Don't Fail Me Now(20)

“What do you want, grandma? I just changed your damn bandage last week!” she barks in a near-perfect imitation of Aunt Sam’s weary growl.

I start cracking up, and she saunters over waving a finger, not breaking character.

“You tell those bedsores ain’t nobody got time for them, some of us need to go get our chins waxed!” (During one of their bitterer fights, Mom called Aunt Sam The Bearded Lady, and ever since that day we have jumped on every possible opportunity to bring it up.) We double over, trying not to let our cackling wake Denny.

“Stop it, I’m gonna die,” I gasp, my diaphragm spasming.

“Sorry,” Cass giggles. Within seconds, her features settle back into impenetrable neutrality, the sparkle in her eyes fading to a bored stare. It’s startling to watch, like getting a door slammed in your face. “When do you think we’ll get out of here?” she asks.

“It’ll be a while,” I say. “I have to save up.”

“What about the money from Yvonne?” Cass asks. “Didn’t Denny give it to you?” I must look confused, because she sighs and mumbles, “The little thief.” She darts out of the bedroom and returns a minute later with a roll of bills held together by a hair elastic. “Here,” she says, holding it out. “She said not to give it to you until we left. I guess she thought you might not take it otherwise.”

I unwrap the cash slowly, gritting my teeth to keep from crying, and count out five twenty-dollar bills, three tens, a five, and twelve ones. With the $200 I emptied from my checking account this morning, this gives me enough to pay Aunt Sam plus $47 left for gas. It’s not much of a cushion, but it’s something. It’ll buy us another couple of days, at least.

I’m so focused on the tallies in my head that I don’t even notice Cass opening the computer, and by the time I look over, it’s too late. Leah’s dimpled smile (Dimples. Those are Buck’s. Cass has them, too, she just hasn’t smiled in . . . what, years now?) fills the screen, a sheaf of golden hair covering one of her giveaway green eyes, a pool of amber-flecked jade, just like mine.

“Who is that?” Cass asks, giving me an odd, suspicious look. She’s perched on the bed, all taut angles, like a runner on the starting block.

I briefly consider lying, but my brain is too fried. “That’s her,” I say.

“Her who?” I give Cass a look and watch as the realization tenses her features one by one: the full lips thinning, the small nose scrunching, the straight eyebrows knitting together into a shallow V. She squints at the screen. “That’s her?”

“Yup.”

“Damn,” Cass says, “I always pictured her as more Willow Smith than Taylor Swift.”

“Me too.”

“How’d you find her?” Cass asks, shaking her head, clicking through the photos. “I thought I’d looked at every Devereaux on here.” She looks at me expectantly, and even though I want nothing more than to avoid this conversation, I can’t work up the necessary energy.

“She doesn’t use it,” I say. “She goes by Harper. Her stepdad’s name.”

“Leah Harper,” Cass whispers, and I know her brain is working overtime all of a sudden, struggling to fit a new name and face to the specter we’ve been building in our heads since we were kids. “How did you figure it out?” she asks, her facial muscles as usual not betraying anything beneath the surface.

“Her brother came in tonight,” I say, rerolling the bills from Yvonne’s loan to avoid eye contact. “He was looking for me.”

As if on cue, Cass lands on the photo of Leah and Tim. “Oh yeah, I saw that guy,” she says. “I knew something freaked you out. What did he want?”

“Nothing,” I say before I can stop myself. “He was just curious.”

She shoots me a skeptical side-eye. “Come on. Why would he be curious about you?”

“Um, thanks?” I shove her.

“You know what I mean. He’s not even related to us. Why would he care?”

“It’s . . . complicated,” I hedge.

“What?” she asks, getting annoyed.

Cass and I have an amateur telepathy thing going where I can usually communicate basic messages just using my eyes. When we were kids, it was stuff like, Go upstairs. It’s okay. Don’t be scared. But right now I’m just pleading with her, Let it go. You don’t want to know. Trust me.

“Tell me,” she says.

“Not now, okay?”

“Shut up and just tell me, Michelle,” she says, her voice getting loud. “You’re freaking me out!”

“Fine.” I look her straight in the eyes and take a breath. “Buck is dying.”

“Oh,” she says, with the surprise of someone who was expecting a different, much worse, answer. I wonder if she thought something had happened to Leah. Better to lose a confirmed piece-of-shit father than a perfect imaginary sister, I guess. Cass thinks for a few seconds and then asks, “What’s he dying of?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t even ask?”

I didn’t care, I want to say, but I don’t want to transfer my bitterness over Buck onto my sister. She was only two when he left, so she doesn’t even remember him. She basically grew up without a dad, like Denny. I think Buck is a little bit like a cartoon villain to Cass: a one-dimensional bad guy who let us down that time, long ago. But I remember. He was there; he was my father—until he wasn’t. And I will never, ever forgive him.