Hayley shrugged. “You know how we used to laugh at those old re-runs ofThe Love Boat, about how people would fall in love in seven days? Did you know Kelly’s boyfriend’s dad did that? Apparently, he and the woman he married two weeks after they met have been married for something like four years. So who’s to say what’s the right or wrong way to do this?”
Tori cut a corner of the toast and a piece of the middle of the egg and put them in her mouth together. It was true, no two courtship stories were the same.
“A couple weeks ago,” she told Hayley, “Stacy who runs the youth group at church told me that when she and her husband Gary were dating, they broke up and got together again seven times in five years. Now they’ve been married for eleven years.” She looked at Hayley and they both shrugged.
“So who’s to say?” Hayley asked.
“But not everyone who gets together, stays together. What if my mom is right and things would be easier if we waited?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, Tori,” Hayley said, pointing her fork at Tori, “but I’ve seen you two together. You really think you can make it until next summer without giving in? And how are you going to feel about this magical love you have if youdo end up moving the wedding date up because you’re pregnant?”
Tori thought about Friday night. No matter how strongly she believed in her choice to wait, she wasn’t sure she could make it six more months. “Not being able to keep our hands off each other isn’t much of a good reason to get married.”
Hayley tilted her head. “Is that why you’re getting married?”
Tori shook her head firmly.
“So what’s really bothering you?”
She thought about it for a moment. Thought about yesterday’s conversations with various family members on both sides. Thought about her nightmare and the other bad dreams and what they might mean.
She chose her words carefully, not wanting Hayley to know about the shrink and the meds any more than she wanted Joe to know. “What if there is something wrong with me? Something that would be bad for our relationship? What if our previous pinky-swear to never get married was wiser than we realized?”
Hayley finished her last bite of breakfast, staring at a space on the far wall. “I worry all the time that we’re broken, permanently broken, you and me and Lexie.”
Tori nodded, running her fork lightly over the designs on the plate. That’s why they’d made those promises years ago, and she and Lexie had renewed their vow to remain single when Lexie’s boyfriend Rodney left her.
“So why do I feel this overwhelming certainty,” she asked quietly, “that I can be whole again with Joe? It’s not that I think I need him in order to be okay.” She tried to find the right words. “It’s more that when I’m around him, I feel like I can conquer the world. He’s big and strong and he makes me feel safe, butIfeel stronger around him. Even when I’m not around him, really. I feel like…I don’t know how to say it…like I’m thereal me when we’re together. The “me” God had in mind when he made me. I feel beautiful and strong and confident.”
Tori looked up to see if Hayley was terribly confused. But she was nodding. Still staring at the wall, Hayley said, “Funny, Joe said something almost just like that.”
“What?” Tori gasped. “When? Where?”
Hayley turned to her and seemed to come out of her thoughts. She shrugged. “A couple weeks ago. I was with Bull, and Bull was with Joe, and…I don’t know. It came up.”
Hope soared. She and Joe both knew that their sudden, explosive love for each other was outside the norm. They’d talked about it enough to know that loving each other wasn’t a problem. Liking each other wasn’t a problem. Combining their two disparate lives and families seemed to be the real hurdle.
And he didn’t even know about her mental health history. Maybe that would prove to be the high bar on the hurdle that knocked them back.
“You know I haven’t told him much about our past, me and Lexie’s.” As teenagers, Hayley had sometimes gone out into the city with Tori to look for Lexie after she’d given up baby Charlie and run away. “You think I should? Is it the kind of secret that needs to be told? Because I just don’t see how anything good can come from the telling, or anything bad from not telling.”
Hayley took their plates to the sink. “You know how I feel about secrets.”
Tori nodded. “Don’t tell if you don’t have to.” She thought about it some more. “But if I’m going to share my life with someone, am I being selfish by bringing secrets into the marriage? Am I being selfish by wanting to get married now instead of waiting?”
Hayley picked up her mug of peppermint tea. She liked it best when it was warm, not hot, having steeped for at least twenty minutes. She tested it, then took a few swallows, leaning against the counter.
“I think to be human in this broken world is to be selfish in many areas of your life,” she said. “And I think there’s a difference between selfishness and self-preservation.”
Tori nodded, agreeing while also realizing she still didn’t have an answer. Maybe subconsciously she thought that getting married now would help seal the success of Operation Freedom, her challenge to find her real self. Maybe that was selfish of her.
Or maybe all this pushback was the world’s way of forcing her to really think about what she wanted, and to work for it, fight for it.
She thought about Joe. He was so wonderful. She would fight for him any day. She just didn’t want to fight so hard that she hurt him, allowing him to marry someone who was so broken that he would be cut on the harsh edges.
Was keeping her secrets an act of selfishness or self-preservation?
And what she had worked for years to disprove, did she need to reconsider — was there really something wrong with her that could hurt other people? If she was wrong and she did need to remain on medication and continue seeing a psychiatrist every week, there was no way she could keep that from a husband. And if she told him, she’d have to tell him that it had been going on for over twenty years.
What would he think of her then? Worse, if she found that she was right, and she didn’t need the doctor and his drugs, but she’d told Joe about twenty years of medical “issues,” would he ever look at her the same again?
A mistake like that could break the one thing in her life that was undamaged.
Chapter 8
BEING on vacation from MGV Security was not the same as being on vacation from work. Christmastime in Double Bay meant double-time for the superheroes who were willing. And because some weren’t willing to work extra hard when they, too, wanted to be with their families, it meant you never knew when you were going to get another call for help.
Joe had barely woken up Monday morning when Mickey phoned. Of course, Joe told his friend he’d meet him at the clubhouse in forty minutes. He took a minute to reply to Tori’s text from last night — wished, in fact, that he’d heard it come in so he could chat with her — then he threw on his super suit, put some cat food in Snickers’ dish, and rushed out.
At the clubhouse, Mickey was waiting in the black SUV with dark tinted windows that they used when working. It was just the two of them this morning. Bull, a history teacher at Washington High School as his day job, wanted to visit one of his students at the juvenile detention center. Hayley, the fourth member of their team, had taken the week off so she could help Tori with wedding preparations.
Joe still couldn’t believe Hayley and Tori had been best friends since elementary school. How odd it had been when Tori “introduced” them last month. Hayley had responded by saying he looked familiar, wasn’t he one of Bull’s friends, and Joe had gone along with it. From her reaction, Tori hadn’t known Hayley was dating Bull either, which goes to show how scrupulously Hayley protected her privacy.
Still, she had obviously kept Tori in the dark all this time about her secret identity as Green Thumb. Joe had only kept his secrets for a few weeks. That wasn’t so bad.
“What’s
up?” Joe asked Mickey, buckling his seat belt.
Mickey pulled onto the street in the industrial neighborhood where their office, MGV Security — with the clubhouse in the basement — was located. “A church over on Wesley Avenue had just loaded a rental truck with over one hundred boxes of Christmas meals. Driver went inside to refill his coffee and the truck was gone when he came out.”
“And the police are…”
Mickey slanted him a look. “Spread too thin. Still trying to work through the four car break-ins and two carjackings at the mall yesterday.”
Joe nodded. Double Bay never had enough law enforcement to cover the city. That’s why superheroes congregated here, plenty to do. Didn’t hurt, of course, that despite the crime, the weather, and the unemployment, it was a beautiful place to live.
“Any ideas?”
Mickey didn’t answer right away. He had some kind of crazy genius gift with technology, and he invented all kinds of gizmos that came in handy for their team, and for other superheroes as well. Over time, they’d also discovered that Mickey could often drive around, with no specific route in mind, and locate a vehicle he wanted to find.
It had happened accidentally several times when they were still in college. One day, Bull decided they would test Mickey and see what happened. Joe and Bull hid their cars in various parts of the city and asked Mickey to find them. Then they borrowed Joe’s parents’ cars and his sibling’s cars, and then they rented a couple of big trucks. Still Mickey could discover the location of the vehicle in question.
So Joe didn’t ask where they were going, just waited quietly in the passenger seat. He thought about Tori’s text. Why was she awake at three in the morning? She’d never texted him in the middle of the night before. He wished he had an excuse to see her before tonight, but she and Hayley were working on wedding stuff. He was vague on the details.
Joe noticed that the snowfall from yesterday and last night had accumulated about six inches on the ground, nearly a foot total. Not enough for Michigan people to be concerned with. Though as he was thinking about it, he noticed a few flakes coming down. He wondered how weird it would be to have a sunny and warm Christmas. This year would be his first, assuming the forecast for Orlando proved accurate.
That thought led to thoughts of Tori again. And her parents’ conviction that the wedding should be postponed. His parents wouldn’t be against that decision, either. His dad had gotten on his case again last night, asking if Joe had explained to Tori about their family.
Joe told him that he’d brought it up a couple times, but she didn’t understand that he wasn’t joking. He was working on it.
Owen hadn’t been particularly happy with that answer. He’d lectured Joe about keeping secrets from one’s spouse, the physical difficulty in running off to work at a moment’s notice with believable excuses to one’s spouse, the impossibility of explaining late nights, bruises, and missing or ripped clothes to one’s spouse.
“If you don’t want a spouse,” Owen had said grimly, “now is the time to decide.”
Joe told him hedidwant a wife and hewould tell her when the timing was right. He was feeling kind of proud of himself for standing up to his dad without letting anger overrule reason.
Then his dad said, “If you don’t tell her, I’m not marrying you.”
Joe had stood there in the garage where Owen had ambushed him, staring at his dad and trying to decide if it was a bluff. He’d finally nodded his head and walked back into the kitchen.
He wondered now, as he watched the snow fall, how serious his dad was. Would he really stand there in front of the church and Tori’s family, holding up the wedding until Tori nodded her head and said she understood that Joe wasn’t joking around?
Mickey mumbled under his breath.
Joe turned to look at him. “Close?”
“Maybe,” he muttered.
They were in a residential neighborhood in the Park City area. The name implied a lovely little community, but it had long ago lost its luster. Today’s Park City streets had as many thugs and boastful bandits as it had working class people trying to hold onto their integrity.
It was the “boastful” part that made it easy to find the bad guys here. Sure enough, Joe saw what must be the truck they were looking for a block away. People were pulling boxes out of the back and taking them to nearby homes and cars.
Mickey growled when he saw it. He braked for a moment and both men pulled their masked headpieces over their faces, adjusting the voice-disguising units at their throats and doing a sound check.
“Testing one-two-three,” said Joe, now Superhero X.
“Dirtbags, scumbags, and thieves, oh my,” said Mickey, now Tick Tock.
Tick Tock pulled the SUV to the other side of the street, grill to grill with the stolen truck, and tapped the other vehicle’s bumper just enough to make the truck shake. Then he turned off the engine and jumped out.
Superhero X was already on the street, glaring at people carrying the stolen boxes of food. Most of them ran. Two lanky young men in flannel-lined coats and knit caps peered around from inside the back of the truck just as X and Tick Tock came around the sides.
One of the two started cursing up a storm, kicking and punching boxes in the truck. Apparently, he didn’t think he’d get caught so quickly. Tick Tock bounded up into the back and pulled one of the guy’s arms behind his back.
X followed the movement of the second guy. He stuffed a wad of cash in his jeans pocket and jumped out of the truck onto the street, his legs already making a running motion as he hit the ground. X let him jump, afraid the guy would fall and hurt himself if X grabbed his leg.
But the guy forgot how slippery the street was now with the packed snow. He didn’t get two steps before he fell on his face. X put a foot on the small of his back, using just enough pressure to keep him down.
He pressed a button on his wrist and called the police. Then he folded his arms and glared at the neighbors taking advantage of the situation.
A boy of maybe fourteen crept back slowly with his box. He made a wide circle, never taking his eyes off X. He stopped about twenty feet away and put the box on the snow-covered sidewalk.
“I didn’t steal it,” he said quietly. “I gave him all the money we had.”
X let his glare soften a degree of two. “You understand thatthey stole it?”
The boy hung his head and nodded.
“I can see that you know it was wrong,” X said sternly. He paused and then said, “So why’d you do it?”
The thief under his boot started spouting a string of curses and threats. X pressed his boot down harder until the man was gasping for breath.
“Well?” he asked the kid.
The boy shrugged. “We was hungry.”
Well, hell. X sighed. The worst part about his job was that he couldn’t help everybody. He couldn’t solve all the problems. And he couldn’t give this hungry child something that didn’t belong to either of them.
All right, Lord, what can we do? We’ve got some hungry orphans and widows down here needing your provision.
The boy started to walk away, his head still hanging.
“Wait,” X called. He remembered what Stretch spent his time doing when he was just Darian Johnson. “You know the East Side Youth Center? Near Overland Boulevard and Sixth?”
The kid looked up, hesitated, and nodded.
“Go over and ask for Darian. Tell him Superhero X sent you. He’ll fix you up.”
The kid furrowed his eyebrows, trying to find the catch. Then he nodded again.
“How much you give this thief?” X asked.
“Twenty bucks.”
X bent down, dug the wad of cash out of the scumbag’s front pocket, and started to peel off a twenty. The guy started fighting him so X pulled a zip tie out of a pocket and tied his hands. Then he picked up the money roll, pulled off the twenty, and stuffed the roll back in the guy’s pocket.
He held the twenty-dollar bill out to the
kid on the sidewalk. The kid took a step toward him, then stopped.
“Everybody makes mistakes,” X said. “It’s whether we learn from them that determines the kind of people we become. What are you going to do if this opportunity presents itself again?”
The boy looked at the scene around him — a stolen truck filled with boxes of Christmas food meant for other people; two superheroes standing on the thieves while waiting for the cops; neighbors watching from behind their curtains, hiding the boxes they’d bought so the superheroes wouldn’t take them.
The boy turned back to X and said with all seriousness, “Cut the bologna into turkey shapes.”
X burst out laughing. He almost fell over with his foot on the thief’s back. He looked over at the truck and saw Tick Tock laughing, too, a rare sight indeed.
Darian’s words came back to him suddenly. X couldn’t help all the people in this neighborhood, or all the people on this street, but he could help one starfish.
“What’s your name?” X asked.
“Jackson.”
“How many people are going to be at your house on Christmas, Jackson?”
“Ten.”
“All right, you’re going to have all the makings for Christmas dinner for ten delivered to your house by tomorrow night. You know why?”
Jackson shrugged. “Because you’re a superhero?”
X smiled at him. “Because I think you’re a good kid trying to take care of your family, and I think you’ve learned something here today.”
Jackson shrugged again. “Yeah, stealing’s wrong, no matter who stole it.”
“Exactly. And sometimes you get rewarded for being honest.”
Jackson nodded. He scuffed the toe of his shoe against the snow on the sidewalk. “Can I shake your hand?”
X walked over to the boy and shook hands, giving him the twenty-dollar bill the kid had been too nervous to retrieve. Jackson pointed to his house and let X record him giving his address into the tiny microphone in the wrist of his suit.
A Very Merry Superhero Wedding (Adventures of Lewis and Clarke) Page 9
