by Lucy Score
“Scarlett, I’m not going anywhere for the time being, and I certainly wouldn’t leave without at least talking to you first. And I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that I’d want to be with anyone else when I have you. There’s no one out there like you. I’d be the biggest idiot in the world to keep looking when I have you in my bed.”
She beamed at me, and I felt the tension in my shoulders relax. “Really?”
“Really.”
She grinned and wiggled in her seat. I watched in horror as she shoveled the asparagus into her pretty mouth. Her face froze, and then her eyes widened as the realization hit her. She clamped a hand over her mouth.
I shoved her napkin at her. “Spit it out before you vomit,” I ordered.
“Gah!” She grabbed the napkin and pressed it to her mouth. “Ohmygod. Ohmygod. Ohmygod.”
I held out her wine glass. “Drink.”
She drained the glass like she had the beer the first night I met her.
Scarlett put the glass down with a clunk. “That was the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.”
“You didn’t try the chicken yet,” I pointed out.
“Man!” she wailed, throwing the napkin of masticated disaster on the table. “I just wanted tonight to be perfect!”
I reached across the table and held her hand. “Baby, it is.”
“No. It’s not! The food is horrible, and I got all nervous and basically forced you to be my boyfriend, and I’m really hungry and all we’ve got is half a potato each!”
I used my grip on her hand to pull her out of her chair and over into my lap.
She sat stiffly against me, and I hid my smile. Her stubborn streak was a mile-wide like my gran would say.
“I’d like to point out that I haven’t turned you down, and we have pie.”
“You didn’t say yes,” she said, pouting at her hands in her lap.
“Scarlett, when’s the last time anyone said no to you?”
“It happens on occasion.”
“Not this occasion,” I told her.
She raised her gaze to mine, and I felt my heart glow a little brighter.
“I’ll be your boyfriend on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You promise to never cook again.”
28
Scarlett
I gave the front door a good kick. Warmer weather always made the front door of my father’s house stick. I hadn’t been back here since that morning I’d found him. Even in death, Jonah Bodine Sr. hadn’t looked peaceful.
I took a deep breath and stepped inside. My childhood home was a bungalow. The yellow siding had always struck me as too cheerful for the family that lived within its walls. Especially after Mama died.
I dropped the keys on the skinny table Gibson had made in his high school shop class. Dad’s keys were there too. Dropped there the afternoon before he died. I’d muscled him into the house. He’d snuck a flask along to a job site, and I’d had to bring him home early before the clients saw him shit-faced on the job. I remembered tossing his keys on the table one last time.
It was stuffy and dark inside, reminding me that this was now an empty house. There was no more life in the Bodine bungalow. The blinds had been drawn the night Daddy died and remained closed since then. I’d been avoiding this place and the memories just like my brothers. But I was the only one of us who had the memory of him dead in his bed.
I turned into the long skinny living room on the left. Everything here was exactly the same as it always had been. A saggy plaid couch. The recliner that didn’t recline quite right. The flat screen TV I’d bought dad two years ago when his rabbit-eared dinosaur had finally called it quits. I’d mounted it above the fireplace for him with the sad hope that having something nice would make him want to make an effort in other areas of his life.
My father had taught me a lot of things. He’d shown me how to use every tool known to man to fix just about every problem created by man. But he’d also taught me that no matter how much I hoped or prayed or tried, I couldn’t control other people. I couldn’t make them make the choices I wanted them to. I couldn’t drag them into health and happiness.
It was a painful, essential lesson.
With a sigh, I set about opening the blinds and windows in the long room. Maybe some fresh June air would sweep out some of those memories that haunted us all.
One by one, I worked my way around the room, opening them before moving on to the eat-in kitchen on the opposite side of the house and doing the same. The first floor was divided in half by the stairs to the second floor. I tried to look at the house objectively, like a new project for which history didn’t matter.
I’d always wanted to expand the kitchen into the useless breakfast nook. Now I could.
I skipped Daddy’s bedroom in the back of the house. I wasn’t ready to revisit that room. Not with its most recent memories.
Growing up, it had been mine. The only one on the first floor. There were three small rooms upstairs. When I’d moved out at nineteen, I’d moved Daddy to the first floor since his drinking made him unsteady on his feet.
I looked around trying to decide where to begin.
Overwhelmed, I sat down on the first step of the staircase. It still squeaked as it had for fifteen years. We’d all learned to skip that step when it would have been faster and smarter to just fix the damn thing.
I sighed out a long breath. Jonah, bless his big heart, had offered to come help me today. But it wasn’t exactly fair to him, asking him to clean out the home of the father who’d abandoned him.
So, it fell to me. I put my face in my hands and allowed myself a moment of pathetic self-pity. What did I really have to be upset about? I, Scarlett Bodine, age 26, had my very first official boyfriend. We’d sealed the deal last night with baked potato and pie and some vigorous, acrobatic sex on my porch swing. At least until the chain had snapped and we’d fallen in a heap to the floor.
Totally worth the bruises.
In the grand scheme of things, having to tackle my father’s house alone was an emotional inconvenience, but my good stuff outweighed the bad. Now, if I could just get up the gumption to start…
The crunch of tires on gravel out front had me lifting my head.
Had one of my brothers felt guilty enough about dumping this on me that they—
It wasn’t a Bodine climbing up the porch steps. It was Devlin. And I wanted to cry.
“Hey, I thought I’d see if you needed a hand—”
The velocity of my body colliding with his cut him off. He was here to help me clean up a mess that wasn’t his because he cared. I clung to him like Virginia creeper. Gratitude made my eyes sting.
“Thank you,” I whispered against his t-shirt. He held me close and stroked a hand down my ponytail. I breathed him in, stealing a bit of his strength, and then unwound myself from him.
He was watching me with a soft look on his face. “Do you think you could greet me like that every time you see me for a while?” he asked.
“Yeah. I think I could do that,” I said softly. I stepped back and let him inside. “Welcome to Bodine Bungalow.”
Devlin glanced around, and I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of home he’d grown up in. I’d be willing to bet it was a bit grander than my own childhood home.
“It’s nice,” he said. “Cozy. I bet there are a lot of memories here.”
There were. Enough bad memories to be haunted by and enough good ones to make the loss still hurt.
“Yeah. Lots of memories,” I agreed, my throat tight.
“Where do you want me to start?” he asked. “You have me for the day. I’ve got cleaning supplies in the car, garbage bags, a couple of plastic totes. I have a scanner back at Gran’s if there’s any paperwork you want to save.”
My eyes started to water. It was the dust, I told myself. Not the freely offered help.
“Let’s start with the fridge. That’ll be the worst of it. Then, we can l
ook for any paperwork and photo albums. Things I want to keep,” I decided.
He nodded. “I’ll grab the supplies.”
I watched him walk back down the porch steps—the same steps that I’d bounded down in a bid to run away from home twice in my teens—and fell just a little, tiny bit in love with Devlin McCallister.
Devlin hadn’t said a word when we’d cleared the dozen empty bottles of cheap Kentucky bourbon from the kitchen cabinets. He hadn’t mentioned the fact that the refrigerator was empty except for beer and moonshine and a really old jar of mayonnaise. And he hadn’t raised an eyebrow when I’d opened each and every bottle and dumped it all straight down the drain.
He was too polite to ask any questions. He knew the basics. But I was tired of not saying anything, tired of accepting.
“My father was an alcoholic,” I announced as we carted two waste baskets of recyclables out onto the front porch.
“Okay,” Devlin said.
“He always drank, but it got worse after my mom died,” I continued.
“How old were you when she died?” Devlin asked.
“I was fifteen. Car accident.”
His hand settled on my shoulder, and I stopped my fidgeting. “I’m sorry,” he said simply.
“She was a good mom, mostly.” It was important to me that he believed me. “She and my dad got pregnant in high school and married. In some ways, they never grew up. They fought a lot. There was a lot of jealousy. And obviously at least one of them wasn’t faithful. Daddy drank too much. Mama didn’t handle it well. And they raised four basket cases.”
Devlin leaned in close and cupped my cheek in his hand. “Baby. Nothing about you says basket case.”
I closed my eyes, relaxing into his soothing touch.
“I started going to work with my daddy in the summers at twelve because Mama thought he was drinking on the job. He was. By thirteen, I was driving his ass home. By fifteen, I was doing most of the work.”
Devlin towed me into him, wrapping his arms around me, creating a safe, warm space. “Gibson hates him. Daddy never kept it quiet that Gibs was the reason he and Mama got married. Bowie is the good guy trying to undo all the bad that Daddy did. Jameson just kept his head down and tried to live his own life outside of the drama.”
“And your mother?” Devlin asked.
“She hung in there for us. She didn’t know what happiness was. But she knew what was right and wrong. Made me make that promise not to get married before thirty and made my brothers promise not to get married for any reason other than stupid in love.”
“Did he ever hurt you?” Devlin asked.
I leaned back and looked up into those stormy eyes. “Daddy? No! Of course not. At least not physically.”
He relaxed his hold on me.
“If not physically, then how?”
I shrugged and pressed my cheek against his chest. It was my new favorite place to be. “I just wanted to be important enough to him that he didn’t need to drink,” I confessed.
“Baby.”
Devlin said it so softly, so sweetly.
“I know. I know that he was an alcoholic, and I know you can’t just matter enough to someone to make them quit. But I really, really wanted to,” I told him.
Again, he ran his hand through the tail of my hair.
“I can’t remember a time growing up that I wasn’t worried about Mama and Daddy gettin’ a divorce. Looking back, I don’t know why they didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t like they were happy.”
“Maybe they felt like it was the right thing to do,” Devlin offered gruffly.
“But the right thing shouldn’t be so unhappy. Should it?” I asked.
“Easy doesn’t mean right,” Devlin pointed out.
I sighed. “There was a time—right after Callie disappeared—that things were good. Everyone was trying. Even Gibson,” I recalled. “I think it scared everyone and made them want to hold on to what we’re all lucky enough to have.”
“But it didn’t last?” Devlin asked.
I shook my head. “Never does, I guess.” I looked into the front yard at the trees I used to climb as a kid, pretending I was in the jungle far, far away. “Anyway, thanks for listening.”
Devlin leaned in and stroked his thumb across my cheek. “Scarlett, anything that’s important to you is important to me.”
God help me, I believed him.
My sigh this time was one of relief. “Thanks, Dev. How do you feel about snooping for important papers?”
He grinned. “I feel pretty damn good about that.”
29
Scarlett
Even with Devlin present for moral support, I wasn’t prepared to tackle Daddy’s bedroom so we headed upstairs. “Mama and Daddy used to use this bedroom,” I told him, shoving open the white painted door. It creaked like a dang haunted house.
The walls still boasted that English rose wallpaper that Daddy had sworn he’d take down. The mattress still sagged on its old iron frame. There was a bookcase built into the wall, the one change my father had managed to make in his years here. It was a jumble of paperwork and books and old magazines. Judging from the layer of dust, no one had been up here in a few years.
“Gross. Let’s start with this allergy factory,” I suggested. “We’re makin’ sure there’s no outstanding bills, looking for anything on property taxes, any titles to the house or his truck or whatever. At least we don’t have to worry about any life insurance or retirement paperwork,” I said dryly.
“Paperwork is my specialty,” Devlin said. “Why don’t you look for photos and mementos? I’m sure Jonah would be interested in seeing what your childhood looked like.”
It was a thoughtful gesture that I don’t know if I would have thought of making on my own. I knew just where to start. Mama’s trunk was shoved in the corner by the closet and buried under an entire family history stashed into shoe boxes and manila folders. Photos, report cards, drawings. We’d never made it through the mess when she died. And we’d ended up just adding to it in the years after. After pawing through some of it for pictures for Mama’s funeral, we’d left it for Daddy to take care of and—as expected—everything sat exactly as he’d left it.
I cleared the top of the trunk, making neat stacks on the bare mattress. Keep. Recycle. Burn to the Motherfucking Ground.
When I tried to lift the lid, I found the trunk locked. I frowned at the lock. I’d played with this trunk a million times as a kid. Hell, my brothers used to take turns hiding in it when we’d played hide and seek. It had never been locked.
I glanced over at Devlin. He was sitting on the white-washed floor sorting stacks of paperwork. I studied the lock. It wasn’t as if it was a particularly challenging lock. One or two whacks with a hammer would break the clasp easy enough. And I was curious enough to know what my parents had thought was worth locking away. But I didn’t like the idea of busting up something Mama valued.
I glanced over at Devlin who was happily sorting papers like the hot closet nerd he was.
Obviously, there was a key of some sort that locked the damn thing. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. The trunk was old. It wouldn’t be an ordinary key that fit the lock. I opened my eyes. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? I rose and jogged downstairs to the front door. Dad’s key ring was right there. I picked it up and thumbed through them. Front door, back door, garage. My house. Truck keys. And one stubby, brass, unlabeled key.
I held my breath and headed back upstairs, the weight of the keys heavy in my hand. What secrets could my parents possibly have kept? They were an open book of misery and dedication to commitment. It was probably a stack of Sports Illustrated issues or doll clothes. Or, ugh, a fat pile of unpaid bills that my father hadn’t told me about. That would be a nice slap in the face.
I returned to the bedroom and stepped over Devlin’s incomprehensible organizational system. Kneeling in front of the trunk, I slid the key into the lock. It turned with no resistance.
I felt a nos
talgic tug when I saw the green flowered fabric lining. The smell was the same, old and musty, but now instead of being an empty hiding place for kids, the interior of the trunk was packed full. I brushed a hand over my mother’s favorite dress. I’d boxed up her clothing the week after the funeral and given it to the Bootleg Community Church to distribute to the needy. I hadn’t even noticed that her soft, spring green dress was missing.
My father must have tucked it away, I realized. Along with her bed pillow and it’s carefully cross-stitched pillow case. I unpacked them slowly, running my fingers over long familiar mementos. Their wedding album came next. They’d married in a hurry and without their families’ joyful acceptance. So, their album consisted of a dozen sepia-toned shots of my mother in a high-necked lace dress that her cousin lent her. Daddy was oh-so-young in his baby blue suit. His shirt had ruffles on it, something that never ceased to entertain me. As a little girl, I’d insisted on perusing the album hundreds of times and never once had I realized it was like admiring the chain that tied my parents to their unhappy life.
I flipped through the thick pages, studying each picture. There were no glowing smiles during the ceremony, but the last shot was a candid of my father looking down at Mama with a tenderness that rarely showed in the ensuing years. Mama was looking up at him and laughing. In that picture, she sparkled. It wasn’t all bad, their life together. And this picture was living proof of that. There were pockets of happiness in that lifetime. But I wanted more than pockets.
I shot a look at Devlin and found him watching me. “You had about a million emotions go across your pretty face in the last minute,” he told me.
“Oh, yeah?” I asked. He gave me that half smile that I liked so much.
