Every Other Weekend

by TA Moore

  “Yeah, it’s just with Byron being hurt,” Kelly said. He stood up and carried Maxie over to the cot Mom had moved out of the spare room—now Byron’s again—and into the kitchen. It had bolsters tied all around the side, fat and white and not at all approved by the baby sites that Kelly had read. He ignored the urge to argue and laid Maxie down on top of the blanket, where he squirmed and gurgled to himself. “He needs his sleep, and Maxie doesn’t sleep through the night. I suppose you and Dad could get up for him….”

  Kathleen snorted. She claimed she could count on one hand the number of times Jim got up to feed any of the boys at night. For a man who’d spring awake at the sound of a teenage boy’s foot midsneak on the stairs, he could sleep through a baby’s wails like he’d taken a pill.

  “I don’t know,” she hedged. “Cole told me that you had a friend over. Now, I’ve nothing against you getting back out there. I want you to find a nice boy, someone to settle down with for a while. It’s just, well, you can’t ‘hook up’ with strangers when you’ve a baby in the house. Who knows what they might do?”

  “I work with Clayton. I’ve known him for a while,” Kelly said. He swallowed the bitter taste in his throat. “Besides, I don’t think he’s going to be back.”

  Kathleen pursed her lips. “Well, then he’s a fool,” she said. “Any man would be lucky to have you, sweetheart. You’ve a good job, a good heart, and look at that face. You and Byron are both the picture of your dad as a young man, and he could have been in the movies, you know.”

  Yes, Kelly had heard both versions of that story. The one Kathleen had polished up for the boys and the other police wives, and the one Jim told if you got enough whiskeys in him at the bar. In Kathleen’s version she never mentioned the director was drunk and just wearing chaps when he made the offer.

  It still supported the idea that his dad was handsome, Kelly supposed.

  “It just didn’t work out,” Kelly said. “He’s not really interested in anything long-term, and neither am I right now. I’ve got other things to deal with.”

  It was the truth. It really was. Somehow it just felt like a lie.

  Kathleen sighed. “Well, you’ll find someone else,” she reassured him. “You’re still young, and it’s not like you have to worry about a biological clock.”

  From the back of the house, Aggie yelled, “Go to hell, Byron!” and then slammed the bathroom door.

  Kathleen pretended not to hear and finished putting Byron’s lunch together. “Get the door for me, would you?”

  Kelly went over to push it open, his body a long stretch against the wall. “Okay,” he said. “What do you think, though? Probably best if Aggie or I mind Maxie tonight?”

  Kathleen shrugged an “I suppose” his way as she went out past him. “Just make sure you bring him back in the morning. I want him to get to know Byron better.”

  She went down the hall to the guest bedroom, and Kelly headed to the downstairs bathroom. It was a good bet. He rapped on the door once—just in case Aggie was actually using it for the intended purpose—and nudged it open.

  Aggie stood on the toilet seat, elbows on the window sill, and blew smoke out the cracked window toward the garden next door. She glanced around at Kelly with an expression that managed to be both guilty and defiant at the same time.

  “Don’t tell Cole,” she said.

  “It’s bad for you.”

  She snorted and took a drag. “I’m a doctor. I know it’s bad for me. Going to jail would be bad for me too. So I had to make a risk assessment.” Smoke escaped her mouth as she talked, and she batted it around with her hand. “I’m going to tell you something, and this one you can tell Cole—I hate your brother.”

  Kelly sat down on the edge of the bath, and his phone dug uncomfortably into his hip.

  “Cole or Byron?”

  She flicked ash into the cup of her hand. “Both.”

  “What did Byron do?”

  She hung the hand with a cigarette out the window. It wasn’t just anger in the set of her mouth and around her jaw. It was something a lot like pain.

  “He offered to sell us Maxie,” she said.

  For a long, disconcerting moment, Kelly felt nothing much—not even the anger and frustration he’d kept tamped down in his gut since the day before. It was just the sort of statement that didn’t make sense outside of the context of a TV screen and a rugged, trustworthy detective. Normal people with jobs, who ate pickle-and-ham sandwiches their mom made, didn’t try to sell a child to other perfectly normal people.

  Except apparently Byron did.

  “Fuck,” he managed at last.

  “Yeah,” Aggie said. “That’s what I said. I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t mean it and he just wanted to press my buttons. Who’d even say that, though, about their own child?”

  The anger leaked back in. Kelly could feel the scorch of it as he breathed, like the burn from bad whiskey. It wasn’t useful—a hard lesson from his childhood was that once Byron got you mad, he’d make you look like the bad guy—but he couldn’t get on top of it.

  “On the bright side, at least it was you,” he said. “If he was up and about, Maxie might just have been gone by morning.”

  Aggie shot him an angry look. “It’s not funny.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  A tinge of gray washed over Aggie’s face. Her fingers trembled as she pulled her hand back in through the window to draw on the cigarette.

  “He would—”

  “Is this still about the money he wanted from Cole?” he interrupted tightly.

  Aggie pressed the heel of her hand against the bony arch of her brow, and the smoke was lost in her dark curls as she mentally shifted tracks.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I told Cole that if he wanted to sell the house, I’d divorce him, and we could divvy it up fifty-fifty. Up to him. He’s pissed off at me—slept in his office for the last three nights—but it seems like he wants to stay married. Enough to tell Byron no anyhow. So instead of a loan, he offered a sale instead.”

  “What does he need it for?” Kelly asked.

  Aggie shrugged as she pinched the cigarette out between thumb and forefinger. “Being an asshole isn’t cheap?”

  Kelly roughly scrubbed his hands over his face. Most of the time his brain adapted to the missing eye. It filled in details and smudged the edges around the missing slice. His hand right in front of his face stumped it, though, and he was abruptly aware of the blind spot and the cool weight of his glass eye.

  It made his eye socket itch for some reason. It was a pinprick of misfired nerves, right at the back of the eye. He stood up abruptly.

  “What are you going to do?” Aggie asked. She shoved the butt into her pocket and jumped down off the toilet to grab his sleeve. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “You don’t even…. You don’t know the half of it, of what he’s done,” Kelly snapped. His voice echoed off the tiles, and habit and a desire not to upset his mom made him drop it back down. Not that he was sure she deserved that. “I’m going to kill him.”

  Aggie winced and tightened her grip. Her nails dug into his bicep. “Don’t be stupid. That won’t help anyone.”

  That was always the problem, wasn’t it? By the time you caught up with whatever damage Byron had done, it seemed like the least destructive course to just tidy up and move on—every time. Eventually you had to admit there was always going to be a next time.

  “I have to do something,” he blurted out as he pulled his arm away from Aggie.

  The sharp notes of “Mack the Knife” from his pocket interrupted him. He probably wouldn’t have killed Byron, though. Kelly hoped not, for his own sake. He wasn’t sure Father Peters was up to forgiving fratricide.

  “Take the call,” Aggie told him. She shoved him down the hall. “Go outside and talk to whoever that is. Do that. We can work out what to do about your brother later.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  KELLY DIDN’T take the call. Not right then a
nyway. He let it ring to silence and walked down the street, far enough away from the house that it felt like he’d left. Then he finally called Clayton back. He hadn’t outwalked the anger, but he’d gotten too far away to do anything about it.

  “I can’t do this,” he blurted out. It wasn’t what he planned to lead with. He thought he’d start with hello and segue from there. But the minute the line connected, all the other words sank away and he was left with those four to lead with. “Everyone feels bad for him, and I just want to kill him. My mom made him a sandwich, and I hope he chokes on it. The stupid selfish asshole.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, and then a short, harsh laugh.

  “And I expected your qualms to be around testifying against him,” Clayton said.

  His voice was cool and precise, the lawyer voice. A couple of times, when he was at the court, Kelly had watched Clayton as he politely cut some guy’s mistress’s story into confetti. It was weirdly hot, all detachment and sharp edges, and it provided an unexpected comfort.

  Coolness and detachment were two things that Kelly felt he needed right then, even if he did have to siphon them from someone else’s voice on a phone call.

  “No,” he said. Then honestly squeezed the rest of the words out of him. “Not yet anyhow. I mean, I’m not going to back out or anything. It’s not going to be easy, though.”

  He stopped as he reached the end of the street. If he turned left, he could walk to the café where his dad used to stop on his way home because a burger and coffee on his breath was an easier fight than smoke and booze. If he turned right, there was a park where he used to hang out to watch people with their dogs. He’d always wanted a dog, but they couldn’t have one because of Byron’s allergies.

  Instead of going to either, he sat down on the curb. It was quiet. No one was around. And if someone thought he was a drunk, then it would serve his family right.

  “You might not have to,” Clayton said. “I need to talk to Byron. The hospital said he’d discharged himself.”

  “Yeah,” Kelly said. “Well, people kept telling him what to do, and he hates that. Mom’s got the guest room set up for him until he can fend for himself again. Why do you want to talk to him now? I thought Baker said—”

  “What’s the address?” It was less hot when that detached, dismissive voice took a layer off your skin. He hesitated.

  “Kelly.”

  “Hey, if you meet my parents, we’re going steady. I already warned you about that.” Kelly tossed the joke in to buy himself a minute to think. He supposed it wasn’t a very good joke. It felt a bit sad. And this wasn’t going to be the start of anything, just the end—not that Clayton had ever wanted more, but who wanted even a casual relationship with someone whose family was as screwed up as his. He licked his lips and frowned down at the concrete scoop of the gutter between his feet. Ants crawled around his boots. “Look, I appreciate wanting to punch Byron, but my dad does have a gun. If you’re looking for a fight—”

  “Not today.” He could hear the thin, tightly amused smile in Clayton’s voice, almost feel it against his skin. “I just need to talk to him. It’s important.”

  Kelly rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. His skin was hot under his fingers.

  “All right,” he said finally. It wasn’t much of a concession. Clayton could find the address if he tried. He wouldn’t even have to try that hard. “Just. My family doesn’t know anything about this yet. They still think he’s… a good cop hit by a car.”

  “Close enough,” Clayton said. “He’s a bad cop hit by a car. Where is he?”

  Kelly rhymed off the address. It was the first address he’d ever known, the one he learned to tell the teacher at school and the taxi driver when Mom or one of his brothers couldn’t get there. In an emergency it was probably still the address he’d have given as he was wheeled into the hospital.

  Expiration-date lovers meant you didn’t get to depend on them in a crisis.

  All of a sudden, it didn’t feel like home anymore.

  Clayton repeated the address to someone and then hung up.

  “You okay, hon?” a woman asked as she stopped, her sandaled feet a safe distance from him. “Are you sick?”

  Kelly pushed himself to his feet. “Sorry. I’m fine,” he said. “Just got a call and….”

  The woman winced and tapped her cheekbone with a touch of empathy as she saw his face. “Oh, your poor face.”

  He grinned wryly and rubbed his thumb over his eyebrow. “Rough week.”

  “Hope it gets better.”

  “No signs so far.”

  She gave him a sympathetic smile and headed down the street to her house. Kelly brushed the grit off the seat of his jeans and wondered how slowly he could walk back.

  Not slowly enough to beat LA traffic.

  It was an hour of stiff conversation, jangled bells, and a heavy, sick anger in his gut that roiled back to life every time he thought it was gone. And there was half an hour of silently worried looks from Aggie before she got called back to the morgue.

  “…just need to wait for the manifold to get here,” Jim said as he popped the tab pointedly on a ginger beer. He looked sweaty, his scalp pink through his cropped hair, and he’d scabbed his knuckles on the engine. “Some bloke in Idaho I found online.”

  Kelly grabbed a handful of chips. “You going to actually get that old Jeep running?”

  “Eh, don’t know. I’ve had a few offers. No point in fixing it up if I’m just gonna hand it on. Besides, you buy an old car like that, you want to get your hands stuck into the engine.” He leaned back on the chair, balanced his weight on the creaky back legs, and gave Maxie a fond look. “Maybe get some new project. Something I can get this one and the girls to work on with me. Something they’d like.”

  Kathleen sniffed as she poured bourbon over a bucket of split ribs. “Betty and Lou don’t have the time to spend their weekends getting dirty, Jim,” she said. “You know Trisha has them signed up for all sorts of classes. They have no time to do anything, even with Trisha’s mother to ferry them around.”

  “Well, if she and Wilde get divorced”—Jim shrugged—“he’ll have custody some days.”

  Kathleen hissed at him. “Don’t say things like that,” she said. “Father Peters will be here tomorrow. What if he heard you saying something like that? They’re not getting divorced, and if they do, we’re not telling the Father.”

  Even Maxie looked skeptical, and most of his attention was on whether or not he could put his foot in his mouth. Before Kelly had to think of something to say, his phone buzzed briskly and someone rapped on the front door.

  “Are you expecting anyone?” Kathleen asked as she shook globs of barbecue sauce off her fingers. She reached for a dish towel to wipe her hands, and worry pinched her lips together as they rapped the door again. “Do you think they’ve found something out about Byron’s accident?”

  Kelly scooped his phone up off the table as Clayton’s name scrolled over the screen. He slid it into his back pocket and pushed the chair back. The legs were loud as they scraped over the tiles as he stood up.

  “I’ll get it,” he said. “It’s for me.”

  He dodged the immediate questions and went to let Clayton in.

  “Jesus,” he said when he opened the door. Shock flattened his voice. “Are you all right?”

  There were dark circles under Clayton’s eyes, bruised in as though someone had dug their thumbs into the soft skin, and his arm was tucked into a bleach-white sling that sliced across the front of his shirt. It was yesterday’s shirt—yesterday’s suit—with the collar tugged loose and stains on the cuffs.

  Clayton looked surprised for a second, and then he glanced down at his bandaged hand. He moved his fingers stiffly.

  “Last night some of your brother’s friends wanted to express their opinion on his… situation.” Clayton glanced past Kelly as he paused and then settled on that last word. “It’s just bruises.”

&n
bsp; Kelly gingerly touched his hand. The skin was hot under the rough bandages, and he reached up to cup Clayton’s face. He grazed his thumb along the stubble-rough edge of Clayton’s jaw and slid his hand back to grip the nape of his neck.

  “You should have called me.”

  “I was at the hospital,” Clayton said. “And I had to deal with the police. There was nothing you could have done.”

  Maybe not, but Kelly wished he’d been there anyway. He supposed that was Clayton’s call to make, though, so he swallowed the bitter taste of rejection.

  “What happened?”

  Clayton reached up to grip Kelly’s wrist and pulled it down from his face. “I’ll tell you later.”

  From behind Kelly, he heard Jim clear his throat.

  “This the friend you were talking about?” he asked. “You might want to ask him in off the doorstep.”

  Kelly felt a jolt of anger—like electricity under his skin—but he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as though Jim wanted to kick Clayton out, but something still rubbed him wrong about the way Jim said it. Maybe it was the carefully unweighted friend. It wasn’t the time to deal with him. Kelly ignored the frustrated growl in the back of his mind that wondered if it ever would be time.

  “Clayton,” he said as he finally got around to letting go of him. He stepped back and gestured. “My dad, Jim. Jim, this is Clayton.”

  Jim scratched the side of his nose, cleared his throat, and gave a stiff incline of his chin.

  “Clayton.” He glanced briefly at Kelly, rubbed his hand briskly on the thigh of his jeans, and then thrust it out. “Nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  There was a pause. It dragged out long enough to be awkward, and then the flinty hardness of Clayton’s face softened. He gripped Jim’s hand for a brisk no-nonsense shake.

  “You too,” he said. “Sorry, but I’m actually here to speak to your other son Byron. If that’s all right with you.”

  Jim looked confused, but when he was halfway through a shrug, Kathleen butted in from the kitchen. “Why?” she asked sharply as she stalked out. “He’s not well. I don’t know if he wants to see anyone.”