Indecent Proposal (35 page)

Ryan had nothing left to cling to. No pride. No animosity. No hurt feelings. Nothing.

Just as she opened her mouth to say please, Nora stepped aside.

“Come on in,” she said.

And for the first time since that night when Paul had robbed her dad of all his hard-saved money, she stepped back into her home.

“Thank you,” she whispered, walking past her sister, unable to look at her because then the floodgates would open and she’d be a crying pregnant mess in sequins on the old beige carpet.

The house was the same and yet not. The same blankets were thrown over what looked like a new gray couch. The mantel over the fireplace still held the shrine to Mom, the candles and the wedding picture. The snapshots of Mom in the hospital, red-faced and beaming, holding each of them as babies. Nora’s high school graduation portrait was shoved in the back and in the front there was a new one of Olivia, sitting in a spotlight, bent over the keys of a grand piano—playing her heart out.

The television was new, but it sat on the same fake wood TV stand, the corner broken in from some wrestling match between Wes and one of the Sullivans down the street.

Dad’s recliner was still there. The stuffing coming out of a split at the arm.

The smell was the same. Coffee and Lysol.

Upstairs a shower came on and all the pipes throbbed and clanked at the pressure. Part of the soundtrack to her childhood.

She put her fingers to her lips and closed her eyes. Feeling in utterly equal measures the pain of having been gone, the relief at finally being back, and the strange and surprising gratitude that she’d managed to
grow up and past the person she’d been when she lived here.

She’d thought for so long that this was her home. That part of her rootlessness was that she couldn’t come back here. But she realized the truth in this moment. It wasn’t really her home. Not anymore.

If Nora had let her come back after Paul, she might never have changed. Not really. Certainly she never would have met Harrison or gotten pregnant. But she would have stayed some version of the girl she’d been in these four walls.

Angry, mean, prideful.

Thank God
, she thought,
thank God I got away
.

“How long do you need to stay?” Nora asked.

“I … I don’t know. A week, maybe.”

“Your room is still empty. You’ll have to move some boxes, but it’s yours.”

In every variation of her homecoming that she’d imagined over the years, this nonplussed, undemanding version of her sister never made an appearance.

“Why are you doing this?” Ryan asked. “Why now?”

Nora had always been good at bad news. Ryan remembered when Nora looked her right in the eye and said Mom wasn’t coming home from the hospital. That she would die in that room in Eastern, attached to the tubes and the machines. Nora had held Ryan while she cried in those stiff-backed hospital chairs. They weren’t even a year apart, but Nora handled grief as if it were Play-Doh. While everyone around her was wrecked with sadness, she was able to just roll hers up into smaller and smaller pieces until she could put it away.

“Because you’re here,” she said, point-blank. “And you weren’t before. It was easier to tell you to stay away when I wasn’t looking at your face. You look like shit, by the way.”

Ryan laughed, not that it was all that funny.

“And I missed you too.”

“Nora?” Dad yelled from the kitchen, and her heart dropped into her stomach. “Who you talking to?”

Nora lifted an eyebrow and stepped so close, Ryan felt the edge of her coffee cup in her sternum. “You do one thing, one thing to hurt that man, and you’ll never step foot inside this house again. I don’t care if you’re pregnant or not.”

Ryan sucked in a quick breath. “You saw the news?”

“No. I looked at you. I’m a nurse, Ryan. And you have always been a shitty liar.” She took a deep breath and walked to the kitchen doorway. “I’ve got a surprise for you, Daddy.” Her tone implied that the surprise was an Ebola infection.

The kitchen was bright, the sunlight from all the back windows a kind of beacon, and she followed that light to stand beside Nora in the doorway.

Daddy, in an old pair of work pants and a gray Eagles tee shirt probably as old as Ryan, sat at the head of the beat-up Formica table, the newspaper separated and opened around him in his complicated paper-reading ritual. He wore a pair of half-glasses, which, when she shuffled guilty and anxious into the room, he slid up onto the wild shock of white hair on his head.

Age had not been kind, and he looked a little like one of those wizened troll dolls with the crazy hair.

“Is that …” he whispered.

“Hey, Daddy.” At the sight of her father, the same but older, thinner, and more delicate somehow in that bright sunlight, the tears stormed the gates and she was overrun. So many years gone. Wasted. For what? “It’s me.”

Daddy glanced from Ryan to Nora.

“Don’t look at
me
,” Nora said, cutting across the kitchen to the coffeepot. “She just showed up at our door like a stray cat.”

His throat bobbed and his hands opened and closed into fists, and she would do anything—anything at all—to change the fact that the sight of her gave him any pain.

“I told her she could stay here,” Nora said.

“Really?” Daddy asked. “Will wonders never cease.”

“She paid off the mortgage,” Nora said with a shrug. “Started that fund for Olivia. The money she took has been paid back.”

“I figure I forgot about that money a long time ago,” Daddy said.

Please, Daddy. Please just get up from that chair and hug me
.

And then he did; he got to his feet, the aluminum chair sliding across the old linoleum with a screech. Ryan set her bag down. Dad took a step and so did she, and then she was flying across that kitchen into his open arms. His familiar Old Spice-scented hug.

“I’m so sorry,” she breathed, over and over again.

“I know,” he said, stroking her hair like she was ten again. “And … I am too. We all are. It’s going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

It wasn’t. Maybe not ever. Not after Harrison and the election. Her heart broken in that suite in Atlanta. But it felt so good to hear her dad say it after all this time.

“What’s going on?” another voice asked from the back steps that led into the kitchen from the second floor.

Ryan whirled to see her little sister, Olivia, standing in the doorway.

Not so little anymore, she thought with a pang.

Olivia was a beautiful young woman. Tall and thin, with wet brown hair sliding down her back. Her wide brown eyes glanced from her to Daddy to Nora, taking it all in.

“Hey, Liv,” Ryan said.

“You’re back.”

Ryan nodded, and Olivia slowly stepped off the last stair and crossed the kitchen. “Nora let you in?”

“I didn’t really give her a choice.”

That made Olivia smile, and Ryan stood in a kind of breathless wait. A painful limbo.

“Thanks for the dress you sent on my birthday.”

Ryan smiled. She’d been sending Olivia tee shirts and dresses from vintage shops in the Village since she’d left Philly. And they emailed each other fairly often.

“Did it fit?”

“It’s far too tight and way too short,” Nora said.

Olivia, to Ryan’s nearly anguished delight, rolled her eyes and Ryan didn’t wait for Olivia to come to her, she just pulled her sister into her arms and hugged her. Olivia, after a minute, hugged her back. Hard.

“Nora told me about the college fund,” Olivia whispered. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long,” she whispered, feeling the weight of all the things she’d missed in this girl’s life. Boyfriends. Friendships. Broken hearts. All the concerts and practice.

“Come on, Olivia,” Nora said. “Eat some breakfast; I’ll get dressed and get you to school.”

Nora walked past Ryan, dodging the hand Ryan reached out for her. Glaring at her over her shoulder, making it very clear that Ryan could come back in the house but Nora would not be so easily won over.

Two down
, she thought, her arm slung over Olivia’s shoulder, while Daddy stepped behind the stove talking about making his girls some toads in the hole.

After breakfast, Nora took Olivia to school and Ryan nearly fell asleep at the table.

“Go on up to bed,” Daddy said, kissing her forehead.

“Where are you going?” she asked, wanting to linger in the warmth of his smile for as long as she could.

“Had a little fire down at the hall; we’re going to start
fixing it up,” he said, referring to VFW Post 2. Dad’s home away from home.

“I’ll come with.”

“You look like you’re about to fall over. Go on up to bed.”

There was no point in arguing, so she climbed the old steps, skipping the second one and its squeak, out of habit, too exhausted to count the memories buzzing around her. Her room was dark but still impossibly smelled like Jean Naté and mothballs. The boxes got shoved onto the floor on the other side of the mattress by the window, and she fell face first and dreamless into the worst of the sag in the middle of her old bed.

Hours later, she woke to her sister shaking the mattress with her foot.

“Hey, get yourself up, sleepyhead.”

“Is this a joke?”

“No. It’s six o’clock.”

“In the morning?” Had she been asleep for almost twenty-four hours?

“No. At night, and I’ve got to get to work. There’s meatloaf downstairs, but you need to make sure Olivia does her homework and doesn’t just practice all night.”

“Practice … right.” She rolled over and pushed her hair out of her face.

Nora, in blue scrubs, her hair held away from her face with a thick silver barrette, stood in the tiny space between the bed and the old beat-up dresser with all the Roxy Music and The Cure and Morrissey stickers on it from her emo music phase.

For a moment, the sight of her sister right there shrunk her lungs down to nothing.

“You got these?” Nora asked, tossing a bottle at her. Ryan didn’t react fast enough and it hit her shoulder.

“Prenatal vitamins? Yes.”

“Have you had an ultrasound? Because you can come into the ER later and I’ll—”

“I’ve had an ultrasound. I wasn’t due back at my doctor in Atlanta for a month. Everything is fine.”

“You planning on staying for a month?”

The accusation was painfully clear.

“My life literally imploded, Nora—”

“Your life is always literally imploding.”

“Look, I’m sorry everything about me is too damn messy for you. But I’m not a kid and you can’t wound me anymore. You’ve hurt me all you can hurt me. So stop wasting your energy.”

For a second they just stared at each other. Years and miles and more hurt feelings than should be held in a lifetime between them. But they were sisters. And that still mattered to her.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” Ryan said. “We’ve wasted so much time doing that.”

Nora laughed and wiped her lip with her thumb, looking like a boxer getting ready to go back in the ring. “We’re Kaminskis—that’s all we know how to do.”

Oh if that wasn’t a crutch, she didn’t know what was.

“Well, I’m a Kaminski,” she said, throwing off her blankets and getting to her feet. God, this room was tiny. Why did it seem so big in her memory? She opened her bag and pulled out some yoga pants to pull on. “And I’m giving it up.”

Nora laughed deep in her throat as if the idea were a joke, and Ryan sighed. “I am not the girl I was,” she said. “I’m not picking up men and letting them tell me who I am.”

“Really?” Nora asked. “You’re telling me you showing up here, pregnant and broken-hearted, has nothing to do with a man?”

“It’s me and the baby right now. That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

The doubt in her sister’s voice made her want to punch her in the nose, but she was rising above those instincts.

Downstairs there was a pounding on the door, and Nora swore and turned on her heel. “If that is the Davies boy from down the street coming back here to sniff around Olivia, I am going to kick his ass,” she said, stomping down the steps.

Ryan threw on a tank top and ran after her sister. Because watching her sister kick a boy’s ass was still a pretty good time around the Burg.

Ryan got to the bottom of the stairs just as Nora pulled open the door.

“Listen, you little shit—”

But it wasn’t the boy from down the street.

It was Wallace.

Chapter 27

“You brought him here?” Ryan asked, following Wallace out the door to his rusted hatchback. She was wearing Olivia’s bunny slippers but no coat, and the November wind off the Delaware cut right through her. “In that?”

“Can we leave my car out of this? And yes, I brought him here, because for two days he’s been doing nothing but drinking and talking about you. And I can’t take any more of it. So you get him.”

“What if I don’t want him?”

“This is your husband?” Nora asked over her shoulder.

Wallace nodded.

“Weren’t you just saying none of this was about a man?” Nora asked, and she could hear the smirk in her sister’s voice.

“Wallace, this is my sister Nora. Nora, this is Wallace.” They exchanged cool nods.
Oh man
, it suddenly occurred to her why she’d liked Wallace so much. He and her sister were so much alike.

“Ryan,” Wallace said. “He wants to make things right.”

“Then he shouldn’t have made them so damn wrong.”

“Bring him in,” Nora said.

“Nora!” she protested.

“Let’s get him inside,” Wallace said, ignoring her. Nora and Wallace worked without her to get Harrison out of the car and into the house. They dropped him on
his back on the couch and Wallace pulled the afghan over him.

“There you go,” he said. “One husband delivered. I left Noelle at the hotel, so I’m going to get back to her.”

“You can’t just leave him here,” she said.

“I can,” Wallace said. “I am. He’s in bad shape, Ryan, and I think he needs you.”

“Well, I’m sick of being what he needs when he’s in bad shape!”

Olivia was on the stairs and Daddy came in from the kitchen. Nora was barely keeping a straight face.