Authors: Lauren Gilley
4
Then
Mike Walker had two sisters. One was fifteen, one was ten. The fifteen-year-old was a green-eyed, blonde-haired cheerleader with a Miss America smile and a body that was in the full bloom of adolescent beauty. The ten-year-old had always-tangled hair, dirty jeans and a pink spot on the tip of her nose from a scab that had nearly healed-over. Her name was Jo, and she answered the door when Tam rang the bell.
He bit back a sudden chuckle when the door swung open and revealed Joanna standing in the foyer. She was in black jeans that may very well have been her brother’s, a white Atlanta Braves sweatshirt, with a red stocking cap pulled down over her ears, her darker-than-the-other-Walkers hair a messy tangle over her shoulders. Her eyes were a blue-green he hadn’t ever seen before and they took a leisurely, speculative trip up to his face from his red Converse sneaks.
“You’re here to see Mike?” she guessed, and he thought he detected a hint of suspicion in her voice. As an only child, he didn’t know if this was normal sister behavior, or if Jo was the “paranoid little freak” Mike described her as.
From the door, he could see people moving around down at the end of the foyer, heard a raucous tumble of voices, and began to regret his decision to come. He hadn’t called ahead and it was a Sunday – didn’t huge families like Mike’s have big Sunday pot roast dinners every week to which they invited everyone from the mailman to the preacher? He didn’t know. He’d lingered at home this afternoon until his mother had mopped up her bloodied nose and sequestered herself in her room, offering him a weak smile and a promise that Dad wouldn’t be back that night.
“Are you guys having some kinda party?” he asked, “I can go.”
Mike appeared in the doorway behind his sister. “Move, midget.” He gave her a hard shove that earned a scowl. “Nah.” He smiled at Tam. “It’s cool. Come on in.”
Tam had come on his skateboard – two miles through the biting cold from his neighborhood to this one – and propped it up carefully on the front stoop before wiping his shoes on the mat and entering.
The Walkers lived in a two-story brick house that seemed twice the size of the squatty, mildew-covered bungalows in his own subdivision. Winter had robbed the trees of their leaves and the lawn of its color, but the yard was large and dotted with oaks whose thick trunks he wouldn’t be able to get his arms around. Here, at the Walkers’, there was pine straw and flowers and an American flag flapping on its pole. Tam took one step across the threshold and was assaulted by warm air and the pungent aromas of dinner: some kind of meat and something that smelled of garlic that left his mouth watering. His frayed, tattered senses were wrapped up in a soothing balm of everything his life lacked. The smells, the sounds, the tastes and textures of this place were so commonplace to the Walker family, and yet so dazzling to him. When Mike closed the front door, he had the sense of having walked into Narnia, the wardrobe doors sealing up behind him, and he never wanted to leave.
Mike’s father, Randy, was in the living room, talking over the TV, and threw up a hand as they entered. “Oh, good!” he had one of those booming, thunderous voices and big square faces of a man who’d played high school or college ball and had dreamt of going pro. The hand he held up was big as a bear paw with blunt, meaty fingers. His jeans were acid wash holdovers from the eighties, his sweater green and sloppy and wearing thin in the elbows. He had a crew cut and a smile that turned his eyes to happy crescents.
This is what a dad is
, Tam thought. He’d met the man before and he’d been dumbfounded by how picturesquely dad-like he was then too. He was a Rockwell painting and a storybook character. Mike and Walt were going to look like him when they grew up. Little Jordan – who’d been lying on his stomach on the floor and sat up, throwing a blue-green glance over his shoulder – was not. Neither Jordan nor the little one, Jo – who was tucking her hair up into her stocking cap, a series of neon Band-Aids on her fingertips marking some kind of tomboy war wounds – resembled either of their parents. There was something almost elfish about them.
“You’ll make six, Tammy,” Randy said, grinning broadly.
“Six, for…?” Tam was trying to process this new nickname. Had someone his own age bestowed it upon him, he would have kicked their ass. But coming from the dad of all dads, he supposed he had to swallow it.
“Football.” The big man got to his feet with a mud-spattered football clenched in one meaty hand. “You play with Walt and Mikey. I call dibs on the munchkins.”
**
Jo liked playing against newbies: they always underestimated her. People assumed that Dad picked her out of pity, as a way to make up for her smallness and her gender; let the big man play on the same side of the little girl so maybe she wouldn’t go down in embarrassing flames.
The biggest advantage in the world is being underestimated
, Dad always said.
When you prove ‘em wrong, they can’t freaking believe it.
Because Mike was so full of boyish pride, because he insisted Jo would only be quick until she had her period and turned into a “legit girl,” he never covered her like he should have. She was always just that far in front of him. And Tam, who didn’t know her save as the little sister who tried to tag along, would have no defenses against her. He’d be too worried about Dad.
The front yard was the optimum playing field. This time of year the Bermuda was short, brown and even under their feet. The driveway was the home end zone, the pine straw bed between their yard and the Powells’ was the away end zone. The wind was the sharp, snatch-your-breath-away kind of draft; it stung her cheeks and numbed her nose, and she knew it would impact the ball’s flight through the air. The sky was one big bank of gray clouds overhead, the elusive promise of southern snow just a whiff of ice.
Jo had pulled on fingerless gloves and her favorite, red clay stained Nikes. She’d tied her hair in a messy knot and stuffed it under her stocking cap so it wouldn’t be in the way. As she bent her knees and crouched, fingertips braced in the rough grass, poised and ready, excitement licked through her. Jess kept telling her that one day she’d discover nail polish and start caring about her wardrobe, but for now, she sucked in a deep breath of ice-smelling air and prepared for what she did care about: running.
She was to Dad’s left, Jordan on the right, a stretch of yard, Walt, Mike and Tam the only things standing between her and the driveway. And victory.
Tam…
She allowed herself a moment of ridiculous, school-girl staring. The wind was tossing his dark hair around like a fan in a music video shoot, his eyes vivid and brows black in the eerie grayness of early evening. He was dressed more like a skateboarder than a jock, but his stance was telling; he knew what he was doing in a quiet, confident sort of way. Jo wondered if he might be a bigger threat than her brothers, but then her dad called the play and she pushed it out of her mind.
The only threat he posed, as it turned out, was to her fragile, fluttering heart. Because when he brought her down in the gentlest tackle of her life, when she wound up straddling him, both of them laughing, she was pretty sure she fell in love with him, and that scared the hell out of her.
5
Now
Jo was not a person who dwelled on things she couldn’t have. As she slid the key in the ignition of her 2002 Mustang and cranked the engine, she took a moment to enjoy the overpowering heat of the interior of the dark blue car. The AC in the clinic chugged away at full blast all day and for just these few minutes before the June evening plastered her scrub top to her sweaty skin, before she cranked her own AC up full blast and rolled down the windows and fanned herself with one of the flea and tick control brochures riding in the cup holder, she relished the blanketing humidity. Her goose bumps were chased away and some of the tension eased between her shoulders. It was one of those small joys she tried to find in her everyday life because, as a person who didn’t dwell, she couldn’t let herself get sucked down by the relentless knowledge that she left Honeygood Veterinary Clinic every afternoon as a technician and not a doctor.
“I’m going to be a vet,” she’d told everyone who’d ever asked her about her future career path. She’d always loved animals, had always tried making pets out of things: the baby cardinal that had tumbled out of its nest during a storm and that she’d nursed in a shoebox. The nest of juvenile mice her dad had found behind the hot water heater in the garage. The tangled and crusted poodle mix who had followed her home from a skateboard lesson with Tam when she was eleven. She’d begged and pleaded and cried to keep that mop of a dog, but Mike was allergic, and Beth wasn’t going to fill her house up with allergens that gave her son “an excuse to leave home early and not come back.” So Jo was going to be a vet, and put all her animal-maternal instincts to good use.
But college had proved a financial complication and not wanting to burden her family, she’d taken the pre-vet diploma and hadn’t even so much as applied to any of the vet schools she’d once dreamed of. Dreams were for children – for little girls who didn’t understand their parents’ money woes and who believed in magic, the power of wishes, and the authenticity of meant-to-be love.
But she
did not dwell
.
She didn’t dwell all the way home, through the well-established, tree-filled side streets of the Kennesaw/Marietta suburban conglomerate. She didn’t dwell as she turned down the street where she’d grown up, on her way to her childhood home. She didn’t dwell on the fact that she lived with her parents because it was an arrangement that benefitted all of their pocketbooks. She kept right on not dwelling until she pulled into the drive and saw the U-Haul parked at the curb and noticed Mike’s silver Beemer nosed up to the open garage door.
And then anxiety bubbled up in her stomach and surged up her throat until she struggled to pull in her next breath. Mike rarely came by the house anymore, but where there was Mike, there was often Tam, and where there was Tam…she was an irrational bundle of exposed nerves and volatile emotions.
She slid her Mustang into park, but waited, engine idling, prepared to flee. Two men ducked out of the garage and started down the drive toward the U-Haul. She recognized her brother immediately and noticed, with a relief that was crushing and disappointing, that the other guy was a generically pretty friend whose name she couldn’t quite remember. Something with an R, she thought.
Hands shaking thanks to her surge and retreat of adrenaline, she killed the engine and slid out of the car, dragging her oversized brown leather hobo bag with her.
“Hey, midget,” Mike called as they passed on their way back to the truck. The nickname didn’t carry the bite it had in their youth, and unfortunately, because she topped out at five-two, it was still accurate. Her brother was in a wilted blue oxford, the sleeves folded back to his elbows, khakis and loafers. His friend, brunette and sporting a jaw like a retired college quarterback, was similarly dressed and tossed her a wave and a tight, white smile that didn’t touch his eyes.
Ryan
, she remembered his name when she saw his smile. One of Mike’s coworkers and groomsmen, the guy who’d bored her with tales of the stock market at the engagement party. “What’s up, Jo?” he called in an overly loud voice full of forced congeniality; Jo hadn’t grown up with three brothers not to learn when men put on the charm versus when it was real. There wasn’t a damn thing real about this Ryan guy.
“Hey.” She spared him the barest of glances. “What’s with the truck?” she asked Mike. Then she grinned. “The wedding off?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She shrugged.
“The market’s so bad right now, Delta agreed to move into the townhouse with me until we can find a new place. So I brought my furniture over.”
Jo felt her brows jump up her forehead. She knew exactly why he was ditching his furniture, but she enjoyed making him voice all the reasons he should have dumped Delta a long time ago. “But won’t you
need
furniture if you’re living together?”
He made a face.