Family Love

by Liz Crowe

  “I’ll just bet you did,” I said, slouching down and staring at the book I’d been pretending to read for the past hour.

  “Yes, and had quite the enlightening conversation with a woman named Miss Turner. She was a real priss, I can tell you. But.” She stopped and sipped again. “She made it perfectly clear that they had not had anyone named Angelique Brianna Love enrolled for the past three and a half years.”

  I sighed and dropped the book, turning from her, my feet on the hot concrete, my mind spinning with the possible ways out of this mess.

  “Three and a half years. My lands, that means the year before I got sick, you simply up and stopped going to your classes. Heavens. Your poor daddy. This just might kill him.”

  “Stop trying to blackmail— ”

  “Oh, honey, I’m not blackmailing you. I don’t have time for that. I’m telling you straight up that you will have to break it to him tonight. What we do with you after that, I can’t say.”

  I jumped to my feet. “What you’ll do with me? What you will do? With me?”

  She rolled her eyes and flapped her hand in front of her eyes. “Sit down. I’m on your side on this one.”

  I already had my mouth open to let loose with a string of curses I couldn’t actually afford, given the dwindling state of the money I’d brought with me. When her words connected with my brain, I dropped into the chair, stunned. She patted my leg. “You know, you could work at the pub again.” She sipped her lemonade. “Or maybe you can work at the brewery. Heaven knows your Daddy and Dominic could use a foil … or something to keep them from coming near to killing each other every other day over there.”

  “I’m not gonna …”

  She shot me a look that advised me without a word to shut my mouth if I knew what was good for me right then.

  “I remember my first summer in this house,” she said, in a dizzying change of subject. She set her empty glass on the table between our chairs. “Antony was about a month old or so. It was the hottest summer on record. The AC worked about half the time, and when it did, it leaked into the foundation, making water seep up through the bottom basement floor. I recall sitting in my kitchen, surrounded by dirty dishes and laundry, with your brother latched onto my tit like if he let it go I might disappear on him.”

  “Mama, TMI.”

  “Nonsense. You’ll be a mother someday, and it’ll be all right to talk about babies sucking the energy right out of you twenty-four-seven. Anyway, your Daddy was trying his best to make enough money every month to pay on his loans to his uncle and keep groceries on our table. But really all I remember is hot. H-O-T and miserable, I tell you. But we made it.”

  She glanced over at me. “We stuck it out. We sacrificed. Because we had to.” She turned so her legs were between our lounge chairs. “If you want to toss what you worked so dang hard for Angelique, all those years, all that practice, all those competitions, because it got ‘too hard’ for you?” She hooked her fingers the words. “Well, who am I to try to offer you anything more in this life than to sling beer, barbeque, and pizza? If you’re satisfied with that, I guess I will be, too.” She stood up and stretched. I noted that she seemed to be putting much-needed weight on after her year of medical trauma. Her hair had grown back, thicker, a little darker red and wavy.

  My mind spun. Bouncing from her claiming to be on my side, to the overt slam she’d made about my lack of aspirations, the bitch. God, I hated her. I ground my teeth, determined not to rise to the bait she dangled. I rose from my seat, picked up my book, and met her bemused expression with one of my own.

  “Mama, don’t we have a wedding to go to?”

  She blinked. I gave myself a mental high-five for disarming her, albeit sneakily.

  “I’m … who … oh, Cara.”

  “Yes, Mama. Sweet little Cara Cooper, the girl my brother is still so sick in love with he can’t see straight. She’s marrying herself a rich Prince Charming today. We told Kieran we’d be there for him, remember? Best get tidied up.” I flicked her hat as I passed, sending it sailing along in a sudden breeze until it landed on the calm blue surface of the pool.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The church was no better than an oven in the middle of a desert in a heat wave. I couldn’t imagine why Cara thought having her wedding on what was traditionally one of the hottest weekends in the middle of the summer was a good plan. But she did look pretty in her simple, sundress-style wedding dress that I knew probably cost thousands of dollars, given her fiancé’s family money.

  I sat with Mama, although we had not spoken two words after that little altercation by the pool. I, for one, didn’t care if she never spoke to me again. My mind was full of escape plans and alternatives to those, even as I had to admit I was still, for some reason, reluctant to leave Lucasville. I’d grown comfortable here, too comfortable it would appear, if my mother’s goading earlier in the day wasn’t hint enough.

  But at that particular moment, no one looked more miserable than Kieran. We were a few pews up from him, since he and the other three had shown up late, just in time to see the bridesmaids and Cara process down the aisle. I’d turned once to check on him, as had Mama. His jaw was clenched. Sweat poured down his face.

  The strange thing was, Dominic looked even more distraught. I certainly hoped he didn’t also have a thing for Cara. Jesus, Lord, as if one pair of brothers tangling over a woman hadn’t been enough.

  Cara and Kieran had been together from the beginning, at least as long as I had memory of him. She’d been kind of adopted by us early on, once my mother figured out her daddy was a drunken abuser, and before he up and left her and her mama high and dry in the trailer park.

  Lindsay always did have a kind heart for strangers in dire straits. Another thing I never understood: how come she could hardly stand the sight of me, but would take in strange kids, dogs, cats; even once, memorably, a baby goat that had gotten loose from a farm a few miles down the road.

  “What’s wrong with Dom?” I whispered to her, my sudden concern for him outweighing my need to ignore her.

  She frowned and turned slightly, flapping the wedding program in front of her flushed face. I held the top of my dress out from my skin, seeking a smidgeon of relief from the stifling heat. When she turned to face the front again, her lips were pressed tight together and the program flapped faster.

  “What’s wrong?” Daddy asked from her other side.

  Mama shook her head and kept staring forward, where Cara now stood by her future husband, a drop-dead gorgeous man, and as we all knew, rich as God himself.

  There was a long, very awkward pause, as if the couple was supposed to say or do something, but had forgotten it. The minister looked at them, an expectant expression on his face.

  “Stop,” a voice said from behind me.

  I did not have to turn to realize it wasn’t Kieran who spoke. While Antony bore a nearly perfect physical resemblance to our father, Dom’s low, raspy voice could have come directly from his throat.

  I closed my eyes, realizing something else about the situation … when it wasn’t Cara who turned around to meet the eyes of the speaker, but her fiancé, Kent.

  “Oh, Lord,” Mama said, flapping that program and starting to rock back and forth a little. “Oh, my dear, sweet Lord.”

  I bumped her shoulder. She frowned at me. Sweat dripped onto the hands I had tightly clenched in my lap.

  Daddy turned to see what all the fuss was about. “What in the hell?” he asked, looking across Mama’s wildly fluttering program at me. “I thought that was Kieran’s old girlfriend.”

  I blinked. My throat had closed up. I glanced behind me again and noted that Aiden was standing next to Dom now, trying to pull him out. Kieran was staring down the aisle at Cara, who’d turned along with Kent.

  “Stop,” Dom croaked out again, looking gaunt and haunted. Aiden touched his arm, but Dom shook him off, shoving past him into the side aisle.

  The low murmuring that had begun with Dom’s
first interruption ramped up. Daddy stood, half turning, so he could both watch his sons and keep an eye on what was going on at the altar.

  Kent had dropped down to the steps. Cara crouched beside him, arm around his shoulder, lips to his ear. The overheated air seemed to crackle with tension.

  “Lindsay, you’d best be explaining this to me,” Daddy said in a low, ominous tone.

  Mama just kept waving her program, so fast her hair flew around her face. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved as if she were praying. When I looked at my brothers, there were only three of them. Dom had disappeared.

  Kieran dashed out after him. Daddy and Mama followed, but I kept my eyes pinned on the couple who were supposed to be saying their “I do’s” right about now. Kent looked crushed. Cara, resolved. When she smiled down the aisle at my relived-looking red-headed brother, I figured we’d be having another Love family wedding soon.

  Whatever was going on with Dominic and Cara’s fiancé, I figured we’d also be dealing with, in typical Love fashion. My father roared at Kent when the guy headed out, presumably to find Dominic. I couldn’t recall when I’d seen his face so red, heard him speak such hurtful words, even relative to the one son he clashed with most often and most brutally.

  “I won’t have that in my house, Lindsay. I tell you I won’t have it.”

  He stomped out. Mama collapsed in a pew. A scrum of well-meaning friends with water and fans and whatnot surrounded her. I watched Kieran drop to one knee in front of his high school sweetheart.

  “Dear Jesus, what has he done now?” Antony asked, coming up next to me, his face a mirror image of our father’s. I knew he did not mean Kieran.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lucasville

  One Year Later

  I woke to the sound of my parents arguing.

  This had been my alarm clock most days, for a full year since that horrific almost-wedding between Cara Cooper and Kent Lowery.

  The big reveal—that my brother Dominic, the consummate ladies’ man and champion female heart-breaker, father to one child, as yet un-introduced to the Love family, thanks to an adventure/mishap in Germany a few years prior, had been having an affair with a man for the past year—had proven too much for my traditionalist father.

  Mama didn’t care for it, I’m sure. But she was not about to cut her son out of the family as Anton had done at a typical, fraught, family gathering a few weeks after the event.

  It had made for the brightest, loudest, most explosive, and scariest fireworks I had ever witnessed between my parents. Afterward, my father had been relegated to a cot in the pole barn, while my mother fumed and slammed shit around in the house during her waking hours.

  The day after Dom tore out of the driveway on his Harley—after coming within an inch of a fistfight with our father —I sneaked out of the house and found him recuperating at a familiar hiding place.

  About five miles out into nowheresville, the Brantley’s farm was home to a hot new trend in eating local and organic. Not to mention Diana Brantley, Dom’s very first girlfriend.

  Diana and her sister Jen had transformed the debt-riddled mess of a tobacco farm their parents left behind into a trendy business, basically by selling at her sister Jen’s cute little downtown deli whatever Diana grew in her garden or shot and killed and dressed on her own. “Brantley’s” was now a huge phenomenon. I’d even seen the name on the menu at a pseudo-locavore joint in the city, praising Brantley’s—read: Diana’s— goat’s milk cheese.

  Most importantly, though, the place served as my tormented brother’s haven and always had. Dom had not treated Diana well. Everyone in town knew that. But whenever he needed a place to hide out, it’s where he went, and she didn’t seem to mind. Of all the women in my brothers’ lives—and there had been a fair few, including a couple of them they’d fought over—Diana was the only one I ever truly considered a sister.

  When I pulled into her long gravel drive, I was happy to see my instincts were spot on. Dom’s Harley was there, along with Diana’s vintage Ford pickup with the word “Brantley’s” painted on the tailgate.

  “Come on in, Angel,” she’d said, gesturing with her potato peeler. “Pull up a chair.”

  “Got another one of those?” I asked, pointing to the implement in her hand.

  “Of course. Second drawer.” We peeled about three pounds in comfortable silence. The only noises came from the cow, making a low mooing sound every now and then, and the clanking of the bells around her goats’ necks.

  “So, where is he?” I drank two big glasses of water and waited for her to fess up that he was upstairs in her bedroom.

  “In the haymow, last I saw him.” She started chopping the tubers and tossing them into a giant soup pot already warming on the stove. “He could probably use the company.”

  “What is this I hear about the handsome new vet in town?” I bumped her hip with mine. “He’s making an awful lot of house calls out here lately.” She blushed.

  “Can’t a girl have any romantic secrets?” She brushed a lock of her dark blond hair off her forehead with the back of her hand.

  “Not in this stupid town, and you know better than most folks.”

  “True.” She smiled at me. “And you? Will I be receiving a weddin’ invite soon, future Missus Robert Foster?”

  “Oh, Lord, no. I broke it off with him last week, actually. He was making too many settling down noises for my taste.”

  “Good for you. He’s a twit.”

  I laughed. “Yeah. He has a humdinger of a skill set, though, I can assure you.”

  “Again. Good for you. Now move on and find someone with that, plus a brain in his fool head.”

  “That’s the plan.” I wiped my hands on a towel and picked up a knife. She shot me a glance.

  “No. Go on and see your brother. He could use family right now, I think.”

  I sighed and leaned against the sink. “It’s pretty bad, Di. The worst, I think. And that’s saying a lot.”

  She put down her knife and gazed out the big kitchen window. “He was a total mess when he came in here last night. I … I did what I could.” Her blush gave her away.

  “Dominic doesn’t deserve you,” I said, putting my hand on hers. She shook me off and started chopping again, violently, as if to purge something, or perhaps imagining my brother’s nuts under her knife, which no one would necessarily blame her for.

  “Yeah, well, he can stay out there a bit longer,” she said, not looking at me. “But we’re gonna be renovating the barn soon.” She put her wrist to her forehead and sighed.

  “Oh? What for?”

  “Jen and Dale have a wild hair about turning it into a … a … I don’t know … place for small events. I don’t want to. But I’m gettin’ outvoted.”

  “Well, that will be nice.”

  She made a dismissive noise. “Whatever. I think it’s dumb. But it does mean Mr. Love will need to find himself a new place to hide.”

  I patted her shoulder and headed outside. I found him with his legs hanging out the upper level window of the barn, half-empty bottle of bourbon in one hand. “Well, if it isn’t the one sibling I can always count on to distract negative attention from me,” he said, patting the hay-strewn floor next to him. “Cop a squat, sister. Have a drink.”

  I sat but waved the bottle away. “No, I’m meeting with Gayle over at the dance studio later. Don’t want her to smell booze on me during a job interview.”

  He pulled away, looking shocked. “Job interview? That mean you’re gonna stick around? I think you should go back to New York. I fuckin’ would if I had half a chance.” He took a long pull from the neck of the bottle. “Fuckin’ Anton.”

  “You look like ten miles of bad road, brother,” I said, reaching out to touch the road rash on his face. “You skid out?”

  “Yeah,” he said flinching. “Among other things.” He glanced over his shoulder.

  “You’re such a pig, Dom.” I swung my feet alongside his. “Poor Di
ana.”

  He snorted, then drank some more. “Oh, I think ‘Poor Diana’ isn’t the right phrase.” He side-eyed me. “I met her new man. He’s quite the specimen.”

  “Jealous?”

  He shrugged.

  “You should be, and it would serve you right.” I leaned into his shoulder. He put an arm across mine, and we sat a while, contemplating his misery in silence.

  “I didn’t. I mean, I did, but … shit,” he finally said, tossing the empty bottle down onto the grass, sending one of Diana’s barn cats yowling into the bushes. I put my hand on his jeans-clad thigh.

  “I don’t care, Dom. You’re still my brother and I love you. But I don’t know how we’re gonna fix this thing. Mama and Daddy squabble over you every dang day. He’s out in the pole barn, and Mama claims he’s not comin’ into her house unless he apologizes to her and to you.”

  “That’ll happen right about when Diana’s goat sprouts wings and flies off.”

  “I guess.” I bit my lip. “Did you love him?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Fuck.” He jumped up and stomped away, leaving me staring out over the wide expanse of Diana’s pasture.

  The next week I started working a few classes with the little girls at my old friend Gayle’s dance studio. She was competing with a couple of the bigger ones in Lexington and Louisville, but had a great location and facility, with two full-sized rooms, and was planning her second recital. I’d heard about her losing her assistant, which turned out to be another juicy story. The girl had flat-out seduced one of the dance daddies and busted up a marriage. My timing, showing up the next week after getting that tidbit through the grapevine, had been prudent.

  It wasn’t really fun, but it provided both a distraction and income. I’m fairly certain I don’t have a teacherly bone in my body, but I needed the money, and was not about to go back waiting tables at the Love Pub. No way.

  The first weekend after being gainfully employed doing at least something with my God-given talent and skills, I went out for drinks in Lexington with Gayle and her sister. We met up with a few of her sister’s friends at one point, and ended up at a small nightclub, which shocked me. I would never have dreamed the silly little jumped-up horse town with a college in it like Lexington would have such a place.