Keep You (32 page)

             
Son
. Christ, he couldn’t cope with that. If he was going to break away from this family, it had to be clean. He couldn’t have all these fuzzy edges and liberal uses of nicknames and titles that didn’t belong to him. In the wake of his grand gesture, he could feel himself shutting down. Full of ash and embers after the fireworks display. His wet, muddy clothes were stuck to him, water kept dribbling down out of his hair, and he needed a drink in a painful way that reinforced his belief that his genetics could not be outrun.

             
“How ‘bout you just call me a bastard and I walk away and let you guys get back to normal?”

             
“You don’t wanna do this.”

             
“At least take a swing at me.” Tam presented his still-tender, already-bruised jaw. “Take at least one tooth out.”

             
Randy fixed him with the dad-eye – Tam had never gotten it from his own father, but he’d seen it doled out to Walt and Mike and Jordan enough to know it immediately. It said
you’re being stupid, but you’re my boy, and I’ll get over it
. It was salt in Tam’s raw, ragged wounds. “Tammy, you don’t wanna do this.”

             
His throat was starting to close up. The rain was thundering on the pavement outside and for a moment, Tam wondered what it might be like to go back upstairs and pretend this night had never happened. But he shook his head, swallowing around the lump that threatened to choke him. “No, I don’t,” he admitted. “But what I want is irrelevant.”

             
“Not irrelevant to my Jo.” For a man who’d just had a bomb dropped on him, Randy was handling the I-love-you and the secret affair with the composure of a combat general.

             
He wasn’t in that moment – and wouldn’t be on the ride to Galway and what was left of his night spent in the airport, trying to steal an hour’s sleep on a hard plastic chair – but Tam figured that at some point in the future, he’d be proud that he said, “Joey’ll be alright,” and left Randy standing there in his muddy shoes.

**

              Beth sighed as she hung up the phone on the nightstand and wondered if she’d ever stop sighing. It was just coming up on three in the morning and that damn Irish rain was still rattling the window panes. Three of her babies were camped out upstairs, watching bad infomercials and eating vending machine junk. Two were sulking. Her adopted baby was trying to run home. And she sat in a yellow puddle of light on the side of her fluffy confection of a bed and couldn’t enjoy any of the taupe and mauve finery around her. She’d been expecting the call and had answered on the first ring. The conceited bite of Louise Brooks’ voice hadn’t rattled her this time.

             
Randy was beside her, elevated on a stack of pillows, watching an infomercial for a chainsaw that she figured Jo, Jordan and Jess – how appropriate, her three J children – were watching too. “The wedding’s off, isn’t it?” he asked and it wasn’t really a question.

             
“Yes.”

             
“This isn’t the kids’ faults.”

             
“No,” she agreed, and knew which kids he meant. “Lord.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I feel so guilty.”

             
“About?”

             
“I should have been more involved. He was just a
child
and I should have insisted – called social services…we shouldn’t have let him deal with that on his own, Randy. We shouldn’t have. We could have adopted him. We - ”

             
“Tam was a proud kid. Still is. He wouldn’t have gone for that.”

             
“We were the adults.”

             
“You gave that boy a safe spot.” Randy had on his official dad voice. “You’ve got nothing to feel guilty about.”

             
But she did, though. After Tam and Jo broke things off, he’d quit coming by the house. She’d thought it had been to avoid Jo, but wished now that she’d reached out. His age didn’t change anything: he was still a kid, still dealing with more than he ever should have had to.

             
“When was I gonna find out about him and Jo?”

             
Beth sighed, yet again. “They were young and crazy about each other and scared to death they were gonna get caught. And then they split up and I didn’t wanna say anything…I could just
kill
Walt.”

             
“Wouldn’t do any good.”

             
She swung her legs back up over the side of the bed and tucked them beneath the covers. “I thought we’d raised him better than that,” she lamented.

             
“Not for lack of trying. Three outta five ain’t bad. Every family ends up with an asshole or two.”

             
Beth snorted. “And your brothers say that’s
you
in your family.”

             
He feigned indignation. “I’m delightful.”

             
She chuckled, but it was hollow. Exhaustion was pulling at her bones. Jo’s tears and Tam’s devastated face were plucking heartstrings, an anxiety welling in her chest that couldn’t be put to bed as easily as her overtaxed body. “You’re not upset with them – Tam and Jo – are you?” she asked quietly.

             
Her husband chewed it over in his head, the TV casting shadows across his strong, blunt features. The crow’s feet and laugh lines time had stamped into his skin were made more noticeable by fatigue. He looked, at once, just like the man who’d beamed down at her on their wedding day, and like someone world’s older. The time between then and now had an elastic quality. Beth couldn’t believe it had been thirty-five years, just like she couldn’t believe it hadn’t been longer than that.

             
“No,” he said after a moment. “’Course not. If this wedding couldn’t make it through that, then it didn’t have a prayer to start with.”

             
Beth felt a disbelieving smile touch her lips. “I didn’t mean about the wedding.”

             
He finally turned away from the TV to face her, confusion tugging his brows together. “They’re adults. She’s not knocked up, is she?”

             
“No.”

             
He shrugged. “It’s Tammy. I couldn’ta hand picked a better one.” The frown deepened. “’Course, if he keeps running off, he’s gonna blow his chance.” A flash of anger touched his eyes and was gone again. Beth knew it wasn’t anger, not in its pure form, but a disappointment in his own inability to talk Tam into staying.

             
Still oblivious in so many ways, but, where it counted, Randy knew everything he needed to know. Tam was family. Losing Delta this week was a Godsend. Losing Tam…that was heartbreaking.

26

Now

              Home welcomed them with hot, sticky arms. The ground was dry, cracked red clay, the sky a blue-gray haze between which UV rays recycled, doubled, and turned the world into a greenhouse. Atlanta was a humid shock after a week in Ireland. But it was a crazy den of pine tree suburbs, kids in sprinklers, snarled rush hour traffic, boutiques, big chains, boarded up windows in crap neighborhoods and lots of well-loved front lawns in the mediocre ones. It smelled of woods and motor oil, cut grass and all the grill steam and popsicle gumminess of summer. The insects droned, cars snaked their way downtown to watch the Braves and boaters snaked out of town to Allatoona and Lanier.

Marietta, along with its neighbors, was its usual mix of slumberous and hectic. It was a suburb. It was the kind of place where people lived, where people dreamed of bigger things, where people were, at the end of the day, grateful for a split level with a lawn chair on the back deck.

Jo had been born here, and, despite all of Ryan Atkins' insistence that it wasn't adventurous, she'd realized that life was not one big paycheck, and that she loved her family, and didn't need extravagance...she might very well grow old and die in this place. That wasn't an unbearable thought. Jo was not a person who dwelled. Who was resentful. She didn't
need
things - pomp and fuss, mani/pedis and label clothes. She didn't need just any man. Didn't want just anyone. But four years of living with a very integral piece of her heart missing had led to a realization in Ireland: she wasn't willing to live without one particular man any longer.

“Oh, G
od, how bad was it?” Sasha Long – reed-thin, startled brown eyes, bone structure that complimented her choppy blonde pixie cut – was the closest thing Jo had to a best girlfriend. Meaning, they caught a movie now and then and traded gossip at work and swapped the occasional funny email. Jo didn’t really do best friends, but she and Sasha were close enough that the Ireland trip and the legend of Delta had been covered over lunch. Jo had withheld any and all Tam-related bits of information as she’d delivered the short version of the non-wedding fallout. She liked Sasha, but she wasn’t talking about Tam with her.

“Delta went out to the car in sunglasses with a scarf around her head,” Jo said as she shook two
Cosequin tablets into the bowl of Alpo she was prepping. “It was so Jackie O meets Paris Hilton. Drama queen to the last.”

Sasha winced. “How’d your brother take it?”

“One would assume a jilted groom would be crushed, but who could tell. He was his usual asshole self.”

From beneath the shelter of a black umbrella loud with the pattering of raindrops, Jo had watched Mike through a falling curtain of water as they headed to the shuttles. His skin had been pasty and full of lines in the gray morning, his shoulders slumped. He’d turned to look
one last time at the castle, and then his eyes had cut through the rain and pegged Jo with a glare so full of contempt, she’d shivered.

“That’d be so terrible,” Sasha mused. She opened the crate door so Jo could set an early dinner down for Capote – a French bulldog being boarded while his owner was on vacation. The little
smush-faced drool machine dove into his food, slurping happily. “And all that money. Do you think they got a refund?”

             
“Not a chance. They already had the tent set up and everything. Her parents took a total loss on that.”

             
“Damn.”

             
Jo did one last rundown to be sure that every dog and cat that should have been fed and watered on her watch was settled – as happy as they could be in a metal box – and tried to scrounge up some kind of facial expression that was representative of the sympathy she didn’t have for the Brooks family. “I figure if you have the money to blow in the first place on that kind of thing, then you won’t miss it either way.”

             
“I guess.” Sasha made a face as she folded her arms over the counter that ran along the far wall of the kennel. The dogs were quiet for the moment, but only until they were done eating, and then the constant barking would begin again. “Kinda sucks how unromantic it all turned out to be.”

             
Jo snorted. “Nothing involving my brother has the potential for romance.”

             
The door that led into the main treatment room swung open and Jamie, one of the girls from the front desk, poked her head through. “Mrs. Clark wants an update on Snickers on line two. I told her you’d be able to talk to her, Jo.”

             
Jo sighed. “Sure. I can do that on my way out.”

             
Jamie nodded and started to duck out again.

             
“Hey. Do you know where Golden Oaks is?”

             
“The hospice?” Jamie frowned. “Yeah. Why?”

             
“Could you give me directions?”

**

              She’d changed into jeans and a clean black tank top, had raked her hands through her hair and touched up her lip gloss. A strange flutter of butterflies surged in her stomach on the drive over while she tried to rehearse what she would say. She only succeeded in giving herself a case of the nervous cold chills.

             
Golden Oaks was set off the road, down a narrow drive lined with trees, green breaks sheltering the facility from the McDonald’s and Kauffman Tire on either side of it. Every detail of the exterior of the building had been designed to mask the depressing truth; this was where people came to die. As Jo rolled over the last speed bump at the end of the drive, she was greeted by a two story, Georgian brick house front, a white-columned portico spanning the circular drive. Two long, modern, dull brick wings branched left and right from the back of the house, but the grounds around them were immaculately and ornamentally landscaped. The view from every window would have been lovely.