Fix You (34 page)

             
The curtain twitched in the living room window: Jo checking to see who was at her door. Then the locks turned and a sliver of her face appeared. It stung a little that, even though she knew it was him, she kept the door between them.

             
“Walt.” Her voice was tight. “What are you doing here?”

             
“I want to talk to your husband.”

             
Which was something of which she clearly didn’t approve. Her blue-green eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. “Why?”

             
“I never got to congratulate him on getting hitched,” he deadpanned.

             
“Pardon me if I don’t laugh at your lame attempt at humor,” she quipped. “Unless you come up with something better than a bad joke, no dice, Walt.”

             
“I didn’t come to fight.” He lifted his hands and offered his palms as proof. “I just want to talk to him.”

             
She started to say something else, but the door pulled wide and Tam appeared behind her. He didn’t look like his abusive father, but he dwarfed Jo, and he had big hands. And Walt wasn’t sure if he could ever swallow those fears. But he met the guy’s too-blue eyes and nodded a stiff greeting.

             
One of Tam’s hands – big like his father’s – landed on top of Jo’s head, gentle as thistledown as it brushed down her dark, honeyed hair. “I can watch out for myself,” he told her with a little smile that clearly held meaning for Jo, but that Walt didn’t track.

             
With a look that was a clear warning, Jo melted out of sight behind the door and Tam stepped in front of it, pulling it closed behind him as he joined Walt on the stoop. Tam gave him the up/down and moved past him, dropped down on the wooden step and stretched his legs out in front of him. He was in jeans, socks, and some old threadbare band t-shirt. He fished a pack of smokes from his back pocket and shook one loose; stuck it between his teeth before he asked, “Why’re you here?” in a flat, disinterested voice.

             
Wales had always been smug; he’d never had a damn thing to his name save a leather jacket and that old Detroit-made hunk of steel his mother had left him. How could a man with no accomplishments have anything to be smug about? Walt had always supposed it was nabbing Jo, gaining a place in the family, that had fueled his sense of victory. It was a notion that had spawned a loathing, one that he was having a hard time swallowing tonight.

             
“I came to wave the white flag,” he said, biting back the contempt in his voice.

             
Tam lit his cigarette and turned to glance back over his shoulder, blowing smoke into the night through his nostrils. “Not buying it.”

             
“You don’t have to.” Walt moved up and dropped beside him on the step. “But it’s the truth.”

             
Tam’s dark brows gave a speculative jump. He faced the mansion across the drive from them; there were lights on in the back of the house, visible through front windows, back in the servants’ quarters where Jess lived. “Okay, so, it’s the truth. Why?”

             
Walt heaved a deep, painful sigh. “I don’t like you.”

             
“Figured that.”

             
“And I don’t plan on ever liking you.” It seemed such a horrible thing to say to someone’s face – even the side of someone’s face – but Tam had never been one for the social niceties, and Walt didn’t figure anything he said could upset him. “But I…I need you to help me understand.”

             
There was the sound of Tam taking a drag on the cigarette; the rush of an exhale, the plume of opaque gray billowing against the indigo sky. “Understand what?” His voice had a knowing edge to it.

             
“You know.”

             
“I feel like I’m in a bad detective movie.”

             
“You
know
.”

             
Another inhale and exhale. “About Joey.” It wasn’t a question. “Even for a prick, I always thought you had to be a little bit smart. All these years and you still don’t get it?”

             
“Humor me,” Walt said through his teeth.

             
Tam shrugged. “Fine.” Another drag: this one felt heavy, a great gathering of breath before something bigger than smoke came spilling out. Walt thought he knew where Tam would start his story – somewhere between prom and a wet blue-green dress and stolen whiskey – but he was wrong.

             
“I don't care how hard you worked, how much you saved up; you grew up a prince compared to me. Your childhood was perfect. I was ten-years-old and trying to protect my mom. I had nothing to hold onto except for the hope that maybe, one day, I'd get to choke the life out of my old man. That shit got me up in the morning. Got me through the days Mom couldn't get out of bed and we only had enough bread to make her a sandwich, and my stomach was eating itself.”

             
Walt was watching him now: the side of his face. The tip of the smoke flared orange and died. Tam ground it out on the concrete, relinquished it to the stoop beside him and dug out another.

             
“And then,” he continued, “I met your family. And then I met your sister. And for a few hours at a time, I got to pretend I had something good in my life. I don’t have any jealousy for you,” he assured. “It was never about that.

             
“It was always about Jo. Jo is everything I never knew a girl could be. She's the only reason I'm not dead or in jail.” His lashes flickered under the glow of the carriage lamps and his eyes cut over, hostile, his voice hardening. “I know what you think I am. I know how you think I treat her. And you're full of shit. You were right about my old man, Walt, I'll give you that. And I'm his son, sure, and I'm not afraid to throw a punch. But what you think…” He shook his head.

             
“I think you took advantage,” Walt said, voice soft for reasons he didn’t understand.

             
Tam faced him, eyes blazing, words pouring out of him in a way that was too hurried and heartfelt to allow for editing or withholding of information Jo’s brother wouldn’t want to hear. “Joey was seventeen and no one had ever touched her but me. This guy...this piece of shit who took her to prom...she was shaking so hard her teeth chattered. She -
damn
- she kicked him in the jewels and got away from him, but only because she was Jo and because he didn't expect it. He almost...Jesus.” His hands curled into claws and he reached for his cigarette to cover. “I don't have words for the kind of angry that gets me. To think about someone hurting her...I hit him so hard. Over and over. He was just a kid and I turned his face into hamburger. And it felt
good
. It felt good to hit Ryan Atkins too. And my dad. I would kill someone for her. No guilt. Nothing. You can bet your life on that. But to think that I'm not good to her; that I don't worship the ground she fucking walks on...you don't know shit about me, Walt. And I don't care if you ever do.”

             
Two hours ago, Walt might not have believed him. But after he’d watched his best friend offer up his girlfriend like she was nothing more than a golf club – after that same friend had talked about Walt’s sister like she didn’t, and had never, meant anything to him – he looked at the shithead sitting next to him and had a new appreciation for the stress tremors running through Tam’s hands. The chaotic, violent light glimmering in his eyes. He remembered a night two years ago when Tam had threatened him in his parents’ driveway because he’d made Jo cry. He thought about what he’d glimpsed through the window: the man who hadn’t known anyone was watching, but who’d been coloring with his wife and daughter anyway.

             
“I went to see Dylan before I came here,” Walt said, and Tam’s face went slack with surprise. “He had his…his toy there with him. He offered to let her…take care of me.”

             
The surprise was replaced with the same sort of contempt Walt had always felt for Tam. “Sick bastard. You didn’t take him up on it, did you?”

             
“Of course not.”

             
Tam shrugged.

             
“He’s treating my sister like shit.”

             
“Yeah. What’re you gonna do about it?”

             
That still eluded him. He glanced across the drive, eyes landing on the white Ford crew cab truck. “Her contractor?” he asked, and saw silhouettes move in the lights in the house windows.

             
“He’s a good guy,” Tam said, and then added: “He’s not Dylan.”

             
Walt snorted. “If I ever even really knew who Dylan was.”

             
There was a beat of silence. “He’s dark,” Tam said finally. “And there’s a difference between living in a dark place and being black on the inside. Trust me: sometimes people rise above, and sometimes people sink below. Where you come from doesn’t mean shit.”

             
And Tam, Walt thought with an ironic non-smile, was the one who’d risen. Dylan, for all his money and success, had fallen.

             
“Daddy,” a small voice sounded behind them. “It’s bedtime.”

             
Walt watched Tam twist around to face his daughter. His face was transformed completely.

             
“Yeah it is, munchkin. You don’t want Mama to sing you to sleep?”

             
“No,” Willa said with a sleepy giggle.

             
“I’ve still got that whole cat on a radiator thing going on,” Jo said from the doorway.

             
“Alright.” Tam got to his feet. “Whatcha wanna hear tonight?”

             
“’Whip the Post’!”

             
“’Whippin’ Post’? You’re just an Allman Brothers girl, aren’t you?” He scooped up Willa and went inside.

             
Jo lingered.

             
“You can relax,” Walt said dryly to the driveway. “He’s all in one piece still.”

             
She snorted, and her bare toes padded across the step until she stood beside him. “I wasn’t ever worried about him getting hurt.”

             
She’d been worried about her brother instead, and that had to count for something. “Sit.” Walt patted the stoop beside him.

             
“I have dishes to wash.”

             
“Sit, Jo. Please.”

             
She did, but slowly, and he could feel her wary gaze on the side of his face. “I don’t have anything to say to you, Walt,” she warned. “So make this quick.”

             
There’d been a time when she’d adored him…at least, he’d always thought so. But she loved Tam more. And maybe, if the guy really did worship her as he claimed, that was okay, because God knew Walt had never worshipped anyone and little Jo deserved that.  “I went to see Dylan tonight,” he said without preamble, and turned to catch the displeasure that streaked across her face. “And I thought I was going to hurl watching him with that new…pet…of his.”

             
Her brows lifted a fraction, but she said nothing.

             
“He doesn’t want to reconcile with Jess. The shit he said…” he shook his head. “The guy’s a nightmare and I never even suspected it. I was wrong about him, Jo.” He looked into her big, almost-turquoise eyes and wanted her to understand. “I got it
wrong
.”

             
“Yeah, you really did.”

             
“I don’t like being wrong.”

             
She rolled her eyes. “You also don’t pay close attention. You never really knew me. And I don’t blame you – you were in college when I started middle school. You weren’t here. You didn’t ever get to see what I saw.” Cleary, she understood that they weren’t talking about Dylan. “I may be the baby, but I’m not an idiot.”

             
He felt a faint smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Did I ever say that?”

             
“That or something very much like it.”

             
He couldn’t apologize – he wasn’t ready for that – but he draped a careful arm across her little shoulders. She stared at the house across from them, but didn’t shrug him away, and Walt thought that might be a start.

**

             
Gwen had left only the night lights on for him when he arrived home: the polished silver lamp on the kitchen counter, the fluorescent tube above the washing machine, the hall bathroom upstairs. The master bedroom was all in shadows. He slipped in soundlessly and undressed, left all his clothes in an uncharacteristic heap on the floor.