For You (The 'Burg Series) (7 page)

“I do. I’m an American. I know how to use it, my kids know to avoid it and it’s locked in a safe anyway so they couldn’t get it even if they wanted to make trouble.”

I let it go and tried something else. “Al’s not a dweeb and it’s highly likely he owns a gun.”

Meems’s husband Al was anything but a dweeb. He’d been the center on the football team, on the line, right next to Morrie. Time had made him a little soft but it hadn’t made him a slouch. And he was a hunter, I knew he had guns. And he loved me, I knew he’d blow the brains out of anyone who tried to hurt me or got near his wife and kids.

No, that wasn’t true. Anyone got near his wife and kids, Al would not use his gun, he’d go in with his hands and rip them apart.

“They got no room for you, Feb. Theirs is a full house.”

This was true, they had four kids and Al wasn’t a chemist at Lilly. He worked on the highway crew. It was union, it paid well and the Coffee House was nothing to sneeze at because Meems could bake. Her muffins were orgasmic and her cookies and cakes were so good, you’d sell your soul to the devil if she made you do it just so you could have one. Still, they had four kids and Meems had a fondness for catalogue shopping. Bob, her postman, blamed her for the hernia he suffered last year and he wasn’t joking.

“Colt works a lot. You wouldn’t have to sleep on the pull out. He’d probably let you use his bed.”

If Morrie was being funny, I wasn’t laughing.

“If he’s gone all the time, what purpose would it serve me staying there?”

I watched Morrie’s face change, resistance drifting through it in a hard way, and I knew part of the bucketload of shit that sifted through my brain while I wasn’t sleeping last night was going to come spilling out just then.

I wasn’t wrong.

“We gotta talk about Colt.”

I shook my head.

His coffee cup came down with a crash and I jumped back a foot. I looked down, seeing the mug had split right down the middle and coffee was all over the place, spreading, spilling down the side of the counter, dripping in a coffee waterfall to the floor.

I looked at my brother. “Holy shit, Morrie.”

He turned and with an underarm throw he tossed the handle to the coffee mug, a jagged section of mug still attached to it, into the sink with such force it fractured again, bits flying out everywhere.

I didn’t jump that time but I took a step back.

“Morrie –”

Morrie leaned forward. “You’re gonna talk to me, February, talk to me right, fucking, now.”
 

I lifted my hand in a conciliatory gesture but Morrie shook his head.

“You spill now or you spill when Mom and Dad get here. Your choice but it’s been too fucking long. We all let it go too long. We shoulda made you spill ages ago, before Pete –”

“Stop!” I shouted.

No one talked to me about Pete. No one.

Not Meems. Not Jessie. Not Mom and Dad.

Not even my brother, who I loved best of them all which was saying a whole helluva lot.

I thought that’d work, it had worked before many times. Everyone knew I couldn’t talk about Pete.

But it didn’t work. Morrie moved fast. Before I knew it he had his hand curled around my upper arm and he gave me a shake. It wasn’t controlled, it was almost brutal and my head snapped back with the force of it.

My breath started coming fast but thin. Morrie got Dad’s temper which could flare out of control, though neither of them ever hurt anyone who didn’t need to get hurt. I got Mom’s which also could flare out of control but we were women and our hurt came from words rather than actions and those, unfortunately, lasted longer.

“What the fuck happened?” Morrie was in my face. “What made it go bad? What made you do what you did?”

“Let go of me Morrie.”

“Answer me, Feb.”

“
Let me go!
”

Another shake and my head snapped back. “
Answer me!
”

“
You’re hurting me!
” I yelled.

“
I should knock some fuckin’ sense into you!
” he yelled back.

I made a noise like I was going to vomit, it was involuntary and it sounded nasty. Then I wasn’t breathing anymore, not even thin, useless breaths – nothing, no oxygen.
 

Morrie’s face changed and he let me go, stepping back. He looked whipped, injured, the expression hideous on his face, the knowledge of what he’d done and what he’d said attacking him.

“Baby Sister,” he whispered but I shook my head.

He couldn’t go back to beloved big brother now. Not after that. Not after that. No way. No fucking way.

“I’m moving in with Jessie,” I announced, turning away.

“Feb, don’t. You need to be protected. You need someone lookin’ after you.”

I turned back. “A couple of hours in, Morrie, fine job you made of it.”

He flinched, his head jerking back with the weight of my blow. Just as I said, my anger came out in words and they hurt far worse than my arm was stinging just now.

I nodded my head to the bar that separated his kitchen from the dining area. On it, probably doused in coffee, was the list I spent most of the morning writing.

“Give that list to Alec, he wants it.”

I left it at that. I had to. And I walked away to pack.

* * * * *

“You’ve got a nerve,” Pete’s Mom, LeeAnne, said in my ear.

“LeeAnne –”

“I’m not giving you his number, you bitch.”

“This is important.”

“Nothin’s that important.”

“Someone’s dead.”

LeeAnne fell silent and I lifted my gaze to Meems and Jessie who were both crunched into Meems’s back office at the Coffee House. Both of them were watching me, both of them looking pissed and harassed, both of them knowing what this cost me and both of them wishing they could pay the toll instead of me.

“Her name is Angie. Evidence came out last night that she was murdered because of something that happened between her and me. There’s a possibility that anyone who…” Christ, how did I say this? LeeAnne was a bitch, the worst mother-in-law in history, but still, good manners prevented me from saying it straight out. “Anyway, anyone who didn’t get along with me might be in danger.”

“You’re poison,” LeeAnne spat, “always were.”

I didn’t get that, even from LeeAnne. She was a bitch but she’d seen me in the hospital and she knew her son did that to me.

She knew it wasn’t
me
who beat the shit out of Pete. It wasn’t
me
who came home that fucking, shitty, awful night and attacked me far worse than any of the times before. Times which could be brushed away as too much drink or what Pete called “our passionate but volatile relationship” (I thought it wasn’t much the first and too much of the last). It wasn’t
me
who tried to rape me, who I had to fight back, scared silly, losing the fight, only somehow to escape and drive over to Morrie’s house.

It was just
me
who happened to pick a time when Alec was at Morrie’s. And it was
me
who was battered, bloodied, my clothes torn, barely able to hold myself up, having performed a miracle by driving myself there in one piece at all. And it was
me
who Alec took one look at, turned to Morrie and said, “You see to her, I’ll see to him.” And it was
for
me that Alec drove straight to my house and nearly beat the life out of my husband.

“Please, LeeAnne, give me his number,” I said.

“Still can’t see right out of his left eye, my boy,” she countered.

I didn’t doubt this was true. Alec did a number on him. Detached retina, amongst other things.

It wasn’t more than he deserved. He’d done a number on me. We were both in the hospital at the same time.

I got out earlier.

Pete got out and left town. He didn’t press charges. This was likely due to Morrie, Dad and a variety of other townsfolk making this Pete’s only option.

I wasn’t going to say I was sorry.

I
was
sorry. Very sorry. So sorry it had seeped into my soul. But not sorry for Pete Hollister.

Having had a very long time to look back, Pete had always been an asshole. But he’d been a good-looking one. Not as good-looking as Alec but with Alec lost to me, Pete would do. And I needed someone. Someone to fill the hole Alec left. No, it wasn’t a hole. It was a wound. I couldn’t close the wound so I needed someone to numb the pain. Or take my mind off it. Pete did that, he was good at it. He delivered his own brand of pain in order to succeed wildly in this endeavor.

What I was sorry about was the fact that Alec hurt Pete and I knew he’d hate himself for doing it instead of hating me. And I was sorry that I put him in that position. It was the only one he had, he and Morrie had been looking after me so long they didn’t know how to do anything different even if things had changed between Alec and me. And I was sorry that he saw me the way he did, beaten, not his February, never to be his February again. She was gone like he told me the Alec he was once was gone. Pete had beaten her out of me. I answered to my name but I didn’t know who February was any longer. I’d spent nearly two decades trying to figure it out but never could. The only thing I knew was she wasn’t the girl I used to be.

“LeeAnne, if you don’t want to give me his number then just please call him and warn him –”

“I’ll call. I’ll tell him the bitch is back and he should brace. It was a dark day, the day he met you.”

Then I heard her hang up.

I flipped my cell phone closed and curled my fingers around it.

“Well, that’s done,” I told Jessie and Meems. I was shaking.

I’d forgotten how much I hated LeeAnne. I’d always been so focused on how much I hated Pete that I forgot to hate his mother. But now I remembered.

I knew hate, even as a kid because I always hated Alec’s parents.

Even as a kid, before I understood it and before it happened between him and me, I hated the way Alec’s face looked when the call came, his Mom telling my Mom to bring him home (those times she remembered he was over at all). Or when his Dad would come around to get him.
 

Then when I grew older and I understood somewhere right and true inside me that he was mine, I hated them more when he’d get in a mood because of them. Because the town was talking about something they’d do that was crazy, like when his Mom went drunk to the liquor store and fell into a display, making a bunch of bottles of rum fall over and crash to the ground and the police had dragged her in. Or when his Dad showed up sauced at a football game and stood at the other team’s bleachers and alternately bragged loudly about Alec or insulted their boys and he’d been jumped before some men from our side, some of the coaches and even some of the players, including Alec, had had to pull his Dad out of the fray.

But that hate slipped away after that night when the police took his Dad away and Social Services had told his Mom he wasn’t coming back and Dad and Morrie moved Alec into Morrie’s room. Because after that night, he was safe, he was healing, he was finally home and I didn’t have to hate anymore.

And for awhile, those years when Alec finally was mine, I forgot what hate felt like.

Glory days.

“Feb –” Meems started.

I got up. “I need to get to the bar.”

“Ain’t no one gonna be bothered, you take a coupla days off,” Jessie told me.

“I’ll go into hiding when the town finds out anyone who ever looked at me funny might be the next one to end up bloody and dead in an alley.”

Jessie and Meems looked at each other before they both looked back at me.

“No one’s gonna blame you for this, Feb,” Meems told me.

“Right,” I replied.

“Feb, everyone on some level is gonna understand you’re feelin’ exactly as you’re feelin’ right now,” Jessie said.

“Maybe, after Alec catches this guy and the fear fades away. ‘Til then…” I let that hang.

I’d been in a lot of small towns, sometimes spent only months in them, a couple, the towns that reminded me of home, I spent over a year. I knew how people thought. I knew how they could turn. I’d even seen it once and it hadn’t been pretty. I hadn’t even been involved and it still hurt to watch.