Between the Sheets (30 page)

And Ty had allowed her a few weeks to forget, but now it was time to remember. It was time to get back to her reality, difficult as it was.

“Mom, we need to talk.”

“About the factory? Because I know our numbers are down, but I’ve made some changes to the—”

“It’s not about the factory.”

“I can’t lay anyone else off. We’re running on a skeleton crew.”

“Mom. We’re going to have to bring someone into our house. A nurse. To care for you.”

Mom was silent, and the tall weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt and between the stones of the drive were laid nearly flat by the wind. Sturdy weeds leveled.

She felt an acute sympathy.

“We need help,” she breathed.

“With what?”

Shelby’s laugh was barren of joy. “With everything.”

“Nonsense. We’ve never needed help before. I can run the factory just fine—”

“I know, but now we do. And I need you to understand that. I need you to understand that and to say it’s okay. To say I did my best. That it’s all right that I can’t do it on my own.” Her voice cracked and she closed her burning eyes.

I need you to say that you love me anyway. That you love me despite all the ways I was to blame in how Dad treated you. That despite all the ways I have let you down, my love for you has evened the scales at least a little
.

Can you tell me that?

Mom, please tell me that it’s okay
.

Dust and stones pinged off the car and the dust swirled in tornadoes and cyclones around them, obliterating the rusty gates of the factory. The dark broken windows stared down at them like a thousand glittering eyes.

“Did we eat?” Mom asked.

Shelby sagged against the steering wheel.

“We had lunch an hour ago.”

“I’m hungry.”

Shelby dug through her purse and handed her a bag of crackers. Evie took them, worried the edge of the plastic ziplock, but didn’t eat any of them.

“Did we eat?” Mom asked.

Shelby hadn’t expected anything different. Not really.

She wiped her eyes and started the car.

I have to do it myself
, she thought. Trying to muster up the wherewithal to not only understand that she had to be her own comfort, her own counsel, but that she had to not
need
anything from her mother anymore. She had to separate the relationship in her memories from the relationship now; otherwise she would only be hurt.

Shelby put the car in reverse and left behind the ruins of the factory. Not bothering to look back.

Chapter 20

Casey stared out the windshield at the school. It was Monday morning and the playground was empty. School looked weird with no one around it.

Ty turned off the truck, and the silence was so thick Casey found it hard to breathe. Outside his window the sky was white-blue like ice.

Here comes the father-type-person-and-son chat
.

“You know you can go in there and get in trouble again.”

Well
, Casey thought, looking at Ty, who was leaning forward, resting his crossed arms on the steering wheel.
That’s a different tactic
.

“You can get into it with John again. You can piss off teachers, you can refuse to do whatever it is Mr. Root thinks you should do. Hell, you can take a swing at Mr. Root.” Ty rubbed a hand over his face. He’d been acting weird since Friday night. Distracted. But not in his usual way. He seemed sad.

“You can do all that stuff, Casey. And you’ll get suspended. And I’ll ground you, and we’ll manage, but … nothing will ever change.” Ty looked right at Casey. Like
right
at him, and Casey felt hunted by that look. He stuck a finger through the tiny hole in the knee of his jeans, making the hole bigger on purpose, but Ty didn’t say anything. “Or you can choose. You can choose to not do those things. You can ignore John if he tries to get in your face. You can listen to the rest of your teachers like you listen to Ms. Monroe. You can always get in
trouble or … you can try and stop.” He popped open the driver’s side door and cold air washed into the cab of the truck. “I wish you’d stop, Casey. For us. So we can catch a break.”

Ty didn’t wait for Casey to say anything, he just got out of the truck, and Casey had no choice but to follow, feeling like his stomach had been hollowed out.

Inside the office, Scott was sitting in one of the two chairs outside Mr. Root’s door. When Casey and Ty walked in Scott snapped up in his seat, watching them as they crossed the room.

“Have a seat,” Ty said, and Casey slumped down in the chair next to Scott while Ty went in and talked to Mr. Root.

The second hand on the clock over Colleen’s desk seemed like the loudest sound in the world. A minute thundered by and they didn’t say anything. In the silence, Casey imagined using his foot to kick all the shit off the front of Colleen’s desk. Those stupid bobble-head figurines. The Roll Tide flag. The pen jar. He wanted to shatter that jar. Watch those pens go flying.

“How was your suspension?” Scott asked. Casey turned sideways, ignoring him.

If he kicked hard enough he could put a dent in the front of that desk. He could get a couple of kicks in before someone came and stopped him.

“John’s mom moved back with his grandparents. He’s not in school anymore.”

Well, that was awesome news, but he still didn’t say anything.

Colleen had changed the poster over the coffeepot. It was a picture of two cats, big gray fluffy ones with long whiskers that pulled their faces down so they looked like they were frowning.

We are not amused
. That’s what the poster said.

Casey could rip that stupid poster off the walls. That
poster and the fire drill instructions. Like they even needed instructions.

If there’s a fire, run. Every idiot knows that
.

“I’m so sorry,” Scott whispered. “I’m so sorry I held you down and let John hit you like that. I’m—” His voice broke, and Scott swiveled away so they almost sat back to back. Casey looked over his shoulder to stare at the back of Scott’s head. “I feel really bad.”

“Yeah? What about what John said about Ms. Monroe? Because that’s the stuff you should feel bad about.”

Scott swiveled back around. “Did you look on YouTube?”

Casey shook his head. What Ty said that night made sense to him, and he didn’t really want to look. He liked thinking about Mrs. Monroe the way that he did. “I’m not going to. It’s not my business.” Scott looked surprised by that and Casey felt very suddenly grown up. Very suddenly
better
than Scott. “He shouldn’t have talked about her that way.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“I’m totally right.”

They were silent again, but Casey didn’t feel like kicking a dent in the desk anymore. Or tearing down the posters.

“What do you think Mr. Root is going to have us do?” Casey asked.

“Clean the fold-up chairs under the stage in the gym.”

“Really?”

“It’s what he always has kids do when they come back from suspension.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad.”

“There’s like a ton of chewed-up gum stuck to the bottom of them. You have to pry it off with a screwdriver.”

Well, that was gross.

“What did you do all week?” Casey asked.

“Went to my grandma’s. What’d you do?”

“Worked at Cora’s with Ty.”

Scott’s eyes went wide. “That’s cool.”

It was.

He’d learned how to do shit. And Ty had treated him pretty good. And Cora gave him free fritters when Ty wasn’t looking and Brody showed him how to use the power tools.

It had been about the best week of his life.

And then on Friday, Ty had called off the party with all the scary biker guys and Casey and Rita sat up late and watched all the Iron Man movies back to back. And on Sunday they ate about a gazillion fritters after church. And even church wasn’t so bad. There had been a bell choir there, and when they played, he could feel those bells ringing in his chest.

But Shelby and her mom hadn’t been at church, and that kind of bummed Casey out. Ty was bummed out, too; that was obvious. Casey suggested they get some fritters to take to Shelby and her mom, and Ty had looked at him like he was the smartest guy in the world.

“Isn’t Ty your dad?” Scott asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you call him that?”

I don’t know anymore
.

And right then Casey decided he would try. He’d pull up the bridges and he’d be an island, and he would try to stay out of trouble.

To give them a chance.

Friday night Ty walked across the highway to Shelby’s house. He tried the barn first but the door was locked, so he jogged up the cracked cement steps to Shelby’s back door, unsure if he was doing the right thing but
sure that he couldn’t take another day of not seeing her. Another day of her brief answers to his texts.

The rosebushes Evie had yanked out of the ground were still lying there like dead soldiers, and Ty took a second to pull them by their root balls into a pile. He’d come over later with a paper bag and clean up the rest.

Casey said Shelby hadn’t been at school all week. And she’d sent out an email on Saturday morning that all the classes in the Art Barn had been cancelled for the week. Whatever was happening inside this house, it was big. Big enough to knock the most competent woman he knew off her stride.

He knocked carefully on the back door, and within seconds, Shelby was there opening the screen.

She looked like she hadn’t slept since last Friday night, or eaten. Or seen daylight.

She was pallid and messy. And his stomach pulled up hard at the sight of her so undone.

“Ty,” she breathed, and for just a moment he rested in the warmth of the fact that she missed him, too. Whatever else was going on, she missed him. It was obvious. Everything about her screamed that.

“Hey,” he whispered. “I just wanted to check on you. Everything okay?”

“We’re …” She glanced backward, her face reflecting for the briefest moment a terrible grief. “We’re doing okay.”

“Liar,” he said without any heat.

Her lips pursed in a tight smile, an acknowledgment that he was right but she wouldn’t go any further.

“We missed you at church on Sunday,” he said.

“I … I got the fritters,” she said. “On the steps? I’m assuming those were from you?”

“Casey’s idea, but I’ll take credit.”
I’ll take credit if it means you’ll hug me
, he wanted to say.
I’ll take credit if you bend just slightly and let me help you shoulder some of this load you’re carrying
.

“Casey said you weren’t at school this week.”

“I took the week off to interview some nurses to move in.”

“Wow. That’s a big step.” He remembered that night on the phone, her misgivings about having someone in the house, how it might make her mother worse.

“I should have done it weeks ago, but I didn’t.” The sound of voices trickled out of the house behind her and Shelby glanced over her shoulder. “Deena just arrived so I could take care of some paperwork and some Art Barn stuff. I’m sorry I had to cancel classes at the barn, but I just have to get someone permanent in here.”

“How is your mom handling it?”

She took a deep breath and he could tell that she was about to lie. She was about to say “fine” when nothing was fine.

“Baby,” he breathed and cupped her neck in his hand, and for a moment she pulled away, she resisted what he was offering, but he held on. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

Her laughter splintered and he could feel the tension in her bones. Under her skin. She was razor wire and unrest. She was dark sharp knives and billowing red clouds. She was full of awful.

“Shelby?”

When she looked at him, he saw a version of the woman he’d seen before—the night she came and yelled at him for working on his bike too late, and the night of their date, with that red mark on her cheek and all the heartbreak in the world in her eyes—she was that woman, pushed to the ugliest extreme.

“You’re going to break, honey. You’re going to crack if you don’t—”

She fell into him, against him. Gratefully, his body
caught hers. His hands, as if simply waiting for the chance, curled around her back, her waist.

It was a hug. Long, long overdue, and he was just settling into it, hanging his head against that perfect place on her shoulder, squeezing her into his body so not even air came between them, but then she pulled back and grabbed his hand, leading him off the porch, across the lawn toward the barn.

“Shelby, wait.”

“I don’t …” She shook her hand in front of her chest as if she were trying to shake something off and her manic energy was a cloud around her. Impenetrable and real. “I don’t know what to do, Ty. I just want to forget for a minute. That’s all. That’s what you promised, remember? You promised to make me feel good.”

“God, that’s all I want to do, baby. But this is bad medicine for you right now.” Even he could see that.

“Don’t say no,” she begged. “Please.”

He couldn’t stand to have her beg, not for this. Not for something he wanted so badly he was nearly hard at the thought of her in that barn. Of what they did to each other in that barn. He let her pull him toward the dark building and watched as she unlocked it with a key she’d pulled from the pocket in the hooded sweatshirt she wore.

Inside, in the gloom of the Art Barn, she pulled him into her strong arms and he went without a fight, because it had been a week since he’d seen her. A week since he’d touched her. And it felt like years.

Kissing her, he walked her backward toward the couches, navigating the small tables and the shelf in the middle of the room.

If there was a voice in his head telling him to slow down, he couldn’t hear it.

He’d missed her. Missed her more than usual because he’d been sure that this weeklong silence was her way of
breaking it off with him, and he was so damn relieved to have her back in his arms, her body tight against his.

Her skin was cold but her mouth was wet and he sunk deeper into the contradiction of her, held harder to the sublime paradox of her. They hit the back of the leather couch and he toppled them over, controlling their fall, so she landed carefully on her back and he braced himself above her.