Keep You (29 page)

             
It wasn’t a surprise when Mike came in, hands jammed in the pockets of his khakis, hair still damp from the shower. A redness around his eyes was the only clue that he’d been out drinking and breaking up fights the night before. That and the bruise on the inside of his forearm he’d half-covered with his sleeve. Tam felt the accusatory slant of his gaze and decided maybe the food was a better idea than the conversation he was about to have. He pulled the basket toward him and split a flaky piece of cod, a curl of steam licking up from its white innards, batter crackling and crunchy. His stomach said no, but his head said yes.

             
Mike sat down across from him with the air of a man who didn’t intend to stay long. So this was going to be one of those drive-by lectures. “We need to - ”

             
“Talk, yeah, I figured that,” Tam said, and popped a bite of fish in his mouth to stall. His patience had abandoned him the night before at Talon’s, but had since returned – cold and oily with regret. Now Mike was restless, but Tam was full to the brim with don’t-give-a-shit. He had all the time in the world. He choked down the cod, not sure it would stay down, chased it with a swallow of Guinness. Mike had pressed his lips together into a thin, white line, face starting to redden. “Should I have the bellboy bring my bags down?”

             
There’d been a time when Mike would have laughed off the sarcasm and whatever they’d been arguing about wouldn’t have mattered anymore. Tam had a knack for diffusing misunderstandings. But now, Mike’s Randy-looking face twisted with disapproval. “What the hell’s your problem, man? Ryan’s face is all kinds of screwed up and Delta is - ”

             
“Furious? Livid? Threatening to cut your balls off?”

             
“
Tam
.”

             
It was worse than if he’d yelled or called him a dickhead and stormed off. On some level, Tam knew he was trying to goad his friend into a more volatile eruption, the kind of profanity-laced man fight that blew up and then blew away, the kind they’d had their whole lives. But the stern, paternal edge to the way Mike said his name slapped him in the face. He’d acted like a petulant child. A teenager. Someone caught in a youthful indiscretion while Michael Walker was having to rise above and be the adult. The poor guy who had to make excuses for this tagalong childhood pal who couldn’t get his act together.

             
Tam licked the little bits of batter and grease off his fingers and reached for his beer again. “Ah,” he said. “So it’s that kind of talk.”

             
“Ryan said you’ve had it out for him since day one.” So the pretty boy had turned stool pigeon. “You know you’re being an asshole, Tam. What I can’t figure out is why.”

             
He was grateful for his shades, the way they hid his eyes, because it gave him the courage to meet Mike’s gaze head-on. “Then we’re even, cause I can’t figure out why you set that douche up with your sister. Have you heard him talking about her? Did you hear what he said last night?”

             
A blank look flickered across Mike’s face.

             
“I didn’t think so.”

             
He recovered and shrugged. “So? Jo’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”

             
“Aren’t you brother of the year.”

             
“This isn’t about Jo. You’re intentionally trying to screw up my wedding and - ”

             
“Is that what you think?” His headache was coming back with a vengeance. After last night, after listening to the wrecked catch to Jo’s voice, he didn’t have the energy to be indignant. He was just…sad. Just overwhelmingly morose down to his bones to know that the Walkers, all of them, were slipping through his fingers. They’d always been his lifeline and now, the more desperate he became, the more he pushed them away. “Do you honest to God think I’d try to ruin your wedding on purpose?”

             
A beat passed filled with the quiet sounds of the bartender wiping out glasses and the man three tables over rustling his newspaper.

             
Then Mike did the worst thing of all; he figured it out. “How’s your mom?” he asked quietly.

             
They’d been sixteen the first and only time Mike had met Melinda. His driver’s license hot off the printer, the thing burning a hole through his wallet, he’d pulled up to the curb of the old Wales bungalow in Randy’s truck, the windows down, Limp Bizkit flooding the speakers. Tam had been doing laundry, stringing the wet clothes up beneath the ceiling fan because the dryer was busted again when he’d heard the bell ring. Melinda had answered the door, the onion she’d been peeling in her hands, a fresh bruise shining through hastily-applied makeup on her cheek.

             
Tam glanced away, staring at the halo of sunlight radiating around his beer. “She’s fine.”

             
“Look, man” - a reluctant sigh - “if you need money I - ”

             
He shoved to his feet, the table wobbling, beer slopping out over the edge of its glass.

             
“Tam.”

             
“I better go sleep off the rest of this hangover so I don’t ruin your wedding any worse than I already did,” Tam tossed over his shoulder as he headed for the door.

**

              Nails done, hair trimmed and styled with so much product she felt like she had to go wash it immediately, Jo made her way toward the bar in search of lunch and a pint…or two. Jess and Beth had both made attempts to involve her in some tourist activity or other, but she hadn’t been able to muster even a scrap of excitement. She was pouting, and she knew it, but didn’t care. This wasn’t the active, I’ll-show-them kind of pouting. This was sheer physical exhaustion and emotional overload that was running her aground.

             
There was a dainty parlor just down from the cocktail bar; full of spindly-legged French chairs and little settees, thick velvet swags held back from the windows with gold cords. The fireplace was a great yawning mouth topped with an elaborate, hand carved mantle, two tables set up with chess boards in front of it. As Jo walked past it, she spared its interior a passing glance and saw two figures backlit by the watery gray sunlight glowing in the windows behind them: a man and woman, sitting together on a sofa, knees touching as they faced one another. He was blonde and she had a waterfall of dark locks cascading over one shoulder.

             
Delta and Mike made her miserable enough separately – she wanted nothing to do with the pair of them together – but the desperate, whiny way Delta said “family” in a voice that was not eavesdropping-proof had Jo flattening her back along the wall beside the entrance to the parlor. She knew that whatever she was about to overhear would curl her hands into indignant fists, but even that was a better distraction than reliving the night before every time she blinked.

             
“…can’t afford it,” Mike was saying once she was still and the rustle of her hair against her ears had quieted. Jo’s brows lifted in shock. “My brother and sister still live at home to chip in. They don’t have money to blow on a big trip like this the way your folks do.”

             
Delta made a disagreeing sound. “Don’t try to make it out like that’s my family’s fault - ”

             
“I didn’t say it was.”

             
“ – they didn’t have to come for the whole week.”

             
With a patience lacing his words Jo hadn’t heard before, he said, “You don’t know my mom. Refusing an invitation is rude. They had to come.”

             
“Then they could at least be pleasant about it!”

             
There was a soft, masculine sound that might have been a chuckle. “Come on, baby, have
you
been pleasant?”

             
“I can’t believe you just said that!”

             
A definite burst of laughter this time. “You know you’re being a little…”

             
“A little what?”

             
“Nutty.” But he said it so gently, it didn’t sound like an insult. Far from it, in fact. Jo had never been witness to this side of her brother. Had she turned the corner and tried to see it with her own eyes, she was convinced it would prove to be a figment of her imagination, that it was really two other people sitting in there. If the voice hadn’t so definitely belonged to her brother, she might have thought he was – and the realization brought a fresh surge of pain knifing through her – Tam: that sweet, joking way he’d always chastised her.

             
“And your best man,” Delta said in a huff. “Is there anyone else’s face he plans on destroying before we take pictures?”

             
“I’ll handle Tam.”

             
“We cannot have another incident like that, Michael!” Delta pressed. “If he can’t get his act together - ”

             
“I said I’d handle him, didn’t I?” A defensive edge crept into his voice. “He’s going through a rough spot. Leave him alone.”

             
Jo’s pulse picked up a fraction. Did Mike know about them? About the night before? She’d always assumed he was clueless, but if he knew…and he didn’t approve…and he’d encouraged Ryan to ask her to the wedding…

             
She dashed the idea almost immediately. No, if Mike knew, he would have confronted her about it.

             
“Mikey.” A soft, frantic sigh and the use of the nickname added a layer of humanity to Delta. Or at least to her voice. “I’m just so afraid this isn’t going to work out.”

             
“It’s not too late.” The settee made a settling sound. “We skip out on this whole thing right now and we can stop at the first church we come to. Get hitched without the fuss.”

             
“No, I meant…” Jo could envision her sculpted dark brows pulling together. Maybe her white teeth tugging at her glossy lower lip.

             
“What?” Mike prodded, and Jo realized she had her ear pressed to the wall, the fine hairs on the back of her neck at attention as she waited.

             
Delta’s response was a low, stressed murmur.

             
“No.” Mike’s voice sounded harder and sharper, the way she’d always heard it. “No,
do not
say that.”

             
A trio of guests came around the corner at the end of the hall, three middle-aged women who looked like they’d all pooled their resources for a magical, Irish girls’ trip. They were laughing and talking with one another, their wedding rings catching the light as they gesticulated wildly, and Jo knew it was only a moment before they glanced up and noticed her. She dug the side of her face into the paisley wallpaper, straining to catch some meaning in the muffled exchange of voices inside the parlor. To preserve this new, not-so-damning mental image she had of the two of them. But the voices of the women covered whatever low, urgent things Mike and Delta were saying to one another and Jo’s conscience kicked in before she could get spotted and branded a spy.

             
She slipped into the bar, breathing deep the smells of cigar smoke and wood polish. None of the guests present were part of the wedding party, nor were they in her age bracket, for that matter, which was good, she wanted to be alone. She found a table over by the window and ordered a Guinness. Through the rain-speckled panes, the sun was shining, but only for the moment, clouds stacking up out over the lake again.

             
Jo watched birds wheel above the lawns, diving at unaware guests, and wished not for fame or wealth, but for a different Ireland. For one that she and Tam watched through the rain spattered window together, their fingers laced, his chin hooked over the top of her head. It was a selfish, impossible wish, but she wished it all the same.

24

Now

             
Billingsly castle was holding its breath. Thunderheads rolled in from the hills, thick and white and folding over like biscuit dough, bubbling, boiling magenta along the edges where the skillet was the hottest. The fog was the shifting, smoke machine stuff of the
Thriller
video, liquid where it pooled around boles of trees and curled up through branches, giving the forests a haunted look. The air hummed with the waiting, a low-pitched buzz that tickled across skin and left ears itching. Lough Corrib was as flat and slick as black glass. An eruption was building within the ancient, ivy-covered stone walls of the castle, its pressure filling up the stately rooms and testing at the mullioned window panes.

             
Jo could feel the discordant vibrations all the way down to her bones. She spent two days in limbo, watching every other member of the wedding party and family walk their separate tightropes. Delta was like a frightened animal, eyes over large, lips trembling, and she snapped at anyone who dared get too close, teeth gnashing and claws raised. Mike looked like he wasn’t sleeping at all…none of them did, really. Even Jordan, always unflappable, had big dark circles beneath his eyes. He went jogging every chance he had and went to bed early. Tam didn’t make an appearance at all, and Jo was so disturbed by his absence that she’d become obsessed with watching for his entrance. She didn’t eat more than she had to to stay on her feet. She wasn’t sure she ever slept, especially not once the maids changed her sheets and they no longer smelled of Tam.

             
For two days the castle slumbered like a dragon, smoke curling from its nostrils, and then the rehearsal dinner was upon them.

             
They were having it at the pavilion down by the lake and that was only because Beth had been unable to convince anyone that she should take the shuttle into Cong, buy up everything she’d need for a, as she’d put it, “quaint picnic type thing,” and host it on her own dime with her twenty-five cent paper plates by the light of lime scented candles from the tourist trap boutique in town. The scene had been an unpleasant one; Beth near tears as Maureen and Louise Brooks explained (Maureen with gentle patience, Louise with a snotty tilt to her superior nose) that the rehearsal dinner was included in the wedding package and that it had already been paid for. By the Brooks. Beth’s mortification of failing a time-honored Southern tradition had been palpable. Jo had watched Delta roll her eyes and wondered how she’d felt any shred of sympathy for the princess the afternoon she’d overheard her whimpering to Mike. Clearly, that had been a fluke, an accidental display of normal human qualities.

             
Now, as nightfall came swooping down on them, clouds spreading like wings as they tumbled over the hills and rolled across the lough, a breeze snatched at the table linens and blew out half the white tapers in the centerpieces.

             
“Oh, Lord,” Beth fretted as she walked between the tables that were already set for dinner. Two solid wooden pallets had been pushed together along the east corner of the pavilion, its table set for two, the honored place for the bride and groom from which to survey their subjects/guests. Hotel staff with Bic lighter sticks were hastily attending to the candles. “The wind keeps picking up,” she said. “And if it rains…oh, Lord.”

             
“Mom,” Jess said gently, hooking a hand through their mother’s elbow and trying to draw her away. “The castle deals with this sort of thing all the time. They’ll sort it out and it’ll be perfect by the time the rehearsal’s done.”

             
“It’s just that - ” She licked her lips, taking off the last touch of lipstick that remained, her forehead a maze of tension creases. Jo swore her roots had grown out just in the past week. “If things aren’t just right…the rehearsal dinner is the
groom’s family’s
responsibility.”

             
“It’ll look beautiful.” Jo took up her mom’s other elbow. “And the best part is, it didn’t cost us a cent. Think of it this way: because Delta picked it all out, she can’t possibly find anything to complain about.”

             
“But she can complain about his poverty-stricken family not putting it on themselves!” she protested. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes wild.

             
Jo locked eyes with her sister and knew their thoughts were running along the same track; it was physically painful to see their mother in this kind of distress. Over a supposedly joyous occasion no less.

             
“We are not poverty-stricken,” Jess said, firm. “Since when does lack of a Bentley mean you need government assistance? Come on, Mom.”

             
“The girls are right, Mama,” Randy said. He stood at the edge of the pavilion, pulling at his tie and rolling his shoulders inside a suit coat that looked a half size too small. “Not a damn thing you can do now.”

             
“Language!” Beth hissed.

             
“Not a darn thing you can do now.”

             
One of the wait staff, a skinny redhead kid with a liberal sprinkling of freckles across his nose had heard their predicament and paused beside them on his way toward the buffet, a chilled silver pitcher in his hands and a towel over his arm. “We’ve got it all handled, mum,” he assured Beth with a congenial, crooked-tooth grin. “It’ll be grand.”

             
“Grand.” Beth heaved a sigh. “Well.” She took one last pained glance around, could find nothing terribly amiss, and let herself be towed away from the pavilion. “I guess it’s in God’s hands now.”

             
“Don’t be like that,” Randy chided.

             
“Like what?”

             
“Like the world’s ending.”

             
Dylan was waiting beneath a tree, hands in his pockets, a bored look on his face. He fell into step beside Jessica as they headed back toward the path and around a grove of trees, their dress shoes clipping on the slate pavers. Limbs scraped together overhead and it was an ominous sound, the wind just a notch past refreshing and moving into bitter, foreboding territory. Unruly tendrils of hair pulled loose from Jo’s simple ‘do – the front pulled back at the crown with the back left loose and tumbling around her shoulders – and got stuck in her lip gloss. She extracted them with a careful finger and cast a glance up at the clouds, praying the rain held. All this night needed, on top of the triplicate layers of stress, was a nice, jolly downpour to put everyone in a better mood.

             
Maureen had been right about the location out by the lake, though. As their group came around a bend that emptied onto a grassy clearing that butted right up to the shoreline, the ceremony tent and all its trappings came into view.

             
It had been built up with temporary carpentry on the sand, so that the waves slid up beneath it and gave the wooden stage the look of a dock. The tent itself was a substantial, metal framed structure, its roof pitched, its flaps gathered at the corners with golden cord. A narrow boardwalk bridged the pebbled shore and the plateau of grass where classic white chairs had been arranged around a single aisle. The flowers were not in place, nor the red carpet and its white rose petals the bride would make her way down, but even in its skeletal stage, the venue was a dramatic display of white against the emerald and black of the landscape.

             
The wedding party milled around at the end of the aisle, dressed in Sunday finery, the girls fluffing their hair and complaining loudly about the wind, the men fiddling with change in their pockets and wondering aloud how long the rehearsal would take.

             
Jo tightened her grip on her mother when her eyes landed on Tam and couldn’t seem to help it. He’d been slinking around unnoticed, possibly even avoiding her for the past two days. She’d known that the night after Talon’s had been a mistake, but she hadn’t realized how large of one until it became apparent that Tam wanted nothing to do with her afterward. What had she expected after all this time? After he’d left her the first time? He’d never even told her that he loved her.

             
He didn’t even attempt to assimilate with the other groomsmen. They wore sport coats and good slacks, square-toed shoes. Tam was in black dress pants that fit more like jeans, the same pair of black, white-soled sneakers he’d worn the whole trip, an untucked white oxford that was two buttons too open at the collar, his red undershirt visible, his red tie loose and a little crooked. And his leather jacket. The cloud cover turned his glossy hair black. And his eyes…

             
His eyes were what gave her heart a little lurch as he turned them toward her and stared at her through the shifting bodies of the others. They seemed almost sunk in his head, the shadowy rings beneath them dark and pronounced. He looked sick. Like he hadn’t slept. His blue irises were as bright as she’d ever seen them; they glowed in the surreal twilight.

             
He was stone cold sober. And staring at her with a ferocity that caused her step to falter.

             
Tam had not cooled off in the last forty-eight hours, and Jo realized then that it hadn’t been the castle she’d felt trembling around her, waiting. It had been Tam.

**

              As Regina Malone slid her doughy arm through Tam’s elbow and batted her lashes up at him before they began their trip back down the aisle, he saw it all as if he were watching from a closed circuit monitor somewhere. He wasn’t there – his feet on the boardwalk, Regina’s big meaty hip thumping against his as he escorted her away from the altar – but in a place of absolute certainty that had nothing to do with this wedding or this rehearsal dinner.

             
Tam knew three things.

             
One: Jess had been right about a grand gesture.

Two: His dying mother and his MIA alcoholic, abusive father were the ingredients to the perfect genetic disaster. His DNA was full of cancer, insanity, weakness and cruelty, and this week had proved what he’d wondered all a
long; he could, at any point, become one or both of his parents, which meant he would surely pass that fucked up cocktail of crazy on to any children he ever cursed a woman’s womb with. At some point in the very near future, Melinda was going to die, and then Hank would come looking to collect whatever meager, pitiful wealth she’d left behind, by force if necessary. And just like Walt had insinuated four years ago, that chain of events would put anyone in Tam’s life in danger. He was a damn disease, and he wasn’t going to subject anyone to that.

             
Three: Jo Walker deserved to know that none of it had ever been her fault.

             
His grand gesture was not, he knew now, a way to get Jo back. It was a way to set things right. To give her closure.

             
“You got any plans tonight?” Regina’s voice was like a fish hook caught in his jaw, forcing his head down and around, yanking him into an awareness of his surroundings that he didn’t want or need. She was smiling up at him, long, nude fingernails playing with the zipper on the cuff of his jacket. She was eyeing him with lots of coy, bad-girl eyelash fluttering. Even if he told her that her particular brand of flirting never worked on him, or that he thought she was a bitter bitch who took her overeating issues out on other women, she’d chalk whatever he said up to being a jackass who wasn’t sensitive to her weight. So he wasn’t going to waste time on her.

             
“None that involve you,” he said, facing forward again.

             
She went stiff beside him and didn’t protest when he shrugged off her arm and headed across the lawn toward the pavilion where dinner was being set up. Delta was giving a rundown of the picture procedure for the next day, but he didn’t care and hitched his shoulders up against the first fat drops of rain that slapped the back of his jacket.

             
The staff was busy driving skinny metal hooks into the grass and hanging glass lanterns from them, the buttery yellow light pushing back against the gloom of the evening. Tam caught a familiar silhouette from the corner of his eye and allowed himself one last real look at Jo before he executed his grand gesture.

             
She was in the lilac dress she’d worn the day of archery practice, soft, curling strands of hair billowing around her flushed cheeks. She looked timeless, her face just a slip of nose in profile and peaches-and-cream delicate cheekbones. She was small and slight, but sturdy in her own little way, curvy in all the right places. She glanced at him, a sudden flash of blue-green darting through the gray, the touch of her eyes as warming as if she’d reached up and pressed her small hand over his heart.

             
Tam knew four things.

             
Four: He was never going to get over her.

**

              Delta was as rigid and brittle as a piece of beautiful, fragile china. Her strapless tube dress was the same shade of navy she’d required all of them to wear on their toenails. Her hair and makeup were flawless. But three little creases seemed permanently carved between her brows and her shoulders had a tense, unnatural set to them. From her vantage point out among the general populace – the wedding party and the fifty some odd friends of the Brooks who had arrived that day – Jo thought her future sister-in-law looked overcome by more than just bridal nerves.