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“Only because Gus values his balls,” she said, flipping the file open and retrieving an eight-by-ten glossy and sliding it in front of him. “Sadly, it appears Misty has lost hers.”
* * *
A shiver tore through Bree as if the fingers of Misty’s ghost had run along her spine. They were coming with a frequency she hadn’t expected, as if being awake was a chance to be assaulted with visuals—the body strewn across the blood-drenched sofa. Would Jane and Aiden turn into the next Dexter? She watched as they played in the fast food chain’s tunnel system, wondering where the trauma was. They should be curled up in balls, rocking, and yet to them, it was a random Sunday where they got chicken nuggets and apple slices.
While she slept next to them in Ice’s bed as he took the sofa, they had tossed and turned, but they weren’t waking up screaming. Would it hit them randomly in their mid-twenties? All Aiden said was they were playing in their room, waiting to be told when they could come out. Had Misty tucked them away, believing she could handle the situation? No, they would have said that.
“Can we go back to Daddy?” Aiden, red-faced and sweating, asked as he snagged the last slice of apple from his Happy Meal and began playing with the toy at the table.
“Where’s Jane?” Bree asked, scanning the plastic windows as kids randomly crawled by.
There was no way she could maneuver through the tunnels after the little girl. Even if she did, there was at least a 75 percent chance Aiden would circle back and the process would start all over again. Better to sit and wait. The only danger would be if one of the twins passed out from exhaustion. It happened more than one would imagine because other kids will let a sleeping one lie. The respect not shared with adults, it seemed.
Her phone buzzed, and she sent Aiden on the fetch-and-retrieve mission of his womb mate.
“Hi, Mom, I’m so sorry I didn’t call you. Yesterday was crazy,” she said when she opened her phone.
“Good or bad crazy?” her mother admonished. “I know you’d said you’ll call me next week, but something wasn’t right. For all I know, you ran down to that Strip and stole my chance at being the mother of the bride.”
“Nice try,” Bree said, having been getting the“Is there anyone serious in your life?”comments since around age sixteen.
“You can’t keep all your men fictional.”
“But they behave better, and if they piss me off, I can just skip ahead until they act right,” she countered as she brushed away the feel of Ice tickling the back of her neck and returned from that distant place.
The memory was vivid because it had been less than a day ago when he’d crossed a line because she’d practically waved him through the gate. Crossing her legs, she did her best to understand what that man had done to her. From the first moment, when he trapped her on the porch, she was struck by him. Her girlfriends in college always quoted the belief “you know within five seconds of meeting a man if you want to sleep with him.” She never agreed with the statement, and yet with Ice, she wondered if it had taken five? In a different time or place, would she have let him take her over and have his way with her from a simple hello? Lust was one thing, but her mother was talking about love, commitment, the grown-up way of looking at life. Something she wasn’t about to take on in this moment.
“Is that why yesterday was crazy? One of your book boyfriends was misbehaving?”
“I needed to help Misty with her kids, that’s all.”
No reason to go into the how and whys, it wasn’t a lie, and that mattered to her mother. Snagging a nugget, she dipped it into the last of the honey mustard sauce. Her appetite was minimal, but she wasn’t a fool and knew she needed to eat something.
“Bree, I prayed with Pastor today after church,” her mother said. “You know how I get when I feel something isn’t right with my babies.”
“Have you checked on Junior and Deidra?”
“I don’t need to. They are barely a stone’s throw from my front door,” she said. “Besides, I know which of my babies is in trouble.”
“Right, because your elbow clicks when it’s me, your finger swells when it’s Deidra, and if your knee buckles, Junior fell off the jungle gym,” Bree teased. “Did Pastor tell you how blasphemous it was for you to believe in voodoo and Jesus?”
“God sends signs in the way the person can understand,” she scoffed.
“Are you sure he isn’t telling you to go to a physical therapist and a rheumatologist?” Bree countered, because the last thing she wanted to admit was her mother was right and it wasn’t tennis elbow.
“Bree Stanton, don’t you sass me,” she warned. “A woman is only as good as her word, and are you telling me, hand to God, you’re fine?”
“Me? Yes, I’m fine.”
“But Misty isn’t?” She’d sussed it out. What was worse, telling her mother now? Or later admitting she’d held back the truth and having to explain? Scanning the tubes, she could see serious negotiations were being made between the twins and another set of kids in a round landing space at the top of the rocket ship. “Mama, Misty died.”
“What? Died? How? Was it a car accident? She was too young for a heart attack or stroke,” her mother said, and Bree knew the woman was stick straight in whatever chair she was sitting in.
“She was murdered.”
“Murdered, across the street from your home? Bree, that’s it.”
Bree could hear her mother fussing and moving around, probably grabbing her keys with one hand and waking her computer to buy plane tickets with the other.
