Good Neighbors (Book 1 of the Home Again Series)

by Alyssa Kress

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  After careful consideration, we have decided not to schedule your tryout with our exercise group.

  The email was from Mrs. Wilson. Apparently, she didn't even want to let Erica try out leading her group of nine friends in an exercise session.

  It was late, well past midnight. Regarding her laptop set on the desk in her bedroom, Erica blinked a few times to make sure she really was reading the "not" typed in there. She was tired after having spent the day on the phone soliciting clients and also calling around—for the third time—to get an interview for a job at one of the local gyms. None of them were hiring, but they'd all promised to keep her resumé on file. Big help.

  And now this email from Mrs. Wilson.

  A lead ball sank in her stomach. It probably hadn't been prudent for Erica to place so much hope in gaining Mrs. Wilson and her nine friends as clients. But adding them to her roster would have upped her number of customers from nine to nineteen

  Still not very many, to be honest.

  Slowly, Erica closed her eyes. The new hearing before Judge Devon was to take place in less than a week, and Erica was not coming up to snuff. She had no viable business or income. Of course she didn't. She was pathetic.

  Opening her eyes again, Erica turned back to her computer and hit the delete button on the email. But the words were burned into her brain. After careful consideration... Narrowing her eyes, she fought back the pressure behind them. She was not going to cry. No, not even if the critical, monster voice in her head, the one about which she'd long ago confessed to Brennan, was absolutely correct. She was an abject failure.

  She hadn't even been smart enough to snap up Brennan's marriage proposal when she'd had the chance. She'd been too stupid to recognize what a washout she was. Now she was letting Liam down because of her own uselessness. The judge would never appoint Erica his guardian.

  The pressure in her forehead grew, but she was determined not to give in to it. She closed her eyes again and breathed in deeply.

  "Erica?"

  Startled, she blinked her eyes open and found Liam standing in her bedroom doorway.

  "Oh. Hey." She scrounged up a wan smile. "I didn't know you were still up."

  "I could say the same thing about you. Is everything all right?"

  What was her face showing? "Everything's fine." Hopefully, he didn't catch the slight wobble in her voice.

  Liam's gaze went down the hall. "I couldn't sleep."

  Frowning, Erica stood up. "What's wrong?"

  With his gaze still down the hall, Liam's face contorted. "I feel so bad."

  "Oh, no." Erica hastened toward him. "What is it?"

  "Dad—" Liam gulped back a sob and shot Erica an agonized look as she approached him. "I let down Dad..."

  "What are you talking about?" Poor Liam looked so distressed that, awkward as she felt at the gesture, Erica put her arms around him.

  It was apparently the wrong thing to do. As soon as Liam felt her arms around him, he completely broke down. Hunching over, he put his head in his hands and started sobbing.

  Not knowing what else to do, Erica kept her arms around his back. The gesture did not appear to comfort him in the slightest.

  After a minute of hard sobs, Liam sniffled and made a muscular effort to control himself. Gently, he pulled away from Erica's embrace. "I'm sorry. I just—I wish I could talk to you about him. About Dad, I mean." He threw Erica a frankly pleading look.

  Oh, boy. It was the middle of the night. Erica was exhausted and completely wrung out. The last thing she wanted to do while tired and disgusted with herself was discuss her abusive father. But... She looked at her younger brother. His eyes were red, his face drawn.

  If she could avoid being a failure in this one simple thing, letting Liam talk about his father, then she ought to go for it.

  "You can talk to me." Amazingly, she didn't choke on the words. "Here. Come on. Let's sit on my bed." One thing Judge Devon had been right about, among others, was Erica's absence from Liam's life for so many years. She owed him far more than one heart-to-heart sibling talk.

  Liam, still sniffling bravely, sat next to Erica on her flowered counterpane. "I don't know," he mumbled. "Maybe you're not the right person to talk to, really. I mean, I know you had a very different experience of him as a father."

  "Don't worry about that," Erica recklessly declared. "Just talk to me. Tell me—" She searched for something to ask. Not how Liam might have let down Dad—that was obviously a downer. "Tell me—what's your favorite memory of him?"

  "My favorite?" Liam stopped sniffling and frowned, obviously thinking. Then a small smile curved his lips. "Well, one of my favorites is the time he tried to make a pie. I remember the timer going off on the oven, and he went to open the door with this happy, expectant look on his face. But that pie looked like a caved-in volcano. And it had the consistency of a rock." Liam chuckled. "We ended up throwing out the pie tin along with the pie. It was impossible to get that volcano out of it."

  Erica tried hard to imagine the scene. Richard Carmichael, the loudmouth king of the household who used to complain about her mother's vacuuming skill while sitting in his easy chair with a beer in his hand—baking a pie?

  The thing was...she almost could imagine it. Richard Carmichael was also the man who'd planted those roses, put up the decorative garden fence.

  Liam was smiling now. "And then there was the time we went to a bonsai show. Dad had a big argument with one of the vendors over whether he was selling a true miniature maple or just a small branch of one. That guy was totally wrong, but he wouldn't give an inch. Dad pointed out the size of the leaves, which were way too big and then the texture of the bark—until this dude started to pretend he didn't understand English. We were laughing so hard..."

  All right, this story Erica could imagine easier. Her dad had loved to argue. And she could believe in his interest in plants since she'd been sharing his garden. She could almost imagine him—sober, pleasant, humorous—trying to buy a genuine bonsai maple.

  "Okay, okay." Liam was now on a roll. Apparently, he was no longer concerned that Erica couldn't relate. "One night he thought there was a burglar in the house. He went downstairs with my baseball bat. I heard a loud crash and ran downstairs. He turned on the light and we found out he'd 'killed' the suit for the cleaner that he'd hung over the front closet door." Liam started to laugh.

  While watching her younger brother laugh, a strange sensation crept over Erica. In her mind's eye, she started to see her father, the father of her oldest, dimmest memories. This was the father who'd taken her ice skating. He was the man who used to sit her on his lap so he could read her picture books. This father had once put her on his shoulder to watch a parade. Oh, she remembered him.

  Emotions started to bubble to the surface: sharp, powerful emotions—all the emotions she'd been holding down for so long. Despair over Mrs. Wilson's email sat right on top, but under that was more. So much more...

  She felt anger and frustration and—envy. Incredible envy. The relationship Liam had had with her father had been wonderful. It was a relationship she wished very badly she could have had. It was one she would have had if only—

  The denial she'd set in place and fed for so long wasn't holding up any more. She was envious. In fact, her envy was gigantic. On some level, she must have suspected the danger of acknowledging this demon. Her envy overwhelmed everything in its path, like a tidal wave.

  "Oh, I wish—" Her throat was so tight so could barely get the words out. "I wish I could have known him. I mean—" What did she mean? She really meant she wished he could have known her. That he could have taken her on long rambles through the home improvement store and that he could have tried to bake a pie for her.

  She wished he could have loved her.

  Oh, God, yes. That's precisely what she wished. The tears Erica had been holding back were now too powerful to resist. Her emotions were too powerful to resist. They poured forth, and she cried.

&nb
sp; No, she didn't cry. She sobbed. Great, gut-wrenching sobs. She'd wanted her father to love her.

  As she sobbed, unable to stop, she realized that this was what she'd been resisting ever since watching her father slip from this world at the hospital. This horrible, gigantic grief that her father had not loved her.

  "Aw, Erica." Liam put his arm around her shoulders. "Erica."

  The power of her grief was terrifying. No wonder she'd done her best to keep this caged. It was a runaway steam engine and yet— And yet— There was a distinct relief in letting go, in admitting it all. About a ton of weight lifted off her chest. She didn't have to pretend any more.

  She wanted to be loved. She'd always wanted to be loved. But her father had not loved her. Her mother hadn't loved any of them, putting up with his bad behavior the way she had. So none of them had been lovable, Erica least of all.

  She cried and cried all her old, ancient grief.

  "Erica." Liam squeezed her close.

  "Liam." A realization hit Erica like a cannonball. She struggled for enough composure to speak. "I love you. You're my brother. I really, really love you. I want you to know that." Nobody else should suffer the way she had.

  "Hey." His eyes were red again. Had he been crying, too? "You're my sister and I really, really love you, too."

  She hiccupped a laugh amid her sobs. For one bright shining moment, she believed him. Someone loved her. She was lovable. "You are the best," she told him.

  "So are you."

  She started laughing. "We are so strange."

  "Yeah." Liam joined her laughter.

  Erica put a hand on Liam's shoulder. An odd exhilaration chased through her grief. "We're sticking together. No matter what the judge says."

  "Agreed." Liam smiled.

  Erica had no idea of the financial or legal ramifications of the promise she'd just made, and she didn't care. They were sticking together like glue.

  She had no sustainable business, no financial stability, but she had something better now.

  Hope.