Made for Breaking

by Lauren Gilley

  Drew shrugged. “I can crash on the couch.”

  When Lisa didn’t get immediately to her feet, he pulled out the chair beside her and sat. Down on her level, he could see the fluttering of her lashes as she blinked furiously at the table top. A shadow of a bruise was forming on her temple and anger tightened like a fist in his gut; the bastard had hit her. It wasn’t enough that he was trying to…well, he didn’t like to run all the scenarios…but to know that the tall shadow he’d clocked had hit someone who he’d clearly outsized and outweighed…That was pulling all sorts of strings Drew hadn’t known were dangling inside him.

  “You hated that job.” He meant it as a joke, but it came out more consoling than that.

  She brushed her knuckles over her eyes and when she lifted her head, she didn’t look like she was about to cry. If he’d ever seen a situation in which a chick was perfectly entitled to some tears, this was it, but she refused to give in to that. The delicate lines of her face hardened. “This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me,” she said fiercely. “I’m not the stupid…idiot…stupid” - her cheeks flushed with mounting anger - “girl who just lets things happen to her!”

  Drew couldn’t help it: he wanted to smile. He didn’t do it, but the impulse was there, as was the sensation that her anti-girl-ness was endearing in its own way. “I’ve seen grown-ass men get mugged and carjacked.”

  “So?!” She threw up her hands.

  “So,” he explained, “you’re not…’some stupid girl,’” he used her words, “because you couldn’t fight off a dude who got the drop on you and was much bigger than you.”

  Her scowl told him he’d missed the mark.

  “Are you mad at me?” he guessed with a sigh, figuring it was true.

  The anger bled out of her face as she shook her head. She sighed. Pulled her lower lip between her teeth. “No.” Her eyes darted between him and her clenched hands. She always guarded what she said to him, so when she spoke, he was shocked. “I’m mad” - her voice was stilted – “that I…that I needed someone to…come to my rescue.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to be a bother to anyone.”

  He bit back another smile. “It wasn’t a bother.”

  “Because my dad pays you.”

  “Because I like you.”

  She leaned back in her chair, hands braced on the table, and blinked at him. Her brows drew together and he thought she was trying to be nasty with him, but she failed. “Well, you shouldn’t.”

  This time, he did smile, and she glanced away from him.

  “I’m serious,” she insisted, but her voice quavered just a little and he knew she was trying to convince herself more than she was him. The girl was all kinds of screwed up.

  She stood and he did too, his useless, casted hand hovering at her elbow as she wobbled. And maybe it was dumb to think that she might actually ask for or accept help, he realized, as she pushed her chair in and headed for the door.

  She stopped, though, and his senses, though already feeling the first numbing strokes of the pain meds, came to attention as she halted beside him. She stared at the floor a long moment, drew in a deep breath. And then before he could respond, she turned and slipped her arms around his waist in a quick, tight hug. Her whole body was shaking as she pressed it, however briefly, to his, and when she glanced up at his face, her green eyes were slick with moisture and brimming with all the terror she’d been trying gallantly not to show so far. She stretched up on her toes and touched the softest of fleeting kisses against his cheek, and then she was gone, moving away from him, and Drew wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing.

  Ray didn’t sleep. At a quarter past eight, he was ensconced in the room he’d turned into his office, drowning in a sea of paper.

  In the front left corner of the house, set off the dining room in what had once been some kind of parlor or sitting room, his massive, claw-foot desk had been wedged diagonally so that the back of his chair was snugged into a corner of the room. A tall window dressed in wooden, horizontal blinds kept the sunlight at bay, the two lamps on either corner of the desk providing the illumination he needed. The floors were the same bare, creaking wood as throughout the rest of the house and the walls were some vague shade of cream that Cheryl doubtless knew the name of. The only pieces of furniture, save the desk, were relics from some generation of grandparents or other: a spindly-legged, striped sofa and a small, glass-paned cabinet that he used to hold his law tomes.

  He’d known sleep would be elusive, but when it proved nonexistent, he’d bent his focus toward productivity: a frenzied, insane sort of productivity. After he’d been expelled from the bar, he’d spent a week in the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels. Then he’d realized that the only thing to be done was to try and maintain some scrap of the life he’d built for his family, and so he’d put his more oily traits to the next best use. Now, aside from King Customs, he owned two businesses.

  The security firm, which was really just Sly, Eddie and sometimes Mark, was listed in all his accounts under the title RBSS – Russell Business Security Solutions. It was vague and direct at the same time, sounding much more self-important than what it truly was: hired muscle who served as everything from party bouncers to executioners of shady nighttime shake downs. The work was not consistent, but his costs were almost zero save the guys’ salary, which, though decent by their standards, was considerably smaller than what he charged his customers.

  Adamant was a payroll company that serviced two hundred businesses in Alpharetta that handled many of its clients’ HR responsibilities in addition to depositing money in employee pay accounts. Ray had scraped and scratched and fought to get the loan necessary to buy the company, and now his banker blushed at their infrequent meetings because he’d doubted Ray’s ability to make payments. Idiot. He always made his payments. Though Adamant was run by a former Russell & Carillo hopeful intern who’d decided he belonged in an office and not a courtroom, and Ray trusted him, he made a point of stopping by at least twice a week, but usually more often than that, to check on things.

  And then there were his stock investments, which, given the current state of the economy, added up to shit.

  None of the paperwork strewn across his desk was at all relevant to any of his business ventures.

  He had photocopied news clippings dated three years ago that detailed Carl Shilling’s trial. Ray’s very last trial. He had all the old Shilling files he was supposed to have destroyed when he was disbarred. He had printouts of the cell phone pictures he’d taken of Shilling’s car at the La Quinta. It was all spread around him and a pen was clamped between his fingers as he hashed theories on a yellow legal pad.

  The night they’d gone to “visit” Shilling, Mark had said he thought the man looked shaken. Broken. Afraid of them. And if Ray hadn’t known him to be a murderous son of a bitch, he would have agreed. Because it was hard to rectify whoever Drew had described as “trying to snatch” his daughter with the sweating, skinny Carl Shilling who’d just been let out on parole. But it was the only lead he had, the only explanation that made any sense, and he was jotting notes as fast as his cramped fingers could fly over the paper.

  He was so concentrated that he didn’t hear the door glide open, or hear Cheryl’s bare feet move across the planks. He sensed her presence, more than anything, and glanced up to find her with a steaming coffee mug clasped in both hands, wearing khaki cargo shorts and a loose, white, sleeveless top that reached nearly to mid-thigh. She’d showered and applied her makeup; her hair had been dried and fell in loose tumbles over her shoulders. But she looked like he felt: exhausted and wired all at once.

  As he watched her, feeling guilty, her eyes fell over what he was working on, and her mouth pulled to the side in a grimace. “Ray.” Her tone was gently chiding. “What are you doing?”

  It was so obvious a question that he knew it wasn’t real. He glanced down at the hard-pressed, slanted letters he’d written across the page in w
hat looked like the harried hand of a madman. “What’s it look like?” he said, reaching to gather the scattered papers to the center of the desk.

  “What it always looks like,” she answered, and he glanced up again and saw her lift her brows in a knowing way. “Like you’re taking everything on all by yourself.”

  He held her gaze until he couldn’t, then he sighed. They’d had a version of this argument hundreds of times, and he’d learned it was easier if he didn’t argue, but heard her out. He waited as she crossed to the sofa and perched on its edge, took a sip of coffee.

  “You’re not responsible for taking care of this whole family,” she said, as expected, and he felt himself nodding. “Not even from murderers.”

  His head snapped up, attention snared by this addition to her speech.

  Her eyes were full of fear and pleading. But bravery too. “Tell us. Tell all of us. The guys and Johnny and Lisa and me. I won’t live inside a horror movie full of dumb teenagers who insist on splitting up and pretending they don’t believe in ghosts.” Her chin lifted to a defiant angle. “We’re gonna sit down and we’re gonna figure out who’s doing this. And we’re gonna make it stop. You hear?”

  Even though he felt like he was being slowly strangled, Ray smiled. “I love you. You know that?”

  “I do.” She returned his smile. “Which is why I know you’ll tell us.”

  23

  On her stomach, on the love seat, a pillow that was nearly as big as she was filling up her arms and propping up her head, Lisa could find no shame in her baggy sweats, lack of makeup, or current state ensconced beneath a light blanket in front of the TV. She’d had worse shots to the head, and she’d been to parties more exhausting than her attack the night before. So it was with great reluctance that she acknowledged that it was her nerves – tattered, fried and totally done – that had pushed her fatigue onto a whole new plane of misery. Her head pounded, a vague nausea tickled at her stomach, and her limbs felt weighted down with lead. She wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. Except, as dawn had fallen over the house, as the Vicodin had kicked in, she’d tumbled headlong into a nightmare that had sent her bolting upright in bed, breathing in ragged gulps, sweat plastering her pajamas to her body.

  So as noon melted into afternoon, she tried to find some comfort in resting, if not sleeping. At another time, she might have felt like a slug for it, but she was past the point of caring.

  There was a Braves game on and Drew was sitting on the sofa, near enough that she could hear the ice cubes shift in his glass every time he raised it to take a swallow. His presence was comforting and she was done pretending it wasn’t.

  “You ever had one of those?”

  Lisa forced her head up and glanced at the TV and the DQ commercial that was playing across its wide screen. A new kind of Blizzard was being advertised and she gathered it involved brownie pieces of some sort. “No.” She rested her chin on the pillow again. “You rethinking your diet or something?”

  “I am when I watch that commercial.”

  He’d been striving to engage her in light, benign conversation all afternoon. Rather than annoying, his occasional comments were welcome reminders that she was being watched over. In some part of her brain she knew that she was overly grateful for his presence because she was still so shaken from the night before. But that didn’t stop her from clinging to him – figuratively speaking, anyway. If that clinging became physical, she was in for some seriously poor decision-making.

  On the floor, half-lying beneath the coffee table, Hektor stretched and groaned in his sleep. The light coming in through the windows was gray and heavy with the promise of an afternoon storm. It was almost the perfect rainy day.

  The motion detector chimed as the front door was opened and two familiar male voices echoed off the high ceiling in the foyer. Sly and Eddie were talking about whatever tail they’d picked up at a bar the night before and as their booted footsteps moved toward the back of the house, Lisa twisted around so she could get a look at Drew’s face. As she expected, his jaw was clenched in apprehension. As far as she knew, he and Eddie hadn’t mended fences.

  “Yo,” Eddie greeted as he stepped into the family room. He carried an overstuffed black duffel bag in each hand and he chucked them both at Drew. “You left your shit behind.”

  Clearly, there was no truce.

  One of the bags landed with a muffled thump in Drew’s lap, but the other flipped over the arm of the sofa and crashed into the legs of the hand-me-down end table, sending the glass lamp it held tumbling into open space. Drew made a grab for it and saved it from shattering against the floor, cursing.

  “Hey!” Cheryl protested as she entered via the kitchen. “Who said you could throw things in my house?!”

  Sly smacked the back of his friend’s head. “Told you, dumbass.” Then he turned toward Lisa. “How you doin’, sweetheart?”

  She sat up and consolidated her pillow and blanket in the corner of the loveseat, her knees draw up to her chest. “Fine.”

  “Liar.” He plopped down beside her but didn’t push the issue.

  “Who was it?” Eddie asked as he propped a shoulder against one of the built in bookshelves.

  “No idea,” she said with a sigh. Admitting that was almost as frustrating as racking her brain and coming up empty. She’d tried to recall some tiny, recognizable detail about her attacker, and still, she had no clue.

  Sly and Eddie traded a meaningful look and Cheryl sighed. “Oh, no, no more of that secret shit.” She stepped back to the threshold and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Ray!” she hollered, “they’re here!”

  “Dining room!” his answer came echoing back.

  Cheryl nodded and motioned for everyone to follow her.

  Dread sank like a stone in Lisa’s belly. In her memory, every official, dining room-held family meeting was brought about by some negative life change that affected all of them. Like her father’s disbarment. Like the news that they’d have to leave Alpharetta and return to Cartersville. And this time, as a little stab of pain radiated up her arm thanks to her valiant struggles, she knew this meeting somehow related to her. Just as she knew that Ray didn’t address all of them unless he was out of alternatives.

  The dining room table was a Russell family heirloom: sixteen feet long with a scarred, but still shiny mahogany top, legs that were heavy white pillars carved with intricate grape vines. The silver and crystal chandelier above it was original to the house and tarnished despite all of Cheryl’s best efforts, but it, like the table, belonged in the room with its sweeping windows and floor-length drapes. As a family, they were transient, but some pieces of history had earned their permanent places.

  Ray was seated at the head of the table, facing the windows, and Mark and Johnny joined them all from upstairs as they took their places: Cheryl at the foot, the rest of them in between. Lisa situated herself so she was between her cousin and Drew, the boxer buffered by Cheryl on the other side, and it took her a moment to realize that she’d been willfully shielding him from Eddie. Protection went both ways, she supposed.

  Ray worked his hands back over his head – if he kept the habit up, he’d be completely bald – and then faced them with a look that somehow managed to capture all their gazes at once. “I think I know what’s going on,” he said without preamble, and proceeded to tell them.

  “Do you feel better?”

  Lisa hadn’t intended to wind up on the front porch with Drew again, but somehow it had happened and she wasn’t complaining. The rest of the guys were in front of the ball game and her mother was prepping dinner after having refused any of Lisa’s help; Ellen was coming over, she’d said, and Lisa “needed her rest.” So she sat at the edge of the porch, legs dangling over the side, the breeze tugging at her hair. The roiling clouds overhead were the color of soot, the afternoon was dark around them, and lightning streaked in forked tongues across the sky.

  “Not really,” she admitted. He was sitting beside her, legs f
olded, elbows on his knees, and she turned to regard him. He was watching her, like he always was. “I almost wish this was some grudge against me. Now Dad thinks this is all on him.”

  “Well,” Drew said after a beat of silence, “it is on him. He caused this, Lisa. It’s not something you have to beat yourself up over.”

  She forced a chuckle. “Right. Plenty of people to do the beating for me.”

  He didn’t smile.

  “Lame joke?”

  “Yep.”

  She blew out a breath that ruffled her hair and watched the lightning tear open the clouds. In a matter of minutes, a curtain of rain would uncurl from the heavens like a bucket tipping over, but for now, it held off. “I’m scared,” she admitted, and felt heat bloom in her cheeks. “I feel like a weak-ass,” she continued, “and I hate it. I hate someone controlling my life: where I can work, whether or not I can even be alone.” Frustration was welling up in her chest and she checked her speech before she started hyperventilating in anger.

  When Drew’s hand landed on top of her head, she was so startled her spine went rigid. And then his thumb swept down along her temple, over her bruise, and pushed her hair back behind her ear. It was meant to be comforting, but was awkward, like he didn’t know quite whether he ought to touch her or not and had settled for patting her head like she was a dog.

  But at the same time, the gesture was terribly sweet in its uncertainty and innocence.

  Lisa didn’t look at him again, not even when he pulled his hand away. She was afraid her smile might be mistaken for making fun of him, and that he wouldn’t reach out again after he saw it. And that wasn’t what she wanted – him refraining from reaching out.

  God help me, she thought, but here come the bad decisions.

  24

  “Johnny,” Lisa called through the open door into the garage. “Come here.” She kept her voice low because the two windows in the office were open and Ellen was making startling progress across the lot in her peep-toe pumps.