A Time to Gather (3 page)
“You should have shot him.” He flashed a grin. “Actually, you’ve got another chance. Here he comes now.”
She looked over her shoulder. The hot anchorman didn’t look so good. Hangover was written all over his puffy face, messy black hair, rumpled clothes. She wondered what his adoring fans would think.
An older man walked beside him, obviously his dad. Though not as tall as the younger Beaumont and fifty-something, his handsome face would turn heads as well.
She should shoot the father, too, for bailing the son out so soon, for not letting him suffer consequences that might remind him not to drink and drive.
As they approached, the scowling duo paid no attention to Rosie and Bobby, but she heard the exchange between them.
“I called Dan,” the son hissed. “Not you.”
“It’s not your brother’s job to get you out of jail.”
“And since when is it yours?”
“I’m your father.”
“Ha! You check out of my life for thirty years and now you’re my
father
. That’s rich.”
They moved out of range, and Rosie caught no more of their argument. Not that she needed to hear more. Her macho police demeanor melted the instant she deciphered the tone of their voices.
“Aw, nuts,” she muttered.
Bobby chuckled. “Hit the soft spot, did he?”
“I really hate it when they have
issues
.”
“Rosie’s Adopt the Hopeless Club, now in session.”
“Oh, get lost, Grey.” She spun on her heel and walked away, Bobby’s laughter echoing in her ears.
L
exi wasn’t sure why she agreed to pizza at a restaurant with her siblings. The three of them reminded her of paintbrushes long overdue for a good cleaning: stiff with the old and a few hog-hair bristles shy of being useful for creating anything new.
Jenna was . . . Well, Jenna was Jenna, an unequivocal pain in the neck.
Erik, the oldest of the four of them, was a male version of Jen: gorgeous, talented, bossy.
Only Danny, Lexi’s fraternal twin, prevented the evening from dipping into really ugly territory.
“How about we change the subject?” Erik scowled into his goblet. “‘Chew on Erik’ has become quite boring.” He downed half the wine in one gulp.
Jenna had been haranguing him nonstop for twenty minutes. “Maybe being chewed out is exactly what you need! I mean, a DUI? Give me a break! How old are you anyway? You’re on television! People look up to you! Danny, tell him how stupid he’s behaving.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to be redundant, Jen. How about we move on to the menu? What kind of pizza do you all want?”
“But he hasn’t gotten the message! Erik, don’t you dare order another glass of wine.”
He kept his arm raised and signaled the waiter. “I’m not. I’m ordering a bottle.”
“Then I’m leaving. Move.” She shoved at Erik, who had her blocked in the booth seat.
He didn’t budge. “Nasty habit you have, running away all the time. You haven’t left Kevin again, have you?”
“You snot! That was totally uncalled for.”
“So is ranting and raving about my habits, nasty as they are. It’s not like I get blotto every night and then drive and get caught.”
“But you had to do it now? In the middle of Mom and Dad’s plans? Their do-over wedding or marriage blessing or whatever it’s called. The point is you were so hungover you missed your tux fitting appointment. You can’t blow their special time!”
Erik did not reply. Even Jenna closed her mouth.
An eerie hush settled about them. Noise of the bustling pizza joint sank to a background hum. Scurrying waiters slowed to robot pace.
The siblings rarely got together as an isolated foursome. Aside from the special connection between the twins, the four of them were not exactly close friends. They saw each other at family events with brother-in-law Kevin, their parents, and grandparents in tow. There were occasional social doings when their paths crossed with mutual friends. But a dinner like tonight? Not in recent memory. Lexi had no clue why Jenna had insisted on it or why on earth they’d all agreed.
Until now.
The wedding reference brought them all up short. Lexi felt like they’d come upon a neon sign flashing a message: “Now hear this: You are all in the same sinking ship.”
Erik sighed in his dramatic way. “Well, gang, I confess. That is precisely why I drank myself into a stupor at this exact point in time. I don’t want any part of Mom and Dad’s
re-wedding
stuff, and my guess is neither do any of you. Jenna, you’ve turned into a first-class shrew. Lexi, you’re so closed in on yourself, you’re going to disappear altogether.”
She squirmed. Who wouldn’t be tentative with the king and queen of drama? As far back as she could remember those two had always dismissed everything she said with a laugh or some demeaning remark.
Erik continued. “Dan, if you don’t have some deep, dark, nasty secret, I’ll plead guilty to the DUI charge that the mayor already fixed.”
Beside her, Danny piled up sugar packets, his eyes lowered, his lips bunched. People often didn’t believe he was Lexi’s twin. His brown hair was darker than hers and curly. Unlike her, he had their dad’s black-brown eyes. Sometimes, though, people noticed the twin-ness in their ability to read each other.
She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not have a deep, dark, nasty secret.
Danny folded his hands on the packets and eyed Erik across the table. “I lost a client. My biggest.”
An excruciating pain shot through Lexi, as if a rhinoceros had just fallen atop her and crushed
every bone and organ in her body.
Danny shrugged. “My fault. I’m surfing instead of working, and the whole time I’m thinking to myself, who gives a rip? Let them design their own stinking software.”
Erik guffawed. “You are such a Boy Scout! I was talking booze, sex, drugs.”
“Get off your high horse. We’re both talking about our living. You’ll lose yours if you keep this up.”
“No worries. They love me at the station. My fans adore me.”
“It’d be Dad’s worst nightmare come true, you know, if either of us flopped at our careers.”
“Whatever.”
Jenna cleared her throat. “Kevin,” she whispered. “Kevin’s going. Next week. They’re shipping out.”
They turned as one and stared at her.
She nodded, her face crumpling.
“Next week?” Lexi said.
“No way!” Danny exclaimed. “He’s not supposed to go until sometime after the wedding! In June, not March!”
“Stupid, idiotic, incompetent, lousy, rotten marines.” Jenna lifted her hands in a helpless gesture.
Erik flung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Oh, Jen-Jen.”
“That’s why I’m such a shrew!” she blubbered.
Lexi wanted to slide under the table and slink on out the door. It was all too much. Danny not confiding in her? Erik drinking like a fish? And Kevin? Her brother-in-law? Overseas?
She grabbed a breadstick. Only over her own dead body would she ever agree to get together with her siblings again.
A
rhinoceros?” Danny grinned.
Lexi stood beside her twin, studying her unfinished oil painting. No wonder she’d imagined a rhino earlier that evening. She’d been engrossed with the animal, working on its likeness for weeks now.
They were in her apartment, in the spare bedroom she used as a studio. Danny had driven her there after they’d finally eaten dinner—a mushroom-and-pepperoni pizza that still wasn’t feeling quite right from the inside. Kevin’s news had dominated their conversation. By the time they left the restaurant, Jenna was under control. Erik wasn’t, but she and Danny escorted him into his condo and hid his car keys.
“Lex, how on earth do you come up with these subjects to paint?”
“The Wild Animal Park.”
“I know that much. But why choose this guy? I mean he is one ugly dude. Horrific. Your work is disturbingly realistic sometimes.”
The white African rhino filled much of the sixteen-by-twenty-inch canvas. His head turned slightly, the two horns on his snout were front and center, one menacing eye above them.
Danny stepped nearer the canvas and studied the color photo clipped onto the side of the easel. “Whoa. How close were you to the real guy when you snapped this?”
“A few feet. I took one of those photo caravan tours at the park. He came right up to the truck.”
“He’s not a true white color, really. Just gray. Is he endangered?”
“Yes.” She studied her depiction again.
Except for the shiny dark eye, all the colors in the painting were drab and fading. Light gray armor covered the rhino. There were stark, leafless tree branches behind him, an ashen sky, sunbaked earth beneath him, a few dried-up weeds.
He said, “Everything about this is endangered, isn’t it? The ground, the plants. The sunless sky, even. It’s like every detail is in the throes of death.”
She shut her eyes briefly. Danny always figured them out.
“Lex, I was going to tell you.”
She assumed he was referring to his business situation. “You didn’t have to. It’s okay.”
“But it’s not okay. I tell you everything.”
She shrugged.
“Don’t do that. Don’t shrug it off. I’ve been avoiding you, Lexi. You’re my other half and I’ve been avoiding you like the plague. Which makes absolutely no sense at all.” Plainly exasperated, he clasped his hands atop his head. “No sense at all except it shows you how tied up in knots I am over this whole mess.”
He wasn’t talking about the business situation.
Lexi watched him pace the small room in quick, jerky strides. Whenever her twin was wound up like some battery-operated bouncing toy, she waited without comment until the energy drained.
He pressed his fingertips against his temples as he turned again. “Mom and Dad, the perfect couple, churchgoers, outstanding community leaders, high-society members, parents of four fairly normal adult children. Out of the blue, Mom files for divorce. Mom, the one who taught us how much God hates divorce. The one who swore if we followed God’s standards, we wouldn’t have problems.”
Lexi’s recollections differed. Their mother’s faith had not been so well-defined to her. But then Danny embraced religious things differently than Lexi did.
Danny still paced. “Mom leaves Dad and says the past thirty years have been nowhere near what they were cracked up to be. Okay, so he wasn’t around all that much. He provided for us, didn’t he? Now he throws his entire life’s work away, his passion, and says he should have listened to Mom more? And she says she should have disagreed with him more? What does this say about our childhood?”
Lexi met his glance with an uncertain shake of her head. She didn’t know what it said.
“It says it was all a crock. It says if I can’t trust my parents, who can I trust?” He blew out a breath and halted in the middle of the room, hands on his hips.
“This is why you’re tied up in knots?”
“Yeah.”
Lexi let her gaze wander back to the painting. Despite the almost eerie connection she and Danny had on every level, it surprised her whenever he grasped meaning in her work. As a child, she never colored inside the lines. Now, as an adult, she painted her originals in a similar manner. An observer would not mistake the rhino or tree or other things for anything else, but no distinct outlines formed the subjects.
She looked at her brother. “Our parents aren’t coloring inside the lines anymore.”
He scrunched his lips together.
“According to your standards, they don’t look like they’re supposed to look.”
“So my standards are wrong?”
“I don’t know. I only know that you used to have a fit when Mom put gold stars on my coloring-book pages. The ones that had crayon marks all over them. Now when you see her and Max’s messy pages, you don’t have fits. You just surf and don’t work.”
He lowered his head. “I’ve practically been living in the water.”
“How bad is the business loss?”
“I can still pay rent and buy food.” He toed the carpet for a moment and then looked up. “So, what do we do? Call in sick for the next re-wedding event?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
He smiled, his first of the long evening. “But we can’t. They’re our parents. Guess I’ll just surf some more while you keep painting nature on the verge of extinction. We’ll get through it. God will get us through it.” He turned again to the painting. “It really is very good. Erik says you hold too much inside. Maybe you ought to invite him over to see this.”
“Got to catch him sober first.”
“Yeah. Okay, I’m out of here, sis.”
Within
moments of his leaving, Lexi squirted a glob of paint from a tube onto a palette. She pulled out the widest of her brushes. A short time later, the rhino, the tree, the dirt, and the sky were obliterated, disintegrating in a pool of burnt umber.
R
osie sat cross-legged on an ottoman directly in front of the television, elbows propped on knees, chin in hands. A waist-up shot of Channel 3 news anchor Erik Beaumont filled the screen. With an appropriately somber expression on his face, he related a story about a bank robbery.
On the other side of the living room, her dad’s recliner creaked. “He is not bad looking.”
“For a gringo.”
“Rosita, you should not use that word.”
She smiled. The gentleness of Esteban Delgado’s admonitions tickled her.
“Papi.”
The word for “daddy” sounded like “poppy” in English. She’d always called him that. “I’m almost thirty years old. When are you going to give up on me?”
“When you quit talking like a hard-nosed cop. I know what the streets are like. They will ruin you if we don’t keep our guard up. I will get to heaven and your
madre
will turn her head in disgust and say she never knew me.”
Rosie glanced at him. His facial features reflected his Aztec heritage. His accent spoke of a childhood in Mexico. His ample waist indicated that he overindulged on the yummy dishes served at the restaurant he owned. His mention of her deceased mother meant he was overtired.
“Papi, go to bed. I’ll let myself out.”
“Take this man here.” He pointedly ignored her, nodding toward the television. “Nice and clean looking. Handsome.”