Losing Streak (The Lane) (3 page)

“I planned on it.”

His smile, so dark, almost angry despite his obvious amusement, widened.

“I know.” He winked. “Why I came over to you in the first place.”

“Because you like to lose your money?”

“Nope. Because I’m a masochist.” Then he was moving away and letting a small crowd fill the space he’d occupied. If his intention was to make an exit that forced me to watch him go, made me remember him after he was gone, he’d be sorely disappointed. I’d dismissed him before his back had even disappeared from view.

I had enough to think about and work that needed to be done to make up for my slip in restraint earlier without dwelling on Masochist Intruders.

Chapter Two

I eased open the door that creaked painfully on its hinges, my heart banging wildly. I was scared—no, I was terrified—of what I would find on the other side. It was a secret fear of mine, one that was almost crushing in its intensity, that I’d be the one who eventually found Mama. That sometime while Jackson and I had been away, she had quietly slipped out of our lives without us knowing it. That her body, so weak and fragile and exhausted from struggling just to function around the disease intent on killing her, had given up the fight and she had died, scared and alone. Maybe she’d been calling for us. Maybe she had called for me specifically. But we were too far away, too focused for the moment on other things, to hear. It was never peaceful, this image. She didn’t gently ease out of this world into whatever lay beyond. No. In my mind it was always traumatizing and cruel. Another injustice in a life that had already been filled with them.

A sigh of relief, nearly identical to the ones that had come before it, escaped my lungs as my eyes latched on to her sleeping form on her battered floral couch, and I drank in the sight hungrily. Her chest rose and fell with a steady, reassuring rhythm. She was still with us. Today wasn’t the day that everything crumbled around me, leaving me to pick up the jagged pieces and cut my hands on them.

Once, when we were younger, before Mama was sick and so much revolved around just keeping her among the living, I had read Jackson a
Winnie-the-Pooh
book. At nine, he’d been too old for it, but it was one of the few we’d actually owned, and most of them were out of our age group. Mama had been working; she was always working back then, which left things like bedtime stories up to me.

“That’s stupid,” he’d announced after I came to the part about Piglet saying Pooh’s name in order to be sure of him. Back then, everything had been stupid to Jackson. It’d been his favorite expression. He hadn’t been trying to be a difficult kid. It just made him feel older, I think, being cynical and judging everything beneath his intelligence. “It doesn’t even make sense.”

“Maybe not,” I agreed, not because I did but because at ten, I was already tired. As if he sensed my insincerity, he continued, trying me like the mother he wasn’t able to.

“It is!” he insisted. “He’s standing right next to him. How much more sure could he be?”

“I don’t know.” A ten-year-old shouldn’t have had a reason to sigh and yet that was exactly what I did as I closed the book and set it beside us on the narrow bed we had to share. “Maybe he’s slow. Maybe he needs to be sure Pooh hadn’t left somewhere and only his body is still there.”

“Or maybe he needs glasses because that bear is obviously right next to him.”

I thought, back then, I’d understood it, though. Sometimes you just needed to be reassured. Not because you were stupid or needed glasses, but because things could change suddenly to those you cared most about. You needed to make sure they hadn’t.

I really got it now, now that the threat of something happening was always hanging over our heads. And I felt like a Piglet with better hair as I softly called out, “Mama,” to her obviously present figure. But I had to be sure. I had to be sure of her.

Her eyelids immediately fluttered and whatever tension had been lingering in my muscles slid away. I crossed the room slowly and knelt next to her before she was able to force open slightly yellowed eyes. I pretended not to see the disappointment that danced across her face when she saw it was me.

“Rose,” she breathed, reaching for me with gentle hands as she sat up slowly, the process so obviously agonizing for her that it was painful to witness.

“How are you feeling?”

“Oh, just fine.” She patted my cheek softly, and for a second I almost hated myself for that pang of irritation that had shot through me only moments before. “Even better now.”

I was frowning before she finished speaking because she didn’t look fine. She looked like a woman with only the barest of holds on her existence. And yet, she also didn’t look nearly as bad or as tired as she should have. A sinking feeling started in my chest and bled into my gut.

“How was chemo?” I kept my voice even, watching her closely. Like a child who knew she’d been caught, her gaze dropped from mine to her lap. That feeling solidified into a heavy suspicion and intensified. “Mama. You didn’t go, did you?”

“I didn’t have a way to get there,” she murmured, more to her lap than to me.

My teeth ached from how hard I was grinding them as I rose to my feet to loom over her and planted my hands on my hips. “That’s bullshit and you know it. I arranged for Mrs. Swanson to take you.”

“Edie has enough going on without having to shepherd me to doctor’s appointments—”

“It’s not just a doctor’s appointment!” I interjected, trying and failing to keep the heat steadily rising in me from creeping into my voice. “It’s something to save your life. Are you trying to die on me?”

Her head snapped up as her soft blue-gray eyes found mine once again. “What in the world kind of question is that, Rose?”

“The kind I want an answer to. Are you, Mama? If I’m not physically here in front of you, demanding that you do these things, you won’t do them? Are you so determined to leave us? To leave Jackson?”

Her head was shaking forcefully, tears filling her eyes as soon as Jackson’s name left my mouth, and normally that alone would have had me reining in my anger. I’d never been able to stand to see Mama cry and I was the only one ever permitted to see her tears. But not now. Not with the worry and fear and dread crashing over me in relentless, harsh waves.

“Then why, Mama? I took care of everything. I even gave Mrs. Swanson gas money to do it. All you had to do was get in the car and go.”

“That’s why,” she said, barely above a whisper. So low that even in the quiet of the tiny, cramped apartment, I had to strain to catch it.

“What’s why?”

“Because you took care of everything. You’ve been taking care of everything and that’s not fair.”

“What about life is? Nothing’s fair. Nothing has ever been fair. It’s not fair that you’re sick either.”

“And I won’t get better.”

“Don’t say that,” I said sharply, yet not sharply enough. Not nearly as sharp as the knife that slipped between my ribs and twisted. “Don’t you dare say that. That’s the point to all this. To make you better.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do.” She reached over and covered one of the hands still on my hip with one of hers. I felt the urge to snatch it away, to get down to eye level and scream and wail in her face that she wouldn’t dare have this conversation with Jackson and that was what wasn’t fair. Of all the unfairness everywhere, the fact that I had to have this conversation with her, but not Jackson, never Jackson, was the most unfair of all.

Instead, I leaned toward her, the St. Christopher’s medallion I wore swinging free of my cleavage to dangle between us. Our eyes were both drawn to it, watching it as though the answer to every question ever uttered was etched there on its surface. For Mama, it probably was.

“I do,” I said after a minute. I could feel Mama looking at me, waiting for me to continue. “I believe in it like it’s my religion.”

She sighed, quiet and resigned, and I knew I had won. If Mama understood anything, it was believing in something so fiercely that it shaped your entire world. That you’d give anything for it and wouldn’t hear a word against it.

“It puts a lot of strain on you,” she said. I knew without having to look that her hand had gone to the delicate cross Daddy had once given her, nestled between her barely-there breasts. “My bills. Your bills. The medical ones. That’s too much, Rose. You’ll break under the weight of it all.”

“I make enough at the bar—”

“Not that much,” she interrupted. “Not enough for you to support yourself and me and not feel it.”

Her eyes held too much understanding, because Mama had worked in enough bars over the years to know. I didn’t agree with her, though. Didn’t confirm what she already knew. Because what I did or didn’t make didn’t matter. Neither did whatever strain it did or didn’t put on me. She mattered and I had a responsibility to her. One that required me to do whatever I had to. Because once she’d done it for me and Jackson, and now it was my turn.

“I won’t break.” I gave her a grin I didn’t feel, one she didn’t care about the way she cared about Jackson’s. “I learned from the best how not to.”

She didn’t look reassured, but then again, I hadn’t really expected her to. Sometimes I just talked because that was what I was supposed to do. I said the things I was expected to say. And we never pointed out how meaningless those words really were.

* * *

I put off going home, back to that tiny, dark apartment with too many people living in it and around it. It was no easy feat, considering it was nearly four in the morning by the time I left Mama’s and everything was closed, save for a few convenience stores and a diner or two. I’d told the Frat Boy he’d bought me dinner but God knew what he really did was help pay for an office visit for Mama. Especially now that I had two to pay for, the one I’d have to call and reschedule and the one she’d missed. That was, of course, assuming her doctor didn’t drop her for a no-show.

At the thought of that, I let out a growl and jerked my battered steering wheel to the left, pulling sharply into the parking lot of the Grab ‘n’ Go twenty-four-hour mini-mart. My car, the tired girl that she was, let out a groan when I slammed her into Park. She was a noisy thing, abused and old, but I didn’t feel bad for beating my hands against her worn dash as I let loose the scream I’d felt building up in me half the night. I’d told Mama I wouldn’t break under the strain and that hadn’t really been a lie.

I was already broken.

The lot around me was empty, save for a battered truck in as bad of shape as my Lumina, and relief swelled up at finally being alone, in the freedom to unleash that angry part of me that wanted to thrash and roar. The tears, hot and bitter, followed, and I let them fall because there were no witnesses to my shattering. Only the soft, uncaring lights of the Lane in the distance, and it already knew how damaged I was. It knew that I had to shatter. I had to burst apart away from everyone else then glue myself back together in order to keep performing. I was a patchwork girl. A girl with so many cracks in her surface I was nearly a monster Frankenstein could have created.

My storm was violent and ear-shattering, and I was so lost in the force of it, that I almost missed the tapping on my window. But I didn’t, couldn’t, miss the voice that called out after a second, and broke through my undoing, “Hey, you cool in there?”

I brushed roughly at my eyes and snarled, dimly aware that most of the noises that escaped me were bestial. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell this intruder to beat it, but any send-off withered away once I cranked my window down and took a good look at him, air too chilly to belong to spring slapping me in the face.

Masochist from Duke’s frowned as he took in my no-doubt blotchy face and wet eyes. I steeled myself for a comment that would only piss me off. I kinda looked forward to it. I wanted somewhere to direct the warring storm raging inside me.

“You hungry?”

I blinked.

“What?”

He rocked back on his heels, stuffing his hands down into the pockets of his worn jacket. “I said are you hungry? I know a place up the road. Kinda shitty, but they’re open and cheap. And they passed their last health inspection. Barely, from what I heard, but hey.” He shrugged. “I like taking risks.”

“I can’t.” The list of reasons why I couldn’t was long enough to fill a book and maybe part of a sequel.

“You can’t what? Take a risk or eat? Because I bet you can eat.”

“You’d bet wrong.”

He laughed as if something was genuinely amusing about what I said. “Sweetheart, I never bet wrong.”

“First time for everything.”

“True enough. Like eating with a stranger. You ever eat with one before?”

“Every time I eat.”

A smile dangled on the corner of his lips and, against my will, I felt mine start to turn up.

“You’re a deep one, Sadist. Thought you might be.”

“You make a habit of judging girls based on one encounter?”

He shrugged again and took a step back. “First time for everything, right? Now, whatdya say? Want to eat with a stranger? I’ll even sweeten the deal for you. I’ll pay.”

“What’s the catch.” It wasn’t a question. It was a demand. Because of course there was a catch. There always was.

He raised his hands shoulder-high and shook his head. “No catch. Just food. I’m hungry and don’t want to look like a dumbass eating alone. We don’t even have to make eye contact.”

I was hungry. Really hungry. I was hollow with it. And following him to a public place wasn’t as if I was traipsing into a dark alley. Not that I was necessarily worried about my ability to protect myself, but there was too much depending on me. I couldn’t afford to behave like a complete fool. But food I didn’t have to pay for and no expectations that followed? Didn’t really seem like much of a risk at all, actually.

I nodded and he winked at me before he turned toward that battered truck. “It’s called Gabe’s. I’ll meet you there,” he tossed over his shoulder.

“Hey, wait!”

He paused and glanced back, eyebrows raised in question.

“That’s it? No comment about—this?” I indicated my face with a jerky hand.

“I’m sure you’re told you’re pretty often enough.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“I know.” He gave me a look that sent blossoms of warmth through my chest, making me frown. “And I did comment. I asked you if you wanted to eat.”

With that, he climbed into his truck and, without waiting to see if I would follow, started it and pulled out. Maybe he didn’t really care if I was coming. Or maybe he was betting that I would. If it was the latter, he bet correctly, because without hesitation, without even really being able to understand why, I put my car in Drive.