Between the Sheets (29 page)

“Who else is here?” Casey asked, looking down at the plate of half-eaten toast in front of him.

“Ashley,” Brody said. “She just went to the bathroom.”

“I went by the bar to settle the bill,” Ty said to Sean.

“Ty,” Sean said, digging back into his jalapeño omelette. “It’s ten a.m. on a Saturday.”

“I know, but I didn’t want to leave it hanging for too long.”

Sean laughed. “Well, I think you can leave it hanging until after breakfast.”

“Anything happen after I left?” Ty was braced for news of a fight.

“No. Broke up pretty quick, actually. I think one of the boys from St. Louis stayed with the new first-grade teacher, which means The Pour House has had its first stranger-to-local hookup. I feel like I’ve arrived.”

Cora came by with a pot of coffee and a menu. “Hello, boys,” she said, giving Casey a special grin. “You here to finish up my arbor?” she asked, and Casey shook his head.

“I go back to school on Monday,” he said.

“Well, I suppose that’s all right,” she teased. “You want some breakfast?”

“I can’t believe you’re here working,” Ty told Cora. “You must be beat after last night.”

“Actually, I just got here,” she said. “Sean and I slept in and my staff opened the place.”

“And look,” Sean said. “It didn’t burn down.”

“I know,” she agreed. “One of these days we might actually get to take a vacation.”

The two of them made like lovebirds, and Brody nudged Casey and rolled his eyes. Casey pretended to put his finger down his throat and gag.

“Now,” Cora said. “You want some breakfast?”

“We just ate, actually,” Ty said at the same time Casey piped up. “Pecan pancakes.”

“All right,” Ty said, not interested in fighting the tide. He turned over his mug. “Pecan pancakes, and I’ll take some coffee.”

“You know some folks have been asking about you this morning,” she said, pouring coffee into his mug.

“Me?” he asked, alarm bells ringing.

“It’s gotten around that there was a guy in town who fixed up old motorcycles. Sounds like half the town has one in their garage.” She watched him through the steam billowing up around his coffee cup.

“Who has been telling people?” Ty asked. The auction was less than twelve hours ago. News doesn’t usually travel
that
fast.

“Me,” Sean said.

“Me, too,” Cora said.

“I’ve kept my mouth shut,” Brody said. “I don’t want my carpenter to open up a garage while I’ve got all this work.”

“I’m not opening a garage,” Ty said.

Ashley came out from the back hallway leading to the bathrooms. She had her hands tucked into the sleeves of her navy sweatshirt and her freckles stood out harshly against her pale face.

Brody gave Casey a nudge and scooted out of the booth.

“You all right?” Brody whispered, rubbing his hand down her back.

“I’m going to head home,” she said with a wan smile. “You can stay.”

There wasn’t even a question. He grabbed their coats from the hooks by the booth, threw some money on the table, and off they went.

“Why are you smiling?” Sean asked Cora, who was
leaning back against the booth, watching them go with a grin on her face.

“Because love is a wonderful thing,” she answered. “I’ll be back with your pancakes.”

Casey asked for Sean’s phone and he handed it over, and within seconds the theme song to Plants vs. Zombies was blaring. Casey quickly turned it down, and Ty was struck with the sudden need to touch his son. To hug him.

And he didn’t know how to get from where they were to where he wanted them to go.

Sitting here in this booth, with these people, after what they’d done last night and the way they treated his son … it felt right.

He still wasn’t sure if leaving Memphis was a mistake, but coming here certainly wasn’t. And how those two things existed in tandem he had no idea, but there it was.

This place, these people—they were good for Casey. And maybe they’d be good for him, too.

“Hey, so what’s happening with you and Shelby?” Sean asked.

Casey’s head sprung up from the phone.

Ty shot Sean a death stare.

“Sorry,” Sean whispered.

Casey glanced from Ty to Sean. “What’s going on?”

“It’s complicated.”

“No, it’s not.” Casey said, putting down the phone. “That’s just what adults say when they don’t want to tell kids about something.”

Sean snorted.

“You know,” Ty said to Sean, “I was just starting to like you.”

“Ty!” Casey cried, and Ty realized that this was very serious for the kid.

“I like Shelby,” he said, honestly. “A lot.”

“Does she like you?”

“I think so, yes. Does that bother you?”

“Bothers
me
,” Sean joked, but Ty ignored him.

“Casey?” he asked again.

“You shouldn’t hurt her,” Casey said, looking back down at the phone. His finger pressing against the plastic that surrounded it.

“Why do you think I would?”

Casey’s eyes shifted from Ty to Sean and then back to Ty. “Because that’s what adults do, right? When they like someone?”

Oh, God
. That’s what love looked like in Casey’s world. Like fighting and doors slamming and crying. Love was ugly for Casey.

“Not all adults,” Sean said quietly. “I would never hurt Cora. Brody would never hurt Ashley.”

The corner of Casey’s lips shifted. “He’d probably kill anyone that hurt Ashley.”

“This is true,” Sean said.

“I won’t hurt Shelby,” Ty said, though he couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t hurt
him
. In fact, the more he thought of last night, and the moat she had dug around herself, the more inevitable it seemed.

Casey didn’t look up, so Ty leaned over and put his hand over the phone. His fingers brushed Casey’s and he jerked them away.
Right
, he thought,
that’s how far away we are from a father/son hug
.

“Did you hear me?” Ty asked, and Casey’s blue eyes held a thousand questions. A thousand doubts. “I won’t hurt her.”

Or you
.

Love should be beautiful. Love should be quiet and full of grace and kindness, and Ty didn’t know how to show that to Casey the way that Pop and Nana had shown him. Maybe he could bank on Sean and Cora,
Ashley and Brody to do that. To show both of them what love between adults looked like.

He half-expected the kid to make a flip comment, some kind of joke, but instead he nodded, as if he understood all the things Ty was trying to say. And then he slid the phone out from under Ty’s hand, without ever touching him, and was soon back to killing zombies with weaponized cartoon plants.

“Excuse me.” An older man and woman stood at his elbow beside the table. There was something about the guy that reminded him of Pop. Maybe it was the dark blue work pants he wore, or the chambray shirt rolled exactly to his elbow. “You the fella that fixes motorcycles?”

“I ah … I guess I am. I mean, I don’t have a garage or anything …”

“My husband has a problem,” the woman said, getting to the point. “He’s got a collection of bikes that he always says he’s going to fix up, but all they do is sit in our shed rusting.”

Ty perked up. This was how he found parts for his rebuilds, old guys like this with a shed full of rusted machines.

“Are you selling them?” he asked.

The old man looked doubtful, but his wife nodded emphatically.

“There’s two I’d like to keep,” the man said quickly, before his wife could go cleaning out his shed. “I’ll pay you to work on them with the parts from the others and whatever cash makes up the difference.”

Ty nodded. “I’ll come and look at them.”

With a shaky hand the old man wrote his name, Otto Turner, and phone number on a napkin, and they made a plan to speak later in the week.

Before Casey was done with his pancakes, another guy came by asking questions about his Harley’s clutch,
and Ty found himself inviting the guy to bring it around to the house so he could take a look at it. And as Sean and Ty and Casey were standing to leave, a woman stopped by and asked if he worked on cars, too, since she thought the mechanic in Marietta was scamming her because she was a woman and didn’t know anything about cylindrical belts.

“That’s because no car has that,” Ty said. “He’s making it up.”

“And charging me three hundred dollars,” she said, nearly in tears, and it was the tears that did it.

“Can you get it to my house?” he asked, and the woman nodded. “Get it there today and I can have a look at it tonight.”

She left, grateful and smiling, and he could feel Sean beside him laughing.

“Not in business, huh?”

When Casey had walked into Pop’s shop, Ty’s world had tilted with certain inevitability. And he felt the world tilt again in a way that told him he couldn’t avoid this. He couldn’t pretend any longer. If this was home—and his son seemed to want it to be—then it was time to put down roots.

It was time to grow up.

“When does this damn Chamber of Commerce meet?” he asked. “Because I’m going to need some help.”

Gravel crunched and pinged under her car’s tires as Shelby rolled to a stop in front of the old Del Monte factory her mother used to run.

The chain-link gate was topped with barbed wire and another layer of razor wire on top of that. Chain the size of Shelby’s arm locked the doors together with three different padlocks. But next to the gate, a section at
the bottom of the fence had been rolled back to make a hole a person could squeeze through.

Before the
America Today
show and the Maybream contest, this factory had been abandoned, but it remained remarkably undamaged. There hadn’t been a lot of graffiti, and the windows had been untouched.

But after the fiasco with the live taping and the factory going to that town in Alaska, the building had taken the brunt of the town’s anger.

The windows gaped, rimmed with shards of broken glass. Graffiti covered the stone and brick walls. Beer cans and litter blew across the old loading dock.

Shelby had always loved the fact that the old factory never looked abandoned. It had seemed as if it were just waiting for work to resume, patiently sitting here on the south side of town for its chance to once again be useful. To bring back jobs and save the town’s economy.

Now it looked abandoned.

It looked uncared for and unwanted.

There was no more pretending.

In Evie’s lap was a pile of Kleenex she’d torn to confetti, creating a bird’s nest of anxiety. Mom had kept it together in the doctor’s office, but Shelby knew when her mother was faking it, when she was pretending to understand what was going on. Evie had spent most of the Saturday morning emergency appointment struggling through the questions.

Faking the answers.

“What happened to your head, Ms. Monroe?” Dr. Lohmann had asked.

“An accident,” Evie had answered, feeling for the bandage as if the answer might be there. But Shelby knew she’d forgotten all about the bandage. About digging up the rosebushes despite the puffy and no doubt painful scratches all over her exposed skin. “I’m fine, though, Doctor. Totally fine. How is your wife?”

Dr. Lohmann wasn’t married, but he’d smiled and held the light up to check her pupils.

You can’t pretend anymore,
he’d told Shelby.
You can’t stubborn it out anymore. The disease is winning and it’s time to change the way you live
.

“What are we doing here?” Evie asked, blinking through the windshield at the factory.

Shelby didn’t have an answer to that. She didn’t have answers for anything. She had a file full of the names of nurses Dr. Lohmann could recommend for in-home care. And an ache deep in the pit of her stomach, where all of her fear lived. Her worry.

They’d left the doctor’s office and she’d driven them here, to the south side of town on the far side of the river to the abandoned factory. This factory for so many years was who her mother was—it had been what she was good at. The part of Evie that Shelby’s father could not crush.

On autopilot she’d driven here, or maybe her subconscious had made the choice, coming to this place that had been a source of strength for her mother. For them both.

Because they would need strength for what was coming. And right now, she had none.

Inside her purse in the backseat, her phone dinged. Another text message received.

Ty
, she thought. He’d texted her twice, once last night and then again this morning, and she’d texted back brief replies, that her mother was fine. That she was fine. That she appreciated his worry, but they were okay.

Truthfully, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever been farther from okay. Last night had been awful. Her mother, agitated and upset and probably in pain, had wandered the house all night and Shelby had been too scared to sleep.

Instead she made a pot of coffee and remembered the
first time she’d logged onto one of the Alzheimer caregiver chat rooms and read what people had posted. Adult children, exhausted and at their wits’ end, locking their parents in their rooms. Tying bells to their ankles. Drugging them to sleep.

Five years ago, when Evie had been diagnosed, Shelby couldn’t even fathom doing that to her mother. She’d thought, stupidly, innocently, that she would be so much better than those people she’d been convinced were mistreating their parents.

Last night at the worst of her mother’s confusion and aggression and wandering, she’d considered all of those things.

And today she felt sick with guilt. Crushed by her own inadequacy.

She wanted Ty. She wanted to see him, rest her head on his shoulder, let his touch take away some of this dread and guilt and worry that skittered under her skin.

That was the pressure valve. She wanted to see him, touch him, so that she wouldn’t have to think. So that she wouldn’t have to deal with finding a nurse, convincing her mother to accept another person in their home. Accepting that person herself.

But she couldn’t avoid this any longer. Her mother was deteriorating past the point that Shelby could care for her herself. Past the point that she could fool anyone that she was doing an okay job.