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Kept track of made me feel like I was something he’d misplaced. A sock or a watch.
Ugh. Not a watch.
“You’ve been busy the last five years,” he said. “Starting your business. Bea moving in. You’ve accomplished a lot.”
“You had me followed?” I asked.
“I had to know you were all right.”
“The irony of that makes me a little sick,” I said, resisting the urge to throw my soup in his face. “You’ve delivered your message. You can go.”
He didn’t move and I wanted to scream at him.
“You should be at the funeral,” he said. “I think…for your sisters, you should be there.”
“Will you be there?”
“Of course.”
“Then I won’t. Leave.” The words sounded high and strained, and he just sat there, like what I wanted, what I needed, just didn’t matter to him.
Not today, Satan, I thought and started to gather my shit. My computer and files. The left-behind toy car. If he wouldn’t go, I would.
“Veronica,” he said, and his fingers brushed against the knuckle of my thumb. I felt it so specifically—so completely—I had to fling his fingers off. Fling them off or literally blow up.
“Don’t.” I couldn’t look at him, only stare down at my grilled cheese sandwich, furiously blinking back tears.
“I’m sorry.” He gathered up his fine blue jacket and his rude lips, his leaner face and strong wrists and…left.
He just left.
I didn’t watch him go. But I heard the bell over the door, assumed it was him, and exhaled so hard I was folded over the table. My head against the Formica.
“Jesus H., hon, who the fuck was he?” It was Melody, of course. She liked the gossip.
“No one,” I said to the Formica. The girl for whom he was everything was gone. Burned to dust in the humiliation of that night. In my back pocket my phone buzzed and I pulled it out.
I didn’t have to look.
“Sabrina,” I said.
“Oh, my God, Ronnie,” my sister said, her voice thick with tears. “He’s gone. Our father is gone.”
Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me to go. I can’t do it. I love you, little snowflake, but I can’t…
“Please,” she whimpered. “Come home.”
3
VERONICA
I shared a house with my sister, Bea. Actually, we both shared a house with her two dogs. A mastiff and a Chihuahua. It was ridiculous. Every time one of us walked in the door it was Armageddon. Fur and yapping and tail wagging.
Forget it if we happened to have a bag of cheeseburgers.
“Yes, yes,” I said to Thelma and Louise, who wouldn’t let me past the front door without their due. “I missed you, too.”
Thelma, the mastiff, licked my arm leaving a trail of slobber on my skin. My flowy black shirt was now a flowy shirt of dog hair.
“Bea!” I shouted, and I heard the fast-moving thuds of her footsteps coming downstairs.
At best our house could be described as eclectic. Maybe boho with a side of shabby chic.
In reality, nothing matched and nothing went together. It was all a hodgepodge of comfy old denim couches that didn’t go with the velvet chairs that all had stacks of books beside them. The art we’d bought one piece at a time from different community festivals with varying degrees of seriousness. I had a thing for photography, so there was plenty of that everywhere. A lot of dogs and trees with full moons behind them.
All of it was covered in dog hair and coffee cups.
It wasn’t pretty, but it was the best home we’d ever had.
Because it was ours. Not our father’s. Not Clayton’s. Ours.
And that made it beautiful.
Bea arrived on the small landing between the living room and the kitchen. At the sight of her, I felt my heart squeeze. Tenderness and that old urge to protect. To save her from pain.
“Hey,” I said.
“We need to talk.”
“You heard?” I asked and pushed through the gleeful dog barricade between us.
“Heard?”
“About Dad.”
She sucked in a breath. “That’s…no. I don’t know anything about Dad.”
“Then what do you need to talk about?”
She closed her eyes and I felt that deep brace in my stomach. That gird-your-loins feeling that came with being a sister to Bea. When I moved to Austin she didn’t follow right away. She’d dropped me at a hotel with all the money we had in our purses and gone back to The King’s Land.
I spent a week selling my jewelry and the dress, finding an apartment I could afford. I got a job and enrolled in night school so I could finish my degree. I wasted no time getting the pieces of myself put back together. I created this version of myself—capable and calm—because this was the kind of person I wanted to be.
Bea showed up at my door one year later with a black eye she wouldn’t tell me about, the Chihuahua, and a couple of thousand dollars cash. I asked a lot of questions, and she didn’t answer one of them.
