Don't Fail Me Now(70)

“Me neither.” She always looks small in her oversize clothes, but right now I can see back a decade, to the little girl clinging to her mother’s legs, squeezing her brown eyes tight, trying not to be seen. “And I’m sorry,” she says. “I did think about you. And Denny. It just . . . wasn’t enough.” I know she doesn’t mean that to sting, and I try not to show that it does. I sit down in the grass and lean back on my elbows. If I tilt my chin up I can’t see the road, and with the sun beating down on my face it almost feels like I’m back in our yard. When it gets really brutal in the summer, we all set up back there on towels, even Mom sometimes. The crabapple is somehow still alive, so we have to clear away the rotten fruit first, but all we really need is some lemonade and a radio to make a day of it.

“Can you tell me why?” I ask. Cass drops down next to me, and a little black zippered case I didn’t notice she was holding falls to the ground between her knees. It’s the new insulin kit from the hospital. I made Tim hide it in the glove compartment. She catches me looking at it and blanches.

“I was bringing it so you could . . .” She picks up the case and lobs it at me like a live grenade. “I wasn’t going to . . .”

“Do you want to, though?” I ask. “Still?”

“I mean, not right this minute,” Cass says. “I feel a little better.”

“Good.” I turn the case over in my hands. She’ll still have to do shots for the rest of her life. I wonder if she’ll think about it every single time. I know I will.

“It wasn’t one specific thing,” she says after a minute. “It was a lot of stuff.”

“Mom,” I say.

“That didn’t help.”

“No, I was going to say I talked to her. A few days ago.”

Cass frowns and chews on her lower lip. “Was she mad?”

“No,” I say. “She was just scared and sad. Kind of all over the place, like normal.” When Cass won’t meet my eyes, I put my hand on her knee and shake it gently. “She’s mad at me, and Buck. But not you. Nobody’s mad at you.”

She gets quiet for a minute and drops her elbows to her knees, then her chin to her elbows, folding in like one of those Jacob’s ladder toys. We have one at home that Mom got from church as a kid. Apparently they were allowed to play with them at Sunday school because of the biblical reference, but there’s not much you can do with a staircase to heaven that doesn’t actually go anywhere.

“It’s one thing to not have Buck. Or even Mom sometimes. But if we got split up . . .” She shakes her head, picking at the grass.

“That’s not going to happen,” I say. “If Mom slips up again, I’ll file for custody myself.”

Cass looks up at me, surprised and a little bit suspicious. “But then you’d be stuck with us. Like, for life.”

I’ll admit, I haven’t thought the legal guardian thing through yet—and I hope I never have to. But after this week, staying in Baltimore for a few more years doesn’t sound so bad anymore. Seeing some of the rest of the country has been cool, but no place has felt quite like home. Just call me Dorothy Gale, I guess.

“I’m already stuck with you for life,” I say to Cass. “You’ll never get rid of me.”

“What about school, though?”

“I can take night classes or put it off for a year or two.” If I take that assistant manager gig—if Yvonne will still give it to me—I could probably pay my way through the University of Maryland without too much aid. They have a great law school, actually. I could up and do a one-eighty on the family business. Who knows? “And I’m serious about getting you into a new school, too,” I say. “If you want.”

“Maybe,” Cass says. “It’s not going so great.”

“I know.” I take a breath, trying to tread carefully. “While you were in the hospital . . . I read some of your texts.”

“Oh.” She doesn’t look angry, exactly. More hurt.

“I’m really sorry, I was just so worried.”

Cass blinks nervously. “It’s okay.”

“So . . . you and Erica aren’t talking anymore?” I ask gently.

“Nope.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“There’s not much to talk about,” Cass says with a far-off look. “I liked her, and she didn’t like me. Not in the same way, anyway.” She lets out a shaky breath. “I’m glad you know,” she says. “It’s kind of a relief.”

“I love you no matter what,” I say. “And someday I know you’ll meet someone who loves you like I do, for exactly who you are. Don’t settle for anything less.”

Cass nods, but there’s a vacant, sort of despairing look on her face. I recognize it—it’s the same feeling I get whenever I think about falling in love. Because what if he wants to get married someday? Love is one thing, but marriage is something else completely, something murkier and infinitely more frightening. Marriage, to us, means Madison and Buck. It means an electrical storm that burns everything in its path.

“I’m scared to see him,” Cass says, as if reading my mind. “I don’t remember him at all. Not a smell, not a mental picture, nothing.”