Forever Promised (16 page)

When Mikhail had turned the hose on the porch, he’d made sure to give her a face full of water as well, as he had seen her brother do once to Jeff and Collin when they too had been acting like spoiled children.

They had taken it with more grace.

Missy had screeched and come roaring at him with fists and fingernails flying. Mikhail stood his ground, looking forward to one solid punch in self-defense. He was not squeamish about hitting women. If Lucas hadn’t grabbed her around the waist and put her in a three-point restraint right there on the porch, Mikhail might have had the satisfaction of landing that punch too, and in the way of all feral pigs, this one might actually respect a predator mightier than herself.

Alas, Lucas
had
restrained her, and while her face had been pushed into the newly stained wood, Mikhail had squatted down and calmly explained what would be expected of her at Promise House.

The incident with the cigarettes and the restraints would not be counted against her, he said, feeling magnanimous, since she had not known the rules until this exact moment.

That had been the first day.

The second day, she’d slapped their poor little recovering drug addict, scratching his cheek until it bled, because he’d dared to ask her if she had done crank. He’d only been, he’d tried to explain to Mikhail, trying to encourage her.

“It’s so hard, the first days,” he’d sniffled, and Mikhail had actually put an arm around Eddie’s shoulder. He’d worked so hard. He’d been with them for nearly two years, and he’d worked hard every day at staying clean. Mikhail worried for him. He would be exited in a year, and he would not be ready. Was there not some way to keep him there? Could they not find a cot for him, a way for him to stay at Promise House and live?

Mikhail knew which children would survive on their own, and Eddie was not one such. To see him destroyed by Missy’s vicious temper… well, Mikhail had not liked her when she’d arrived.

When she’d stolen Emily’s lipstick on day three, Shane had put her in the white room—a time-out room with the rules of the house written on the wall in indelible ink—for two hours. He’d tested her on them when she’d emerged.

If Mikhail had been there, instead of at the Faire in Gilroy, he would have petitioned for her to be removed right then and there.

But he hadn’t been, and she’d kept her nose clean for days four and five.

This was day six.

Shane was currently sleeping in, because Mikhail had insisted, because he had stayed up pretty much for seventy-two hours during the weekend Mikhail had been gone. One of their counselors had been sick, and Shane had slept over to fill in for her. None of them slept well at Promise House—too many things could go wrong—which was why there was a rule and a rotation schedule, and generally, three days was too many.

When Mikhail and Kimmy arrived home only to find Lucas cooking dinner and Shane asleep on the couch, Mikhail read the entire staff the riot act.

He did this on occasion. It never occurred to anyone there he was not an actual employee, more of a volunteer. People didn’t bother him with trifles; they did what he said and he was content.

So this morning, hearing Missy treating Sweetie with that much contempt? No. There was nothing good in that, and Mikhail would
not
let it slide. But she seemed to have learned
some
humility. Maybe enough to allow her to stay.

“Yes,” he said, keeping his usual lip curl. It would not do to express hope. “You may go now to your room. Be pleased to keep your hands to your own belongings, and maybe spend some time writing an explanation to your counselor for today’s incident.”

“My
counselor
!” Missy protested. “But Kimmy’s such a—”

“Disciplinarian,” Mikhail said with a straight face. “Yes, my dear. She is. And you need that at this moment in your life, or you would, perhaps, be able to do laundry without getting into trouble. Which reminds me, go finish what you were doing in the laundry room while I talk to LeLauna. Thank you.”

Missy glared at him, possibly wishing his entrails were being slowly roasted in the fires of purgatory while he watched. He was not interested in her petty schemes of revenge.

He looked at LeLauna and allowed his eyebrow to rise.

“Sorry, Mick—uhm, Mikhail,” LeLauna said automatically, and he repressed a smile.

“That is wonderful. Perhaps you could tell me what you have done?”

LeLauna straightened up for a moment and tried to think. “I, uhm… I used foul language,” she said proudly, and Mikhail rubbed at his mouth so he didn’t smirk.

“This is true, because none of us here swear even a little, am I right?”

And LeLauna
did
smirk. “Kimmy’s got a mouth like a sailor fucking a trucker,” she said, rolling her eyes, and now Mikhail
did
smile, because it was true. Yes, the counselors tried not to swear so much in front of the children, but that did not mean they did not swear at
all.

“Yes, well, she says all of the words her brother does not,” Mikhail said staunchly, although Shane had been known to let the F-bomb slip out on occasion as well. “But that truly is not my point.”

“And I’m waiting here!” Sweetie said, her narrow eyebrows arching.

“Don’t be impertinent. The point is, she would have tried to con anybody. Black, white, yellow—there was no reason to respond with your race.”

She flinched back. “It was just an expression—”

“Yes. And you are not in trouble for it. But there are so many troubles here in the air, yes? When that trouble is here, we should address it. Before it comes to visit, let us hope it does not visit. That is all I’m saying. If
she
had used that unfortunate word, we would be finding another place for her. Let us not introduce it into this place. It is like any other….” He fumbled, his English deserting him when he needed it most. “I do not let Dallas, Tony, Eddie, or Cooper say ‘faggot’, although they are gay. It opens a door, and beyond that door lies monsters.”

She nodded carefully. “I hear you, Mikhail. If I use it, she can use it, and I don’t like the way she’d use it.”

“Yes. You are very clever. You will need to think of better words, is all.”

There was a moment there when the corners of Sweetie’s mouth pulled up, and Mikhail caught his breath. She was intensely beautiful when she smiled.

“I hear you. Can I go get my clothes out of there? ’Cause if she spits in them or somethin’ gross, you’re gonna wanna get rid of
me
next.”

Mikhail did not correct her, but he did nod in dismissal and sink back down to the kitchen table to contemplate his neglected coffee.

He was washing his coffee cup in the sink when Kimmy came in. If they were performing, Mikhail would say she was playing a fairy or an elf sneaking in the woods—he recognized those graceful, quiet steps. They were part of the thing that could make someone with a mouth that sounded like a sailor fucking a trucker still seem graceful and elegant.

“I know you are here, cow woman,” Mikhail said with a tired smile. “You are making a run to Wal-Mart, are you not?”

Kimmy grimaced. “God, I wish we could afford somewhere else.”

Yes, well, you did not boycott the place that fed you, even if they stood against everything you stood for. “And I wish food fell down from trees. Why are you tiptoeing in like one of the outside cats? What have I ever done to you to make you think I cared, one way or another, if you are there behind me?”

Kimmy laughed, because they played this game of insult, and Mikhail was comforted. He was not as easy with all the bitterness Missy stirred up in him again as he used to be. He was happier now that he’d left most of that behind.

“I’m not tiptoeing because I’m
scared
, Mick… Mikhail,” she said, catching herself up at the dreadful nickname that he loathed unless her brother was saying it. “I’m tiptoeing because I
want
something from you.”

She said it with a smile, but her lower lip was out, and her round brown eyes were shiny, and her next step was not graceful at all. In fact, it was a little clumsy and it trembled, and Mikhail was abruptly concerned.

“Sit down, Kimberly, before you fall down. My God, I’m glad we are not performing—you would wrap those cow thighs around my neck and strangle me dead. What is the matter?”

Kimmy sagged into the chair pathetically, and Mikhail came up out of his own ruminations enough to realize she was wearing Lucas’s old cargo shorts
and
T-shirt, like she was trying to minimize her body by swimming in those outrageously large clothes.

Like she was trying to hide.

He sat down next to her and bumped her shoulder. “Are you going to tell me or let me guess? I am
so
good at guessing the ways of people with breasts, am I not?”

Kimmy snickered quietly. “Oh, heaven forbid.” The laughter died quickly. “It’s… it’s girl stuff,” she said.

Mikhail resisted the urge to run out of the room screaming.

“Wonderful. Will I start menstruating from the telling of it? Why are you not talking to Amy and Benny?”

It was Kim’s turn to grimace. “Because Amy and Benny are good girls,” she said simply after a moment. “You know.
Good
girls. And you weren’t a good boy. And that makes a difference.”

For a moment Mikhail just blinked at her stupidly, because as much as he called Kimberly cow woman, he thought of her as the best of women. And then he got it.

“You mean you were a slut?” he asked, and her laughter was reassuring.

“Yeah, Mickey. I was a coke whore—and you knew me when.”

Mikhail did remember her when. He had worried for her. She had been—like her brother, actually, very much so—so hungering for love that she attracted the worst people. Unlike her brother, Kimmy hadn’t had the moral center, the solid sense of right and wrong, to hold her steady and give her purpose. And like Mikhail, when he had slid from dance to drugs to the streets at the age of fifteen, she had lived and breathed a profession in which it was better to be high than even a pound above the minimum weight to sustain life.

He swallowed hard, suddenly unwilling to banter with names. Not with Kimberly, who could flip him off while she was knitting a sweater for her brother.

“You were lost, Kimmy-love,” Mikhail said, borrowing Jeff’s pet name for her because it was better than cow-woman. “We were all so terribly lost. Amy and Benny—they know the worst of me. I am sure they know the worst of you. They still love us.”

Kimmy looked away. She had such a pretty face—a high forehead that supported a fringe of bangs and the kind of smile that showed just a hint of her even white teeth when she wasn’t planning on it. “Benny thinks Deacon’s going to go through with it,” she said randomly.

Mikhail grinned. Yes, Shane had come home talking about Deacon, who—characteristically—had injured himself when upset.

“So,” Mikhail had asked his great lover as he’d come out of the shower that morning, “how did you help Deacon to the car?”

“Like this!” Shane had growled, and then the horrible man had
picked Mikhail up
in his arms, like a girl. But the things that had happened after
that
had no girls involved, and it was a
very
pleasant memory.

“Yes,” he said, back in the kitchen with Kimmy. “He is still protesting—and still hobbling on crutches, I believe—but he will see sense eventually.”

Kimmy nodded and clasped her hands tightly in front of her on the red-checked kitchen tablecloth, worrying her fingers knuckle by knuckle. “Why do you think it’s seeing sense?” she asked, her voice almost whisper low, and Mikhail thought about it for the first time since Benny had called him and told him—complaining bitterly about Deacon’s stubbornness, which he had taken for granted.

“Because he is a good man, and good men deserve children,” Mikhail said after a moment. “I would… for Shane’s sake alone, I would try to have one of ours, but the children here—they are his children instead, and I have my students, and we are good with that. But Deacon and Carrick—they live more guarded lives, I think. They need a child of their own.”

“Good men deserve children,” Kimmy whispered, and then, to Mikhail’s horror, she wiped her face on the back of her hand, and he realized she had been quietly crying as he had nattered on.

“Oh, Kimberly—whatever I said, it was nonsense. You know me. I’m an ignorant Russian man who knows nothing about women or children or lady parts—do not listen to me! Look! I will go call Benny, or Amy, or—”

“I started my period today,” Kimmy said, but there was a sob in the middle of it, and Mikhail made himself busy starting the kettle for tea and getting some Kleenex. It was a halfway house for runaways—there were at least two boxes of Kleenex per room, the nice kind with aloe in it, which was considerate and necessary.

He returned with the Kleenex, some leftover cupcakes from the night before, and a keen wish to be somewhere else.

“Here, eat one,” he said, and Kimmy stuck out a flat tongue and licked off all of the pink icing first.

Mikhail shuddered. “I can’t believe you just did that! That’s appalling!”

“I’s za beth par’,” she said through a mouth full of sugar and lard. “’O we af any mil’?”

Mikhail swallowed hard on his rebelling stomach and got her a glass of milk. “No wonder you did coke,” he said, truly stunned. “If your sweet tooth is that rabid, it’s the only reason you are not
truly
a cow!”

Kimmy at least swallowed and washed it down with milk before she answered. “I started my period, Mikhail. I’m three weeks late.”

Mikhail squinted at her. “I have no lady parts, soon-to-be-cow-woman. I do not know what this means.”

Kimmy grabbed the Kleenex, blew her nose into it, and tried to clean up. It was hard—she put on makeup every morning, and now it was running into her eyes and all over her face.

Mikhail sniffed. “Come here. You have a raccoon face—it is not at all attractive.” Mikhail took a clean tissue and started wiping under her eyes and cleaning off her cheeks. She had dark eyes and dark eyelashes, like her brother, and Mikhail thought it was a shame their parents were both cold, useless people, one of whom had died and the other of whom had not visited for either wedding. They had good bone structure and threw perfect specimens. If only that was what a person needed to be worth the air he or she breathed.