Along Came Trouble(42)

“I haven’t told anybody.”

“Yeah,” he said, pausing between screens to take a drink from the Styrofoam cup he’d perched on top of the game. “I got that impression.”

Katie looked at her shoes again and went back to twisting her ring. “I’m married,” she said.

At first, he didn’t respond because his brain couldn’t figure out what to do with the information. She wasn’t seeing anyone—and he would know, because she lived at his house and worked in his office. His fingers went slack on the joystick as he tried to puzzle it out, and Ms. Pac-Man bit the dust with a sound like a shot from a digital laser.

And then it clicked. This wasn’t recent news. This was the past she’d been hiding. “To Levi?”

She wrapped her arms around her stomach. “It wasn’t a real marriage. He proposed one night when we were both half drunk. We only did it to get residency, because we couldn’t afford the tuition otherwise. And even married, we could only afford for one of us to go at a time. Which is why—”

She glanced at him and faltered. He tried to make his face do something less rigid and foreboding, but every muscle in his body seemed to have frozen.

Katie was married to Levi. Presently. Right this second.

“Where is he?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I ran into his mom at the post office, and it would seem he’s in California. I thought he was in Tibet. He told me he was going to Tibet. When he left. I mean, he didn’t actually tell me, but he left me this note, and the note said he was going to Tibet, and he wished me luck, only he took all the money, so it wasn’t as if luck was going to be much help—”

“Jesus Christ.” Caleb smacked the flat of his palm into the side of the video game hard enough to knock his drink off the top, spilling crushed ice and water all over the cheap red carpet. Katie went down on her knees and started pushing the mess back into the cup with her hand, as if there were some way she could prevent the water from soaking in.

“Leave it.”

She didn’t, and he couldn’t stand to see her there, looking like she was doing some kind of penance. He found her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Leave it.”

“Clark?”

A teenager with a shaved head and several ounces of metal in his face slid their pizzas onto the counter. Caleb looked at him without really seeing him, and the kid shuddered.

“Caleb,” Katie whispered, giving his hand a squeeze with her cold, wet fingers. “Get the pizzas.”

Moving stiffly, he pulled his wallet out of his pocket and paid. When he had the pizza boxes in hand, he turned and walked out the door.

Married. His baby sister.

He didn’t know why it should make a difference. She’d lived up north with Levi for almost a decade, first in a ramshackle apartment with cinder-block bookcases, later in a ramshackle house that Katie had done her best to turn into a home. He’d visited them up there, had even learned how to fly fish from Levi. He’d liked the guy all right, accepting him as Katie’s choice. Levi was a little flaky, a happy-go-lucky type. Good with the customers he guided on raft trips and taught how to kayak.

Caleb had liked him.

She followed him up the hill, across the campus toward Ellen’s house, walking a step or two behind him. He wanted to tell her she didn’t have to trail after him like that, but he was too worked up to talk.

Married him. She’d married Levi. The word was stuck in his head, and he couldn’t get past it, even though it was probably the least important thing she’d told him.

Married him, and he’d used her, cleaned her out, and left her.

At the top of a steep, grassy hill, Caleb stopped abruptly. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“What? When?”

“When he left! Christ, Katie, you got married, you put him through college, ran a business with him, and then he stole all your money and went to Tibet? And you didn’t f*cking think it might be a good idea to call?” His voice slipped the track and rose to a shout on the last word.

She flinched, and he sucked in a deep breath. He was too amped up, yelling at his sister as if she were the one who’d done something wrong.

“You were in Iraq,” she said cautiously.

Caleb dropped the pizzas and turned away from her expression. He walked ten feet away from her, twenty, and found a tree to kick as hard as he could.

“That f*cking low-life scumbag son of a bitch,” he said. He managed not to shout it. The words came out more of a tortured mutter. “What an *.”