The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(100)
He grins and kisses me again. “I’m sure. Move in with me. I’ll even let you decorate.”
“Well, with that offer, how can I refuse?”
His indignant laughter is absolutely worth the second pillow to the face.
Brandon watches Mercedes pause in the middle of setting a framed picture on one side of her ofrenda, staring at the rubies and diamonds in her silver band and the way they glitter in the candlelight.
Cass snorts and pokes her in the rump with the butt of her beer bottle. “We get it, you’re still shocked she agreed to marry you. Maybe finish your task and then goggle?”
“I’d say vete al infierno, but not tonight.” She arranges the newest picture on the shelf, fingers lingering on the frame. Marlene Hanoverian had any number of small, annoying strokes over the past years. About a year after Faith’s funeral, however, a much more significant stroke had left her hospitalized for nearly a month. In the two years since then, the larger strokes had become a little more common, taking a bit more from her each time. Just a month ago, she passed in her sleep. She smiles out from the photo, surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren in her kitchen, everyone coated with a thick dusting of flour from the kind of accident that can only happen with that many small hands in the room.
Kissing her wife of only a week, Ksenia leans forward to arrange brilliant orange and gold cempasúchiles around the base of the frame. “I have to take my ring off at work,” she admits. “It keeps distracting me when I type.”
Eliza toes off her shoes and settles back into the couch, propping her swollen feet on the ottoman. She’s had a year and a half to become accustomed to wearing a wedding ring on her hand, only to have to recently adjust to wearing it on a chain around her neck as her fingers swelled.
Brandon thinks she’d be a little less grumpy if men could get pregnant, too, or at least have all the same symptoms.
He adjusts the small offering plates on the left side of the ofrenda, making sure the food isn’t obscured by the flowers. For Chavi, who was the reason they’d met Priya, there are yellow chrysanthemums. For Faith, his own Faith, water-dyed rainbow roses. And for Ian, who was the reason they found Faith and Erin and all those other girls, a delicately plaited wreath of forget-me-nots wraps around his photo, taken at a ceremony in which the TPD honored him for a lifetime of service. He’d lived only five months or so after Faith’s funeral, and nearly to the end kept saying he was still deciding whether or not he wanted treatment. But he’d died at home, as out of pain as Hospice could make him, and at peace.
Small plates of food sit in front of the frames, as well. Chavi’s plate is fragrant with raisin-studded saffron rice, naan, vindaloo, and green curry, along with a tiny bouquet of the root beer Tootsie Pops she almost always had close to hand when she was drawing. For Faith and Ian, Mercedes helped Brandon make tamales from his mamá’s recipe, with arroz con pollo, peppery steak empanadas, and a handful of stacked alfajores. The majarete they’d attempted, failed at spectacularly, and then purchased. Ian’s also has a shot glass full of the cold ginger beer he’d kept out in his studio to cool him off when his glasswork was done. In front of Marlene’s photo, the plate holds pastries and baked goods they all made by hand, just as she’d shown them how to do over the years.
Kneeling in front of Mercedes and Ksenia, almost pressed back against their legs, Priya, Inara, and Victoria-Bliss arrange flowers around a series of frames on the lower two shelves of the bookshelf-turned-ofrenda. Priya has one picture there, a girl with a warm smile and a wreath of amaranth pinned around a dark ballerina bun: her friend Aimée who was killed only three years after Chavi, by the same man. The rest were provided by Inara and Victoria-Bliss, the Butterflies they knew who never made it out of the Garden, and the girls they knew who never made it out of the Butterflies, from the beaming Cassidy Lawrence to the reserved Amiko Kobiyashi. The girls don’t keep their own ofrenda, but Mercedes offered to fold them into hers. They’re familiá, after all.
Brandon glances over at Eliza, noting the way she rubs the heel of her hand just above the swell of her belly. He thinks about asking if she’s all right, but he has a set limit of how many times a day he’s allowed to do that. Does he really want to waste one when she has a smile on her face? She barely showed at all for months, but abruptly, at the seven-month mark, she suddenly looked pregnant, like she glued on a basketball overnight. Without the gradual change of weight and girth to get used to, it’s left her off-balance more often than not. Somehow it’s hard to believe that just three years ago, he was caged by a house he couldn’t claim and questions he couldn’t ask, just as she was leashed by a dress she couldn’t destroy and a word she couldn’t say.
Jenny sits next to her, so he doesn’t ask. They’re talking about stretch marks and some kind of lotion; he’ll have to ask Jenny about it later to make sure he can reliably locate it in a store. Eliza doesn’t often ask for the little things that will make her more comfortable.
Vic comes out from Mercedes’s narrow kitchen, bottles in each hand. He holds two of them out to Brandon.
He looks back at Eliza.
“They’re white birch beer,” Vic tells him with a chuckle. “Nonalcoholic, completely safe for her to drink.”
“In that case . . .” He accepts them and walks over to Eliza to give her one of the chilled bottles.