by Ren Benton
Cynicism must be in the municipal water supply. “Not all of them. Not even most of them. Matter of fact, five out of six people I’ve met recently are excellent.” She excluded Daniel Dunleavy on the grounds of being a douchebag. “Including you.”
He sighed wearily. “I knew you were a terrible judge of character as soon as I found out you’re with Griff. Let that man of yours sniff out the losers. He knows the scent.”
Wes and Griff went back far enough to involve a favor so old, they were both tired of having it on the books. “How do you two know each other?”
“Ask him about his tattoo.”
She was familiar with Griff’s body. She’d lathered it up only a few hours earlier. She’d heard the stories behind his scars related to tree climbing, mountain biking, rock climbing, snowboarding, surfing, and assorted other misadventures. She had seen no tattoo nor residual evidence of having one removed. “He doesn’t have a tattoo.”
Wes snickered. “Ask him about it.”
If she couldn’t figure out how to give Griff what he wanted, she had no right to ask him anything.
20
Griff was drilling pilot holes for the screws that would fasten the mirror to the back of one of Violet’s cabinets when a shadow fell across his work surface. The shadow didn’t lean to one side and bulge on the other with a bag of infinite holding, so he didn’t bother looking up. “What?”
“You didn’t come back to work yesterday,” Dan stated the obvious.
“My presence wouldn’t have been any more productive than my absence.”
“Trust me, I didn’t need you there defiling more contracts.” The scream of the drill piercing the mirror’s backing cut Dan off. “I just wanted to make sure everything was all right with Ivy.”
Everything was right with Ivy. It was without her where things went wrong.
So, naturally, he’d told her to get out of his life.
It didn’t seem any smarter now than when the words had tumbled out of his mouth, but if he was honest about his needs, anything less than a full-time commitment from her would keep him in a perpetual state of wanting more. He would resent her for not giving him enough, and she would hate him for demanding more than she thought she was able to provide. They couldn’t survive in the crack between all and nothing.
Dan emptied his lungs between bursts of the drill. “Well, is she pregnant or what?”
If there weren’t sheets of glass scattered throughout the garage, Griff would have tested whether throwing something was as cathartic as Ivy made it look. “This isn’t the Forties, Dan. If she was pregnant, she could do something more productive than sit in the rain like the world is ending.”
The drill bored into the wood again. “She has four kids to care for. They need more care than average and she has a custody case going on, so it’s the worst possible time for her boss to fuck her over on a promotion.”
He swapped the drill bit for a screwdriver bit and tightened the chuck. “Oh, and we’ve had a rough couple of days because I waited until she was more overwhelmed than one human should be expected to endure to tell her I need more from her than an occasional date, so if she wants to cry in our courtyard or dance naked in the damn fountain, she has my blessing to do so.”
“Dammit, Griff, I’m just trying to protect you.”
“Oh, your idea of protecting me is accusing me of being irresponsible with my sperm?” Okay, he had been, but he immediately followed up with the next most responsible option.
“I’m more worried about women taking advantage of you. You give too much benefit of the doubt to a pretty face.”
He was such a judgmental asshole about a pretty face, as if he hadn’t married one and been birthed by another. “Name one woman who has ever taken advantage of me.”
“Faye.”
That name from Dan’s mouth hit him like a slap in the face. “How do you know about her?”
“Your friend Wes needed help dragging you and Mason out of the lake of booze you were drowning yourselves in. To the surprise of no one, you’re not a quiet drunk.”
Griff supported his forehead with his hand. Dan had known the whole time. No wonder he’d been so harsh and unforgiving. It must be hard to be proud of a little brother who enthusiastically participated in adultery.
“Don’t sit on that,” he muttered. “It’s glass.”
Dan backed away from the blanket-wrapped surface he’d nearly put his weight on. “Every man has a woman in his past who made him blind and stupid, but the rest of us learn. You keep going for the same thing like it’ll be different this time, just like you keep risking your neck. Do you know how it tears me up every time you get hurt? And you just shrug it off and dive right back into danger like you felt nothing, like I learned the lesson for you. All I can do is chase you around reminding you fire is hot and hope you’ll listen this time.”
“I know. I’ve always known, okay?” If Griff expected anyone to believe that, he’d better at least try to explain himself. “I’ve been trying to get warm. It was just the wrong kind of flame.”
The daredevil stunts made his heart race and his senses sharp. Mundane activity, in comparison, barely seemed like living. Faye had given him the same rush, as if he’d subconsciously sensed the crash coming at the end of the plunge.
He had learned something from Faye — moderation. After her, he took his lust and risk of being murdered by a jealous husband in single doses.
Until Ivy.
He had no shortage of lust for her. She kept him excited with her wicked humor and ever-shifting facets. But while he’d been distracted by the fun, his bottomless pit of dissatisfaction began to quietly fill with the parts of her that had more substance than mere adrenaline — her steadiness and comfort, her softness and strength.
He didn’t have to risk his life in pursuit of contentment. Everything he wanted and needed was within easy reach with her.
If she would only let him be within reach of her.
Dan pulled the stool from under the workbench and sat on that. “For what it’s worth, I like Ivy. And not just because she wrapped Rafferty around her little finger. She stood up for you. I mean, she came at me swinging a bat.”
“Varsity softball,” Griff whispered mostly to himself.
“The entire time, despite my terror, I was thinking I could trust her to look after you.”
Griff would look after her, too, so that wasn’t quite as much of a raw deal for her as it sounded. “You just want to foist me off on someone else.”
“Oh, hell yes,” Dan agreed with fervor. “I have a kid now. I can’t take care of both of you at once.”
Griff smiled at the drill resting in his hands. “Take care of my nephew. I’m going to be all right.”
If he worked harder to be steady and comforting, maybe he could fill some of his holes himself.
“As long as you’re here, make yourself useful.” He pointed at the bench behind Dan. “Put on some gloves and help me install this glass.”
He put the screws through the back of the cabinet to hold the mirror and then carefully rolled the cabinet over to expose the front.
Dan ran his gloved hand over the carved inset. “Man, this is beautiful.”
He should be pleased his brother had something positive to say, but instead, it stung. “So what’s wrong with the crib?”
Dan sighed and looked up at the corner near the ceiling rather than at Griff. “Not a damn thing, except I didn’t do it. I’m the dad. I’m supposed to build things, and I can’t even put together a bookshelf out of a box. Did you fix that, by the way, or did my wife do it while she was seven months pregnant?”
“I straightened it out.” Dan really was a lot like Ivy — an overachiever who got completely lost when the end result didn’t look exactly like the plan. “If you want to make something for Nate, I can supervise you so you don’t fuck it up.”
“A boy needs a treehouse.”
The Dunleavy boys had desperately wanted one. Apparently
, some things never changed. “How about we start with something like a toy box so you can learn how a hammer works before we try building a house in the sky?”
Dan grudgingly agreed to pace himself, since his infant son — who was the one in need of a treehouse, after all — wouldn’t be climbing trees anytime soon.
They slid the glass horizontally into the grooves in the uprights of each cabinet and returned one, then the other to the vertical position. Griff painted dowels with glue and settled the top pieces into place.
Dan handed him the paint cans to weight the tops while the glue dried. “I’ve been meaning to ask. What’s the story about the donkey?”
21
Ivy had seen jail visiting rooms on television hundreds of times, so the cafeteria chairs, cubicle walls, and plexiglass divider were familiar sights. What TV failed to prepare her for was the overpowering reek of bleach. What went on in this place that it had to be hosed down with chlorine?
A guard escorted her to a plastic chair. She sat and waited to learn if Holly would see her. She clenched her hands on her lap to control their shaking. Her nerves were nothing if not adaptable, though, and moved to her jaw to find an outlet in her chattering teeth.
A woman sat in the chair on the opposite side of the divider. Ivy nearly apologized for the mistake before she recognized her sister.
Holly’s hair was yet another color — a sedate brown — but more uncharacteristic was that she looked healthier than Ivy had seen her in ages. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot. She looked like she’d been eating more than barely enough to keep herself alive.
They picked up the phones and waited through the message informing them that their conversation was being monitored and recorded. Ivy spoke first. “You look good, Hol.”
“This place is like a spa. You look like shit.”
I’m raising your four kids by myself, which will be impossible with my current job, and the man I love told me he loves me and can’t go on like this in the same breath, so I’m not sleeping much. Thanks for noticing.
But she knew better than to think Holly would be interested in her woes. “Why didn’t you call?”
Holly jerked one shoulder inside her khaki jumpsuit. “I was incoherent for the first few days. By the time they let me out of the infirmary, I figured you had everything under control as usual, so what was the point?”
Ivy could think of any number of points. To name a few, “To check on the kids? To let us know you’re alive? Bail?”
“No one would care if I was dead.”
“Holly.”
“And I don’t want bail. I need to be here. It’s... simpler.”
Nobody cares about me was a familiar refrain she sang to solicit reassurance that she was adored, and it wasn’t the first time she had expressed appreciation for externally imposed restraint and the elimination of personal responsibility that came with it.
Nor was it unusual that she ignored the suggestion of making sure her children were safe. She was a purist among narcissists. If the subject wasn’t herself, it didn’t exist in her mind.
“Do you ever think about Poppy?”
Ivy jolted as if an electric current had shot through the phone. She hadn’t heard that name spoken in fifteen years.
Holly didn’t wait for an answer she wasn’t really interested in. “I think about her every day. I worry her adoptive parents are the kind of monsters you hear about on the news. Or they’re inattentive and let some other monster snatch her from the playground.”
The plexiglass prevented Ivy from shaking Holly for being the inattentive parent who exposed her children to monsters.
“She just had her fifteenth birthday, you know. I wonder if she takes after me at that age, doing Jell-O shots to get the taste of dick out of her mouth, or if she’s studying for a test that’s three months away so she has plenty of time to organize a food drive for homeless widows and orphans happening on the same day.”
The latter was a dig at Ivy, whose grades and extracurricular activities Holly had treated as a personal affront. Now, she frequently told Blake he didn’t have to do his homework. At peak wastedness, she told him, Everybody hates nerds. She couldn’t stand that she’d made little beings who failed to reflect her own image from every angle.
“Every day, I think if Derek had married me, if we’d been a family, my life would be different now.”
Only in Holly’s fantasy world did a sixteen-year-old marrying the twenty-four-year-old drug dealer who knocked her up result in a happy ending.
The ploy hadn’t worked when she was a teenager, but that failure hadn’t stopped her from repeating the pattern — find a clone of the worthless guy she’d screwed most often in high school, try to hold his wandering attention by getting pregnant, and be left alone with a baby she’d never wanted and was profoundly incapable of caring for.
“I don’t see my kids. I mean, like, really see them. When the shrink asked me their names, I drew a blank. I had to think to come up with the names of four of my kids. How fucked up is that?”
“Extremely.”
Holly’s eyes narrowed to emerald slivers. She hadn’t wanted to be agreed with that time, apparently.
Too bad. When she was right, she was right.
Holly smoothed her features. “My lawyer says he can get some of the charges reduced and arrange for me to serve my sentence in residential rehab if I appear cooperative and repentant, so if you still want to take the kids, I’ll sign whatever you put in front of me.”
Not because it would be best for the kids. Because it was best for Holly. She would turn them over to the state to get them out of her way if Ivy declined.
She wished she had 7Up and saltines to settle her churning stomach. “I want them.”
When Holly saw an advantage in snatching back what she’d thrown away, a judge in the future would likely overturn anything she agreed to in her current condition. Roger would have to get Holly’s doctor and lawyer to vouch for her competence and comprehension of any legal documents she signed in order to minimize the damage she could cause later.
For the first time, Ivy felt no guilt for expecting the worst from her sister.
She had anticipated something different before coming here — some indication of remorse, if not a transcendent moment of transformation. She wasn’t sure why, other than wishful thinking. Holly had been in trouble every day of her life, and the consequences never changed her behavior for the better. If she learned anything from her mistakes, it was how to get caught less, profit more, and better manipulate a situation in her favor.
She still had not asked a single question about the children she hadn’t seen for three weeks. If she didn’t have a use for them, they weren’t worthy of a passing thought.
Ivy came to the jail with the idea of giving Holly an extended version of the you’re stronger than this pep talk, but that would be a waste of breath. Holly was exactly as strong as she appeared to be. Wes was right. Regardless of what trauma, illness, or addiction contributed to her present circumstances, the woman on the other side of the divider was everything she showed herself to be — pathologically selfish, neglectful, and irresponsible. A petty tyrant in a cute little package.
Ivy could cry for her, take over the responsibilities she abandoned, and love her from a distance, but she could do nothing to transform her into the sister and mother she would rather see.
Holly feigned a pout. “You look so tragic. Lighten up. No wonder you never get laid. Even chubby chasers want a good time, not somebody who looks like she cries all the time.”
Holly had never had a man who wanted her when she wasn’t a good time, who would stick around through bad weddings and sick kids, who would patiently tolerate tantrums and hold her when she cried, who told her to get out of his life if she wouldn’t give him more because he wanted her too much to settle for less.
Ivy had done all she could here. Her time would be better invested elsewhere. “Goodbye, Holly.”
She hung up the phon
e and stood.
Holly slammed her phone against the barrier and shrieked through the glass, “I’m not like you! I can’t be the perfect little doll everyone wants on their shelf!”
Ivy was tempted to scream back that she’d never wanted to be perfect. Would have loved the option of screwing up once in a while like a normal kid without being pounced on for fear one curse word signaled her inevitable decline into a clone of her lying, coke-snorting, loser-fucking big sister. Would be parking her cute little car at her cute little studio apartment and spending her money on travel and education and all the selfish things she’d wanted for herself before she had to take responsibility for someone else’s children.
But for all her rage toward Holly, she wouldn’t change anything about her life if it meant losing any of the love in it now, and she had so much of that. That was her reward for good behavior, while all Holly had was one sister whose love felt more like obligation.
Ivy left without looking back, saving her words for worthier emotions.
The kids were with their grandparents, so Ivy had time to browse every aisle at the hardware store in search of inspiration. The exploration yielded items on her mental list she’d anticipated having to find elsewhere, which was good, but also subjected her to the siren song of new cabinet handles and paint samples that threatened to seduce her away from her quest and her money.
She resisted the handles but succumbed to a handful of color swatches. Painting their rooms might help the kids feel less like guests.
She wasn’t yet ready to see any man on her doorstep, and the one who turned to wave as she pulled into the driveway wasn’t the one for whom she would make an exception.
He took the shopping bag from her while she fumbled with her keys. “What brings you to this neck of the woods, Jared?”
“Jen and Roger invited me to dinner as thanks for letting him stay in my guest room while they work things out.”
“That was nice of you.” Jen crashed with Ivy; Roger crashed with Jared. No wonder those two thought they were the perfect couple.
