittering backward, her eyes gone wide.

  “There was never anything wrong with me, but there is still something wrong with you!” I fire off. “I don’t have room for it in my life! You never needed me before, and you sure as hell don’t need me now! Get out of here and don’t come back!”

  Noelle is gasping in my arms over and over again. My mom is staring at me like she’s processing what I’ve said.

  She isn’t processing it fast enough.

  “Now!” I shout. “Leave now, damn it!”

  I’ve just started guiding Noelle toward my car when my mom scrambles to her feet. She hurries to an old hatchback parked a few empty spaces away. She fumbles her way into the driver’s seat and gets the car started.

  I try to memorize the look of it—Mazda, black, Texas plates—but there’s no way I can note enough to keep an eye out for it every day from now on. She’s speeding it out of the parking lot before I can even get my phone from my pocket and take a picture.

  But she is gone.

  I stare around, trying to wrap my mind around everything that has happened.

  As suddenly as she appeared, she’s gone, and now it’s just me and—

  I hear noise behind us before, “Oh my God, here! Here!” hits the air.

  I look over and find a young woman hastening to us with a baby on her hip and what looks like a pack of ice in her other hand. She’s coming out of a downstairs apartment catty-corner to mine.

  My surprise must be visible to her.

  “I saw everything that just happened,” she explains as she comes closer. “I had my eye on that woman for a while. She’s been here for over an hour, just pacing around, and I had my window open, so I heard her telling someone on the phone, ‘I finally found him, and he’s gonna give me money for my trouble or else,’ and—” she hands the ice pack to Noelle, “—and I didn’t know who she meant or what was wrong, but it sounded scary. And honestly, she didn’t look great, so just in case it was gonna go badly, I took pictures of her and her car.”

  My surprise is mounting. “You did?”

  She nods. “Then you got here, and things got even weirder ‘cause it looked like she was the one starting stuff, and I called the police since I’d basically heard her threaten you—”

  Oh, thank God, I think at the same time Noelle huffs it out.

  “—they’re on the way. I can call and cancel if that’s what you want for any reason, but you should know I started recording on my phone right before you got here, ma’am, ‘cause I had a feeling it was better to be safe than sorry.” She finally takes a breath and adjusts her baby on her hip. “I’ve got her hitting you on video. I’m really sorry if I was out of line to get involved, but it seemed like the right thing to do, and I didn’t know what she was capable of, and—”

  “No, no, no,” I interrupt. “Thank you! Thank you. You have no idea just how valuable that is to us.”

  She looks relieved that I’m not angry. “You’re welcome! I’ll give everything to the police if you want, and I’ll share my side of what happened.”

  I tell her, “Absolutely,” but the rest of my attention is on turning Noelle around so I can hug her.

  There’s so much I want to say. So much more I want to do.

  For now, I can’t ignore the urge to just hold her in my arms, keep her safe to my chest, while I kiss her forehead over and over.

  “Beck, she’s an angel,” she sighs.

  My neighbor is awesome, for sure.

  The real angel among us, though, has an ice pack against her cheek an
d her pounding heart close to mine.

  —

  The police are gone. Noelle’s parents and my coworkers have been alerted that although we’re fine, an emergency did come up and we’ll be late meeting them. There is now a record of the incident, and my neighbor’s video was helpful. We’ve been promised this whole thing will be tacked on to a small list of offenses my mom already has noted against her; that kind of surprised me since she and my dad were always good at escaping trouble, but I’m well aware of how things don’t stay the same forever. Maybe her past is finally catching up to her.

  At last, I can spend a minute alone with Noelle and catch my breath.

  Once we’re locked into the apartment, I turn toward her—only to run into her, because she’s reaching for me just as I was about to reach for her. We grasp and stumble for a second, then find our balance in the middle of the living room. Her hands have long been free of the ice pack, so she rubs anxiously at my sides while I take her face in my hands so gently, as gently as I can.

  “Noelle,” I finally say, my voice strained, “why did you do that?”

  “I wasn’t about to let her hurt you,” she wobbles out. “She was going to and—and I couldn’t stand there and let it happen.”

  She’s near tears.

  Makes two of us.

  Throat aching, I shake my head. “I could’ve taken it. I—”

  “Beckett, no.” She sniffles, then goes from rubbing at my waist to patting at my chest, those eyes going all over me. “Are you all right? Did she upset you? She didn’t hit you before I got here, did she?”

  I rush glances over her too. “I’m not upset, at least not right now, and she didn’t hit me. I’m fine.”

  “Do you swear?”

  “I swear. Fuck, I just….”

  As desperate as I am to check on her, I don’t want to hurt her more; my hand shakes from how hard I try to carefully curl my fingers against her slapped cheek.

  I’m afraid she might break somehow.

  I’m frustrated about her intervention.

  I’m burning with love for her.

  That’s what this deep, inescapable, luminous feeling is: being in love with her.