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“You’re trying to tell me I don’t know if my kids have grown?”
“No, I’m querying the need for new bikes.”
“Oh, you’re querying.”
Ah, that you’d-be-dead-to-me-if-I-didn’t-need-you tone. “I’m asking.”
“I understand what querying means. You’re not the only person who reads, you know.”
Moving on. “Can’t Krystal use Kendall’s bike?”
“You want Krys to have the hand-me-down while her sister gets the new bike?”
“We grew up with hand-me-downs.”
“It’s different now.”
“Why is it different?”
“Look, I didn’t call to get judged and queried. The girls need new bikes.”
The rest of the unspoken sentence was and Aunty Flick would buy them. It was only a few years and Aunty Flick would be buying Kendall a car, or a boob job. “Let me think about it.”
“Think about it? What, like you think I’m making this up? You think I want to call you and beg for things my girls, your nieces, need?”
Now they were her nieces, not just kids whose growth she wouldn’t understand. “One bike.”
“You’re moving to Washington, big fancy job, and you can’t spring for two bikes. You know, that milkshake machine was shit. It’s already broken.”
What’s the bet someone dropped it? “I’m not a bank. You can’t press me and money comes out.”
“No? After all this family sacrificed for you. Everything we gave up so you had more opportunity. To think we thought you’d lift us up.”
She would’ve pitched her phone at Tom’s wall if she didn’t know he’d hate the mess that would make. “Go ahead, Elsie. Rewrite history as much as you want. It doesn’t make it true.”
Elsie started in on a new round of guilt-tripping, and Flick disconnected and turned her phone off. Elsie could talk to her voice mail, could text till her fingers bled, Flick didn’t have to know about it.
She checked the time. Tom wasn’t coming home. Then she made a new playlist full of angry, raging songs she played at make-your-ears-bleed while she danced barefoot first on the carpet, and when that failed to ease the tightness in her chest, she stepped up on Tom’s indestructible slab of a coffee table and rocked out.
It was better than fighting old arguments in her head, bett
er than going to bed and dreaming about being homeless like she had for the last few nights, triggered no doubt by the lack of Washington apartments available in a price range she could afford.
She sang along with Three Days Grace’s “I Hate Everything About You” and that’s what she was doing when Tom came in, head banging to the line about roommates being kept awake.
He stood there with the handle of his airline wheelie bag in his hand and his mouth open. He looked big and tired and safe and wonderful. Arms that were shelter and legs that were balance, and a chest that, if snuggled against, might ward off the nightmares.
Thirty Seconds to Mars started singing “The Kill” and she stood there swaying, staring at him, wanting him and certain, twelve thousand percent certain, that if she threw herself at him he’d drop her, because at every turn she was too much for him in the wrong kind of way.
“Hi!” she shouted. She didn’t know how to be any other way, so he’d have to deal. Being this way had served her well and it would again. She wasn’t changing for anyone.
Tom let his bag go. He took his suit coat off. He stood at the end of the room and she couldn’t read his expression and this was not what she’d wished for and everything was broken between them like the cheap milkshake-maker, because she’d been arrogant enough to think she could start a game with him and he’d want to keep playing.
He got rid of his tie and undid a few buttons on his shirt, took his time, checked his phone, and still he didn’t say anything. He was faking her out, but she didn’t get off the table because the damage was done now. She’d wanted to seduce him, not piss him off.
He came close and reached for the music controller as Evanescence sang “Bring Me to Life” with the lyric about being woken up inside. That’s what Tom had done to her, roused the part of her that was tired of being alone, that craved someone who had her back, who understood her and loved her for who she was now, not who she was at fifteen, at twenty, not who she could be, or what she could buy for them.
He looked at her like he was calculating the cost of the damage she was doing, stern-eyed, his whole body clenched. He would walk away and that would be worse than one more fight with Elsie.
