Made for Breaking

by Lauren Gilley

  “Because I’m a girl?”

  “Because that’s not the kind of decision a man wants on his conscience for the rest of his life. I know what it feels like. I don’t want you to know it…unless you absolutely have to.”

  She was crying again, fat tears flooding her tender eyes. “Did I – Did I make the wrong decision today?”

  His fingers rustled in her hair. “You made the exact decision I wanted you to,” he said, voice sounding thick, “because you’re a strong, brave young woman. I couldn’t be prouder of you.”

  She let him gather her up against his side like she was a child, her arms going tight around her waist. “I love you so much,” he murmured against the top of her head.

  She cried, too exhausted to try and stem the tears. When she’d calmed, racked with hiccups and shivering, she asked, “Where’s Drew? I made a mess of things with him. I should apologize.”

  It was silent a beat and she felt Ray’s arm stiffen around her.

  “What?”

  “Drew’s gone. His stuff’s gone. We have no idea where he went.”

  And as it turned out, she still had some tears left.

  Tristan’s friend Will with the kidnap-happy hands hadn’t been hard to find. Trevor at Double Vision had been helpful. And Will hadn’t been able to fight anything that wasn’t a hundred-and-two pound girl. Drew hadn’t even broken a sweat. He hoped Will had permanent brain damage.

  The street was quiet in the sinister way of every bad part of town in every part of the country. Dogs barking and being silenced with a whimper. Quick, scurried snatches of conversation through windows. Dark doorways. Rustle of uncut grass. It was nothing like the manicured, tree-lined drive of antebellum relics where the Russells lived. It was nothing like home.

  But he didn’t have a home.

  He hoisted his duffel up higher on his shoulder and quickened his pace. There was a single light on in Ricky’s front room, and if he hurried, he might catch the bastard before he drank himself into his nightly stupor.

  Ricky wasn’t alone, though. In the heaving shadows of the front lawn, a long finger of black broke away from the trees and moved toward him. “What the fuck do you want?” Josh’s angry voice floated out of the darkness, and then he breached the puddle of light from the streetlamp, face twisted with cruel lines.

  Drew held his ground. He was, once again, the guy with nothing to lose, and that was still more dangerous than anything Josh wanted to dish out. “I wanted to apologize,” he said.

  Josh hawked and spat on the ground. “Fuck you.”

  “I’m serious. I wanna apologize to you and Ricky. And…” This was the hard part. “See if I can get my job back. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “What happened? Your pretty little princess bitch got tired of you?”

  He ground his teeth, anger flickering at the edges of his calm at the insult. But he said, “Something like that.”

  Josh’s grin was nasty. “Job back, huh?” He chuckled. “Yeah. I bet Ricky’ll be thrilled.”

  32

  Two Months Later

  Murder case reopened was a headline across the top of Ray’s Wednesday paper. He skimmed the piece: New information has come to light on the brutal slaying of Rene and Anna Shilling four years ago…Husband, Carl Shilling, was accused of the murder…Shilling’s estranged son…expected to go to trial…

  “You’re not listening.”

  Ray lowered his paper and spared his brother a glance over the top of it. They were in the garage, Ray on a camp chair, feet propped on the work bench in front of him, Mark black all over with grease and toweling at it ineffectually. He was grinning, white teeth flashing in his dirty face. “No,” Ray agreed. “I’m not.”

  Unperturbed, Mark swept an arm toward the sleek length of car parked beside him in the bay, grin going idiot-big. “I said, have you seen her?”

  “How could I not? That goddamn gold eagle blinded me when I walked in the shop.”

  Mark laughed, and in the spirit of being a brother who was worth a shit, Ray got to his feet and jammed his hands in his back pockets. “Do I get the guided tour?”

  “With headsets and everything.”

  The Trans Am, completely revamped and taking up valuable garage space, would have earned a Burt Reynolds seal of approval. Mark had painted it black, and revived the eagle on the hood; the seats were tan leather and all the parts, down to the knobs on the radio, were vintage, ordered and bartered and pilfered from other Pontiacs.

  “She’s beautiful,” Ray had to admit. “But.” He gave Mark a flat look. “In the meantime, how many customer cars have you guys finished?”

  Mark’s smile didn’t slip. “No comment.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “I figured.”

  Behind him, a whistle drew his attention. He turned and found Sly coming in out of the sun, garage shadows falling over him. He plucked the last inch of his cigarette out of his mouth and ground it out on the sole of his boot.

  “You guys take two hour lunch breaks these days?” Ray asked.

  Sly ignored the jab and braced a shoulder against one of the ceiling support poles, arms folded. “I was doing a little recon on a lead I got last week,” he explained. His eyes were an eerie color in the shade, almost colorless. A muscle in his jaw ticked and it might have been a substitute for a smile or a scowl; it was anyone’s guess. “I found Drew.”

  Ray expected a reaction; he expected to feel a hard rush of hate and disgust go punching through his gut just at the sound of the boy’s name. He’d never had even a fleeting affection for the boxer, and knowing what he’d done to Lisa should have ensured a visceral recoil at news of him.

  Instead, he felt…nothing but a warm slide of interest. A piqued curiosity. A moment of Huh. How’s he doing, by the way? There was no hate, no contempt, and maybe…maybe even…damn, was he concerned?

  “He’s back with Bullard,” Sly said. “Bare knuckle boxing for shit money and probably boosting electronics too.”

  “Damn,” Mark said. “He went back to Bullard?”

  “He didn’t think he was wanted anywhere else,” Ray said grimly.

  “What happened with all that?” Sly asked. “He just took off that night.”

  His stare made it clear he knew exactly what had happened, and Ray frowned. He was wrong this time. “I dunno, really.”

  “He’s not a bad kid,” Mark said. “Quiet. Respectful. Not afraid to get hit.” Ray could feel his brother’s gaze against his profile and it was accusing. “Far be it from me to try and run your business, brother, but he’s – ”

  “A good fit. Yeah, I know.”

  “He’s fighting tonight,” Sly said. “At Dunbar’s.”

  Which meant they could go pick him up, if they wanted to. If they wanted to pull him out of the shithole of his life a second time and tell him to stay for good. And what would that picture look like? Where would he live? How much of a charity case was he going to be?

  He didn’t have those answers, he realized, because it wasn’t his decision to make. He sighed. “Ask Lisa what she wants to do.”

  Sly’s brows gave a little jump.

  “It’s her call,” Ray said. “I won’t hire him if she doesn’t want me to.”

  But he’d let the punk live in the house with them if that’s what his little girl wanted.

  She’d heard, via some nebulous web article or other, maybe at church – she couldn’t remember – that following a crisis, a person looked at her life in a whole new light. She was thankful for every boring, mundane day after she’d stared down the barrel of true terror.

  Lisa wanted that to be true, but unfortunately, it just wasn’t. It wasn’t that she wasn’t thankful – she was clinging to her family and to her job, her best friend and her dog and every moment they got to exist, alive and well. And it wasn’t that she wished for a charmed life. But each time a nightmare slithered through her brain, bringing with it Tristan’s face and the terrible thing she’d almost done, she woke wi
th a start and reached out through the sheets…for nothing. Because she was alone. And she’d always been alone. Being alone wasn’t the problem; being without Drew was. And it was dreadful. When she thought about Rene and Anna Shilling, and what might have happened to her mother, and to her, she shivered and wished her silent, thoughtful boxer was staring at her. She wished like hell that she didn’t still want him, but she did, and she tortured herself with the last wounded look on his face before he’d walked out of her life. He hadn’t failed her, not once; he’d saved her from her own stupid self. And he’d blasted her mantra – never again – to bits.

  Work was dead and she was doodling aimless patterns around the edges of the desk blotter, thinking she needed to invest in a radio that wasn’t so scratchy-sounding, when the door from the garage opened and Sly made dropping into the chair across from her look a calculated move. She spared him only a glance and kept at her doodle – it was a little bird with a pointed head, a round berry in its beak; a cardinal, she thought.

  “Big Tom’s got a new baby,” she said, conversationally. “A Chevelle. It’ll be in next week for you guys to take a look at the transmission.”

  He was silent, and she finally gave him her full attention. “You’re creepy, you know?”

  A small grin plucked at one corner of his mouth. “I thought you liked strong silent types these days.”

  Even a veiled mention of Drew squeezed her heart. She blinked and hoped it didn’t show. “There’s silent, and then there’s you.”

  He gave a facial shrug and pulled one ankle up on the opposite knee, scraping at something on his boot sole with his thumbnail. “Eddie and I are thinking about going to watch a fight tonight.” His voice was neutral, but the back of her neck prickled. He flitted a fast, blue glance toward her face. “You wanna come?”

  She started to answer, and realized she couldn’t. She swallowed. “Why would I wanna do that?”

  He met her stare unflinching. “Drew’s fighting tonight.”

  Eventually, after another dozen years of decay, Double Vision would become Dunbar’s. Because every honkey tonk in the South eventually crumbled and dissolved into Dunbar’s.

  West of the city, two miles off the interstate, the place sat right at the corner of Hillbilly and Deliverance, a debauched warehouse strung with party lights and pulsing with Skynyrd’s greatest hits. There was nothing around it save a few ill-kempt single-wides and an abandoned used car lot, all the power poles choked with kudzu, the pavement faded and cracking. There were dive bars, and then there was Dunbar’s. It had been a barn once, or so the story went. Between the Christmas lights, industrial fluorescent tubes flickered along the exposed ceiling beams. A bar made of plywood and old barrels ran the length of one short wall and the beer was warm, kept in cardboard boxes. If it didn’t come in a bottle or a can, they didn’t sell it. The floor was dirt and sawdust. There were a handful of pool tables, an old Pac-Man machine, a series of upholstered sofas if anyone felt like getting lucky on top of years’ worth of other people’s fluids and filth. And in the center was the ring, a spotlight beaming a sharp halo across the fighters.

  It smelled like sweat and piss and Lisa wanted to gag. Sly and Eddie walked on either side of her, the three of them arm-in-arm. The crowd was pulsing and screaming and filthy, and the last thing she wanted was to get separated from the guys. They found a spot up close to the ropes and the guys staked a claim with feet planted apart and shoulders rigid. Lisa shrank back in her hood and waited, breathing cigarette smoke and praying like crazy that Sly had been wrong, and that Drew hadn’t subjected himself to this.

  But then the next fight was called, and there he was.

  His trainer – a fat slob with a sweat ring around the neck of his shirt – leaned on the ropes and took hold of Drew’s shoulder, shouting something through the din of the crowd. Drew nodded and flexed his fingers.

  He was thinner than he’d been, which didn’t seem possible. Under a rippling layer of muscle, he was nothing but bones, ribs pressing against his skin, shoulders sharp. His shorts threatened to slip down the sharp points of his narrow hips. Under the lights, the entire right half of his face was a mosaic of purple and green healing bruises. And his broken hand was no longer bound in a cast, but wrapped in white tape like the other, ready for his match.

  “He looks like shit,” Sly leaned down and whispered against her ear.

  Her stomach turned over.

  The fight started like every other she’d seen: the men circling one another, searching for openings, finding their footing. Drew’s opponent struck first, darting in with a fast jab that was deflected. Drew countered, landing a glancing right off the side of the other guy’s head. She couldn’t hear, but could read lips as the opponent cursed. He lit back into Drew with a fast combo, the sick thump of fists against flesh ratcheting up her nausea.

  Drew did more shielding than hitting. And then, before the end, he took a great swing with his right…and she could see the pain going up his arm from his ruined knuckles, hitting him in the skull, taking the breath out of his lungs. She shut her eyes so she didn’t have to watch him fall.

  “Don’t fuckin’ tell me it’s broken again!”

  In the garish light of Dunbar’s locker room, Drew could already see swelling. He cradled his hand and probed the knuckles with his thumb, grinding his teeth together against the fresh needles of pain.

  Ricky had been the one to take his cast off, soaking it in water first and then scraping it away. The hand had felt better than it had before the resetting, but he needed surgery. Every fight put him just that much closer to irreparable damage. His fighting days were over, but he would keep fighting, until his use-of-his-right-hand days were over too. And then he didn’t know what he’d do. Bag groceries maybe.

  “I don’t think so,” he lied, and glanced up to find his boss snarling at him.

  Ricky was flushed and sweating, like he’d been the one in the ring. He mopped his face with the towel slung around his neck. “It better not be. After the shit you put me through.” He shook his head and paced away, breathing through his mouth. “Have you got any idea how much money you cost me?”

  Drew kept his head down and said nothing. Without an answer, disgusted, Ricky left the locker room. “I need a drink,” he muttered to himself, and the noise of the bar crashed through the swinging door.

  For a long moment, Drew sat on the bench, head leaned back against the cool metal of the lockers behind him. The room was dank and rancid, everything covered in some kind of brown sludge that had long ago dried and cracked like old varnish. There was a dripping sound coming from somewhere. And yet, it was the most peaceful moment of the past week; of the past two months, really. His bed at the house was a sleeping bag. The nicest thing he owned was a toothbrush: a Colgate number with a varied sequence of bristles that had felt like an unnecessary splurge.

  He would have liked to shut his eyes and fall asleep there, dripping sound and smell and all. But Ricky would be waiting, so he heaved to his feet and pulled a gray muscle shirt from his bag, shrugging into it and wincing at the pain that shot through his hand and up his arm.

  There was another raucous spill of sound as the door opened, and he turned that direction with a sigh. “I’m coming. I – ”

  Sly Hammond stood in the threshold, a slight shape tucked under one of his arms. He made eye contact – his eyes were the exact terrifying shade of blue that Drew remembered – and gave him a single nod. “I’ll wait outside,” he said, and backed out, the door swinging shut and leaving only the slender little thing in a hooded sweatshirt inside the locker room.

  Drew knew who it was straight off. He saw her in every dream, both waking and asleep. When her slender hands reached up to push the hood back, he started to shake, and couldn’t get control of himself.

  Lisa was in cutoffs and cowboy boots, her legs slender and tan as always. Her hair was loose around her narrow face and shoulders, her expression hitting him in the backs of the knees and making h
im want to sit back down. Her big green eyes were wide open and welcoming, laced with sadness. She took a hesitant step forward. “Hi.”

  He glanced away from her, not trusting himself. “Hey.” He concentrated hard on shoving his water bottle into his bag. “Does your dad know you’re here?”

  She came to his side, all reticence gone, boot heels striking the concrete. He wanted to smile, glad to hear her usual attitude, but that would only make things more difficult.

  “My dad doesn’t own me,” she snapped, right beside him, close enough for him to smell the light brush of her perfume just above the stink of the locker room. “He doesn’t get to make big, life-altering decisions for me.”

  A chord plucked inside him, humming in the dark, secret corners where the tiniest bit of hope remained. He risked a glance at her furious, beautiful face. He took a breath. “Are you ever not angry?”

  He expected a fight, and instead, she softened completely, eyes going liquid and warm, lips parting as she took a deep breath. “Drew, look at me. Look at me for real.”

  He turned his head, heart starting a steady knock against his ribs. He didn’t want to be so effected, but he couldn’t slow his pulse.

  Her hand landed on his arm, her fingers smooth and cool, her touch light as thistledown. “Why’d you leave?” she asked, and her tone tugged at his conscience, stronger than any physical pull.

  He was honest. “Because you never really wanted me around anyway. And after what happened…you were so upset…”

  She rolled her eyes and heaved an agitated sigh. “Yeah, I was upset. That situation was upsetting. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t cool off.”

  “You don’t sound cooled off.”