“I prefer the term ‘loosely organized.’”
I hide the gallon-sized bag of pot under his mess of crap and withdraw my envelope. A quick count confirms I’m paid in full.
“Ready for me to drop you off or would you like to hang for a bit? Maybe share why you look like something that barely made it out of hazing week?”
My eyes flicker from the passenger-side mirror to the rearview mirror. The car behind us is different than the one before. “U-turn at the gas station and then come back the way we came.”
Houston does and I hate how he keeps bouncing his gaze over at me like he’s my friend or something. I gave up friends and I don’t need to give up any more.
“Was last week really about supply issues?”
No, it wasn’t. I check the mirrors again. No cars behind us. My stomach twists, untwists, then twists again. Paranoia comes with the territory of this job, but I’m walking a fine line. Houston was my easy sell, the rest can be questionable, and I need to chill the freak out.
A buzz with a text from my next buyer. His name is Karl and he’s a newer client. I took him on to make Ricky happy but the guy gives me the creeps. Every time I’m near him the hair on my arms stands on end and I’m bombarded by made-up images of him torturing puppies with lit cigarettes while watching porn on the internet.
I blow out an unsteady breath as I have to sell to him next. My face flushes hot and I lean my head against the colder glass of the window. I won’t allow Karl to pull away from the curb. Ricky will say something, but I don’t care. This deal will be done within screaming distance. I can do this. I can do my job.
After him will be Oscar. Oscar likes to try to “mistakenly” touch me. My thighs. My breast. He never gets far and his “mistakes” never last longer than seconds. Selling to Oscar results in hot showers that nearly cause third-degree burns, but Oscar buys more than anyone else. Oscar keeps my grandmother safe.
“Abby,” Houston pushes. “Are you okay? I’m serious, you look like shit.”
“Pull over here.”
Because Houston has played this game before, he does without argument. I put my fingers on the handle and when I crack the door open, he says, “If you’ve got problems, I’ve got ears.”
Great. Even my clients think they’re shrinks. “Next time I want smaller bills.” I ease out of the car and walk away. One deal down without dying. Too many more to go.
* * *
For the first time, I’m thankful for the ramp going up Grams’s porch. My feet and legs ache, my stomach sloshes, and my head and shoulder hurt. I weakly clutch a bag of antibiotics and wish I could take the painkillers the doctor also prescribed, but once again, I don’t possess the luxury of time—not even to heal.
It’s eleven at night. Can’t decide if I’m early or late. I haven’t seen Grams in too long. I haven’t seen a shred of myself in what feels like forever. Hearts were broken today, mine included. Deals were done. My boss and my bodyguard were happy. Somehow, I just feel terrified, exhausted, and hollow.
The large oak door whines when I open it and makes a clunking sound when I shut it behind me and lock it. Triple lock it. With the knob, the chain then the dead bolt. Not that the locks would keep out a shooter, but I’ve kept this place a secret like my father did. Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep it a secret a little while longer.
I turn and my heart leaps into my throat. A quick recognition and the sucking in of air prevents me from screaming, but the large helping of anger is encouraging me to yell anyway. Sitting on the stairs is black hair, broad shoulders, and a key dangling from a finger—my key—and he’s the last person I need to see right now...he’s the only person I want to see right now...it’s Logan.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper-shout then throw my hands in the air. “Never mind. Don’t care. Get out.”
Being Logan, he says nothing. Does nothing. He’s a wall that never changes color.
“Are you stalking me?” I bite out, then a rush of hurt runs through me. I know he wasn’t. Every day I was in the hospital, Logan came here at three and read to my grandmother and then he checked on her every night because he knew I was worried about her going to sleep, because some nights were rougher on her than others. And then he’d text me to let me know how she was.
“Heard who you left with,” he says in an even and lifeless tone. “Figured you’d be working. My bad if you didn’t want to know how she was doing.”
My cell burns in my back pocket and I think of the buzz I had received seconds before walking onto the ramp. It’s like someone reached in and is crushing my aorta. No doubt that text was from Logan. I left with Linus, knowingly setting Logan up to be hurt, and Logan still checked on my grandmother—for me.
My frame shakes and I pivot away from Logan because I don’t know what to do, what to say. The television is on low in the living room, the late news, and I follow the sound, wondering how many times the alley shooting was on last week, wondering if my name was mentioned.
I lean my shoulder on the doorway and Nate smiles when he sees me. “Welcome home, Abby.”
I nod because I’m too tired and shaken to do anything else. “She okay?”
“It’s been a rough week on her, but we made it through.” Nate’s the best night nurse on the face of the planet. Strong, friendly, a night owl by nature. The proud black man who can bench-press both me and my grandmother combined. Three times a week, he’s cracking jokes as he helps lift Grams into the shower as Nadia bathes her. “Your friend was a big help.”
Of course he was. Logan’s one of the good guys. The hero. The right. The moral. The just. Sitting on the stairs of the house full of people damned by the in-between.
“Has she been sleeping okay through the night?” My eyes automatically fall to the baby monitor next to Nate on the couch. There have been many nights that he’s sat by my grandmother’s bed because she’s become scared of the dark as she’s grown older.
“Last night was a tough one, but I think she’ll do better once she sees you again. How are you doing?”
I find the strength to wink at Nate. “That sounded an awful lot like a personal question.”
He just flashes that big white smile and laughs. “Just conversation. You look dead. Head upstairs and go to sleep for the night. Ms. Lynn won’t be happy if you look this bad in the morning.”
Nate knows Grams might not recognize me, but he’s one of those good guys that try to say things to make me feel better. Nate lives with me in the land of gray. I pay all three of my nurses under the table, in cash, all without Uncle Sam collecting his taxes.
When I turn back to the stairs, Logan’s still sitting there. He wasn’t a dream or a hallucination.
“Why are you here?” There’s no anger in my voice, just exhaustion. I hurt him today. He shouldn’t want to be anywhere near me.
Logan circles the key on his finger. “Isaiah told me everything. How you’re trying to push us all away.”
A long weary breath falls from my mouth. That I never counted on. “Seriously? Has he not seen a movie or read a book? This isn’t how things work. I need his help, he gives it, then takes the secret to the grave. I needed the manipulative misunderstanding to work. People aren’t supposed to talk to each other. Especially you two. Men aren’t supposed to have actual conversations. Get your gender roles straight.”
Logan finally breaks his stone-wall appearance as his lips tug up then go back down. “Pushing him away pissed him off.”
Stupid boys and figuring out they have stupid feelings. “Doesn’t change anything.”
“Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. You really want to talk about this right here?” His eyes roam to where Nate sits. I pay my nurses well enough that I could prance around naked with pot pasted all over me and they’d keep quiet, but I keep my business dealings a secret to protect al
l of us.
Short of pushing, pulling, and kicking Logan off the stairs, I can tell by the rigid set of his jaw he’s bent on talking, and let’s be honest, Logan’s massive and would win the physical push-pull contest. “Fine.”
I trudge up the stairs, walking around him, holding on to the railing. My eyes keep closing on their own volition and falling down the stairs would seriously suck. Falling down the stairs and having Logan go all hero and catch me would suck more.
The stairs creak as Logan stands and then follows. I should keep going to my room at the end of the hall and slam the door in his face, but my heart causes me to pause at the first room at the top of the stairs.
It’s Grams’s room. The front room. The one her parents and before them her grandparents shared. The one she moved into once she had my father. It has white curtains that are now slightly yellowed with time. Wallpaper with fancy designs that curls near the baseboard. Furniture that was made new with the house and is all solid wood, easily a hundred years old, and could withstand plagues, wars, and natural disasters.
Logan’s body heat warms my back and I whisper, “Did she remember you? When you visited every day, did she remember you?”
Logan shifts and the heavy pause gives me the answer. “No.”
I nod because it hurts too much to acknowledge the answer with words.
“I need to see her.” But I shouldn’t. I should wait for morning. Going in now could wake her and scare her. If her mind’s not in the right place, she could go into hysterics, crying and yelling, and break what’s left of my already shattered heart, but there’s this longing ache inside me. This need to be held, to be unconditionally loved, for someone to tell me that it’s all going to be okay. All things Grams used to do before the devil cursed her mind.
A brush of fingers on my back and the physical contact after the rough day is like a good soaking in the sun. My muscles melt.
“You go in,” he says. “I’ll wait.”
Logan starts down the stairs, but I stop him. “You can wait in my room. It’s the room at the end of the hallway. I might be a while.”
“Have you eaten?”
Say no. Don’t lean on Logan any more than you have. Today was meant to drive him away.
“I’m hungry, Abby, and need food. If you don’t eat, I don’t eat, and bad things happen when I don’t eat.”
I have to work to keep the laughter to hushed sounds. “Are you a deranged gremlin?”
“Something like that. What do you say? Food?”
“Doesn’t mean I’m letting any of you back in my life.”
My heart flutters when his fingers caress my back again. Logan leans into me and his hot breath dances near the sensitive spot behind my ear. “Doesn’t mean you won’t change your mind.”
Then, as if that moment didn’t happen, Logan jogs down the stairs like touching me didn’t affect him. God, I really do hate him at times.
I take care to be quiet as I walk in, tiptoeing even, too scared that my full weight on the wooden floorboards below will create a sound that would jolt her.
Grams is lying on her back, her head turned to the side, her white hair loose around her shoulders. She’s lost so much weight over the past year that she’s a little more than a bump on the bed and within the past few weeks she’s become a mouth breather. A blessing and a curse. A blessing because I don’t have to wander too far in to make sure she’s still alive when she lies so still, but a curse because I don’t like that it’s so difficult for her to breathe.
I despise that the doctor says her weight loss is normal. That he suggests that her old age is catching up with her and nature is taking its course. As a child, I believed Grams was immortal and I still need her to be.
I had woken up and I was screaming. Even with my eyes open, I still saw her there. The woman in black. The woman who was going to take me away.
“Abby!” Grams rushed into my room, flicking the light on, scaring the nightmare away.
She eased immediately into my bed, shushing me, holding me, caressing my hair. “It’s a bad dream, child. Just a bad dream.”
I sniffled and snuffed and breathed too fast as the tears continued to stream down my face. Grams had continued to talk, her voice calm and I would focus on that sweet sound and then I would focus on her touch and how it never wavered. Grams was nothing like the woman in black. She’d never scare me.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Do we need another fort?”
I nodded and it took a few more minutes for Grams to convince me to let her go as I had clasped my fingers onto her nightgown. I did let her go, believing she wasn’t leaving, and Grams built the fort. The same fort she built for me whenever the nightmare taunted me.
One by one, each and every stuffed animal I owned was placed on the bed, creating a wall between me and the world that scared me.
“We’ll sew tomorrow,” Grams said. “You and I. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
“I’m not good at it,” I whispered as I snuggled deep under the quilt she had made for me. “My stitches are all wrong.”
“Life isn’t about perfection. It’s about spending time with you.”
I was never good at sewing. Stuck my fingers more than I completed a straight stitch. But Grams was forever patient. Forever understanding. Forever there. And because of her faith in me, I always sat still as we worked on a massive quilt together. I cherished that time together. I was hers and she was mine and somehow I belonged.
She opens her eyes and I freeze, praying she doesn’t see me. Praying that she closes them again and drifts back to sleep. But she blinks. Again. A few more times. “Abby?”
My throat locks up and the emotion overwhelms me to the point that tears fill my eyes. “It’s me.”
Her head moves as she looks about her room. “Did you have a bad dream?”
“Yes.” A terrible dream. One that included drug deals, getting shot, making friends and losing friends, falling for someone and letting them go.
“Is your father home?” Grams’s mind, when it decides to function at a reasonable level, resides where she is most comfortable, with me at eight and Dad still taking care of both of us.
Grams hated what Dad did for a living. Every night when Grams tucked me into bed, she told me I would grow up to be better than him. Guess I’m a disappointment.
“No, Dad’s not home yet.” Not ever. The judge seemed pretty serious about that life sentence. “I think he needs to work late tonight.”
“He’s a complicated man,” she says like she believes she has strength, but Grams has none. She lost the ability to stand on her own months ago and can only sit up for so long before shaking. “I hoped when he brought you home that he’d make some changes in his life.”
I remember Grams before her skin was thin and wrinkles covered so much of her face. Her skin is translucent now and her eyes don’t look quite right in her head. The past five years have been brutal, for both of us. I sit on the edge of the bed and tuck her hair behind her ear. “Do you remember when we used to dress up and play tea?”
My best dress, she’d curl my hair, we both wore white gloves.
Grams grants me the same smile she gave to me every morning I woke and every night as I went to bed. “Want to invite your father to tea again? He looks nice when he dresses up.”
The memory of my father bringing home a tux and a “fancy” meal for me and Grams for my seventh birthday is a hug and a knife to the chest. “He told me to take care of you.”
Grams’s eyes flutter as she places her hand over mine. “It’s what he said to me when he brought you home. I’m glad he found you.”
“I’m glad he did, too.”
She closes her eyes, and this time as she sleeps, Grams doesn’t drag in shallow breaths, but deep air through her nose. Eventually, enough time p
asses that her eyes flicker beneath her closed lids. That moment was a gift. A rare gift. The time period may be off, but she remembered me.
Grams is the only person left who knows me, the real me, and when she forgets, I wonder if the only good things about me will die along with her already fading memories.
Logan
I enter through the back door then lock it behind me, thinking of how Abby was barricading herself in when she walked in earlier. Abby, since I met her, has always been larger than life, that unattainable creature that only exists in myths that pretends to be flesh and blood like the rest of us.
But if seeing her in a hospital bed didn’t convince me, then watching her when she returned home proved Abby’s fragile. Possibly more fragile than anyone else. It’s not the ones that know how to ask for help that can shatter, it’s people like Abby who are made of glass and carry the world on their shoulders that are going to break.
Nate lifts his head from a novel and nods as I stride up the stairs. Her grandmother’s door is closed and a light shines from beneath Abby’s at the end of the hallway.
Isaiah and I had a long talk this afternoon and neither of us is happy. What’s going to happen next depends on Abby’s answers to conversations she’s not going to want to have. I lightly knock on the door and at her answer of “Come in,” I open the door.
First thing I notice is pink wallpaper and the next thing I notice—bare skin.
Blood flow in my body redirects south and I can’t stop staring at the curve of her naked back. Abby’s dark hair is wet, making it longer and black. She eases a tank over her head, then pulls it down until that delicious skin is covered.
She glances over her shoulder at me and that devilish grin that sucks me in is on her lips. I clear my throat, because...yeah...that shut down most of my brain processes. “Trying to seduce me?”
“Not really, but it was fun. If you’re going to be insistent on being annoying, then you can help me out.” She walks over to her bed, picks up a bandage, and waves it in the air. “I’ve got a nice entry wound I can’t reach.”