Dream of You (39 page)

             
Correction: he was
dancing
on the table.

             
At some point in the evening, he’d taken off his shirt and turned it into some kind of bandanna he was wearing on top of his head. He had a bottle of vodka in one hand, red cup in the other, and on some level that found this funny, Jo thought he would have made a decent go-go dancer in another life. But mostly, she was just sad to see her most logical brother this messed up.

             
“
Sister
!” he crowed when he spotted her. “It’s my little sister! And sister’s boyfriend. Heeeey, guuuyyysss!”

             
“He’s worse than I thought,” Jo said to herself.

             
Tam moved past her, up to the edge of the table, and extended a hand toward Jordan. Jordan put the vodka bottle in it. “Come on, dancing queen.” Tam had to shout to be heard above the hip-hop as he set the Smirnoff aside. “We’re blowing this hole.”

             
Jordan stared at him a long moment, blinking, struggling to piece things together in his heavily impaired brain. “Hey, how did you get here?” He was shouting too, words slurred.

             
“You didn’t show up for work, dumbass. Your mom’s probably got the police out looking for you.”

             
“Get down, Jordie!” Jo put her hands on the back of a chair and strained up on her tiptoes to be heard. She might have laughed at the frown he shot her had the circumstances been different. “You’ve got practice tomorrow.”

             
He coughed a loud, fake laugh. “I’m not goin’ to practice!”

             
“Jordan - ”

             
“What, you think I’m gonna run for
Kennesaw
? Fuck
that
! I’m…waaaayy too good for that shit.”             

             
“Well, that’s what happens when you turn down all your scholarship offers,” she fired back.

             
The wound was still raw and oozing – his table dance routine was proof enough of that – but with liquor flooding all his self-control, the hurt that flickered through his eyes told her just how deep, just how bloody that wound was.

             
“I’m sorry,” she said, before Tam climbed onto the table and hauled him down.

**

Now

              Jo saw Jordan materialize between her uncles across the room. He slipped through them and went to the buffet table they’d set up in front of the fireplace. She watched him bypass the iced tubs of beer and go straight for the vodka, and the memory of hauling him out of a frat house party slammed into her.

             
“…the most important thing to remember,” her grandmother was still rattling away beside her, “is that, as young as you are, you would be able to find a second husband should the marriage begin to suffer…”

             
It was his face, she realized: the dead, flat, careful mask he’d tried to pull down over the kind of rippling, all-consuming hurt that left a person’s hands shaking – the same way his were shaking on the neck of the Smirnoff bottle. He was the master of impassive expressions, but today, the one he wore wasn’t quite affixed. Didn’t ring true. And despite all of Mom’s mentions, Ellie wasn’t with him.

             
“…surprisingly, there are quite a number of men willing to take on another man’s child…”

             
“Uh-huh, sure, Gram.” Jo got to her feet slowly – she couldn’t just spring up like she always had anymore – and left her grandmother to lecture herself. Jordan had already poured himself more than an afternoon with the family warranted and was tilting back his plastic cup as she drew up beside him. “You want an olive, or would that just slow intake speed?”

             
He darted her a look before he downed the rest of the vodka that told her to tread carefully – a look he didn’t usually direct her way. “Wasn’t Gram in the middle of telling you how you ruined your life?”

             
She folded her arms over her stomach and prepared to get stubborn. “None of it was any more groundbreaking than it was the last time around. Don’t deflect.”

             
His face gave one great big twitch and then finally settled into place, locked up hard. “Deflect what?” He reached for the bottle again.

             
“You went to meet Ellie’s parents and now you’re back early, alone, and hitting the clear liquids. Any of that jump out at you as odd?”

             
“Nope.”

             
“You think you’re a good liar, but you’re not.”

             
“Better than you.”

             
“
Jordan
.”

             
He sighed and met her gaze. It was deep in the corners, and well hidden, but Jo knew where to look, and as she traced his eyes with her own, she saw the intense, sizzling fresh anger. And hurt. “What happened with Ellie?” she asked quietly.

             
“I will never understand women,” he said, and walked away from her.

**

              “El, sweetie, just let me take you home.”

             
God bless Paige. She was the only one who would drop everything on Thanksgiving and rush to pick her up without question.

             
“No, I told Grammy I’d come visit.”

             
“Well, I think she’d understand if - ”

             
“No.” Ellie didn’t intend to raise her voice, but her “no” came out a loud, pitiful moan. She swallowed. “She’s the only family I have worth having.”

             
Paige was quiet a long moment, the unhappy whine of her Mazda’s engine the only sound. “Okay.”

             
It was raining now, the lightest pattering of drops against the windshield, thin trails of water skimming down the window. Ellie stared through the glass, at the tumbling kaleidoscope of parti-colored leaves and the flashing silver trunks of hardwood trees, and tried to wrest control of her thundering heart. She had never in her life felt more stupid. To have trusted the wrong guy once could be blamed on high school stupidity; but to do it twice, to allow herself to trust someone who didn’t love her…

             
And then her family…

             
She wanted to curl under the covers of her bed and let go of the tears that pressed at the corners of her eyes.

             
She wanted to rewind to the week before and retract her invitation to Jordan…almost as much as she wanted to slap him again…almost as much as she wished she hadn’t slapped him…almost as much as she wished she could wish that she hadn’t met him at all.

             
“We’ll figure it out,”
he’d told her,
“I promise.”

             
But real promises were the ones that stood tall in the face of crazy mothers and horrific sisters. Real promises didn’t hurl
fuck
s at her and leave her sitting on the curb.

             
She tortured herself running through all the little details she should have paid more attention to.
“I’ve been a very casual dater for a while now,”
he’d said, and that wasn’t a behavior pattern men broke – not for her, they didn’t. All those unreadable looks, all the times his eyes had moved over every line of her face and he’d said nothing, were stacking up for what they really were: a lack of caring. She’d wanted so badly to believe that he was complicated and sweet under his indifferent outer shell, and really, she’d been projecting her own idiotic romantic notions onto him.

             
“Maybe he just needs to cool off,” Paige suggested. “I bet he’ll call you later and apologize.”

             
“No he won’t.”

             
“Well maybe you could call him - ”

             
“No.”

             
“El,” she sighed. “He’s practically living at our house. You totally love the shithead. Maybe it’s not time to pull a Juliet and throw back the poison just yet, okay?”

             
“Juliet killed herself because she wanted to be together with Romeo forever, not because they broke up.”

             
“Either way, I don’t have to lock up the Liquid Plumber, do I?”

             
“
No
, Paige.”

             
“Good.”

             
They rode the rest of the way to the nursing home in silence, the wiper blades squeaking every so often. Ellie focused every tiny scrap of remaining energy into bundling all her quaking emotions into a temporary wrapper, willing herself to keep stoic in front of her grandmother. Guilt gnawed at her – she’d spent so many hours she could have used to visit Abigail on Jordan – and the last thing she wanted was to bring her tears and drama to the ailing old woman on Thanksgiving.

             
The Golden Oaks assisted living facility was part of a fifteen acre compound that also housed a hospice and retiree apartment complex. Within its lushly wooded grounds, the elderly and invalid could go from community living to end of life care without ever changing venues, only buildings and visitor parking designations. Abigail’s room was termed an “apartment,” though it was more like a dorm; she roomed with another woman and there was a nurses’ station down the hall. Her meds and oxygen levels were monitored around the clock. She always wore the bravest of faces – wrinkles and oxygen tubes and all – but Ellie knew these were not the golden years she’d wanted to live.

             
“Place is a ghost town,” Paige observed as she parked right up against the curb and killed the engine.

             
Ellie pulled the hood of her pea coat up against the drizzle as she climbed out of the car, breath pluming, and stared up at the low-slung Georgian brick structure that looked more like an elementary school than anything else. Orange, yellow and red paper leaves were Scotch-taped in the windows, but there the festivities ended. “No one wants to spend a holiday in a nursing home,” she said woodenly. “They don’t get many visitors this time of year.”

             
“Assholes.” Paige slammed her door and headed up the walk. “Leaving their old people
alone
on Thanksgiving.”

             
Ellie murmured a note of agreement and followed.

             
Beyond the automatic sliding doors and air lock full of coats and umbrellas, the staff had been busy transforming the place. The reception desk was festooned with three dimensional paper turkeys and wicker horns of plenty spilling wax fruit across the counters. Beyond, in the spacious common room where residents played checkers, watched TV and dozed in recliners, orange and brown and yellow streamers had been looped and tacked along the ceiling. Paper cutout turkeys, acorns and squirrels were taped to the walls. The end tables along the walls where magazines were stacked displayed more horns of plenty and wax grape bundles. It was tacky, but it was at least an attempt, and drowning out the typical, medicinal smells was the heavy scent of the Thanksgiving dinner that would be served that evening.

             
Ellie signed them into the visitor’s log and made a beeline for her grandmother.

             
Abigail was tucked down into a slipper chair beneath a window, as close to the natural light as she could be, however gray and dismal it was today. She was bundled in white and gray sweaters with big, shawl collars, as spindly and withered as a baby bird, her hair a tidy white bun pinned to the back of her head. Her green oxygen tank sat at her feet, obscene beside her clean white Keds, and the tubes were hooked behind her ears, draped across her wrinkled, papery cheeks. She was knitting – something a pearly cobalt blue – and her hands quaked with the effort of working the needles together.

             
Ellie kept an old black and white photo in a keepsake chest in the back of her closet of Abigail when she’d been “Abby” – young and curvaceous, laughing, the wind snatching her dark hair across her face, propped up against the hood of her husband’s Ford. It was painful to recall what she’d once been and see her as she was now: a widow, the mother of an only son who didn’t love her the way he should, elderly and failing, counting the last of her days. Already so thoroughly rattled by Jordan, Ellie felt tears building she prayed she could keep in check as she drew up beside her grandmother and cleared her throat softly.

             
“Happy Thanksgiving, Grammy,” she greeted, and Abigail’s head came up in pleased surprise.

             
“Ellie, sweetheart.” She never exclaimed, but her voice, as small and shaky as it was, always conveyed the kind of warmth Ellie had never known from her parents. “Both of you. Oh, girls, I’m so glad you made it. How are you, Paige?”