Keep You (36 page)

             
“Tam.”

             
His near arm withdrew from beneath the pillow and slid around her like a boa constrictor, pulling her into his chest, crushing her against him. She felt his face in her hair, his breath stirring above her ear, and felt the steady thump of his heart against her breasts. She slipped her foot between his shins and her arm around his waist. He was squeezing her too tight and the cigarette smoke smell of him was overwhelming, but she didn’t care in the slightest.

             
“Okay,” he whispered, and it sounded like a prayer. “Okay, okay, okay.” His hand swept up and down her back and then tangled in her hair. “God, Joey.” He sounded lost. Broken. Ashamed.

             
Jo let him hold her, feeling like a human teddy bear, and didn’t try to hold back her tears as they slid silently down her face.

**

              Untangling herself from Tam the next morning proved almost impossible. He stirred, groaning as he let go of her arm and flopped over onto his back. “Time is it?”

             
Newborn, cool yellow sunlight was filtering through the gaps in the blinds and the birds in the crabapple outside were reaching the grand finale of their morning song. “Early.” She pushed her hair back behind her ears and leaned down to press a kiss to his forehead, something like maternal warmth surging through her. “Go back to sleep.”

             
His eyes cracked a fraction and he winced at the light. “Where you going?”

             
She brushed a dark spike of hair off his temple. “To see about breakfast.”

             
“Mmkay.” He rolled away from the window, face in the pillow, and Jo lingered a moment, wondering if what she’d said the night before had stuck, or if she’d have another streak of stubbornness to beat back again today. She was tired to the point of tears of dealing with his self-guilt. She just wanted to be there, to love him and hold his hand and walk with him through the culmination of all his childhood trauma.

             
She’d slept in her clothes, so it was a matter of straightening her bra straps and tugging her jeans back into place. She tried to finger comb her hair and realized she needed conditioner and an actual comb to do any good, so she gave up.

             
The wooden staircase was cool under her bare feet and the first floor smelled like fresh coffee when she landed. Delta was in the sun-painted kitchen, her hair a rumpled mess, dressed in a pair of Mike’s basketball shorts and one of his t-shirts. Her makeup was all but gone, just a faint ring of eyeliner. She looked so unlike the version of herself Jo had always seen, and she halted as she turned away from the coffee maker, eyes wide and startled. They stared at one another a moment, each appraising the other’s disheveled state.

             
“Do you cook?” Delta asked at last. “I’m making eggs.”

             
“Not even a little bit.”

             
“Can you work the toaster?”

             
“Yes.”

             
They moved around the kitchen in a congenial kind of silence. Jo found bread in the freezer, some kind of expensive organic shit, and located the toaster in a cabinet under the microwave. Delta cracked eggs into a skillet and took the whisk to them like a cooking fiend: Giada De Laurentiis in Nike shorts.

             
Jo was pulling the butter out of the fridge when she glanced up and found the guys standing in the threshold, their hair stuck up in bedhead rockstar fashion, wearing identical flat, sleepy, shocked faces as their eyes moved between her and Delta. Tam had pulled a shirt on.

             
Delta reached for the pepper shaker above the cooktop. “You two go sit down. We’ll have it ready in a minute.”

             
They shuffled over to the table without question and Jo got the plates down, poured the coffee. Delta scraped the eggs and bacon out of the skillet with a spatula onto a serving platter and carried it to the breakfast nook that was full of morning sunlight. The table was small, a Pottery Barn clearance find, round with a pine top and pine ladder-backed chairs. They filled their plates and doctored their coffee. Forks clipped against the china. Mike made a slurping sound when he sipped at his no-cream-and-two-sugars.

             
Jo was the first to start laughing. The absurdity of the picture they made – she and Delta with morning-after hair, all of them mussed and bleary-eyed messes, the idiocy of having a go at breakfast like it was perfectly normal, the brightest, purest sun of the day landing on the four of them, here together like this – was so stark that her shoulders started to shake before she realized what was happening. She set her fork down because eggs were tumbling off of it and slapped both hands over her mouth, but a squeal escaped her anyway.

             
Tam was beside her and it spread to him first. “Shit,” he muttered down at his plate, chuckling.

             
Delta’s lips quivered and then she finally smiled.

             
Mike groaned, but laughter came coughing up out of him anyway.

             
“Oh my God, look at us,” Jo said, breathless, dabbing at her eyes.

             
“The wedding breakfast we never got to have,” Delta said, and then her face crumpled and she dissolved into giggles.

             
“You look like shit, man,” Mike told Tam, who grinned.

             
“And you seriously need to shave. Looks like pubes growing outta your face.”

             
Delta gasped and then laughed all the harder.

             
They managed to choke down breakfast and Jo helped Delta clean up, again in silence, but not an unfriendly one. By the time Jo toweled off her hands for the last time and headed for the staircase, Tam was waiting at the door, showered and dressed and smelling like soap, his damp hair flat on top of his head.

             
Her pulse accelerated in an instant. “Where are you going?” she asked. She’d already called into work and told them she would be late. The sight of him ready to leave brought déjà vu crashing down over her; every time she told him what he meant to her, he walked away.

             
His face had too many lines on it, but it softened when he looked down at her. He reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear. “I’m not leaving,” he assured quietly. The sound of footsteps on the stair behind her pulled his attention. “I just need to take care of something.”

             
Mike joined them, still buckling his belt, his hair wet, face clean-shaven. He glanced between them and for a moment, Jo thought he meant to say something. It looked like it took every ounce of self-control not to tell them to move away from each other. But to his credit, he looked at Tam and said, “You ready to go?”

             
“Yeah.” Tam dropped a kiss on top of her head, which caused a dark frown to skitter across Mike’s face, but again, he said nothing. “I’ll call you,” Tam said, as he stepped away. “I promise.”

             
Jo watched them walk down the stoop and head for Mike’s Beemer, heart sinking. She wanted to believe him. She really did…

28

Then

             
“Wales, Ta…”

             
“Tameron,” he supplied, and Mrs. Baker’s eyes lifted from her roster and searched for him among the sea of heads sprouting out of desks. “Like Cameron, only with a T instead of a C. I go by Tam.”

             
“Oh, well that’s easy enough.” She made a note with her red pen and then continued. “Walker, Michael.”

             
“Here.”

             
“West, Hannah…”

             
Something tapped against Tam’s shoulder and he twisted in his desk to face the round-cheeked blonde kid behind him. “Cool name.”

             
Tam shrugged. “Not like I picked it out.”

             
“It’s cool, though. There’s a girl in my first period class named Magenta. Now
that’s
made up.”

             
It was the first day of school and everyone had new backpacks and new sneakers. Girls were wearing skirts and had pinned their hair back with glittered barrettes, their chunky-heeled sandals and cotton candy lip gloss busted out for the occasion. The halls were full of kids who strutted and swung their bags off one shoulder because they were in seventh grade, and they weren’t children anymore, and those same kids giggled and shoved and passed notes between desks because they were, after all, in seventh grade.

             
Tam’s shoes were starting to be too small for his feet and the white rubber toes were marred with grass stains. His jeans were worn thin in the pockets and the knees were blowing out, thin, papery strands of denim shredding each time he sat, making the holes more noticeable by the minute. His hair was falling in his eyes and he kept tugging at the short sleeves of his t-shirt, trying to hide the finger-shaped bruises at the top of his shoulder.

             
He hated the kids around him – their laughing and goofing and general disregard for everything except what they were wearing and who had made stupid, lovey-dovey eyes at whom. He hated them…and wanted to be them.

             
The boy behind him, already getting big in the shoulders and chunky in the middle in a way that suggested he’d shoot up in another year or two, was smiling at him, the blonde, picturesque vision of American male youth. “I’m Mike,” he said.

             
“Boys,” Mrs. Baker admonished. Tam whipped around and saw that she was giving them a stern look from behind the thick lenses of her glasses. “Class has started.” She tapped the end of her marker against the whiteboard for emphasis. She’d written
what is history?
in purple, and clearly intended one of her students to answer. It was a bullshit, trick question, and it was not the sort of inane trap Tam was going to let himself get sucked into.

             
There was another tap at his shoulder.

             
“You already know my name.” He turned his head just enough so he could see Mike Walker from the corner of one eye.

             
“I wanted to ask where you got your shirt,” Mike said in an excited whisper. “I freaking love AC/DC!”

             
“You do?” Tam swiveled as far as he dared.

             
Mike was beaming. “Of course. I mean, how could you not?”

             
Like a spring that had been wound tight, Tam recognized the tension inside him, and felt some of it ease. People didn’t reach out to him. His peers didn’t want to get to know him.
Careful
, he told himself. He wanted to smile back, to be normal, but he knew better than to go all in too early. Friends were only ever friends so long as they thought he was as cool as they were. “What about Zeppelin?” he asked.

             
“Essential.”

             
“The Eagles?”

             
“Duh.”

             
Tam reached up and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Ozzy or Black Sabbath?”

             
“Sabbath, definitely.”

             
“Gentlemen!” Mrs. Baker shrilled, tap-tap-tapping her marker against the whiteboard. “I’d hate to give detention on the first day.”

             
Tam faced forward amid the sniggering of his classmates. He didn’t care; better they laugh at his behavior than the big rip in his backpack.

             
At lunch that afternoon, Mike Walker waved him over to his table. Somewhere between an in depth discussion of Aerosmith in the eighties and Mike sliding one of his Hostess cupcakes across the table to him,  Tam realized he’d made a real, actual friend.

**

Now

             
“I’m still not cool with it, you know,” Mike said from behind the wheel. He had his left arm propped in the windowsill, slumped tiredly in his seat. He shot a quick, sharp look across the BMW. “You and Jo. I don’t even get it.”

             
Tam let his head fall against the hot window glass, watching mailboxes whip past along the shoulder of the road. He reached up and traced an aimless pattern on the window with his index finger, so overwhelmingly tired he felt drunk and not even aware of his own body. “Sometimes I don’t either,” he said. “It’s not something I can explain with a pro/con list. It’s bigger than that.”

             
Mike sighed. “Jesus Christ.” Tam could imagine him wiping a hand down his face. “You know this is going to be awkward, right? What, are you guys just going to
be
together
now?”

             
“You want me to give Atkins a ring? I’m sure his face is almost normal size by now.” Tam rolled his head to the side and caught Mike’s frustrated sigh, his wide shoulders sagging. “It’s not a game,” he added quietly, “and never has been.”

             
A wry, non-smile tugged at the near corner of Mike’s mouth. “Yeah, I got that memo. You love her and I should go suck Dennis Brooks’ cock some more, right?”

             
Tam grinned. “Right.”

             
“Shithead.”

             
“Asshole.”

             
The morning was already sticky. Sprinklers were oscillating in front yards, the joggers on the sidewalks had Vs of sweat down the fronts and backs of their t-shirts. Another hour or so and the heat mirages would start licking up off the pavement. Tam felt the car’s AC ruffling his hair, but it wasn’t quite cool enough. The sky overhead was hazy; it would storm that afternoon.

             
The closer they came to their destination – the address Mike had gotten from a buddy who worked at State Farm and could pull up residency records – the heavier the stone in Tam’s belly became. For a few precious hours, the smell of Jo’s hair filling up his lungs, her familiar shape molded to his, Mike’s orthopedic, too-expensive mattress like a cloud under him, he’d arrived at a truly restful state. A place where Melinda and Hank Wales couldn’t get to him. He’d felt the old, dead stirrings of hope. But now, the sun blasting through the car windows, the wakeful world spinning around him, he was a guy going to tell his nightmare of a father that his burden of a mother had died.

             
“Come home,”
Jo had said, and the echo of those words in his brain was the only thing keeping him upright.

             
According to his car insurance policy, Hank’s last listed home address was in Smyrna, and when Mike turned the Beemer down Signet Street, Tam realized they were dealing with a dead-end road lined with cheaply-constructed, two-story brick apartment buildings from the eighties. He counted four apartments per unit, five units in all. A set of ten mailboxes at the top of the road meant that tenants were sharing boxes or addresses or both. Wrought iron balconies on the second story were draped with laundry, he saw a heavyset woman with curlers in her hair laying giant bras and panties over the railing. Her eyes snapped up and followed the Beemer as it cruised by. The yards were weed-choked and brittle; the grasses and more nefarious vegetation turning gold and crispy at the ends due to a lack of water in this summer heat. No one here bothered to put out sprinklers or plant flowers…mow, even. Skinny, skinned-kneed children were chasing one another like a swirling flock of song birds at the end of the cul-de-sac, hand-me-down clothes hanging off them, hair flopping in their eyes. Like the woman, their eyes locked onto the car, some internal wealth detector pinging. When Mike parked behind a rusted-out Toyota and killed the engine, Tam wondered how quickly a gaggle of ten-year-olds could strip a car. Probably in less time than it would take them to find Hank.

             
“Number three,” Mike reminded as they climbed out. He hit the remote and the Beemer locked with a beep of its horn and a flash of headlights. The look he tossed Tam over the roof was full of I-got-your-back. “You set?”

             
Tam looked up at the empty eye sockets of number three’s upstairs windows, the half-mast lace swags, the thick cracks in the bricks. “Yeah,” he said, slapping some plaster over his own mental cracks, shoring up the gaps where he might prove more vulnerable than he wanted to pretend. “Let’s go.”

             
The children followed at a safe distance, like curious dogs, wary, ready to bolt if they needed to. Some of the older boys circled the Beemer, talking in quick, sharp bursts to one another, conspiratorial.

             
“He’s moving up in the world,” Mike said as they stepped over a rusted lawn rake that was becoming one with the sidewalk. The weeds were so tall that they’d flopped over and threatened to cover the concrete.

             
“The only nice thing he ever had to have was my mother,” Tam deadpanned. He ran a disgusted glance around the termite-ridden sashes of the doorjamb and then rang the bell. He was surprised it even worked, the echo of a chime resounding somewhere in the belly of the house.

             
The woman who opened the door was maybe four feet tall, a little potato with wiry, veined arms sticking out of her blue terry bathrobe sleeves. Her hair was a wispy gray cloud around a face carved with lines, deep furrows in sun-damaged skin like the grooves left behind by a tractor in a field. A big-eyed little girl in a nightgown clung to her robe and she might have been a grandchild, a niece, or no one at all.

             
“What?” she croaked in a smoker’s voice and glanced all the way up to their faces. Over the top of her head, Tam caught a view of a narrow hall and doors on either side that he guessed led into the lower apartments.

             
“I’m looking for a tenant,” he said, putting on his best customer service hat. “Hank Wales. Do you know if he’s in, ma’am?”

             
Her eyes narrowed to bright little slits, the wrinkles on her cheeks tightening. “You two cops?”

             
“No,” Mike said and couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter.

             
She scowled. “You look like cops.”

             
In what alternate dimension, Tam wanted to know, did he look anything like a cop? “We’re not. I’m…” He sighed. “Hank’s son.”

             
The woman swatted the little girl away and she went scurrying down the hall, letting herself into the door on the left. “You don’t look like him,” the woman said, frowning.

             
“No,” Tam agreed. “I look like my mom. And she…she died. I need to let my – ”
sonofabitch
“ –dad know.”
I need to tell him if he dares come near what’s left of her belongings…

             
“I dunno…”

             
“Ma’am,” Mike said, “we don’t want to waste your time. And we know that not a soul actually gives a shit about Hank. If you’ll just let us up to see him, we’ll be gone in ten minutes.” He shot Tam a meaningful look; it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to kick the old man’s ass.

             
The old crone drew herself up, indignant. “He ain’t here!”

             
Tam hadn’t known how badly he’d needed to see – to threaten – the bastard until the opportunity was snatched from him. He felt like the sidewalk crumbled from beneath his shoes. “What?”

             
“Hank’s gone,” she said, folding her arms over sagging breasts. “Lit outta here with all his shit ‘bout two weeks ago.”

             
Tam ran a hand back through his hair and couldn’t come up with any words.

             
“Did he say where he was going?” Mike asked. “Was his lease up?”

             
“Hell no it weren’t up! That shithead owed me a month’s rent and he just up and took everything and snuck out in the middle of the night! I done told him if he was late one more time, I’d throw his ass out.” She snorted. “Guess he threw his own ass out.”