Текст книги "Family Love"
Автор книги: Liz Crowe
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
Chapter Ten
The Halloween party started off a mite shaky.
Mama had a tense moment with her passel of future daughters-in-law early on, when Rosie showed up with her grumpy little boy, Jeff, to help decorate. That super-bitch Melinda, Kieran’s woman, and Renee Reese, who’d been the cause of a fair bit of brotherly strife in years past, were already there. Why, I had no idea, since neither of them lifted a finger to help. I got everyone iced tea when asked, then resumed my task of putting the kids’ gift bags together.
Once things got underway, it calmed—at least as calm as a yard, barn, and tent full of parents and their kids high on candy could be. Love family Halloween parties were legend in our town, and this year would be no exception.
I kept an eye on Mama, noting her every wince or sigh or moment she “just had to sit a minute.” Worry niggled at me, but I’d promised Daddy I’d let them tell my brothers when they were ready. Although I knew it had to be soon, considering.
I was bringing the bushel basket full of parting gift bags into the party tent when Aiden raced in, looking frantic. He spoke with Antony and Rosie, who were wearing Peter Pan and Tinker Bell getups, and would get my vote for the cutest couple’s costume. Especially since my huge, manly brother was wearing green tights and even if Rosie’s outfit looked a little slutty, by her own admission.
All the kids jumping around me trying to get at the stuff I was carrying distracted me. When I looked over at the corner where they’d been, only Antony remained. His shoulders and arms were tensed. His hands balled into fists.
A quick thrill of worry hit my brain. I knew Antony Love in full-on furious mode could be a danger. I also somehow knew that the little brother was gonna bear the brunt of it. I was headed towards him when a couple of the kids started wrestling on the grass. Once I got them sorted out and separated, the creeping dread had blossomed into full-blown panic.
Then Rosie ran in, carrying a squalling Jeffrey. I walked toward her, feeling relieved, until I realized Antony was nowhere to be found. Rosie motioned toward the table where Dom sat, decked out in sexy vampire gear, and flirting his tail off with a slinky-looking lady I didn’t know. He got up and came over to Rosie, and I edged closer, wanting to know what was up, but not at the same time.
Dom hollered for Kieran, and they ran out before I could get the scoop. Mama took Jeffery and left Rosie standing in the middle of the empty space, wringing her hands.
I put my arm around her shoulders. “Drink?” I asked. I liked her a lot, and hoped she wasn’t the catalyst for a serious Love brother breach.
We took a seat next to Bobby, who’d come as a cowboy, and looked mighty tempting in his tight jeans and half-unbuttoned shirt. He made us laugh with a stupid joke, but I could still sense Rosie’s anxiety rolling off her in invisible waves.
A few awkward minutes passed while we sipped our beers. Bobby had his arm draped over my shoulders; possessive in a way that irritated me, so I got up and headed for the bar, unable to sit still. The absence of all four of my brothers seemed the world’s worst omen.
“Anton!” My mother yelled across the tent that was slowly emptying of kids and adults.
I spotted my father by the bar, laughing with my Uncle Lorenzo, who’d been in town for a few weeks spying on the business he’d left in his little brother’s charge. He frowned.
I glanced at Mama. She tilted her head in the direction of the pool outside the tent. Calmly, graciously, Mama made her good-byes, received kisses and smiles from everyone, and then caught my eye. I hurried over to her.
“Stay here, Angelique. Make sure the bar’s still stocked and the folks who stick around have full glasses.”
She looked over my shoulder. “Melinda, Renee, Rosie, would you ladies please come with me?”
They rose, giving each other confused glances, and then followed my mother out of the tent.
“But …” I started toward the opening. Daddy passed by me at a quick march.
“Do as your mother says, Angel.” He disappeared behind the pack of current and future Love women.
Aggravated by their seeming dismissal, and by the lingering presence of Bobby Foster, who now leaned on the bar eyeballing me, I had to wrestle with myself to keep from stamping my foot.
Bobby pushed the brim of his fake cowboy hat up and winked. I narrowed my eyes at him and sneaked over to the tent opening, hoping to hear something, but they must all have been down at the pole barn, since the lights there were bright and the pool was empty.
Sighing, I closed the tent flap door and headed back inside to do as I’d been told. While I was clearing one of the tables, someone grabbed me around the waist from behind.
“What’s up, Glinda Good Witch?” Bobby breathed his booze fumes in my general direction before biting my earlobe.
“Get off me,” I said, a little too bitchy, but I was too stressed to care.
He took my arm and turned me, holding me close again. I put up a half-hearted struggle, then let him kiss me before pushing him away. He did look damn good in that get-up. I licked my lips, my stress translating into a need for physical action of the fun kind. “Later,” I said, smacking his ass as I walked away from him.
I chatted with my uncle awhile until he left, claiming he had to get to the airport. Then I started clearing glassware and pulling the black and orange coverings off the tables, leaving them in a heap I knew I’d be responsible for laundering later. Bobby wandered over, beer in hand. “Can I help?”
“No,” I said, not looking at him. “You should probably go. I think there’s major family drama unfolding, and my Daddy won’t want it aired in front of anybody else.”
“Okay,” he said, agreeably enough. But when I turned, he grabbed me, shoved his tongue in my mouth and mashed one of my boobs with one hand. “Later works.” He let go, shoving me away so hard I stumbled.
“Not with that attitude, it won’t,” I said, rubbing my elbow where I’d banged it to keep myself from falling. “Fuck off, Foster.”
He finished his beer, threw the empty on the grass, then turned and stomped away without another word. I grabbed his bottle and heaved it at the bar, relishing the shatter, not even sure what had gotten into the man … other than me being a bitch to him all night long.
Tears burned my throat and eyes. I held my arms tight around my body, attempting to contain the stress that had been building since Daddy told me Mama’s cancer had spread, and that she had to have another long surgery to remove her uterus, ovaries and part of her liver.
It was bad. My mother was dying. And my brothers were acting like a pack of dumb-asses on top of it all. Finally, I grabbed a half empty bourbon bottle and sat, waiting them out.
Within about an hour, everyone knew about Mama’s condition, and my parents had gone inside. I sat on one side of a table, the silly Halloween lights still lit, the music still playing from somewhere.
Antony, Kieran, Dominic, and Aiden all sat opposite me, staring into their drinks. Aiden had a shiner, and he was cradling one arm. Antony’s nose had crusted blood under it. Kieran and Dom wore scowls so deep it was hard to believe I’d ever seen them smile. They were all soaking wet from a Lindsay-administered water hose intervention to make them stop fighting. All in front of their fiancées.
I held up my glass, filled from the second bottle my father had provided, insisting we drink and calm our asses down before finding a horizontal place to pass out. No one would be allowed to drive out of here. And for the first time in years, we all slept under one roof again, Antony and Kieran in their room, Dom and Aiden in theirs. And me, the precious angel, under my faded pink canopy that I stared at long into the night.
Chapter Eleven
By Thanksgiving Mama’s surgery was complete, and she’d emerged slightly weaker but feeling, as she claimed, about twenty pounds lighter. She used a cane to get around, which was weird. But her bossiness was front and center, undiminished. She and I had reached a bit of a compromise with regard to my increasingly frequent overnights in Bobby Foster’s bed.
Which is to say, so long as I executed my daily slave labor to her satisfaction, she gave me slightly less of a ration of shit when I arrived home the morning after my “sleepover” as she called it.
“Do you love the man, Angelique?” she asked me once while we folded yet more sheets and towels.
“No, Mama. I’m pretty sure I don’t.”
She shot me an odd look—somewhere between put out and sympathetic. “Well,” she said, handing the stack to me to carry upstairs to the linen closet. “You should probably make sure he knows that. I heard tell he’s ring shopping.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever—” I stopped, recalling that he said he wanted a real date this weekend because he had a surprise for me. “Shit,” I muttered as I turned toward the steps.
“I heard that,” my mother sang out from behind me. Sometimes I missed those few quiet days post surgeries when she did nothing but sleep.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and then turned toward her again before heading upstairs. “Hey, don’t forget—”
But my mother wasn’t paying attention to me anymore. She was staring into a small compact mirror she’d been carrying in her pocket lately. Rosie had been making her the cutest bandanas to cover her thinning hair. Today’s was emerald green and had tiny horses on it. She stared at herself, tugging the remaining thin curls of red out from the sides of the thing. Her eyes were watery. I started to speak, but she snapped the compact shut, tucked it into her pocket and looked up at me.
“What? I grow a third eyeball? Go on. There’s more when you’re done with that.” She shooed me away. That night I called Rosie, who was shouldering the bulk of the Thanksgiving meal prep at her house, and had the whole thing organized to within an inch of its life.
“I have an idea,” I said. “But it involves Renee. You up for that?”
“Sure, honey. She’s gonna be our sister-in-law. We’d best get used to her.”
“You are …” I stopped. Stating the obvious about how miserable four different people were at that moment, while being engaged to each other, seemed like a waste of my energy. “You’re pretty special, Rosalee. I hope my brother appreciates you.” I didn’t say which one of them I meant.
“I’ll ask her,” I said, when she stayed silent long enough for it to be awkward.
“Thanks. I’ll make sure there’s a spot in the kitchen for it.”
By the time Renee—former lowly hairdresser at her aunt’s home-based salon, now fancy spa owner—had done her work on Thanksgiving, every one of my brothers, plus Rosie’s boy, Jeffery, sported nearly bald heads. I helped Rosie finish the food and pack it up to take over to my brother’s garage. Antony, Aiden, and I had spent several hours spit-shining the place and getting rented tables set up. When I turned and spotted Renee putting her trimmers and scissors away, I said, “Wait. My turn.”
“No, Angel,” Rosie said. “You don’t have to.”
I pulled my ponytail out; letting my too-long, coal black hair flow halfway down my back. “It’s too long anyway,” I said, firmly, but getting a little nervous. “You’ll make me look all right, right?”
Renee smiled and pointed to the chair Rosie had set up in the corner of her kitchen. “Sugar, some ladies drive miles, wait weeks, and pay me a ton of money for what I’m about to do for you for free. Family discount.”
She snapped the scissors a few times. Rosie blew out a breath behind me. I bit my lip, then sat, trusting my future sister-in-law to give me the first short haircut I’d had since I was able to boycott haircuts as a toddler. I loved my long hair. Got plenty of compliments on it. But as she snipped and tugged, the sensation of solidarity with my mother and our hair vanity filled me, easing my stress. Until I saw the huge pile of black hair on the newspapers Rosie had put down for the clipping frenzy.
“I’ll donate this for you, hon,” Renee said, whipping the fabric cover from my neck and guiding me into Rosie’s small powder room. “Go on, open your eyes, silly girl.”
I peeked. I gasped. I clapped a hand over my mouth. I’d had no idea how huge my eyes were. I blinked. A much older-looking, sophisticated woman returned my stare. “Oh. Lord.” I touched my neck.
Renee leaned in. “Hang on a sec.” She did a fast something else with her scissors, then declared it “perfect,” and added that my Love family bone structure lent itself to this sort of a style.
I nodded, unable to look away from the strange woman gazing at me from the tiny mirror.
Rosie did a double take as she was packing up the last of the pies to cart over to the garage. “Oh, Angel,” she said, wiping her hands off on her apron. “You are more beautiful than ever.” She brushed my cheek with her lips. “Lordy, Antony is gonna shit bricks.”
I grinned and helped her finish loading up the food while Renee cleaned up the hair mess and tucked the nearly two feet of my hair into a large zip lock bag. When we arrived, she insisted that I wait and make an entrance with her. Which we did, to much hooting, hollering and catcalling. I let Rosie put one of her little bandanas on me so I matched my brothers and Jeffery, and we waited.
When my parents arrived, they were shocked, to say the least. Mama started crying straight off. But when she saw my hair, she tugged off her bandana, revealing the thin strands of auburn she had left, also cut short. Then she walked to me, brushed her fingers through my hair, and leaned her forehead to mine.
“I love you, Angel,” she said, hanging onto my shoulders and using the shorthand version of my name I’d never once, in my entire life, heard her say.
Chapter Twelve
That Christmas we had ourselves not one, but two weddings. And the couples that finally ended up tying the knot were not the same ones who’d started out together that bizarre summer.
The following summer, after I’d made it clear to my parents that I would not be returning to New York until maybe the next school year, we welcomed two babies into the fold. Amanda Love, Aiden and Rosalee’s daughter, was born about three hours before Joshua Love, son of Antony and, of all people, Margot, his therapist.
They were sweet kids, and the fact that my mother got to hold them and fawn all over them to her heart’s content made a lot of the past year of hell worth it. She and I hadn’t really changed much, despite the touching mother-daughter moment at Thanksgiving.
But between loving up her grandbabies and worrying about Kieran, whose wedding had been cancelled, then put back on the calendar, then cancelled again over the course of the year, plus the added bonus of falling and busting her hip on the laundry room floor, she had ample opportunity to ignore me. Which she did.
I had settled in, though, in a way that surprised me. I found myself enjoying the ebb and flow of my parents’ lives. I made breakfast, and after exclaiming over it the first week or so, Mama came to expect it. Even on the days I “slept over,” I would make sure I drove the second-hand beater car my brother had found for me home in time to have the coffee ready and the eggs perfect.
She was pretty formidable, my mother. That much I had come to accept. I’d always been of the opinion that my father was the head honcho, ruling the roost, making all the rules. But that first year I spent under her roof again, I got a completely different perspective.
Mama expended a lot of energy worrying about Kieran and Dom that year, once her oldest and her baby seemed settled in with their little families.
With good reason. Poor Kieran had not only fallen again for his old flame, Cara Cooper, he’d lost his job and fiancée—not that anyone really mourned her absence—but to top it off, he crashed his nice convertible into Antony’s pond, luckily only hurting his shoulder in the process.
Dominic was just himself, as always. Flighty when it came to women, laser-focused on his brewery work, and seeming to draw in on himself and away from the family in a way that made my parents and brothers fret about the medications he was supposed to be taking for his depression.
I’d taken to absenting myself in the evenings, sick of hearing about Kieran and Dom, getting antsy and planning how I might escape again and resume what shreds remained of the life I’d left behind in New York. I was moping around in late August when Mama sat next to me in a poolside chair. We’d had a knock-down drag-out—again—the night before, when I was heading out to meet old friends at a bar in Lexington. She’d been pretty nasty about my comings and goings, and how folks were talking about my freedom and how I used it.
I told her I didn’t give half a shit about what “folks” said, and she shouldn’t either.
She called me no better than a streetwalker, coming home at all hours, smelling of sex.
I told her to go to hell and take her hypocritical bullshit with her. Then I reminded her about Aiden’s book and how he’d represented my mother—as a fifties-generation, red-headed version of me, only with a different name and slightly altered set of circumstances.
She’d slapped me, hard.
It had been one of our more productive conversations.
Now that the baby flurry had died down and her other sons were giving her fits, I figured it for high time to get the hell out of town again. But something kept me there, and I couldn’t quite figure out what.
“So, I called that school,” she said, sipping her lemonade and tugging her wide-brimmed gardening hat lower on her head.
“I’ll just bet you did,” I said, slouching down and staring at the book I’d been pretending to read for the past hour.
“Yes, and had quite the enlightening conversation with a woman named Miss Turner. She was a real priss, I can tell you. But.” She stopped and sipped again. “She made it perfectly clear that they had not had anyone named Angelique Brianna Love enrolled for the past three and a half years.”
I sighed and dropped the book, turning from her, my feet on the hot concrete, my mind spinning with the possible ways out of this mess.
“Three and a half years. My lands, that means the year before I got sick, you simply up and stopped going to your classes. Heavens. Your poor daddy. This just might kill him.”
“Stop trying to blackmail– ”
“Oh, honey, I’m not blackmailing you. I don’t have time for that. I’m telling you straight up that you will have to break it to him tonight. What we do with you after that, I can’t say.”
I jumped to my feet. “What you’ll do with me? What you will do? With me?”
She rolled her eyes and flapped her hand in front of her face. “Sit down. I’m on your side on this one.”
I already had my mouth open to let loose with a string of curses I couldn’t actually afford, given the dwindling state of the money I’d brought with me. When her words connected with my brain, I dropped into the chair, stunned. She patted my leg. “You know, you could work at the pub again.” She sipped her lemonade. “Or maybe you can work at the brewery. Heaven knows your Daddy and Dominic could use a foil … or something to keep them from coming near to killing each other every day over there.”
“I’m not gonna …”
She shot me a look that advised me without a word to shut my mouth if I knew what was good for me right then.
“I remember my first summer in this house,” she said, in a dizzying change of subject. She set her empty glass on the table between our chairs. “Antony was about a month old or so. It was the hottest summer on record. The AC worked about half the time, and when it did, it leaked into the foundation, making water seep up through the bottom basement floor. I recall sitting in my kitchen, surrounded by dirty dishes and laundry, with your brother latched onto my tit like if he let it go I might disappear on him.”
“Mama, TMI.”
“Nonsense. You’ll be a mother someday, and it’ll be all right to talk about babies sucking the energy right out of you twenty-four-seven. Anyway, your Daddy was trying his best to make enough money every month to pay on his loans to his uncle and keep groceries on our table. But really all I remember is hot. H-O-T and miserable, I tell you. But we made it.”
She glanced over at me. “We stuck it out. We sacrificed. Because we had to.” She turned so her legs were between our lounge chairs. “If you want to toss what you worked so dang hard for Angelique, all those years, all that practice, all those competitions, because it got ‘too hard’ for you?” She hooked her fingers around the words in that annoying way she had. “Well, who am I to try to offer you anything more in this life than to sling beer, barbeque, and pizza? If you’re satisfied with that, I guess I will be, too.” She stood up and stretched. I noted that she seemed to be putting much-needed weight on after her year of medical trauma. Her hair had grown back, thicker, a little darker red and wavy.
My mind spun. Bouncing from her claiming to be on my side, to the overt slam she’d made about my lack of aspirations, the bitch. God, I hated her. I ground my teeth, determined not to rise to the bait she dangled. I rose from my seat, picked up my book, and met her bemused expression with one of my own.
“Mama, don’t we have a wedding to go to?”
She blinked. I gave myself a mental high-five for disarming her, albeit sneakily.
“I’m … who … oh, Cara.”
“Yes, Mama. Sweet little Cara Cooper, the girl my brother is still so sick in love with he can’t see straight. She’s marrying herself a rich Prince Charming today. We told Kieran we’d be there for him, remember? Best get tidied up.” I flicked her hat as I passed, sending it sailing along in a sudden breeze until it landed on the calm blue surface of the pool.
