The First to Know

by Abigail Johnson

  “Hey,” Chase said when he reached my car and rested his hands on my open window. Every part of me lit up seeing him. I nearly bounced in my seat. Nearly. “I thought you were coming in. You can meet my cousin.”

  The bouncing urge vanished in an instant and was replaced by a desire to slink to the floor. “Oh yeah. I had to call my sister.” I held up my phone as if I needed to offer him proof. “Did you tell him you were meeting me?”

  “No, I thought I’d just let him meet you.” He inclined his head back toward Jungle Juice. “We can go in real quick and say hi.” He considered me. “Does it bother you that I didn’t tell him about you?”

  “No!” I probably answered too fast. “I mean, I haven’t mentioned you to my sister either, so I’d be kind of a hypocrite if I said it did.”

  “Come in with me and meet him.”

  “Um, I’m actually starving. Another time?” I busied myself with putting my phone back into my bag so I wouldn’t see if Chase was confused by my reticence. That was twice now that I’d turned down a chance to meet the guy he considered a brother. So far my excuses had been tired and hungry. What was I going to say next time? Feign an illness? Based on the way my stomach was squirming, I might not be lying.

  “Okay. Where do you want to eat?”

  I picked a taco place nearby—close enough that he wouldn’t think to question my starving claim, but far enough from Brandon that my stomach settled enough to let me actually eat.

  We found a shaded table outside after ordering and I was beginning to relax again when Chase said, “So how come you haven’t told your sister about me?”

  The question caused my hand to jerk and topple my drink. The lid held, but I felt as flustered as I would have had it spilled.

  “Sorry.”

  “Low blood sugar again?”

  “Must be.” I took a huge gulp from my drink. “This is helping.”

  He was still eyeing me a little askance, though I couldn’t tell if it was due to physical concern or him picking up on the fact that I was delaying answering him.

  “So?”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell Selena about Chase; I did. But she’d want to know everything about him, and she’d 100 percent end up telling Mom, who’d insist on having Chase over. With Nick, Mom already knew him, so she’d given me a little leeway on the meet-the-parents dinner front. But she’d never even seen Chase, which meant I wouldn’t have a say in the matter. Which also meant he’d meet Dad, which...no.

  “I guess it’s just been kind of hectic for a while, what with her dropping out of college and trying to become a singer. Every time we talk lately, it’s about that or softball.” I had to put my drink down and hide my shaking hands under the table when I returned the question. “What about you? You haven’t mentioned me either.”

  Chase smiled at me. “Brandon’s got his own girl problems going on. Didn’t feel like rubbing it in how good things are going with mine.”

  One corner of my mouth lifted. “Good, huh?”

  He leaned toward me, resting his forearms on the table. “Great.”

  The other corner lifted and my heart rate sped up. The table was too big for me to lean forward and...meet him...but the idea had me tingling all the way down to my toes.

  When our food came, Chase sat back against his chair. “And anyway, Brandon’s never been great with...”

  “Girls?”

  “That too.” He laughed, picking up his carne asada taco. “More just relationships. His dad never remarried after his mom died, never even dated that I know of. So the idea of being with someone or even really hearing about it secondhand...not my cousin’s favorite thing.”

  “Your uncle must have really loved her.” My voice sounded so far away in my ears. It wasn’t strained or shaky. I almost felt like I was in a trance, watching myself calmly ask questions about the woman my dad had had an affair with. “What was her name?”

  “Maggie—Margaret McCormick.”

  Maggie. My mom’s name was Adriana. It always sounded so nice in my head along with my dad’s: Dennis and Adriana. I liked them together. Dennis and Maggie clashed with a physical pain in my chest, a throb that I half lifted my hand to press away.

  “And yeah, he loved her,” Chase went on. “My mom must have taken thousands of photos of them, and it’s impossible to miss, but I don’t think Brandon has seen half of them. Uncle Bran can’t bring himself to look at them, so they’re buried in boxes somewhere in the abyss that is my mom’s garage...”

  “What?” I asked, my hand sliding toward him, distracted from all the info Chase was giving me by the way his voice fell off.

  He bit into his taco and chewed a long time before swallowing and answering me. “I told you my mom is a photographer. What I didn’t tell you is that she’s also kind of a hoarder.” He lifted his taco again but stopped it an inch from his mouth and lowered it back to his plate. “I hate that word. You immediately think of those TV shows with people buried under newspapers and broken toaster collections or something. She’s not like that.”

  She was like something, though. The muscles along the side of Chase’s jaw tightened.

  “She has a hard time letting go of things. After my father left, she tried to keep everything.”

  “I get that.”

  Chase didn’t smile, not exactly. “Yeah, well, it’s a problem. I had an apartment with a few guys right after high school, but I had to move back home recently. I brought my last box the day we met.”

  I’d been pretty well consumed with my own issues that night, but I remembered him saying he hadn’t had the greatest day. When I’d asked why he’d felt the need to smash something afterward, he’d told me to ask him later. I guessed it was later.

  “There are three bedrooms, but hers is the only one you can still get into. I don’t even know if there’s still a bed in my old room.”

  “Then where do you sleep?”

  “On the couch.”

  I made a face. Chase was the opposite of small. Even if it was a massive couch, I doubted it was comfortable.

  “Apart from a suitcase I keep by the couch, everything I own is in the garage right now, piled up in boxes next to I don’t even know what—back issues of magazines, old Christmas decorations, clothes that fit no one and so many photo albums.”

  My blood pressure spiked at the mention of more photo albums, maybe photos from when Brandon was born, from the hospital, but I didn’t have to fight myself to stay focused on Chase and the sadness in his voice. “That’s why you needed to revisit your old apartment.”

  “I love my mom, but she can’t let go of anything. She hid how bad it had gotten from me, but when I moved home and tried to get into my old room...yeah. I needed to break something, and it was the closest I could get to him.”

  I’d kept my hand stretched toward him, and at this I inched it the rest of the way to his. There was no joking lilt or smile from Chase. Like everything else he said, he laid it bare. My hand tightened around his, another ache joining the one already in my chest.

  “Chase, I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. She’s willing to let me help her. She doesn’t like seeing me squeeze onto the couch each night any more than I like doing it. If I could clear out the garage, I could relocate everything in my old room out there.”

  “And she’d be okay with that?”

  “She wants to be, but I need to do it when she’s not home—otherwise she’ll have a harder time with it than she already will.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “I mean, it’s a start, right?”

  “It is.” He started in on the burrito he’d also ordered. “It’s just hard right now between work and school, and wanting to see this girl I can’t stop thinking about.”

  Not even a blink of hesitation at the last remark. I sm
iled and picked up my taco. I so didn’t need the hot sauce I’d dumped on it. Chase was making me feel more than warm. “Maybe that girl would understand and be happy to get you off the couch as soon as possible. Maybe she’d even be willing to help with the garage.”

  “Yeah?” His smile grew.

  “Yeah.” But then a thought brought me up short. “Unless you already asked other people for help? What about your cousin?”

  Chase took another big bite, swallowing before he answered. “Brandon is...” He paused. “I’m trying to find the right way to say this, since you don’t actually know him yet. Honestly, lately it feels like I don’t know him.”

  I forced the bite of taco I’d taken down my suddenly too-tight throat. “What do you mean?”

  Chase shook his head. “He’s been off for a while. He doesn’t want to talk to me or his dad. He barely even talks to my mom, and he’s usually really open with her.” Chase pulled his mouth to the side. “The only person I’ve even seen him smile at for weeks is the girl we work with. You met her—Ariel?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice to speak.

  “He’s been into her for months and he was this close to asking her out, and then something happened—I don’t know what. He can’t get it together. At all. With any of us. And it’s not like he’s shy or anything. He’s got tons of friends, he plays the guitar, he—”

  “He plays the guitar?”

  “Yeah, and he’s not bad.”

  My heart had wings for a moment, soaring at the thought of Selena and her newfound musical aspirations, the two of them playing together, only to crash again as Chase went on.

  “But it’s been weeks since I’ve heard him play.”

  Weeks since I showed up and he found out about our dad.

  “He came to dinner last month and spent the whole meal staring at this picture my mom has up of his mom. He finally got up and took it right off the wall. Wouldn’t say why or anything. He went home and hasn’t come back since.”

  With a finger I nudged my plate away. I thought about Brandon’s reaction to me the one and only time we’d met. His life was a complete lie and like me, one of his parents wasn’t what he’d thought. I couldn’t begin to relate to how that would affect him, knowing the one parent who’d undeniably betrayed him was dead. How would that anger morph when it collided with a lifetime of sorrow? My anger at Dad was still molten more often than not, but he was alive, a living person for me to direct all that unadulterated pain and confusion toward. If he were gone, and I had only a memory—less than a memory—I couldn’t begin to guess what I’d feel or what I’d do.

  I didn’t want to cause Brandon more pain than I already had. I would have walked away that day without telling him the truth. I’d have gone back home, curled up on my bed and died a little and maybe a lot, thinking about him and our dad and clueless as to how I could make any of it hurt less. But I wouldn’t have dragged him down with me, him or Selena.

  Only.

  I still would have found that picture, that one that might or might not mean Dad knew, that he’d betrayed Mom not just with his body but with his heart too. And not just her.

  And I’d have gone back to Jungle Juice, watched my brother, learned what little I could about him from Chase while discovering another guy I didn’t want to hurt, even as he told me I should. And it wouldn’t have been enough. It still wasn’t.

  A small part of me had been holding out hope that Brandon would get past his initial anger and seek me out the way I had him. That his insatiable need to know would be just as strong as mine, despite the consequences and increased pain that knowledge could bring. Because it didn’t come alone; it came with a sibling. But I was learning things about him, about my brother, that told me we were very different people. We had shared DNA, but our lives had been drastically different. If Chase was right about his cousin—and he would be—Brandon wasn’t going to change his mind; he wasn’t going to take the risk I had. Unless, like with Ariel, somebody grabbed him and made him—and that couldn’t be me.

  All I could do was keep taking that risk, keep looking for the answer that might gain me a brother but cost me a father.

  Chapter 24

  “Ready?”

  In answer to Chase’s question the following afternoon, I knelt down and grabbed the handle to lift up the door to his garage. Fading sunlight spilled into the space, although space was an inaccurate word. There wasn’t any actual space, just stuff, more stuff, and stuff that hid behind and underneath yet more stuff.

  “Whoa,” I said. “You can’t even walk in here.”

  Chase wrapped a hand around my hip and pulled me until I was standing in front of him, my back to his chest. A fire kindled to life, heat spreading through me until I burned all over. The more time we spent together, the more he’d started touching me. Not like he was looking for opportunities to put his hands on me, but like he was growing comfortable enough with me that he could reach out without having to think about it. And even though I still felt a startling burst of warmth every time we made contact, I was growing more comfortable with him too, when the opposite should have been true.

  Ahead of me was a sliver of a path to the back of the garage, but it was so narrow that I couldn’t imagine Chase fitting through it. I might not fit. I could feel him dwarfing me from behind, taller, wider. The hand he still rested on my hip could have spanned my entire side if he moved it up an inch. That thought sent another pulse of heat through my body, and I spun away.

  “So when you said your mom was a bit of a hoarder, you meant she was the queen of all hoarders?”

  Chase didn’t smile.

  “Oh, bad joke.”

  “A little, yeah.” He was staring into the open garage. “Inside the house isn’t this bad, but it’s not that good either.”

  If it was a fraction of what the garage looked like, it was far from not good.

  “She wasn’t like this even a year ago, or I would never have moved out, you know?”

  I nodded. Chase was finishing his freshman year of college, something that was taking him longer than I knew he would have liked because he was managing Jungle Juice full-time to pay for school.

  “My uncle thinks it’s empty-nest syndrome, that she’s hanging on to everything she can because she knows she won’t be able to hold on to me much longer. Plus, once Brandon leaves for college, my uncle is planning on moving out of state, and I know losing them is going to be hard on her.”

  There I was, listening to him talk about sad stuff with his mom, and the first thing I asked about was Brandon. I was not a good person.

  “When is he going to college?”

  “In the fall.”

  Four months. Panic scratched over my skin at that timeline. What if I didn’t know the truth about my dad by then? What if I did? What if Brandon left before we ever got to know him, or he us?

  “Hey, you don’t have to do this.” Before I could respond, Chase was stretching up beside me to pull the handle down. With our height difference, the only safe part of him I could reach were his ribs. I pressed my palm against him and he stopped, glancing down at me and the place where I was touching him, at the warmth zinging from my body to his. Or was it the other way around?

  I was much more reserved in initiating physical contact with him. In fact, this might have been the first time. I’d thought about it, but I always killed the impulse before I could act. It was getting harder to pretend that I wasn’t lying to him. I lowered my hands.

  “I’m still up for this if you are.”

  Chase didn’t say anything about me touching him or how abruptly I’d stopped touching him. It was a stretch to hope he’d think I was being shy, because I hadn’t exactly fled from his touch a few minutes before. Whatever he thought, he didn’t make an issue of it. I was relieved and a little surprised. Chase was a
pretty forthright guy. He didn’t back away from uncomfortable topics, even about himself. He didn’t pretend one thing when he thought another.

  I wished I could be like that.

  “Yeah. I need to before my mom changes her mind.” Chase released the garage door, pushing it back the few inches he’d pulled down. He brushed the back of my fingers with his, sending invisible little sparks dancing along each one. “Thanks, Dana.” It was the smallest of touches, but I felt it everywhere, and I missed it the second there was space between us again. Rather than dwell on my increasing awareness of him, I turned back to the garage.

  * * *

  The garage, it turned out, wasn’t as bad as it had first looked. Most things were organized and carefully boxed. I’d been expecting to find chaos and junk mixed together, but Chase’s mom had been meticulous in her storage. That wasn’t to say there was nothing to throw away. We filled Chase’s truck with boxes of old magazines and old toys. There were tattered board games and an entire trunk of self-help books that went too. And Chase’s stuff had been scattered throughout, wherever he’d been able to find room when he moved back. We set his stuff aside to bring in later, not wanting to waste what little daylight we had left.

  An hour later and I was, if anything, more aware of Chase than ever. I was aware of the way he breathed when lifting a heavy box. I was aware of the way the muscles shifted in his arms when he raised them, and the glimpse of exposed skin below his T-shirt when he reached for anything high. But I was more aware of the way he laughed halfway through the jokes he told, like he’d already reached the punch line in his head and couldn’t help himself. I was hyperaware of the way he talked about his whole family with such easy love. He held nothing back. His openness made it easy for me to ask questions and harder to look at him when I did.

  It also made the process go the other way. We talked about softball and how I wanted to play in college and maybe even beyond, if I could.