Authors: Lauren Gilley
Walt barked a short, harsh laugh. “Like father like son, huh? You gonna beat my ass? Maybe get a wife to slap around?”
“Stop it!” Jo shouted at them and was ignored.
“Four years ago?” Mike still sounded like he couldn’t wrap his head around it. “How long were…
Jesus Christ
. How could you do that to my sister?!”
Jo pressed her hands to her temples and tried to make sense of what she was hearing.
Like father like son? Wife to slap around?
Jordan arrived at her side, springing lightly over the grass. “Cut the shit!” he yelled at them through cupped hands.
“Fuck off,” Mike told him, and shook off Tam’s hand. “I oughta take your damn head off!”
“Then do it already! Go on! I ruined your whole wedding, just do it!”
“Michael! Walter!” Randy was coming up the rise behind them.
Mike lunged for Tam, and then Walt did too. They were a tangle of shadows, lamplight swinging around them, slicing at arms and legs and grappling hands. Their feet fought for purchase on the wet grass.
Jo didn’t know if it was tears or rain running down her face, and didn’t much care. “I did this,” she said as Dad surged past her through the falling water and attacked his wrestling boys. “Oh my God, I caused all of this.”
“No, no, no.” Jordan’s arm stole around her shoulders. “No you didn’t.”
Lightning streaked over their heads and she saw that Randy had pried them apart. They were all slick with mud and rain, their good clothes ruined. Mike was still a seething ball of rage, Walt tight-jawed alongside him. Tam rubbed his hands down his face and shook off whatever Randy was trying to tell him. He started back for the castle and they let him go, rain pouring down on all of them.
Jo was wet to the skin and shivering. She wanted to go with Tam, lifted her foot to follow, but Jordan tightened his arm around her. “Later,” he advised. “Let everybody cool off.”
But as her two oldest brothers swiveled unforgiving glares toward her, she knew that no one was going to be cooling off anytime soon.
25
Now
Jordan remembered a night, four years ago, when he’d been sequestered in his dorm, pulling an all-nighter with his American history notes and a bag of Cheetos, when his phone had chimed around two a.m. It had been a bartender from some shithole place about ten miles away.
“Gotta tanked up guy here says he knows you. I gotta lock up and he ain’t fit to drive.”
Tam had been sitting on the curb out front, feet in the gutter, the neon signage reflected in his messy, glossy dark hair. Elbows on his knees, head in his hands, it had taken sitting down next to him and leaning in close enough to smell the stink of whiskey on him to realize that he’d been crying, his face slick with tears and snot.
Growing up in a family of seven, Jordan had seen and heard enough to land a sane person in an institution. They were not a dramatic family, but that didn’t mean drama didn’t happen. He’d dealt with his own shit, had stuffed it somewhere down deep in his brain where it couldn’t haunt him. So he’d been shocked to find that seeing Tam so broken up had disturbed him, left him feeling cold and restless inside.
“I broke things off with her,”
Tam had finally said between hiccups. And clearly, it had been devastating to him.
Jordan had taken him back to his dorm, wrestled him into a shower and then let him sleep, sitting on the floor and studying by flashlight while Tam snored and tossed and whimpered in his bed. It had been so, so pitiful.
That was the memory doing lazy cartwheels through his mind as he unlaced his good, now muddy, shoes and watched his sisters over on Jo’s bed. Jo had showered and was in sweats and someone’s hand-me-down t-shirt, her damp hair pulled back. She sat with her back to the headboard, wiping furiously at her face as she tried to wrest control of her emotions, but the tears kept coming, shaking her body and shattering each breath that left her lungs. She’d tried to push away Jess, but Jess had stayed, sitting beside her, an arm around her shoulders, being the silent, steadfast rock Jo needed her to be in that moment. Mom always said you weren’t supposed to have favorite siblings, but Jo was Jordan’s – they were the “twins,” the turquoise-eyed freakshows who might have been the mailman’s babies – and he didn’t get to see her like this often. It was disconcerting, and when a heavy fist thudded against the other side of the door, he was all ready to come to her defense.
Jess threw a mother-lion-with-her-cub glare toward the door. “If that’s Michael, don’t you dare let him in. You body check him if you have to, but he is not coming in here.”
“Sure.” Jordan pushed to his feet with a sigh. “I’ll body check Mike. That’ll happen.” But he was prepared to try if he needed to. A check through the peephole revealed Walt and Mom. “Mom’s brought Walt.”
“Well don’t body check her.”
“Duh, sis.”
He cracked the door and Beth put a hand against it, ready to push him out of the way. Jordan braced it with a foot, ignored her indignation, and gave his oldest brother a guarded look. Walt’s face was still compressed and full of frown lines. “You’re not gonna come in here and get her more upset.”
To his credit, Walt rocked back on his heels, a flicker of surprise moving through his eyes. “Fair enough,” he agreed, and Jordan let them in.
**
Jo hated crying. Four years ago, after she’d realized that Tam wasn’t going to turn around and come back, she’d gone up to her apartment, scrubbed her face clean, and started stirring up a big batch of emotional mortar to hold up the bricks of the new wall she was building around her heart. That wall had started crumbling the night of Mike and Delta’s engagement party, when Tam had tried to make contact over beneath a stand of trees. Her shaky defenses hadn’t been strong enough to withstand this week, and then the past hour on top of it. The tears would not be stemmed, no matter how much tissue she pressed to them, and the effort of holding her sobs down in the base of her throat was giving her heartburn.
“Joanna, baby.” Beth’s voice was a soft, maternal murmur as she sat down on the end of the bed and reached to pat her feet, the same way she had when Jo had been a little girl. Her face was lined with sadness, her eyes heavy and glittering. “I’m so sorry, sweet girl.”
Mike calling her a slut she could handle. Blame and indifference could be tolerated. But Jo wasn’t proof against sympathy. It pulled her aching heart out of her chest and acknowledged it; it cracked her open and fresh tears surged down across her cheeks. “Don’t.” Her voice didn’t even sound human. “Mom, please don’t.”
Beth squeezed her foot and that was when Jo realized, through a series of tissue-dabs, that her mother wasn’t a flustered, confused mess. No, she was resigned. Burdened. With the air of a doctor about to deliver grave news to a patient’s family. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I should have told you this before, but I didn’t think it was my place to tell it.” She sighed. “Clearly, Tameron isn’t ever going to do it.”
Jo folded her arms around her bent knees and frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Her mother’s eyes seemed a hundred years old in one of those startling reminders that she was the mother, the wizened elder, and that whatever secrets Jo thought she held, Beth already knew all of them backward and forward. “Oh, sweetheart. It’s a long story.”
And it was, but Jo didn’t breathe throughout the entirety of it. When her mother painted a picture of a child born into a violent marriage, Jo recalled a skinny, thoughtful little boy with the bluest eyes and a glossy mop of dark hair. She remembered falling off his skateboard, and then his promise not to tell her brothers that she’d cried a little when she’d skinned up her leg. She remembered the bruises on his arms that he’d shrugged off as the result of wrestling with friends. The way he attacked every plate of food Beth ever put in front of him.
She thought about how careful he’d been with her that first time, the rain streaking down the window of Walt’s guest room, about her eighteenth birthday, the silver J dangling from his fingertips while he awkwardly apologized for not having anything better for her. She thought about his fingers curling hers around a heart-shaped ruby, about all those summer afternoons that tasted like pool water and sunshine, and she tried to rectify all those memories with this new information about an alcoholic, abusive father and a mentally unstable, cancer-ridden mother.
Walt stood listening, propped against the armoire, arms folded. Jo had a horrible suspicion he figured into all this somehow, and when Beth said, “that day, when he…” and Walt stepped forward, self-righteous anger clouding his features, she closed her eyes, already knowing.
Oh, God
.
“That man threatened
my family
. He was going to hurt
you
, Jo. I did what I had to and one of these days, you’ll thank me for it. Tam Wales is not the guy you think he is.”
Beth sighed and shook her head, her disappointment clear. Jordan and Jess had listened in stunned silence, and Jo realized that neither of them had known about the whole Wales family history.
And there stood Walt, so sure of his actions, so positive in his inability to ever do anything wrong. He’d always been the Walker on a mission, the one going places. He’d been the first to marry – a great girl – the first to have kids – two healthy, bouncing boys – the first to take one step up the ladder from middle class into upper middle class. He was the oldest of her three big brothers, and she’d always seen him as the biggest because he was the mature one, the kind one, the one who’d kissed the top of her head and passed her his dessert and told her how special she was.
But he was the brother who’d betrayed her behind her back and had smiled at her over Thanksgiving dinner the past four years like he wasn’t the reason for the low-grade nausea in the pit of her stomach that spiked whenever someone mentioned Tam’s name.
Anger went shooting through her veins, hot and bitter on the back of her tongue, and she welcomed the taste. In this sob-fest tangle of grief and shock, it felt good to get truly, fiercely angry. She lifted her head, her tissue-filled hands falling to the mattress and tightening into fists.
“You’re right, Walt,” she said in a level voice that seemed to shock everyone else as much as it did her. Jess’s arm loosened across her shoulders. Beth let go of her foot. But Walt nodded, so oblivious he thought she was in agreement with him. “I don’t know Tam Wales as well as I thought I did,” she said. “Turns out he’s a helluva lot stronger than I ever gave him credit.”
Walt’s face went slack. “You - ”
“And you’re right about having to protect your family,” she pressed on. Conviction was boiling inside her now. “You should have kicked him out. You should have given him hell about it. But my safety was
my problem
.”
He scowled. “Jo - ”
“When he told me, I would have dealt with it and whatever happened would have been
our
business, not yours.”
“You’re my sister,” he said firmly.
“And yet you let me go four years thinking Tam hated me.”
“You don’t need a piece of shit like that in your life.”
How, she wanted to know, could he know all there was to know about Tam, and say that? The hungry kid. The teenager who’d helped Dad clean out the gutters. The only man who’d ever been so respectful and sweet to her, who made her laugh, who’d been willing to leave her standing up against the side of her dorm building rather than get her involved in his family drama. He’d been frightened enough for her to walk away.
“Did you,” she said in a low voice that quivered with how much she wanted to slap her brother, “never stop to think that maybe
he
needed
us
? That maybe it was his
life
that was shit and that he needed something good to hold onto?”
Beth nodded. Jess patted her arm. Jo snuck a glance at Jordan and saw the approval in a pair of eyes that were just like hers. Whatever fallout there was still left to endure, she had her mom and her sister and the only brother she wanted to claim on her side.
Walt had the balls to look down his nose at her. “I made the right call.”
Jo lifted her chin and met his lying eyes without flinching. “Get out.”
“Jo - ”
“
Get out
.”
**
“Tam.
Tameron
.”
The use of one’s full name by a father figure was not to be ignored. Tam pulled to a halt, the soles of his sneakers squeaking over the white marble of the long back hall that led out to a rear exit and drop-off zone. The gift shops and parlors on either side of him were closed, their glass-paned French doors locked up for the night, so the only sounds were that of Randy’s hurried approach and of the steadily-falling rain through the open double doors down at the end of the hall. A shuttle waited beneath the portico, the rain looking like snow in its headlights.
Randy had ditched his tie and sport coat, his white shirt untucked and splotchy with rain. The cuffs of his khakis were dark with mud and little clumps of the stuff got left behind in the shape of his shoe treads after every step.
Tam prepared himself for the biggest ass-beating of his life in the three seconds it took Randy to get to him.
“We’ve been looking for you.”
“I figured.”
“We…wait, where are you going?”
Tam hitched his bag up his shoulder and didn’t know what to make of the confusion stamped across the big man’s face. “Galway. Gonna catch the first flight out to Dublin in the morning.”
The reaction he got was the last he’d expected. “Ah, Tammy.” Randy scrubbed a hand back through his sandy, hair, raindrops scattering, and twitched a sideways frown. “Don’t do this, son.”