by Liza Kendall
Charlie knew that Jake and his brothers had trained their little sister well in evasion, almost from birth. Lila instinctively dodged him, spinning on her toe and jumping off the table. Before he knew it, she was running for the massive, long main bar.
“Incoming!” Charlie called to Otto.
“Huh?” He looked up just in time to behold Lila vault toward him, seat her denimed cheeks to the left of his perfectly sliced limes, and spin triumphantly to her feet. “Holy cow!”
Lila’s eyes narrowed on him. “Who’re you calling a cow, little man?”
“Uh—”
“I am a goddess. Now give me that.” She pointed to a bottle of Don Julio Añejo.
“Don’t even think about giving her that, Otto!” Jake growled, in hot pursuit.
“Goddess.”
Otto nodded. He extended his hand toward the Don Julio, but Charlie rounded the bar and swiped it before he could.
“No,” she said to Lila. “You’ve had quite enough.”
“There ish no enough! I have been dealing wiss Felithicy Beeyotch Barnum, and there ish not enough tequila on the planet to make up for it.” Her expression mulish, Lila cartwheeled to the other end of the bar, more salt spilling from the shaker wedged into her cleavage, and commandeered a bottle of El Tiempo that sat near Pullman Duff, the town’s accountant. Rumor had it that he was so cheap he bought Thunderbird in a paper bag for dinner guests and poured it into a decanter to disguise what it was.
Pullman goggled at her and protected his own shot of El Tiempo as she unscrewed the cap of the bottle.
“Lila, so help me God,” Jake said, “if you drink that, I’ll—”
“Sinch when do you care?” Lila asked.
Jake blanched. “I care.”
Lila blinked, going a little soft. “Oh.” But after a beat of silence between the two siblings, Lila suddenly grinned at Jake, shoved the cap into her pocket, and winked as she took a long swig. Then she whipped the saltshaker out of her blouse and held it up to her lips as she yodeled along with the music.
“Pour some sugar on . . .” Lila leaned back dangerously and dramatically for the last notes of the song, seeming to forget the last word of the lyric.
“Dang,” Otto muttered. “Look out: She’s headed straight for America’s Got No Talent.”
“I heard that,” Lila snapped. As she began to struggle upright, the cap of the shaker fell off, spraying her face and filling her mouth with salt. “Thit! Thath not thugar!”
“Yeah, no,” Jake said. “It’s not, Lila.”
“Will you marry me?” Tommy called, as she spewed salt and curses all over the bar. He came running up and tossed some dollar bills at her.
Otto gingerly offered her a bar towel and then retreated to a safe distance.
There were no words for Jake’s expression.
Charlie exchanged a glance with him. He inclined his head toward the debacle that was his sister. Charlie nodded in understanding.
He moved in on the left, Charlie on the right, and they muscled Lila the Lush off the bar, not that she made it easy.
“Leggo o’ me!” she howled, shoving her elbow into Jake’s gut and still spitting out salt.
He grunted in pain. “I’d like nothing better, trust me. But if Charlie and I don’t get you out of here, then Bode will, and you’ll spend the night in jail.”
“Maybe I wanna!” Lila returned. “Maybe it’s the only thing that’ll shtop me from killing Bridezilla!”
A pig snort escaped Charlie, who went to get Lila’s purse while Jake steered his sister toward the exit.
“Hey! I’m serious! Will you marry me?” Tommy asked, stepping in front of them.
Lila blew him a salty kiss. “Yesh!”
“Get out of the way, Tommy,” Jake growled. “I’ll deal with you later.”
“But I’m in love!”
Jake palmed Tommy’s face and walked him backward. Then he threw Lila over his shoulder, and Charlie opened the door.
“Mind if we take your wheels?” Jake asked Charlie. “I rode with George, and frankly I’d just as soon Lila didn’t have access to her car tonight if she wakes up later and wants a chocolate milkshake.”
That earned him a thump on the back from his sibling. “You. Are. A. Caveman.”
He nodded and slid his gaze toward Charlie. “I’ve been called worse.”
“Pumme down, Cavey,” slurred Lila.
“Trust me, I can’t wait. But I’m not gonna drop you to the pavement. Charlie, where are you parked?”
“Over here.” She led them to where Progress hunched, between an old Firebird and, of all things, a Tesla. She opened the passenger-side door and stood aside.
Jake placed his surly, ungrateful burden onto the seat and pushed her over into the middle, with rough brotherly love, as she grumbled at him. His mouth twisted as he looked around the interior of the ancient, musty truck, and he pulled his head out abruptly.
“Want to drive?” Charlie asked softly, extending the keys to him.
He blinked and pursed his lips. Then he accepted the keys, his hand brushing hers.
Her skin tingled, and he drew back quickly. So she knew he’d felt it, too.
He rounded the hood of the truck to get to the driver’s seat, but Lila had other ideas.
“I yam ffiiine to drive,” she announced, gripping the steering wheel and honking the horn.
Jake sighed. “Spoken like every other moron who’s just downed seven or eight tequila shots. Now move over.”
“Not a moron,” Lila protested as Charlie got in the passenger side.
“Okay,” said Jake. “Whatever you say, little sister. You’re a very wise person who just happened to crash into a bottle of tequila for no apparent reason on a Tuesday night.”
“Oh, there are reasons,” Lila muttered darkly. “Bridezillas, and . . . and . . . boyfriendzillas.”
Charlie bit her lip.
Jake raised an eyebrow. “Boyfriendzillas, huh? They sound terrifying.”
“A horror show. You have no conshept at all.”
This seemed to catch his interest. “So who’s your boyfriendzilla, Lila? I didn’t know you’d been dating anyone.”
Lila emitted a mysterious gasp and then a tiny burp. “Dating nobody. Slip of the bum.”
“Ah. A slip of the bum. Sure. Now move over.” Jake shoved her back into the middle of the seat, over her protests.
“You are so bossy! Fine. If you’re gonna drive, I’m ’onna sing.”
“Nooo!” Jake and Charlie said in unison.
Lila giggled and then began to caterwaul her favorite Def Leppard lyrics again.
“Oh, dear God.” Charlie dropped her face into her hands as Jake got in. “Drive fast. Please.”
Chapter 14
Jake did drive fast, starting up old Progress and heading for the small three-bedroom house that Lila shared with Amelie, creator of Bridezilla’s first wedding gown. Thank God that Lila’s cat-strangling segued into gentle snoring within a couple of minutes. Her head kept lolling onto Charlie’s shoulder, but Charlie was just glad for the peace as they drove.
Lila’s shared house was made of limestone, and featured a turquoise front door with a fan-shaped glass window at the top. A lonely cedar tree stood guard in a yard that had a garden bed filled with river rock and was adorned with a single Mexican ceramic pot. A painted metal peacock sprouted from this, seeming to grow out of the soil. Evidently neither resident had the time—or inclination—for gardening.
Amelie greeted them with a mouth full of pins, her tight dark curls twisted into a knot on top of her head. Some had escaped and danced near her ears, her skin gleaming mahogany under the porch light. She rolled her eyes at the sight of her roommate passed out in Jake’s arms.
“Evenin’, Amelie,” he said.
“Mmm mmm mm?” she answered.
“Not sure how to translate that, but I believe it was something close to WTF.”
“Mmm hmm!” Amelie moved out of the way and gestured to them to come in, pointing the way to Lila’s bedroom.
“Hi,” said Charlie, following Jake inside past a dressmaker’s dummy clad in iridescent aqua mermaid scales. They had to step over her tail.
Amelie pulled the pins out of her mouth and dropped them into a porcelain dish on the console table next to it. She spread her hands wide and raised her eyebrows.
Charlie sighed. “Lila had a bad day with Bridezilla and a bad night with tequila. Her inner Leppard came out, and now we’re all Def.”
“Say no more. I’ll get water and aspirin.” Amelie headed for the kitchen.
“Thank you!” called Charlie, and braved Lila’s bedroom with Jake.
He’d deposited her on her queen-sized Victorian bed and was clumsily trying to unbuckle one of her Windex blue wedges.
“Here, let me do that.” Charlie took over.
“I’ll never understand women’s shoes as long as I live.”
She laughed and glanced over at him as she easily undid the straps and slid the shoes off. Jake’s expression said everything he’d probably never put into words to his little sister.
It was tender, exasperated, amused, concerned, and protective all at once. He adored her.
Charlie’s breath caught in her throat, and the familiar guilt that she’d come between these two haunted her. And that she’d allowed Lila to straddle the fence to her friend’s own detriment, while she, Charlie, had firmly sided with her own brother, Brandon. Loyalty came in many shades and forms, didn’t it?
Jake, suddenly seeming aware of her scrutiny, evaded it by grabbing Lila’s trash can and bringing it to her bedside as Charlie put the shoes in her friend’s closet. “Hey, Charlie,” he growled. “This boyfriendzilla thing Lila mentioned? If she needs someone to give somebody a talking-to about something . . . I’m available.”
She nodded at Jake, closed the closet doors, turned, and came face-to-face with a spindly shelf full of party planning books, among them Awesome Occasions! and Elegant Evenings. Then, notably: Weddiculous: An Unfiltered Guide to Being a Bride. Charlie smiled.
Lila’s room was similar to her office. Odd wedding and party accessories sprouted everywhere, a testament to Lila’s job. A yellowed antique wedding veil trailed from one of the bedposts. A painted cowboy boot filled with silk violets adorned her dresser, along with a pair of white elbow gloves. In the far corner of the room, a book lay sprawled as if it had been thrown against the wall. Charlie chuckled as she identified it as Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. Evidently, Lila had fallen short? What a shocker.
Jake found a blanket on a pale green French country–style chair in the room and draped it over his sister. “Let’s hope for her sake that she vomits.”
Ugh. But Charlie nodded.
“She’ll feel better in the morning if she does,” Jake said.
Amelie came in with a glass of water and three aspirin and set them on the nightstand. “So she sang?”
Jake scrubbed a hand down his face. “That’s a questionable verb.”
Amelie laughed. “I’ll keep an eye on her. Don’t worry.”
“Thanks. What’s with the mermaid costume?”
“Silverlake Middle School is doing a performance of The Little Mermaid. I’m helping out with the costumes.”
Charlie put a hand to her heart. “That’s so sweet.”
Amelie’s lips flattened, and she looked up at the ceiling. “It’s a pain in the butt,” she said. But the quirk of her mouth gave away that she loved doing it. “Not as big a pain as Bridezilla, though!”
“Amen to that.”
* * *
With Lila safely in bed under Amelie’s watch, Jake helped Charlie up into Progress’s passenger seat and got into the driver’s seat once more. Without his sister in the car, sitting here with Charlie suddenly seemed so intimate.
He inhaled the familiar smells of old vinyl, rusty metal, musty seat foam, and eau de gasoline. How many years had it been since he’d sat in this truck, tooling around with Kingston? He remembered the old man teaching him how to check the oil and the tire pressure, back when Jake had been “one of the family.” Before the fire.
Ha. Likely he had been their pet project, their charity case. He’d worn Brandon’s hand-me-downs and gladly taken his castoffs: the older-model Dell computer, for example. His old Nokia flip phone. Things that Deck couldn’t afford to buy for any of the Braddock kids. At the time, Jake had been over the moon to have them . . . but had those “free” items come at a price? The price of equality?
Jake fired up the engine abruptly. Progress roared, visibly startling Charlie. He’d almost flooded the engine as a wave of unnamed emotions flooded him. But he preferred them unidentified. They were easier to brush aside that way.
“Why so jumpy?” he asked Charlie. “You okay?”
“No,” she said baldly.
“Why not?”
“I can’t even begin to explain it.” She fiddled with the straps of her big tote bag and stared out the window.
Frustration mounted in him. “You could try.”
Silence.
They’d reached the firehouse now, but instead of hopping out, Jake parked across from the driveway and cut the engine. “You said you’d talk to me. About the past. So . . . ?”
She tucked some hair behind her ears and examined her fingernails. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Yeah? Well, I didn’t know where—or why—to end, Charlie.” The words escaped him, raw and harsh, without permission. Embarrassing after all this time. But since they were out, the hell with it. “One minute I was a part of the family,” he said, “an honorary Nash. And the next, I was an outcast. Shunned. Persona non grata.”
Charlie’s shoulders hunched. She let her bag drop to the floor of the cab and tucked her hands underneath her thighs. “I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’ve said that. You’ve said it more than once. But what I want to know is why! We put out that campfire, Brandon and I. I know it was out. Not a single ember. I even kicked sand over it. And I’m the one who got your dad out of the house, wheelchair and all—”
“I know,” she whispered. “It wasn’t fair,” she said, her voice breaking. “None of it, Jake. I know that. I’m so sorry. But . . . I couldn’t . . . All of it combined was like a force of nature that I couldn’t stop.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder, and Jake put his arm around her. At last, disjointedly, the story was coming out. The story nobody would tell him, the one he’d waited so long to hear.
“I was fifteen years old, Jake, and Granddad was raging and looking for someone to blame. There was an insurance investigator, a psychologist, all the police and the firefighters, everyone asking questions. So many questions, and so many fingers pointing . . .” Charlie shook her head, choking on fresh tears. “Pointing at you. It was awful. So awful. From the get-go, they forbade me to even talk to you, for legal reasons.”
Jake’s heart stuttered. The injustice of it was like a kick in the stomach. He let his arm drop away from Charlie, and he sat there reeling, fighting a sudden urge to smash the windshield. “Why? Why would they think it was me? The campfire was out! I swear it. Brandon saw it. He was there.”
Charlie refused to meet his gaze.
What? No . . . it just wasn’t possible. Had Brandon lied and said Jake was responsible? Aw, hell. Did it really matter at this point if he had? The whole town had whispered that it was probably Jake’s fault. Fair or not.
Charlie kept talking, even though now he wasn’t sure he wanted her to.
“The authorities had a theory. I don’t even know where it came from. And even when th
ere wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute, the idea just wouldn’t go away. Once it got in Granddad’s head, in Mom and Dad’s head . . .” Charlie was absolutely sobbing now.
“What theory?” Jake asked, his voice sounding cold and foreign in his own ears.
“Envy,” Charlie blurted.
Jake’s heart, having stopped, now resumed like a sledgehammer trying to crack his breastbone. Envy? What was she saying? That they’d thought—no. Not possible. Bile rose in his throat. “You thought I—? How could you think that?”
“I didn’t! The insurance investigator was trying to get me to say stuff about you. Stuff that would incriminate you. I told him that he was full of it. He suggested that I was romantically biased and naive. He suggested that we’d all taken in a lonely, unstable kid who had something to prove, who wanted to impress the family, cement his place in it. That you set the fire so you could be a hero.”
Jake heard her words as if from a great distance, trying to cut himself off from the vicious pain they caused. Lonely. Unstable. Something to prove. The truth of the insights hurt almost worse than the crazy supposition that the investigator had arrived at.
Impress the family. Cement his place . . .
“Because, you know, Mom and Dad had given us both a talk a few days earlier. Do you remember? Do you remember The Talk?”
Oh, yeah, Jake remembered The Talk.
* * *
“Jake, you’re like a second son to us,” Dave Nash had said, a regretful, tender expression on his craggy face. His hands, resting on the arms of the wheelchair, shook a little, but who knew whether it was from emotion or MS?
“Yes, darlin’, you are,” Maria Nash chimed in, enveloping him in one of her ample hugs. Jake loved her wide smile, the tiny smudge of coral lipstick that always ended up on one of her front teeth. He loved her messy, curly blond hair, the crinkles at her eyes, the way she looked at him as though she saw into his heart and approved of what was there.
This hug felt different, though. It felt . . . official. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he didn’t want to let her go, even though normally he felt a little awkward at the physical contact.
