by Serena Bell
Not that it mattered. He was looking at her now with utter blankness and indifference. “You had a boyfriend at Stanford. I saw on your Facebook. And it looked pretty serious, and the idea of going to you and telling you what your dad had said to me just felt like—messing with your head for no reason. I mean, you’d lost him, and I couldn’t take more of him away from you. All I could think about was how much you loved your dad. More than anyone else.”
“How are you not angry?” she demanded. “How are you not filled with rage and shaking your fist at the sky?” Her eyes raked his face. “Jax. Don’t tell me you still think he was—right?”
“His methods were wrong,” Jax said.
“But you think he was right to—use you to manipulate me? Some Machiavellian bullshit about how the ends justify the means?”
“No. He was wrong about that, too.”
“God! I am so angry! At both of you!” She closed her eyes.
Jax shook his head. “This is why—” he said. “This is why I didn’t want you to know. Because—God. I didn’t want you to hate him. He loved you so much.” He raked a hand through his hair. “He tried to break us up because he didn’t want you to make a mistake that would ruin your life. He really believed what he said. I was angry at him, yeah, but—I knew he loved you as much as I did.”
“Well, he had a really shitty way of showing it,” she said, and now she was crying in earnest.
He didn’t step forward to hold her or comfort her. He just stood there, eyes on his shoes, until she was able to take longer, deeper breaths. Then she looked up, and found him watching her. His eyes were sad.
“The thing is—” His gaze skittered around the apartment, and she saw it for the first time. Evan’s apartment—cruddy couch, two different board games strewn out on the coffee table, dishes piled in the sink and dirty on the end table. It was just an eighteen-year-old boy’s bachelor pad—there was nothing unusual about it—but right now it felt like an omen. “He was right. That I would drag you down. Maybe you would have come to visit me on weekends instead of staying at college and doing your homework. Maybe you would have spent too much time with me when you should have been doing the Young Business Leaders of America or whatever club. Maybe you would have married me instead of going to business school.”
“No! None of those things would have happened,” she said. “I would have been able to figure out how to love you and be who I wanted to be.”
She wasn’t sure why she was arguing. She was so tired. She wanted to go home and sleep for hours. Mourn the things she was losing all over again. But some stubborn bit of her wouldn’t let go.
He frowned. “But eventually my life would have worn you down. All the times my mother tried to get sober and didn’t. All the times Evan was in and out of the hospital. All the times I couldn’t pay a bill and had to work a second or a third job. I mean, just look at what’s happening now. You want to take the money that was supposed to fund your move to a new city and spend it on my brother. Because I can’t. This is exactly what your father was talking about. This is why he didn’t want you with me. And—” Jax raked a hand through his hair, until it was all standing on end. “I can’t blame him. Because he was right.”
“No,” she said. “He wasn’t. If he thought you weren’t good enough for me, he was wrong. You’re the best man I know, Jax. You take care of everyone in your life. Look at what you did for your brother in the shop. You saved that shop for him.”
But as she was saying it, he wasn’t looking at her, and she realized something. Jax’s life had required him to harden himself against everything and everyone. Every relationship required two things of a person—loving, and letting himself be loved. And Jax would never be able to give her that second thing, even if he had done a better job of the first one than anyone else ever had.
It was even possible her father had known that. Had foreseen it. Maybe he had guessed it would come down to something like this. It didn’t make him any less of a horror show for having engineered their breakup behind her back, but it turned her anger down to a dull roar.
“I got the Buyathon job,” she said.
He smiled a little bit. “I knew you would.”
That made her smile, too, even though every part of her hurt.
“So, you’re going to go back to Bakersfield,” she said.
He nodded. “I’ll try to sell my place and get a smaller one. I’ll use the money to pay for Evan’s treatment.”
“And you—don’t want—you don’t want me to be part of that. Part of—what happens next.”
For the first time since they’d been in the hospital waiting room together, his gaze came back to hers. And there was something so full of longing in his eyes that, for a moment, she thought maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe this time really was different, maybe he would remember what it had been like these last couple of weeks, the joy of the work, the sweetness of the connection, the long, hot, nights. He would say, Your father was wrong. And I know that because this is right.
Instead he gave a short, tight nod. She’d seen that gesture before. It was the way he reached a decision. A conclusion.
She felt a wild flare of hope.
And then his gaze flattened and he said, “No. I don’t.”
46
A week had passed since he left Tierney Bay, and he kept expecting to feel a sense of relief—or at least a sense that he’d made the right decision—but instead he mostly felt like he was wearing a too-tight tie.
He had contacted a realtor about selling his condo and put it on the market, and he was in the process of getting some help from a good friend who knew all about staging properties for sale.
He’d found a studio apartment in a rundown building not too far from his mother’s place, and had a date tomorrow to sign the lease and put down first, last, and security. It was about an eighth the size of his condo, but he could live with that. The thing that really bothered him was the sense that he was moving backwards, losing ground.
He was packing up a box of books in his bedroom when he heard the doorbell ring. He went to the front door and found his mother there.
“When were you going to tell me?” she asked, and pushed past him, into the foyer.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re moving to Tierney Bay, and you weren’t going to tell your own mother?”
For a brief moment, he saw the fantasy his mother had conjured for herself: Jax in a U-Haul, driving into Tierney Bay. Pulling up in front of Chiara’s house with all his possessions on board.
Then a curtain came down on the absurd vision, along with a wave of pain. “What are you talking about?”
“Linda Barnes told me that her daughter is staging your condo for sale.”
Ah. The rumor mill.
“I’m selling it. But I’m not moving to Tierney Bay,” he said. “I’m moving to an apartment a couple of blocks away from you.”
He wasn’t sure what to make of the expression that moved over her face. It couldn’t be—disappointment—could it? Relief, maybe. He’d mistaken it.
“What about Chiara?”
“What about her?”
“You two looked awfully cozy in the shop last weekend.”
He had a vivid, tempting flashback to the way it had felt to move around Chiara as they helped customers in the shop. Each pass had been its own chemical reaction. And all through, he’d known that at the end they’d go home together, and he’d be able to—
Not anymore. He cut the thought short, brushed away the memories, the teasing images.
“Things didn’t work out with Chiara.”
“Why not?”
He hunched his shoulders. “Mom, this is none of your business.”
Now he knew the expression on her face for sure: hurt.
He wanted to apologize—but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. What he really wanted was for her to leave. Right now. Take her curiosity and her questions and her hurt away.
I
nstead, she took a step toward him, and he reflexively took one back. “Jax,” she said.
“You know what? This isn’t a good time. I’m packing.”
“You broke it off with her, didn’t you?”
No. Not this, not right now. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t have some kind of mother-son moment. “Since when do we have heart-to-hearts?” he demanded, wanting her out. Out of his head space, out of his condo, out of his life.
But this time, even though he saw the flicker of hurt, she straightened her shoulders and kept coming. “I know we’ve never been close. And I understand why.”
“I don’t want to talk about this right now.” His throat was tight enough that it was hard work to speak around the lump in it.
“You’ve had to push everyone away. Me included. And that’s the truth. Your father left and I wasn’t there for you. I wasn’t there for you the whole time you were a teenager and trying so hard to take care of Evan. And I know that’s why you’re afraid to take chances emotionally. I know that’s why you’re afraid to let people take care of you.”
God, she was so full of it, with her new age advice and the tender look in her eyes. “I don’t need a therapist, Mom,” he said. “I don’t want your psychobabble. Chiara and I weren’t a couple. We hooked up because we were both in Tierney Bay. For old time’s sakes. And we ended it because she’s moving to Seattle and I live in Bakersfield. Period. And I’ve never pushed you away.”
They both knew what he wasn’t saying. And I could have. But he had always given her what she’d needed. Even though, yeah, she was right: She hadn’t been there for him when it counted. But what could you do? You couldn’t hold that against a person forever. That was just bad karma.
“I’m just trying to help, Jax,” she said quietly.
“You want to help?” he asked, and he couldn’t help it; his voice was sharp. “Stop living in a perpetual state of denial and own up to the fact that if we don’t do something, Evan’s going to have a colostomy bag.”
And there—the look on her face—shock and dismay—told him he’d gotten her off his back, at least for the time being.
47
Every day this week, Chiara had been in the shop, and it still wasn’t any easier. She kept thinking that she’d stop remembering conversations she’d had with Jax. Or the feel of his hands on her body. Or the way he’d looked at her, as if she were the only thing that mattered.
But if anything, she’d felt worse as the week had worn on.
Evan was home, recuperating. Safe, and, for the time being, reasonably healthy. He’d be in this afternoon for a short workday, and tomorrow, if things went well, he’d try a longer day. And then he was going to begin training her replacement, Asher’s friend Tamara.
The door opened, the bells rang. Auburn stood there.
“You can’t hide from me forever.”
“I’m not hiding from you.”
“Come on, Chiara. You didn’t come to family dinner last night. You never miss family dinner.”
“I was—busy.”
Auburn raised her eyebrows. She came over to where Chiara stood and put her arms around her sister. A big, chocolate-chip cookie-scented hug. And Chiara released a breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Her shoulders sank. And her belly, which had been full of knots—well, it was still full of knots. But it did make her optimistic, for one tiny second, that she might survive.
“I take it what Mason said about Dad was true?”
Chiara nodded.
“You going to tell me that story?”
She closed her eyes. She was very, very tired.
“You have to tell me something that will make me hate Dad a tiny bit less than I do right now,” Auburn said. “Because I don’t know about you, but it’s eating me up.”
Tears filled Chiara’s eyes. Auburn drew back, took a close look at her sister, and gently led her towards the tables where she pulled out a chair for each of them.
“Talk.”
So Chiara did, telling Auburn exactly what Jax had told her.
“God. That—” Auburn stopped. “That fucker. It makes me wish I’d done a hell of a lot more to push back on him and the way he treated you and Levi.”
“What do you mean?” Chiara asked.
“He was so exacting with the two of you. Levi because he was the oldest, and you because you were the first girl. By the time he got around to me and Mason, he didn’t have time to kick my ass and guilt me into overachieving. I’m hella sorry now I spent so much time being grateful his radar wasn’t trained on me. I should have been fighting to get him off you and Levi.”
“He never guilted me,” Chiara said.
Auburn raised an eyebrow. “Sure he did. What do you think all that, I know you won’t disappoint me, Kee stuff was about?”
She’d forgotten about that phrase, until Auburn mimicked her father’s sternest tones. Then it came flooding back, along with the expression her father had worn on those few awful occasions when she had disappointed him. Like when she’d gotten a D on a test in calculus.
“He drove you guys hard,” Auburn said. “He was kind of a tyrant, whether you realized it or not.”
It took Chiara a minute to reframe some of her memories, but she could see the faintest outlines of what Auburn was describing.
“He made me design a multi-step improvement plan for myself when I got that D on that test in calc.”
“Exactly.”
“And what about that college application spreadsheet? That was intense.”
“Very,” Auburn said. “He was exacting. He had a vision for what he wanted you and Levi to be, and he wasn’t interested in compromising. And I think—” Her eyes searched Chiara’s face for something. “It’s not super surprising to me that Jax didn’t fit into that vision.”
Chiara shook her head; sighed. “That’s not the part I hate so much. I mean I wish he hadn’t felt that way. And I wish he’d told me that he did. But the fact that he was willing to use Jax’s love for Evan to keep him away from me—? What kind of a person does that?” The anger flared up again, hot and choking; it felt like it was going to drown her if she didn’t do something—run out of the store flailing her arms, maybe.
“Kee?” Auburn asked.
She started to cry. Because she was so hurt and angry and because she would never, ever, ever get to tell him. She would never get to ask her father why he’d done such a stupid, idiotic thing, and she’d never get to yell at him and tell him that she hated him. She’d never get to explain to him about how paternalistic and alphaholic he was, or how she was never going to talk to him again—
Because she couldn’t talk to him ever again.
“Oh, Kee,” Auburn said, and wrapped her sister in her arms.
“I feel like I’m losing him all over again,” Chiara whispered. “I’m losing the man I thought he was. Who wasn’t the man he really was.”
“Hush,” Auburn said. “You know what? I’ll tell you what’s really happening. You’re letting go of the hero-worship. He died right when you were in the middle of it and you never got to grow up and learn that he was a human being, just like all of us, and that he was going to make awful mistakes and be a shitty, classist bastard and piss you off. We all got deprived of that—maybe except for Levi. We’ll have to ask him sometime. I know I always think Mom would know exactly what to do. Even now, I find myself thinking, If Mom were here, she’d know what to say to Chiara! But the truth is, if they were alive? We’d be angry at them for shit all the time. Because they were just people.”
Chiara cried harder then, and Auburn held her while searching out a small pack of tissues in her purse. She passed them over, one by one, until they were all soggy.
“And now you have to stop crying because there are no more tissues,” Auburn said, making Chiara laugh, just a little bit. “And I am so, so sorry but I have to go because I have to be at a staff meeting five minutes ago. Are you going to be okay? I can come back afterwards—”
“I’m going to be fine,” Chiara said. After all, she’d survived this all before. She would survive it again.
Auburn scanned her sister’s face, then nodded, seeming satisfied with what she saw there. She gave her one last hug and hurried out, and Chiara watched her jog up the street.
Then she broke down in tears again. For her father. For Jax. For her high school self.
And her right-now self, too, because even though she knew her heartbreak couldn’t really be worse this time around than the last time, right now, it felt like it was going to turn her inside out.
48
“So, yeah, there’s not much more to show you.”
“Sylvia did a great job,” Patty Labine, the real estate agent, told him. “I like the dish towels.”
“Yeah. Those are hers. So are pretty much all the towels in the whole place.”
“It makes a difference.”
“So you guys say.”
“Realtor open house tomorrow, market open house Sunday. You ready? I need you to put the break-and-bake cookies in the oven, pull ’em out, and leave the house, by 12:45.”
He nodded. “Got it.”
She was letting herself out the front door when she pulled up short. “You have a visitor,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She stepped back to let him see.
His brother was coming up the path.
His brother. What the fuck was Evan doing here?
“I’ll talk to you soon,” Patty said, and disappeared down the path with her adorable gray bun.
“What are you doing here?” Jax demanded.
“How about, ‘Great to see you, brother mine! Thank you for flying down from Oregon to stop in and say hello!’”
“How about, ‘I’m thinking of flying down to California, mind if I stop by?’” Jax raised his eyebrows.
Evan had the decency to look ashamed. “I tried to call, but you didn’t answer.”
“Smashed the hell out of my phone on the work site today. I have a new one on order. Should be here by Monday at the latest.” He gave his brother a stern look. “You could have called Mom and figured that out. You shouldn’t be traveling.”
