Meant to Be Mine

by Lisa Marie Perry

  Sofia grabbed the old shopping cart Luz had used to transport her laundry, wheeled it around the side of the building, and said to Joss, “Beep! Beep! Hop in.”

  “Oh my God. You’re crazy.” But she handed Sofia the cupcakes and climbed into the cart. Then she folded her legs and stacked the cupcakes on her lap.

  Traffic flowed but seemed to slow as drivers rubbernecked to get a look at a woman pushing another in a shopping cart on the sidewalk.

  Horns began to blare and catcalls for their attention rang through the air when Joss started to sing.

  “Really, Joss? ‘American Girl’?”

  “It’s stuck in my head. Blame that supermarket. It resonates, somehow.” She went back to singing, practically shouting and swinging her hair through the chorus—and Sofia joined in, with a less musical voice by far, but she didn’t care.

  They crossed the street as drivers smirked and hands held phones out windows to capture the moment.

  Sofia and Joss would probably appear on the Internet somewhere, might even receive a stern talking-to once the PD got wind of their peace disturbance, but still, she just didn’t care.

  In front of The Dirty Bastards, they laughed when men jostled one another at the entrance as they competed for the glory of holding open the door for a pair of women toting cupcakes.

  “Ladies, c’mon,” Abram Slattery said on a groan, as though torn between telling them to leave and pleading with them to stay. “I’m running a business here.” He threw out his hand to the people peering in through the door and clustering at the windows. “Ma’am, all that frosting in your lap can’t mean good things for the clean clothes in here. I don’t see any dirty laundry in that basket, so why don’t y’all—”

  “I can be a very dirty girl,” Joss contradicted, and the room at large seemed to tense up in tight fascination.

  What a flirt. It was seamless, effortless, as natural as breathing to Joss.

  Sofia, meanwhile, could say nothing. Handfuls of customers lounged on the vinyl modular seating, transferred clothing from washers to dryers, hung out around the reception desk—but she could see only one man.

  Burke. She hadn’t known he’d be here, though Abram was his friend and sponsor. If she’d seen his truck parked at the curb, she might’ve asked Paget to switch places with her.

  Taken the coward’s way out.

  Swinging her gaze around the room, though the only face that penetrated was Burke’s, she identified at least five people who didn’t appear to be actively sorting laundry or waiting for a machine to announce its cycle completion.

  “We’re in a predicament,” she told Abram. “Joss has moved in with me and our stuff from New York won’t fit into Luz’s apartment. On top of that, a lot of the pieces are too heavy for us to carry up and down the stairs in the back.”

  Joss rose up in the cart, offering the cupcakes. “So if anyone here could spare some time, we want to ask if you’ll help us out. Yes or no?”

  Customers murmured and everyone seemed to wait for Abram Slattery to select a cupcake. Lemon or red velvet. Yes or no.

  “Hell.” Abram went to the window and scanned the street, pausing when he saw Paget standing in front of Blush with Tish at her side, looking like an American Gothic parody. Furniture was piled up on either side of them. “Looks like a GD sidewalk sale.”

  His brother separated from the crowd and swept up a lemon cupcake. Yes.

  Stunned that McGuinty was the first to volunteer, Sofia said, “Caro was helping us earlier, but she had to leave.”

  People grunted and chuckled. Evidently his interest in Caro wasn’t under wraps.

  “Caro’s not asking for the favor. You are, so I’m helping you out.” He took a big bite and Joss just about preened in self-satisfaction when his resolute frown melted into surprised pleasure. “Fuck, this is good. Who made this?”

  “Me! Joss Vail. I was a baker’s assistant in New York.”

  “She’s a phenomenal pastry chef.” Pointedly, Sofia looked to Burke. “Imagine what she could do with her own space.”

  His face hardened. All right, so she pushed too far too soon. When he started walking, she expected him to bypass her and the shopping cart, but instead he followed his friend’s lead and took a cupcake. Red velvet, but it, too, was a Yes.

  “Folks should help each other out around here,” he said simply. “I’m heading over there.”

  Other men descended on the cart, reaching for the treats. McGuinty picked up another lemon, this one a No.

  Crestfallen, Joss watched him devour it and suck frosting from his thumb. “Did you change your decision from yes to no?”

  “Nah. I just wanted another. I’m not even a cupcake kind of guy.”

  “Well,” she said, all perky afternoon sunshine again as she passed the nearly empty container to Sofia so she could alight from the cart, “there’s more in the apartment. Shall we?”

  Sofia watched them leave the laundromat and turned to follow, but Abram, who was doling out instructions to his crew, called her back.

  He took a plastic-draped garment from a rolling rack and laid it over the reception counter. “Your jacket’s ready. No charge.”

  “My…” She peeled away the plastic. It was the black jacket she’d worn the morning she pedaled to the marina. “Wh-where’d you get this?”

  Please say anywhere but the one place that would make sense.

  “Balled up in Burke Wolf’s laundry. With my own eyes I saw him standing right over there a few days ago throwing sheets in a washer. And what do you know, this here came tumbling out of his bag.” His voice was low. “My wife saw it, too.”

  Hannah Slattery, who ran the Hot Dish restaurant near the bank building where Sofia’s father had worked before disgrace ended his tenure and turned him loose.

  On a few occasions Sofia had come into the laundromat and found Hannah manning the counter with her husband. Hannah was hospitality personified—she liked to engage and accommodate, and her smile was infectious.

  “Ladies’ fashion know-it-all that she is,” Abram said in that easy, ain’t-no-rush tone of his, “she brought the thing over for dry cleaning and said it was the perfect match to a pair of black pants dropped off that morning.”

  Every fluid inside Sofia seemed to turn to ice. If she attempted to cry, the tears would be icicle daggers. If she tried to pee, it’d come out in frozen cubes.

  “A pair of pants you dropped off.” Abram scratched his chin as she took the jacket. “Now, Burke’s my friend and what he does isn’t always my business. But there’s only one reason I can think of that’d explain why a man would head out first thing in the morning to wash a load of sheets—and that’d be because someone was rolling around in them the night before.”

  “What are you trying to ask me, Abram?”

  The man chuckled. “Well. I’d thought you’d at least appreciate that your jacket’s been all spruced up and returned to you safely.”

  “You don’t need to be crude.”

  “Crude? Sofia, crude would be pointing out the extra care we took in cleaning semen out of the shirt you brought in with those pants. But I didn’t point that out, so I’m not crude after all, am I?”

  Heat rushed up from her toes and settled in her cheeks. The nerve of Abram—he didn’t appear fazed and might in fact be amused by her discomfiture. The Dirty Bastards was, indeed, a fitting name.

  “If this is such a crisis, talk to Burke about it.”

  They faced off, pupil to pupil, frown to frown. Abram was the first to blink. “One, thanks for confirming the suspicion. Now I know for certain what’s up.”

  Damn it! Why hadn’t she taken her jacket and bopped out of there? Allowing this man to bait her had rendered no benefit.

  “Two, I did talk to him. He said he’d kick my ass if I said a word against you.”

  Burke had defended her honor? Confusion tossed her into a tailspin and she clutched the jacket to maintain some composure. “Abram, did you and Hannah tell anyone
?”

  “Nope. But people talk about how y’all used to be, you and Burke, and my wife’s got it in her head that you’re meant to be.”

  “It’s not like that. We’re not together. He hasn’t even seen me naked.”

  It was Abram who blushed next, a ruddy pink color that touched the tops of his cheeks above his full beard. “Christ, Sofia, I didn’t ask for specifics. I just want to tell you that I look out for Burke as if he were my own kid brother. Women have come through wanting to change him or needing him to be a man he can’t be. It never ends well, and then he’s got my own wife playing matchmaker no matter how many times he tells her to back off. You and your sexy window displays might be catching his attention now, but the thing he cares about most is his sobriety. I can’t stand by and let you jeopardize that.”

  “How would I jeopardize his sobriety? In case you’re not aware, I have my own health to think about and don’t smoke or shoot to take the edge off.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He opened the door and led her outside. The other volunteers were already scattered in front of Blush. “You live clean, and that’s great. Burke, on the other hand, is battling a disease that can take hold of him at any time. Addiction’s a motherfucker.”

  “I know that, Abram. I saw him at his worst, in high school.”

  His grunt of laughter lacked humor. “High school wasn’t his worst. That happened after you left.”

  The last sentence carried the impact of a freight train, as though after you left meant because you left.

  Leaving hadn’t been her choice to make. Finnegan Mercer’s opportunities on the Cape had dried up after his release from police custody. She’d been a minor and he the only parent who wanted her. She thought her father needed her, that if she survived she would have the chance to pull her weight and take care of him the way he’d worked so hard to take care of her in spite of how difficult she’d made his life.

  Sofia could give all of her commitment to one person only, and she’d chosen her father.

  She and Finnegan were family. She and Burke were friends. Friendships became untethered; sometimes they snapped. It was tragic but not unnatural. When she left, Burke had lost only a friend—not someone who was a part of him.

  It wasn’t as if he’d loved her the way she’d loved him.

  “Burke and I haven’t talked about that…what happened after I left Eaves.”

  “Well, maybe y’all might want to the next time you think about getting frisky.”

  It wasn’t Abram’s business to advise her. He wasn’t her sponsor and she didn’t require any big-brotherly wisdom.

  “I told you,” she reaffirmed as they crossed the street, “we’re not together.”

  “And I’m telling you that before you and your shopping buggy full of trouble showed up, Burke was talking about heading to the supplies store and gearing up to check safety lines. Now he’s over at your place moving furniture.” His bear paw of a hand clapped her shoulder and it was a pleasantly friendly touch. “I don’t think that’s exclusively because of a red velvet cupcake.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Burke didn’t pretend to know all there was to know about art, but he’d stake his boat he was standing in Sofia’s living room and staring at a blow job.

  “Hey, McGuinty”—he tapped a knuckle against his friend’s arm—“the painting over there. What’s that look like to you?”

  The man scratched his chin, and there was the scraping sound of fingernails against whiskers. “Some lucky bastard living the dream.”

  That’s what he’d thought when he’d first confronted the painting in Blush. It fit into the fabric of a sex shop, but hanging on Sofia’s wall, front and center, it gave him chills.

  No, not chills—the opposite. A vengeful heat traveled through him from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes.

  Quentin from the Eaves Historical Museum, who’d tucked at least three cupcakes into his corpulent stomach and might lose a button on his straining shirt if he took down another, came over to heft one end of Luz’s frayed sofa. “Luz was a legend, but I think Sofia’s picking up where she left off at double speed. Mannequin coitus downstairs, now that?”

  All three men turned back to the painting. Sure enough, a pair of plump pink female lips wrapped around a staff jutting from a rug of pubes. The lines weren’t all that defined and the colors of the oils were muted, but come the hell on!

  “Sofia’s friend, the cupcake fairy. You know she’s the one who painted that oil, don’t you? J.V.” Quentin shook his graying head. “They didn’t make ’em like that in my day.” The oldest person standing in the apartment, he had a solid thirty years on the others. But if he and Sofia’s roommate hit it off, theirs wouldn’t be the first May-December pairing in this town.

  Burke tried to keep his head down and focus on preventing his life from jumping the rails again, yet some talk wouldn’t fizzle. The bored older women—not all of them single—who amused themselves with college-aged summer help, and the men with deep pockets who leisure-sailed and splurged on sugar babies eager to be spoiled? Yup, the folks of Eaves hunted secrets and exposed them loudly. They breathed one another’s confidences the way smokers shared hookahs in a lounge.

  People were still polluting the air with talk about Luz, who’d taken up with a man fifteen or so years her junior. Stir in the fact that she owned a sex shop and he rode a motorcycle, and the speculations seemed to generate themselves. Hers was the most recent death in Eaves—her name would remain in mouths until the next person knocked off.

  That was how it worked, and why Burke rescued himself every time he got on a cargo ship or took his boat out of its slip. His friends and the memory of his mom weren’t enough to compel him to call Eaves his home anymore. If he stayed, this place and all those who held his past like a knife behind the back would break his spirit and leave him hollow.

  The men took the sofa to the alleyway behind the shop, and while a quickly winded Quentin gave himself some time to recover from the exertion, Burke went around to the front and found Sofia among the trio of women hauling an enormous cabinet from the store.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  Sofia grunted, “An armoire. It needs to go up.”

  “Let me take over.” He was already going to her side and nudging her.

  “I’ve got it, Burke. I thought you were on the removal crew anyway.”

  “Couch is in the alley, ready to be loaded up in McGuinty’s truck. You shouldn’t be handling something this heavy. Go on and take it easy.”

  “Burke!” She glared at him, and he doubted her fingertips had gone white from the strain of the heavy piece. The other women made “uh-oh” humming noises. “If you’re here to help, then help. Don’t boss me around, and don’t dictate what’s good for me.”

  “If I could jump in,” Joss the cupcake fairy/erotic artist said, “we can get this armoire around the back, Burke, thanks. But may we borrow your truck? I think we’re going to end up with two donation loads, and it’d save time to drive two trucks over instead of doing a back-and-forth with just the one.”

  “I’ll drop off a haul, and do it with a smile on my face, if Sofia steps away from this before she hurts herself.”

  The profanity that passed her sweet lips wasn’t unexpected. The angrily whispered “Nothing’s changed” as she retreated and stomped out of the shop was.

  Nothing’s changed. In what context had she meant that?

  Motivated to personally see the armoire upstairs and placed where she wanted, he recruited Abram and they carried it up.

  “Anybody seen Sofia?” he asked when he’d walked through the apartment and couldn’t locate her orange-striped gray shirt or her soft brown hair, which was braided around her head like a halo.

  The apartment was transforming quickly as all the pink-labeled items were removed and some of the furniture rescued from the sidewalk or extricated from inside the sex shop was brought up.

  “Check the store,” th
e white-haired firecracker—Paget—suggested as she passed around cups of iced lemonade. “Or the basement.”

  The basement. He remembered it well. He’d never sneaked into the porn palace when he was a kid, but he had spent time in the space below it with Sofia. Sometimes they hung out in the Cape Foods basement, and other times in the hall that connected the two.

  To some it might sound lame as fuck, but he was mellow and felt in control of himself when he was underground with her and it was just the two of them literally in their own world. On occasions when he was high on some shit or she was low in the dumps, they sat together but said nothing. On good days she’d watch him sketch and he would help her study history, her weakest subject.

  They’d provoked each other’s tempers down there, too. When he came to her all bruised up, she’d lecture him about picking fights. When she came to him with labored breathing, he’d lecture her about overtaxing herself cleaning her aunt’s shop.

  Each argument and battle had been derived from friendship. She’d told him once that she loved him, probably because then she hadn’t known any better. And she was an imperfect fantasy to him, one that he’d fought hard to shake in the years after she had left Massachusetts.

  There was no going back. Never again would he be the boy she thought she loved. She said nothing had changed, but she was wrong.

  He’d changed. If he hadn’t, he would’ve died a long time ago.

  Burke didn’t find her in the shop, and unless she’d taken off on foot and left her car and the bicycle, she was still on the premises someplace.

  Taking the stairs next to the shop’s kitchenette, he arrived in the basement. A tug of a chain and the room illuminated. Boxes crowded the space, as did furniture and a cast of flexible mannequins.

  “Sofia?” he said into the immediate silence. Above was the muffle of footsteps. “You down here?”

  He turned to the plywood-covered wall. A precisely cut rectangle, looking as though someone had carved it with a razor blade, was out of place. A similar rectangle was cut into the Cape Foods basement wall, and he’d have to lift it with his nails to pry it away and expose the door. Underneath this door was a shaft of light.