She turned to Dave. “Set list change,” she said. “Let’s open with ‘Lord Have Mercy.’ ”
He raised an eyebrow but nodded, then told Andy and Guillermo.
“How y’all doing tonight?” Emme spoke into the microphone, and the response from the audience broke through her wall. They were cheering. They were there to hear her, not a version of her that was safe or sheltered or false. She’d let her feelings lead her astray, once, but since then she’d trusted herself so little that she’d let everyone else dictate her actions. It wasn’t working and she wasn’t willing to do it anymore.
She launched into the song and the crowd exploded. The live recording they’d put on their website had been downloaded more than any of her old material, and over half the people in the audience were singing along. That chemical buzz of energy ran between her and them, and there it was, the collapse of that sense of apartness, that frightening, overwhelming feeling of togetherness.
She’d missed it, but she was going to get it back.
The buzz of his phone in his front pocket told Tom he had a text. Katie. It had to be.
“Don’t pick it up,” Patricia said. She pushed a strand of her gray hair back behind her ear. “Or do, if you want to, but know that as long as you answer her every call for help, she’s not going to get better.”
The rest of the group had left the meeting, but Tom had stayed behind, picking up half-empty foam cups and folding metal chairs for the older woman who ran it. He set a stack of chairs against the wall and sank into one of the two still open beside the card table that held the coffeepot.
“I know,” he said. “My brain knows, anyway. My heart—just keeps thinking that she’s in trouble and it’s my job to keep her safe.”
“She could be in trouble. You’re not going to like hearing this, but she could die tomorrow. She could drive drunk and hit a tree. She could overdose. And you answering that text now, or later, would make no difference in that at all.”
His first instinct was to argue. No she couldn’t. Nothing would ever happen to her because he would keep it from happening.
Except that he hadn’t kept things from happening. He hadn’t been able to stop her from drinking. He hadn’t been able to keep her away from a string of bad-idea boyfriends, or from a shoplifting arrest as a teenager, or even make her finish her homework before bed when they were kids. It didn’t matter how hard he tried, how fast he replied to her texts, whether he let her stay with him or not.
That thought scared the shit out of him, but it also felt like the giant anvil on his shoulders lifted a little.
Patricia laid a hand on Tom’s arm. She wore a wedding ring and there was something comforting about that. She had learned somehow to make a relationship work, was confident enough to make a lifetime commitment. “There’s a fine line between loving and enabling. Your brain knows it, but it can take our hearts a while to catch on.”
Enabling. It was a terrifying thought that all the times he’d helped his sister out might have made her sicker instead of getting better. Another way that he’d failed his baby sister. “It’s just such a shitty—sorry, I mean horrible—feeling, you know? When you love someone but it just feels like you’re carrying this big weight around.”
Patricia nodded. “That is an awful feeling. But I’ll tell you a secret that I learned when I was about your age: love—real love, the kind that heals instead of hurts—doesn’t feel heavy. It makes you feel lighter. Instead of pulling you down, it lifts you up. It lets you be who you really are.”
He’d felt heavy since he got off the goddamned plane in Louisville. He thought about how he felt when he was with Emme: so free he could float away. And did, when she ordered him around, until she soothed him back down to earth. He let himself fly because she’d be right there, smiling that sultry smile of hers, the minute he landed.
“Tell me this: if you could do anything you wanted, what would it be? Do you even know?” Patricia looked at him with a combination of sternness and empathy that let him be honest. He barely needed time to think about his answer.
“Yeah. I know what I’d do.”
“Then find a way to do it. It took me years and years to figure out what I wanted outside of my relationship with my son. Alcoholism is a family disease and it will try to tell you that you have no options. Don’t listen to it. You have choices. Make them.” She pulled out her card. “And you can call me if you need support, and don’t forget that no matter where you go, there’s probably a meeting you can attend if you need it.”
Tom slid her card into his wallet on his way out the door, feeling like it was a talisman of some kind. A worry stone, maybe, only more effective. Just knowing he had it, and could call if he needed to, let the air slide into his chest more easily. He still wasn’t sure he believed everything she said; it sounded familiar enough, from all the meetings he’d gone to before. But even his skepticism couldn’t change the relief he felt.
It wasn’t the first time he’d noticed the irony in leaving a meeting for family members of alcoholics and driving straight to a bar. He’d always loved the music at McKinney’s, and he knew, realistically, that most venues were bars. If he wanted to listen or play, he’d have to put up with drunks. They just came with the territory.
But as he pulled up outside of his bar, he noticed just how run-down it looked. Yes, they hosted some of the best blues music in the region. But the facade needed repair work and he had no idea how much it would cost. The plumbing went wonky and pipes exploded at least once a year. Years of neglect by his father couldn’t be solved in five years of being owned by him, and even if it turned a bit of a profit, he sank almost all of it back into the bar.
Why?
Some misguided attempt to keep the memory of his father alive? Maybe it had been the only way he could cope with the guilt he’d felt over his relief when his father had died.
Emme’s voice in his head was so seductive. Why not sell?
Even if it didn’t go for much, he didn’t need much. He could tour all he wanted. He had the house and he could rent it out if he toured for months at a time.
He’d kept it as something he had to do for his father, something he had to do for Katie, but he’d never wanted it. He’d just kept it so that he could punish himself again and again and again and always.
Love doesn’t feel heavy. Onstage, playing, the weight was gone. Here, in this parking lot, his feet were made of lead.
It was early enough in the evening that the bar was nearly empty. The scheduled band wouldn’t go on for another four hours. A couple of the regulars sat at the bar. Jim was one of his dad’s old friends who had somehow managed to survive beyond age sixty, a rarity as far as Tom could see. Linda had started coming in after she gave up riding motorcycles when her bike-loving third husband left her. They liked him well enough, but he could tell that they hadn’t really missed him.
Marcos was behind the bar prepping for the night rush. The expression on his face when he looked up and saw him reminded Tom of the way his dad had looked at the doctor during his final hospital stay.
They’d been friends of a sort once.
How much more was he willing to let this place take from him?
“Hey, man.” Marcos set his towel to the side and came out from behind the bar. He held out his hand, but he kept his arms close to his body, his shoulders tight.
Aw, hell. Tom shook his hand and clapped him on the back. He wanted to give the guy a hug, but since they’d never had a hugging kind of relationship, he didn’t want to scare him any worse. Men hugged at funerals and hospital bedsides. Marcos already looked like he was afraid Tom might send him to one of those places.
“Let’s go into the office and talk,” he said.
Marcos called for the barback to man the front for a minute and followed him into the cramped, airless storage room that served as an office. There was only one chair so Tom leaned against the door frame, which wiggled beneath his weight. Something else to be fixed. Jesus C
hrist, it was a wonder the whole place hadn’t fallen down around him literally as well as figuratively.
“I’ve started looking for a replacement for myself,” Marcos said straightaway. “Right now Melissa’s looking pretty good—”
“Tell me about your goals.” Tom interrupted. “Forget for a minute that you screwed up, that Katie screwed you over. Do you want to be a bar manager forever? Or do you have something else in mind for yourself?”
Marcos shot him a look that Tom could interpret all too easily. It said What the hell, man, have you lost it? “Well … I’ve been saving some money so that I could buy a place. That might be my next step once I find my replacement.” He shrugged. “And you know. That way I wouldn’t have to ask you for a reference since I fucked up pretty bad.” He looked away as he said it, but Tom could see the flush spreading over his cheekbones.
“Dude. You’ve worked for me for five years. You fucked up once. Of course I’d give you a reference.” Tom cleared his throat. “But I may not have to.”
By the time Tom left, with as many empty liquor boxes as he could carry jammed in the back of his car, that leaden feeling had begun to lift. He stopped at the hardware store on his way home.
The house was dark when he pulled up so he turned on the porch light to work by. Changing the front door lock was easier than he’d thought it would be. The back door was a little trickier. And he certainly didn’t relish going into Katie’s room and packing up all of her things into the boxes he’d brought home. If he’d thought she would do it herself, he would have let her rather than have to dig through his sister’s belongings. He knew from the start he wouldn’t like what he found.
Katie’s bedroom was so much the same as it had always been that he stopped breathing for a minute. The yellow paint was beginning to peel off the walls where she’d taped posters to them when she was a teenager—he remembered a country music phase, followed closely by a metal band phase. She’d always been messy; as a little girl, she would sit on the floor of her room, every toy she owned spread out around her in a giant pile, and now instead of toys there were bottles, and clothes, and books. And actually a decent number of gourmet cooking magazines, which might explain the state of his kitchen.
There was still a hole in the wall where her first boyfriend had punched it right before Tom had dragged him out of the house and told him never to come back. Which had, of course, only driven Katie closer to him.
Tom began his packing methodically but found that it was impossible to maintain given the state of her room. He didn’t know which clothes were clean and which were dirty so he tossed them all into the same box and hoped for the best. Her books and magazines she’d want. Her makeup. And she’d probably need her comforter and the sheet set from her bed.
He was stripping her bed to pack her sheets when he found Mr. Jibbers.
Mr. Jibbers was a stuffed frog wearing a bow tie. Tom had won him at the school carnival when he was in eighth grade and Katie was in second, and he’d been way too cool for a stuffed animal so he’d given him to her.
He still remembered the way her face had lit up, all tangled hair because he couldn’t get her to sit still long enough to let him brush it, and gap-toothed smile where she’d just lost another tooth. He’d forgotten to sneak into her room to put money under her pillow, and she’d cried because the tooth fairy had forgotten her, right before declaring that she knew the tooth fairy wasn’t real anyway. So Mr. Jibbers had been a consolation prize of sorts. Sorry I fucked up and destroyed your ideas about the tooth fairy; here, have a frog.
And it had made her so happy. That stupid goddamned frog had made her smile like he was the best brother in the world, like he hadn’t screwed everything up, always. She’d carried Mr. Jibbers around with her everywhere, slept with him every night.
And, apparently, she still did.
A wave of guilt washed over him so strong it nearly pulled him under. Tom sank to his knees on the dirty pink carpet of the bedroom floor, Mr. Jibbers clutched in his hands. One of his eyes had fallen off years before, and his bow tie was hanging on by a thread, and it was just another way Tom had tried and tried and tried and still hadn’t done anything right.
Packing up that stuffed frog was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.
Once the final box was packed, he set it out on the front stoop with the others. Then he sat down, too, and waited.
He waited for hours, until his ass went completely numb from sitting on the concrete of his stoop, until he wondered if she was coming home at all. The sky had just begun to turn purple with the approach of dawn when a truck pulled into the driveway and Katie tumbled out.
It only took her a moment to notice the pile of boxes on the stoop, Tom waiting under the porch light. “You might want your boyfriend to stick around so he can take your stuff,” he said. God, he sounded like the biggest asshole on the planet.
“You’re kicking me out.” Katie sounded incredulous. “Because I came home too late? What do you think I am, sixteen?”
“Because you haven’t met the conditions I set forth when we agreed that you could stay here. You’re not going to meetings. You’re not doing any level of maintenance while I’m gone. I can’t do this anymore.”
The driver’s-side door to the truck opened and Eric stepped out. He was a skinny guy, young, maybe even younger than Katie, but he looked hard and stringy. His eyes were bloodshot. “There a problem here?” the kid asked, and Tom was reminded of his own posturing, back when he was a teenager with nothing but an overblown sense of the world’s unfairness.
“No,” he said. “But Katie doesn’t live here anymore. You’ve got a truck, so I’d appreciate it if you helped her move her things.”
“What the hell kind of brother kicks his own sister out?”
A terrible one was Tom’s first thought, reflexive and automatic. But he stopped himself. “The kind who’s had enough,” he said.
The guy moved toward Tom, chest out, arms up, ready for a fight. The tough-guy effect was ruined when he tripped over the concrete of the front walk and had to windmill his arms to keep from falling.
“Have you been drinking?” Tom asked.
“That’s none of your goddamned business,” Katie said. She turned to her boyfriend. “Don’t answer that. Why the fuck do you care? He’s over twenty-one.”
“I care because he drove you over here, Katie.” Tom sighed. He felt exhausted, weary down to his very toes.
“You wouldn’t care even if we got in a wreck. You don’t care if I’m homeless. You’re so fucking selfish, Tommy. You always have been. You only care about your guitar and your band and your friends. It would be easier for you if I were in jail. Or dead.”
Tom had to swallow nausea at that thought. A rush of memories smacked him hard in the gut, of ignoring eight-year-old Katie to practice guitar while she whined for dinner, of twelve-year-old Katie running away from home for the first time because he didn’t pay enough attention to her. Of Mr. Jibbers, still on her bed, even though she argued and fought and scratched at Tom every chance she got, like a wounded animal backed into a corner.
How much of his motivation was pure selfishness, a desire to make his own life easier?
Helping her had gotten her to this point. Maybe it was time to let go and let her fall so she could pick herself up.
Katie was crying now, angry tears. She’d always cried when she was furious. When she was little, he’d wanted to beat up anyone who made her cry. Now he was the one doing it and her scrawny boyfriend was coming toward him.
“Fight me, bro. Fight me like a fucking man.”
He knew the blow was coming, and he could have dodged it, but he didn’t. Tom stood on his stoop, locked his hands behind his back and let Eric punch him in the jaw.
The impact snapped his head to the side, but it wasn’t hard enough to do more than bruise. “I’m not going to fight you,” Tom said when Eric kicked at him.
He dodged it. One punch was all he was willing
to take for his sister. One punch, he figured, he deserved. “I am not going to fight you,” he said again.
Somewhere behind him, Katie started screaming. He wasn’t sure if she was trying to pull Eric off of him or trying to join in the fight, whether she wanted to beat him up or defend him from her boyfriend. Maybe all of the above.
Tom sidestepped again, just as Eric launched himself at him, but Eric tripped over one of the boxes and landed headfirst on the cracked concrete. For a long, sickening moment, Eric didn’t move, didn’t even moan.
Katie lunged for him. “You asshole!”
Somewhere, in the corner of his awareness, Tom knew that the neighbors had emerged from their houses to watch from their lawns. “Calm down, Katie. I’m going to call an ambulance for him.” His heart pounded against his sternum. He was pretty sure there was blood on his face, but he didn’t know where it was coming from.
“You mean the cops. You’re going to call the cops, aren’t you?” She grabbed for his phone as he reached for it, sending it flying across the front yard.
Tom caught her wrists in his hands. How had they gotten so thin? He loosened his grip, terrified that he would hurt her. “He’s hurt, he’s been drinking, I don’t know what else he’s used and now he’s unconscious. He needs medical attention. This isn’t about revenge or getting you in trouble or whatever you’re thinking. It’s about keeping you both safe.”
“As if you even fucking cared,” she said, but she sank to her knees beside Eric, pulling herself free of Tom’s hands.
Tom’s phone was lying somewhere in the dark grass of his lawn. Finding it will take too long.
“Hey, man—everything okay over there?” one of the neighbors called over from behind the invisible border between their lawns. Tom figured he wouldn’t want to step foot onto his side, either, into the mess they’d all just witnessed. He didn’t want to live in that mess anymore.
Have Mercy: A Loveswept Contemporary Erotic Romance Page 18
