by A. L. Woods
“Sure,” she nodded, as if there was a difference between the two, taking a sip from a mug in front of her that housed coffee that had probably long since gone cold, looking unfazed. “What’s she look like?”
I swallowed, blinking at my sister, who let out an exasperated sigh. “Blond? Brunette? Green, straw-like hair?”
“Brunette, shoulder length.
“Cute,” she tittered, batting her lashes at me. “Eyes?”
Big, the color of burnt cinnamon, almost honey under certain lighting. Thinking about Raquel’s eyes made my heart quicken and my breaths hitch in my chest.
“Brown,” I replied, scratching my forehead with my thumb, as if I was expunging the rest of the details from my mind out of fear my sister would read me like a book.
“Name?”
“Raquel.”
“Nice name.” She clicked something on the trackpad. “Last name?”
I paused, my stare tightening on hers. She failed at doing the sweet and persuasive routine on me, her protege. “Yeah, right,” I scoffed. “I’m not falling for that one.” I had learned everything I knew in the art of getting what I want from Maria.
Her face split into a Cheshire grin. “You can’t fault me for trying.” She tapped her chin one time too many, a movement that told me she already had what she wanted, “Although there’s only one paper in Eaton, and you’ve already done the hard part by giving me her first name.”
Son of a fucking bitch.
“Don’t.” I grumbled. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed by my attraction for Raquel. It was that I didn’t want my sisters getting involved. If they got involved, then it was only a matter of time before my Ma started asking questions. And then they’d flood the Advocate’s office, grilling Raquel before I could even get her to have dinner with me. I didn’t want them messing everything up before it had even had a chance to start.
“I could just look her up right now.”
“Maria.” My voice carried a warning, although part of me wanted to know things about Raquel beyond what she had told me. I didn’t move to stop my sister, listening as her fevered fingers made their way across the keyboard, lips rolling together with anticipation.
“Here we go.” She grinned, eyes alive like she had unearthed Pandora’s Box. It was when that smile slid from her face that I knew something was wrong.
“What?” I questioned. Maria’s silence was killing me, the tips of her finger moving quickly across the trackpad of her MacBook. Her lashes fluttered with every rapid blink of her eyes, as if taking a snapshot of what she had seen. Her eyes flitted from the screen to me.
“Raquel Flannigan?” she asked.
I confirmed with a stiff nod.
Maria’s mouth rocked from side to side, her eyes roaming the room, seeking something. She leaned forward in her seat, fingers once more dancing across the keyboard of her laptop. My heart had joined the conversation now, its beat steady in my chest.
“What did you see?” I started to stand, but she held a hand up at me, warning me to not try to look at her screen. Finally, a whistle left her, and her body slouched in her chair. She shook her head and spat out a tight curse.
“Thought that name sounded familiar.”
I tossed her an annoyed look just as she spun her computer around to face me. A headline screamed out at me: Attempted Robbery Thwarted in Revere. My stomach sank to the floor when my eyes landed on an undated mugshot the news site had opted to use. Eyes that had enchanted me in another face stared back at me, the scowl, the shade of hair the same, and, of course, that last name.
“Liam Flannigan,” I said flatly.
“I’m going to wager you didn’t know.” Maria’s fingers worked the mousepad, settling on another paragraph. “This sounds like your girl,” she said, pointing out Raquel’s name. Her face wore a clinical expression, devoid of even a trace of compassion.
“Why would you ever remember something like this?” I said, frowning.
My sister leaned forward, her calculated eyes on my mother’s back, voice dropping to a whisper. “The guy I was sleeping with during my first year of law school was the first responder on the scene.”
I was so glad my hard work to keep her in school had allotted her time to be on her back. I tapered my stare at her. “And this was your idea of pillow talk?” I grumbled, voice edged with amusement.
Maria shrugged absently, turning her computer back around to face her, “It’s the nature of the field, yeah.” She clicked something else, expression going ashen for a split second before that mask secured itself back in place. “She’s certainly had a sad life…” her voice carried, raising an octave when my mother looked back at us with suspicion. “Looks like her sister died a couple of months later.”
“What?” My brows shot up.
“Yeah,” she continued, “There’s another story here from ten years ago linked under related content.” Her eyes moved along the screen as she read aloud. “A seventeen-year-old South Boston girl was pronounced dead at the scene of a single-car crash on the Massachusetts Turnpike on Saturday, November twenty-first. The driver and sole occupant of the vehicle was later identified as Holly Jane Flannigan, the daughter of would-be Revere robber…” Her voice trailed off, her finger working across the scroll pad. “It talks about the incident with the armored car …and that Holly leaves behind a mother, Pauline, and sister, Raquel.”
My breaths are loud when they leave my body. I had gotten more than I had bargained for in my sister’s quick Google search. The information had been under my nose all along, and not once had I even considered looking it up myself, because I guess in some strange way, I had been confident that I would get to know her eventually.
Guilt unsettled me, making me feel like I had betrayed her privacy in some strange way by indulging my sister’s curiosity…and my own. So much about Raquel’s character and disposition made sense now, but I hadn’t earned the information honestly. Dougie had told me it wasn’t his story to share, and it hadn’t been mine or Maria’s to do a deep dive on, either.
Fuck.
Maria blew out a breath, shaking her head with what looked like disappointment. “What is it with you and the broken strays?”
“What are you talking about?” I rubbed my temple with the tips of my fingers, an impending headache looming on the horizon.
She sighed. “The girls you’re attracted to all seem to be cut from the same cloth.”
I goaded her on with a hand gesture.
“There was that girl when you were in high school, the blonde who purposely drove into a bank when the guy she dated before you broke up with her.”
“Colleen? We dated for six weeks before she got back together with him.” My lips tightened into a thin line, failing to see her point. “What made her a stray?”
“Uh, the twenty-five foster homes she got thrown out of isn’t enough evidence?” She grimaced.
I shrugged noncommittally, urging her to continue with a kick of my bearded chin.
“Fine.” Maria organized her papers into a neat pile, tapping the collection against the table so they aligned and fed into her neuroticism, “Then there was that girl a couple of years ago. The Italian one. She purposely got herself knocked up with someone else’s kid because you wouldn’t propose to her, and tried to pass it off as yours.”
Francesca had been good, I would give her that. Almost perfect, really, if it wasn’t for her being just a little fucking nuts.
“I figured her out,” I lamented. That had almost been a monumental disaster, and I was glad I had taken Maria’s advice about the paternity test. Francesca had all but crumbled at the suggestion and spewed the truth: I wasn’t her baby’s father. Last I heard, she had moved to Arizona with the kid’s actual father. Good riddance.
“After you bought her an engagement ring, Sean.”
Okay, the ring thing hadn’t been all my doing, and I hadn’t really wanted to marry her, either. That had been at the behest of the firecracker currently at the
stove, who was dismally failing at being furtive. She was stealing not-so-wary looks at us while remaining taciturn. Ma, who in spite of never even having met Francesca, demanded I do the right thing. She had actually been disappointed when she learned the baby wasn’t mine.
“Ma made me buy the ring,” I said.
“And you listened to her,” Maria spat, whipping the folder shut. I swear, she looked like she was ready to lurch over the kitchen table and bash my head with her laptop.
She wasn’t wrong. Maybe I hadn’t dated the best girls, but...Raquel was different. And I was on a mission to change Maria’s mind about her, but first, I needed to show her that her prejudice wasn’t helping. My sister was the most open-minded and liberal woman I knew, if anyone was going to see reason, it was her.
I placed an elbow on the table, resting my bearded chin on my fist. “So, what you’re saying is that this one is bad news because of the actions of her deceased father?” I laid out the argument on the table. Even uttering it made me feel that shame again for giving my sister the information to investigate Raquel.
“No,” Maria said, rubbing the bridge of her narrow nose, “I’m saying she’s going to have a lot of baggage that I don’t think you have the room to house.”
“My house is fifteen hundred square feet. I think I can manage.” I didn’t care for her metaphors any more than she cared for mine.
Maria shook her head. “She’s just another stray, Sean. And you need to concentrate on fixing yourself before you rebuild other people.”
My body wrenched backward, as if she had tipped the entire bowl of soup in front of me into my lap. My skin felt aflame, my blood pressure like it was soaring, creating a pulse I could feel in my eardrums.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I crossed my arms across my chest, leaning back against the wooden chair, my eyes narrowing as I waited for her explanation.
She let out a long, drawn-out exhalation, as if the mere question had exhausted her stoicism. “I mean that we both know this house flipping thing is not something you want to spend the rest of your days doing.”
I dismissed the accusation with a pfft. I knew where she was going, and I wasn’t in the mood to entertain this conversation. We had it every couple of months, when she was riding another wave of her superiority complex. I slid the chair backward, standing to my full height. My sister did the same, mirroring my stance, arms hanging by her sides, fists folding and unfolding.
“You should consider resuming your classes at the institution.” She frantically shuffled her folders until she found what she was searching for. My eyes landed on the pamphlet. My insides roiled, my lower intestine tightening the way it did when you were about to erupt from deep-seated, boiling anger.
“I already called them,” she continued. “They said they would honor the classes you’ve already taken and you can just resume where you left off. You’re only a couple of credits short.”
Katrina had a mild case of my mother’s condition of not being able to mind her own business, but Maria? Maria was downright overbearing. She would drive your life if you let her, right down to whether you were buying two-ply rather than one-ply toilet paper, and I wasn’t having any of it.
I had given up my ambition to earn a degree for good reason, and I didn’t need her to go rehashing and unearthing things that were better left buried.
“Who the fuck told you to do that?” I snapped, slamming both palms on the table. Her forehead wrinkled at my outburst, and for a moment, I thought she might actually consider that her dictatorial behavior might have gone too far this time. First she was telling me who I should and shouldn’t date, shaming me for who I actually had dated or fucked, and now she was telling me the cure to all my troubles was to resume a program I had left for her?
Maria recovered and tittered on as if she hadn’t just violated a boundary, “You’ve still got all your supplies, so you’d be saving money there, too.”
“I’m not going back.”
“Well,” she said, shaking the pamphlet in front of me, “I think you should.”
I snatched it from her and tossed it with indelicate violence. It hit the table and slid to the floor. My eyes immediately went back to her, not giving a shit that she appeared affronted by my lack of decorum.
My sister’s arms found her hips, standing akimbo as if she was getting ready to lawyer me into submission, but I wasn’t sticking around for it. I wasn’t hungry anymore, and I didn’t care to indulge any more of my sister’s ascendancy lectures. She could save the shit for a fucking jury or the pathetic motherfuckers in their skinny ties that she charged two-hundred-and-fifty dollars an hour.
“If I wanted your opinion, I would ask for it, Maria.” I pushed the chair back in place, taking my soup bowl and placing the remnants on the counter, before stalking toward Ma, who looked less than impressed. Her English was good at best if people communicated slowly, but she didn’t have to be fluent to discern that my sister and I were less than enthused with each other, based on our rising voices.
Ma tsk-tsked at my sister for upsetting me, lips compressing together.
“Don’t listen to her, meu rico filhe.” There was the my rich son bullshit I loved so much.
“Stop filling his head up with bullshit just because you’re afraid of forgetting Dad’s memory.”
That had been a low blow, even by Maria’s standards. She was in full-on attorney attack mode, pleading her case, her countenance pained. “You cannot spend the rest of your life being a substitute for Dad for her,” she said to me, holding out a hand in our mother’s direction. “That is not what he would have wanted from you. He wanted you to go after your dreams, he wanted your name on a resta—”
Ma slapped a palm on the counter, the ricochet deafening the entire house. Maria and I both jolted at the suddenness of the sound, and my sisters upstairs even stopped their squabbling. Ma’s whole body shook when she spun on her heel, face quivering with something indefinable.
“Cala a boca, Maria.” She shot my sister a stare that God himself would fear, sending a shiver rolling through us both. It was a rare event for Ma to be volatile like that, especially against Maria. Pushy? Definitely. But this…this was a new side of her; I couldn’t remember a time she had ever told any of us to just shut up like that. The room thickened with silence, save for the food that bubbled in a stockpot on the stove.
I thought my sister would say more, but Maria merely blew through her nose and shook her head at me. She collected her belongings and stalked toward me, discomfort etched into the planes of her face.
“You’re better than this,” she scolded, not looking at me as she left the room. My jaw set, my breathing strained as the thought settled into the recesses of my mind.
What was her angle? Why did she care so much what I did with my life? It was because of me that she had gone to fucking Harvard. Me. And she wanted to what? Lengthen her neck and look down at me over that fucking nose job we all knew she got two years ago but no one talked about. Give me a fucking break.
I scrubbed my face with my palms, my fingers rubbing into my eye sockets.
“You want food to take home?” Ma asked, her voice cheery, as if my sister and I hadn’t just been arguing. Like Ma herself hadn’t just interceded with her own emotional explosion. My stomach churned again at the thought of food, but I found myself nodding out of habit—because my sister was right. I had always done what she said anyway, hadn’t I?
Ma sighed with contentment, like everything had gone back to normal. “You’re a good boy, João.” She patted my cheek.
Any other day, that remark would have lessened the knot in my chest.
Today, it only made it worse.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
They say things happen in threes. It had been almost a week since the bar incident, six days since my falling out with my sister, and three days since the house had sold to some unlikely buyers—for over the asking price. I was dumbstruck, mouth opening and closing as I t
ried to collect my thoughts when the listing agent of the house called to inform me. After months of struggling to get that thing off my hands, the bouncing checks, and an unlikely couple forging within these four walls—the house was sold, and no longer a source of contention for me.
I’d had the bulk of the furniture cleared out as soon as the ink was dry on the contract. Trina had wrapped the smaller decorative pieces herself, neatly tucking them back into a box. Penelope was out of commission due to a bad bout of morning sickness that left her needing to be within five feet of a toilet at all times. The one time she had come in this week, she’d puked on the front steps. I sent her packing. I didn’t trust that the hardwood wouldn’t stain if she didn’t make it the bathroom in time. She was a liability I didn’t need.
I had been pissed for a solid seven days and had vested all that pent-up rage toward both Raquel and Maria into being busy. My mind craved the consistency of a task, needing the steady rhythm of being concentrated on just about anything to console my thoughts and nurse my bruised ego. I cycled between being furious with Raquel, to feeling so damn sorry for her that I was ashamed of myself.
Being preoccupied had been a welcome respite, and now with the house officially out of my hair, I had to find something else to bury myself in. I hadn’t wasted time once the deal had closed and applied any last-minute touches when I wasn’t clearing the staging furniture out. The buyers had asked for a short closing of two weeks, and I wanted to use what was left of that time to pack up and figure out what the hell was next. I had my eye on another house three blocks over that had potential and wasn’t nearly as worse for wear as the colonial had been. Parts of me had wanted a break, but this oppressive niggling voice in the back of my head dragged up Maria’s words from our argument—and that made me want to do the exact opposite.
“You’re better than this.”
I wasn’t sure who I was pissed off with more right now, Raquel for getting into the car with those guys, or my sister for running her mouth. Then, when I popped a lid onto a box and moved it from the table onto the floor next to the rest of the stack, I suddenly decided I was infinitely more upset with Maria and her superiority complex and pretension.
