For You

  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, P
ete 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.

  “Girl –” Meems started again.

  “I need to get to the bar.”

  I moved and they stepped aside. They knew me, they knew when I meant what I said and when I meant business.

  I gave a wave to Meems and Jessie walked beside me the short distance to J&J’s.

  “When’re Jack and Jackie getting here?” Jessie asked.

  Morrie had called them from the bar yesterday morning about two seconds after Alec had walked away. They were driving their RV up and were on the road by yesterday afternoon. Depending on how hell bent Dad was to get here, they could arrive at any time. I figured Dad was probably pretty hell bent and they could be crossing the town line as Jessie and my boots hit the sidewalk.

  “Any time now.”

  “That’ll be good,” Jessie murmured as I opened the door to the bar.

  I didn’t agree with her.

  Mom and Dad were going to feel the same pressure Morrie was feeling. The pressure to keep me safe. The pressure to keep me from feeling this weight hanging so heavy over my head, knowing, any time, without any control had by me, it could drop, crushing me underneath it. The pressure that was there from Alec and me, the pressure they felt in the short time before I found Pete, the pressure they felt in the short time I remained home after Pete was gone. The pressure of wanting with everything they were for Alec and me to go back to what we had, wanting it so much they’d be willing to make it happen, the pressure and disappointment of knowing they had no means of doing it.

  Morrie’s head (and everyone else’s in the bar) came up to look at me when Jessie and I walked in.

  I had no idea when the bomb would drop. Last night Morrie told me that Alec told him that Angie’s note was going to remain under wraps and any chats he had with anyone I’d put on my list he’d do his best to keep under wraps too.

  Alec was good at a lot of things. He’d been an All-State tight end. He’d gained a partial scholarship to Purdue. He’d graduated top of his class at the Academy. He’d crawled out from under the stench of his parents and been a kid, and now a man, that people respected. He was good at being my brother’s best friend, another son to my folks. He was a good cop. He’d even been a great boyfriend, the best, until he’d stopped being that.

  But this was a small town. He wasn’t that good.

  Then again, the last person who wronged me breathed through a tube for a couple of days, courtesy of Alec, so who knew?

  I split from Jessie who went straight to the bar. I went to the back, secured my purse in the office and went behind the bar.

  My departure from Morrie’s apartment meant he’d had to open up for once.

  My longer-than-usual stay away, due to moving in with Jessie, having a shower there and getting ready to tackle the day there then having to call Pete’s bitch of a Mom in Mimi’s office meant I was in a lot later than usual.

  When I hit the back of the bar, Morrie said, “Feb –”

  “Save it,” I didn’t even look at him when I spoke, “you need to give me time.”

  That was all I was willing to say but I felt his relief because me asking for time meant him knowing I was holding a grudge but also knowing I’d eventually let it go.

  “I don’t know about you but I need a drink. Meems’s coffee is the bomb but it ain’t gonna cut it right about now,” Jessie announced.

  Joe-Bob laughed at Jessie’s comment.

  Joe-Bob was a regular who planted his ass on the barstool by the front door at noon, opening time, every day and didn’t pry his ass from that stool until closing time unless it was to take a leak or wander down to Frank’s restaurant to eat a burger. Hell, he’d fallen asleep at that stool more times than I could count.

  We left him to it. He paid his tab at the end of every month, though God only knew how he managed that. Things were rough for Morrie now that he was paying rent, helping Dee with the mortgage and paying child support. It was sad and it was wrong but Joe-Bob was now beloved by Morrie. His tabs were helping to keep two roofs over M
orrie’s kids’ heads.

  I didn’t laugh with Joe-bob, got Jessie a drink and then got down to work. I spent that time, like last night but more so today, trying not to think about Angie, about the note, about Alec, about whether my cat Wilson would make Jessie’s husband Jimbo sneeze or about anything at all.

  About an hour later the door opened and Alec and his partner Sully walked in.

  Unable and maybe unwilling to stop it, I felt my jaw move in a nonverbal greeting, the way it always did when I saw Alec. Always and forever. Since I could remember.

  I used to do it because it made him smile at me, a smile I hadn’t seen in years, a smile that others saw and it was handsome so I was sure they liked it, at least the girls. But they didn’t get it. They didn’t get how precious it was. They didn’t understand, it not being directed at them, what that smile could do. The power of it. It was like every time he smiled he’d opened a chest of treasure and said, “All this is yours.”

  Now I did it because it made his expression change. He didn’t smile but there was something there, not treasure but precious all the same. It was nostalgic in that painful way nostalgia could be, but it was still precious and addictive, like a drug. I’d forget between times, but when he walked in, the craving would assault me, too much to fight, I was jonesing for it. So I went after it, lifting my jaw then his face would change and I’d allow myself half a beat to drink it in before I looked away.

  Even after all that happened, today was no different.

  Quick as I could, the second I got my Alec hit, I looked at Sully and understood why he wasn’t around yesterday.

  He looked like hell. Brimming eyes, red rimmed nose and he was carrying a tatty tissue which had been overused.

  “You need hot, honeyed water,” I said to Sully when he hit the bar, hot, honeyed water being what Mom used to make Morrie and I drink when we had a cold.

  It probably had no medicinal effects at all except those wondrous ones only mothers could generate. Mothers who gave a shit about their kids and took care of them when they were sick like they were the most cherished things on earth and the world would not be right until her kid’s cold went away. Mothers like my Mom.