Not Looking For Love: Episode 5 (3 page)

"Not in front of the children," Andrew mutters, startling me, since I had no idea he was still standing right behind my back.

"I'll do what I want, Andrew!" Marjorie yells and Amanda finally lets go of Scott, tears bubbling in her eyes. Her mother grabs her arm, and ushers both her children down the hall and into the living room.

Andrew steers both Scott and me into the kitchen. Tina's sipping from a cup of steaming coffee by the window, staring at the snowflakes now coming down hard and fast.

She turns as we enter, smiles sadly at Scott, then goes back to watching the snow. Her curls are all flattened at the back of her head, and she's wearing a light blue bathrobe like she just got up.

Marjorie storms back into the kitchen, her big layered haircut bouncing as she strides right up to Scott. She's wearing so many rings she'll leave scars if she strikes him. The belt of her bright orange bathrobe is cinched so tight, I'm not sure where her real waist is because it can't be that tiny, not with her huge boobs and hips spilling over on either side of it.

She stops right in front of him, panting, her head not reaching much higher than his chest, a lilac fingernail shaking as she points it at his eyes. "This is all your fault. All of it. I could kill you, literally murder you for this."

Tears are flowing down her cheeks again, doing nothing to mask the hatred burring bright and clear in her eyes.
 

"We said we'd be adults about this, Marjorie," Andrew says, his voice sharp as the knife I'm afraid she'll grab at any moment to carry out her terrible threat.
 

"Adults? I don't think Scott here falls under that category!" Marjorie yells. "He's just a baby who had to be saved by his big brother, and look what happened now. Just look what happened! What are you even doing here? You destroyed this whole family! You should have just done the right thing and stayed away. Stayed in jail, because that's where you belong. You, not Derek!"

Her yells are still echoing in my mind, but the silence that fills the kitchen after she stops yelling rips right through my heart.

I step closer to Scott and wrap my arm around his, willing it to stop trembling.
 

Marjorie's eyes fix on mine, her lips climbing up into a snarl. "And who are you?"

"I'm the one who'll make you stop talking like this, if you don't do it yourself." I have no idea where the words are coming from, or which Gail I'm channeling to make my voice so menacing and firm. Or maybe it's actually granddaddy Henderson, ruling over his family of drug dealers and killers, somewhere high up in the Ozarks. But it's a threat I'll carry out a thousand times over, if she doesn't back off.

She's squinting at me, her mouth open like she's about to say something, but no sound comes out. They're all staring at me now, even Amanda who's peeking into the room through the cracked kitchen door, chewing on a lock of her hair.

"This is not how families should behave," I say more quietly, but just as firmly. "No matter what."

And if Mike came in right now, waving around a baseball bat, I'd take him on too.

"I will not be spoken to like this, not by some random stranger," Marjorie shrieks, looking at Tina and Andrew for support. But apart from Tina's sad smile in her direction she gets nothing.
 

"Gail's right," Scott's dad says and opens the door wide, ushering Amanda and Luke inside. I step aside as he walks up to Scott and pulls him down into a hug.
 

"You should have come last night, son," he says, and kisses both his cheeks. Alcohol fumes are wafting off him like we're standing in a brewery.

"I didn't think I was all that welcome," Scott mutters, sounding like he's about ten.

"Of course you're welcome here, Scott," Andrew says, taking off his glasses and rubbing them on his sweater. "Can we just have some breakfast now?"

Marjorie humphs and grabs her children, leading them from the room. A few moments later I can hear her heavy footsteps thumping above our heads.
 

The front door slams and I lunge to stand between Scott and the only way into the kitchen, his arm falling through thin air as he tries to stop me. A second later, Mike's standing in the doorway to the kitchen, his bottom lip swelled black and blue to three times its normal size, the bruise extending down his chin and up towards his eye.

But his dark eyes aren't hard and cold now, and his hands are shaking as he looks from Scott's cast up into his face.
 

"I'm sorry about last night, Scott. I don't know what I was thinking," he says, not moving from the doorway.
 

I glance back at Scott, who's staring Mike like he's not going to accept the apology, his eyes darker than pitch.

"It's alright, whatever," he finally says.

"I shouldn't've come at you like that," Mike mutters, and finally takes a step into the kitchen. "I don't know what happened."

"As long as it won't ever happen again, right?" his dad says, and wraps his arm around Mike's shoulder leading him to the table.
 

"Right," Mike mutters and sits looking down at the wooden surface, as Tina and Andrew bring enough cups for everyone.

I pour the coffee for Scott and myself, clutching his hand so hard our skin might just get fused together.
 

The clock on the wall ticks and ticks, but time does not seem to be moving. It's like we're stuck in some paining, some eerie void in time, which is trapping all the pain and tension, leaving none of it outside. The idea solidifies as Marjorie and her children come back down. She pours herself a cup of coffee and drinks it leaning against the counter, her large breasts rising and falling with each breath she takes as she stares off at the wall of snow falling from the sky outside.
 

I let go of Scott's hand so Amanda can climb into his lap, and watch her fight off Luke as he tries to do the same. The room is filled with their childish bickering, but it's not breaking though the timeless silence does nothing to make the void dissipate.
 

CHAPTER FOUR

"Well, at least that's over," Scott says to me later, as we're standing on the porch, each clutching an umbrella his dad forced into our hands before we left.

I have no idea how long we spent in that silent kitchen, and I'm not really sure any time passed at all.

I open my umbrella and descend the three steps off the porch. Scott follows me.

"Yeah," I mutter.
 

"That was really hot the way you stood up to Marjorie for me," Scott says, looking at me from the side, the edges of his lips curled up into a sheepish grin.

I close my umbrella and stand under his, wrapping my arm around his waist. "She had it coming."

"She's really pissed at me. And with good reason," Scott mutters.
 

"Be that as it may, she has no right to threaten your life." My feet are slipping in the snow, and my whole right arm is white from it.

"Shouldn't take her so seriously. She's always been explosive like that," Scott says. "But she wouldn't actually hurt me. Her and Derek have been dating since I was like Luke's age."

"All the more reason for her to be nicer to you," I say.
 

The harsh, commanding anger that permeated my words to her is bubbling up in my chest again. My entire family is made up of a dad doing his best to disappear in his work, an aunt and two cousins I never see, an uncle living in California, a grandma who berates me all the time, and a bunch of crazy drug dealers who I've only met a handful of times and don't really want to see ever again. Meanwhile, Scott's got this big loving family that'll obviously stay together forever no matter what, and they're threatening each other like that's something you just throw away.

"Your niece and nephew really love you," I whisper and snuggle even closer to him. Marjorie packed them up and stormed from the house when another argument broke out after lunch and she didn't come back that time.

"Yeah, they're great," Scott says.

"She shouldn't keep them away from you," I mutter, fighting down the thought of how much our daughter would love him too, if I hadn't murdered her. I try to bury her under the anger, but that's dissipating like it never was.

"She'll come around," Scott says. "At least I hope she does."

"And Mike, you forgive him, right? You won't go finishing anything with him?" I ask.

Scott's eyes turn as hard as the concrete beneath the slippery blanket of slush. "Not really.
 
Mike's been getting away with too many things, because of what he went through. This time he went to far."

I couldn't agree more, but I won't encourage another altercation. "What happened to him?"

"He was the one who found my mom when she was stabbed. It messed him up pretty bad," Scott says.

My heart is thumping in my chest, a whole new understanding of Mike forming in my head. He couldn't have been more than 12 when that happened. I still can't get my mom's gleaming dead eyes out of my mind. How horrible it must be to see your mom lying in a pool of blood.
 

"That's terrible," I whisper, though it hardly conveys the real emotions cluttering up my chest.

"Yeah, it is. He came home early from school, and she was still alive then, but she died in his arms. She kept trying to say something to him, but only blood bubbled out of her mouth, because they'd punctured her lung. Or at least that's how he described it. I never can tell when he's lying to me."

"It's still a horrible thing to go through," I muse. "Even if only some of what he told you is true."

Scott turns to me, his expression twisted in anger, pity and compassion. "He described it to me so many times it's like I found her too. But let's drop it now. I don't even know why I'm talking about all this."

"Must be from sitting in that kitchen all day," I say, realizing a little too late that he might get offended.
 

He laughs. "You noticed it too, right? How nothing ever gets resolved?"

I nod. Mostly I just noticed the void, the trapped sorrow and pain. But trying to explain that would make me sound insane, and Scott has enough of those examples for now. "Maybe that's how families work, in general."
 

"Yours argues all the time?" he asks harshly and my heart flips in my chest.
 

'Sometimes," I mumble. My mom is dead. I will never argue with her again.

"Sorry," he says. "They just piss me off sometimes."

I wrap my arm tighter around his and lean into him. "It's fine."

 
The streetlight come on just as we turn into his street, and I wish, with all my heart, that things would just get easier already. Less painful, more free, soft like the snow falling all around us, encasing the world in an eerie silence where nothing bad ever happens.

My car's buried under a foot of snow. We're stopped in front of it, Scott gazing up at his dark windows, my heart racing in my chest, hot anger rising with each beat, because I'm certain this is it, that he'll just send me away again now, and never call me again, never pick up the phone when I do.

"It's gonna be freezing up there tonight," he finally says, turning so a wad of snow crashes down my sleeve from the umbrella. "Wanna just go to your house?"

The grin spreading across my face makes my cheeks ache. "That's a great idea."

I help him pack, while the cat's purring fills the entire apartment. After he's done I try to pick her up and carry her up to the attic. But she hisses, beating at me with her paws.

"Just leave her," Scott says. "She can stay here tonight."

"She's really close to giving birth, I think," I say, checking my hands for scratches, but she didn't get me. "But she can't stay here. There's no litter box."
 

"I'll take her over to my dad's house tomorrow," Scott says and opens a can of cat food. The cat wobbles off the bed, and walks toward it, letting him scratch her behind the ears before she starts eating. "Besides, there's plenty of boxes in here."

I empty out one of the smaller ones to fill with newspaper for her to use. An envelope falls out along with his sketchbook and pencil case, hundred dollar bills spilling onto the floor.

"You left all this cash here in an unlocked apartment last night?" It's the first thought that rolls from my mouth, but not the only one I'm thinking, or even the loudest.
 

He shrugs and picks the money up off the floor, stuffing it back into the envelope. "Honestly, there's a lot more of it. And I wasn't exactly thinking straight last night."

"Scott, you have to stop. I think that's what your brother would have wanted, why he went to prison instead of you."

His face is a hard mask again, his eyes blacker than any night on this earth. "I've had enough arguing for one day."
 

"It's not arguing. It's a fact," I say, channeling granddaddy Henderson again, because that might be the only way to save us. "You've been given a second chance and not everyone gets that. So take it already."

I watch softness return to his face, blackness and shadow receding from his eyes, like a hard, gusting wind is blowing them away. His hand is hot against my icy cheek, soft like clouds. "Let's just not talk about this tonight, Gail. Please."

I relent and let him pull me against him, his fingers tangled up in my hair. I rise on my tiptoes and kiss him, because we haven't done that yet today, and I want to, more than I want any other thing. And then it's like we're standing on the sidewalk on the first day of snow, yellow streetlamps flickering all around us, time still and soft, no wind strong enough to move us, and no care anywhere in sight.

I pick up his sketchbook later, as we're heading back out. "Can I have that drawing you did of me?"

"That's not even finished," he says, holding the door open for me.

"You can finish it, then," I say, stuffing the sketchbook and pencils into my bag. "Or draw another one."

He shrugs and leans into the wall so I can walk past him out into the hallway. "I haven't really been in the mood for drawing lately."