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She set the pie down. “Um, one of the girls I work with, her sister has a housekeeping business. I could give you her email.”
He laughed, feeling a touch of real humor. That was a pathetic attempt to tell him he was a slob without telling him he was a slob. Kind of cute. “I live alone and I don’t have people over. I’m a slob because I don’t give a shit and there’s nobody around who does.”
“You don’t ... date?”
If another woman this hot had given him that opening, he would have dived straight into flirtation and seduction, tiny boobs or not. But this one had a circle of red flags staked around her. “You came here to interview me about my sex life? That’s what you want to talk about?”
“No, sorry. I just ... I know I overreacted when you moved in and Geneva was helping. She told me it was nothing but friendly.”
“Yeah, that was almost a month ago. She just told you now?”
“No. She told me that day. She was pissed at me. And at you. You got nasty at the end and really hurt her feelings.”
Cooper knew that. He’d seen and heard it in the moment. But shit, he’d been pissed. Worse—he’d been surprised and hurt, and he strove never to feel either of those ... were they emotions? Whatever, he hated them more than any other kind of feeling. If shit was coming at him, he wanted to see it coming. He’d reacted from that place and had turned a flamethrower on any good feeling Geneva might have had for him.
Oh. That was why they’d been avoiding him since, wasn’t it? Not theassumptionthat he was an asshole but theevidenceof it. He’d let his memory of that part of the story die out in the heat of his anger.
Well, fuck.
“Yeah,” he said now. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. You came in hot, and I came back in kind. That’s what I do.”
She took a step closer and stopped, glancing back at the pie as if her safety were baked into it. “I really am sorry about that. I was just ... All I knew about you was that weird thing in the middle of the night, and then I looked out the window the very next morning and saw her coming out of the truck, and I ... I just panicked. It’s just me and her, and I have to take care of her. The cards are already so stacked against her. I need to keep her safe, and there’s hurt everywhere in the world, even places that should be safe, and I’m just soscared.”
Her voice broke in half; she clutched her arms across her belly and turned sharply away from him.
Fuck. Tears. What was he supposed to do now? “Fuck, please don’t cry.”
With a cough to clear her throat, she turned to him again. Her expression was harried, but her cheeks were dry. “Sorry. I’m okay. I’ll go now. I just ... wanted to apologize for treating you like we’ve been, and to thank you for tonight. Jorge was out of control, and he was going to hurt me, probably badly.”
“Do you understand why?” he asked.
Why had he asked, though? Why not let her turn around and go back where he belonged? Was he really planning to school this chick on the racial dynamics of what had happened between Geneva, Luis, and a couple white boys whose names had not registered in his head?
Siena’s expression hardened. “If you’re about to tell me I asked for it—”
“I’m not,” he cut in before she could piss him off again. “I don’t know what you said, or what he said. Your sister came running over and said you were about to get beat up. I came and saw he was about to beat you up. He told me some stuff while I was calming him down. That’s what I know.”
“What did he tell you?” She leaned against the counter by her pie, like she meant to settle in for a talk.
Okay, then. Cooper turned and leaned back on the part of the counter that faced her. “He told me you told the school counselor that Luis had tried to force Geneva to let him and the other boys feel her up, and when the counselor talked to the boys, the white ones said the same thing. So the brown boy got suspended and lost his chance to be on the baseball team, and the white boys got to doodle in detention for an hour after school and then go on about their business.”
She’d started shaking her head about halfway through his first sentence. “That’s not what I said, and it’s not what my sister said happened.”
“Whatdidyou say?”
For several seconds, she only stared. Cooper could see her trying to decide if he deserved to know anything. He’d argue that saving her ass entitled him to some context, but he stood and waited for her to decide for herself.
She shifted so she was leaning back against the counter and facing him directly. “The counselor called me in because Geneva’s been distracted and disengaged since school started up again, and she wanted to know if I knew why. I did know why—those boys were her only friends since we moved here, until the day after Christmas, when they did ... that. It really threw her. Then what happened when you moved in happened, and we talked about how important it is for women to be careful around men we don’t know. I said something about how even men we do think we know can be dangerous sometimes, and that’s when she told me what happened with the boys. So when the counselor asked me if anything happened over break, and told me how she’s eating lunch alone now and won’t speak up in class”—her voice broke again, and this time tears did happen. “Sorry,” she said, struggling to compose herself. “I’m not a crier, I swear.”
Cooper pulled a couple paper towels off the roll behind him and brought them to her. “It’s fucked up they did that.”
Nodding, Siena took the towels from him and wiped up. After she blew her nose, she said, “I didn’t tell the counselor which of the boys did what. I didn’t remember what Geneva said about any specific one of them. Just that they’d done it, and when she’d refused, they’d humiliated her, and now they weren’t friends.” Her eyes came up and locked with his. “I didn’t mention race at all. There wasn’t a racial dimension to this issue. I didn’t think about race at all. Idon’tthink about it. I’m not racist, Cooper.”
Well, most racists would say the same thing, while they were hanging their white hood in their closet, fixing a Confederate flag to the back of their pickup, and complaining about all the ‘illegals’ ‘stealing’ ‘their’ jobs. But Cooper believed there was a difference between someone who wasaracist and someone who was racist.
Racists, the noun, were the white hood, Confederate flag, DEM DAM ILLEEGULZ folks. Those people were beyond help. They were to be avoided or forcefully confronted, but there was no point in trying to educate or reason with them.
Racist, the adjective, referred to behavior, and that wasn’t always aggressive or overtly, intentionally shitty. It could be something as simple as making assumptions or not paying attention.
