Bloodline(86)

And I guess he did.





CHAPTER 1

“Fifteen two, fifteen four, and a pair for six.” Sephie beamed.

Dad matched her smile across the table. “Nice hand. Cass?”

I laid down my cards, trying to keep the gloat off my face and failing. “Fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six, and a run for ten!”

Mom moved our peg. “We win.”

I shoulder-danced. “I can give you lessons if you want, Sephie.”

She rolled her eyes. “In being a poor sport?”

I laughed and dug into the popcorn. Mom had made a huge batch, super salty and doused in brewer’s yeast. That had been an hour earlier, when we’d started game night. The bowl was getting down to the old maids. I dug around for the ones showing a peek of white. Part-popped old maids are worth their weight in gold, taste-wise.

“Need a refill?” Dad stood, pointing at Mom’s half-full glass sweating in the sticky May air. Summer was coming early this year—at least that’s what my biology teacher, Mr. Patterson, had said. Was really going to mess with crops.

He’d seemed bothered by this, but I bet I wasn’t the only kid looking forward to a hot break. Sephie and I planned to turn as brown as baked beans and bleach our dark hair blonde. She’d heard from a friend of a friend that baby oil on our skin and vinegar water spritzed in our hair would work as well as those expensive coconut-scented tanning oils and Sun In. We’d even whispered about finding a spot at the edge of our property, where the woods broke for the drainage ditch, to lay out naked. The thought made me shiver. Boys liked no tan lines. I’d learned that watching Little Darlings.

Mom lifted her drink and emptied it before offering it to Dad. “Thanks, love.”

He strode over to her side of the table, leaning in for a deep kiss before taking her glass. Now I was rolling my eyes right along with Sephie. Mom and Dad, mostly Dad, regularly tried to convince us that we were lucky they were still so in love, but gross.

Dad pulled away from kissing Mom and caught our expressions. He laughed his air-only heh heh laugh, setting down both glasses so he was free to massage Mom’s shoulders. They were an attractive couple, people said it all the time. Mom had been beautiful, every cloudy picture taken of her proved that, and she still had the glossy brown hair and wide eyes, though incubating Sephie and me had padded her hips and belly. Dad was handsome, too, with a Charles Bronson thing going on. You could see how they’d ended up together, especially after Mom downed a glass of wine, and she’d let spill how she’d always been drawn to the bad boys, even back in high school.

My immediate family was small: just Mom and Aunt Jin; my big sister, Persephone (my parents had a thing for Greek names); and Dad. I didn’t know my dad’s side of the family. They wouldn’t be worth sweeping into a dustpan, at least that’s what my grandpa on Mom’s side swore to my grandma the winter he died of a massive heart attack. My grandma hadn’t argued. She’d been a docile lady who always smelled of fresh-baked bread no matter the season. A few weeks after Grandpa passed, she died of a stroke, which sounds like a swim move but is not.

They’d lost a son, my mom’s parents, when I was three years old. He’d been a wild one, I guess. Died playing chicken in a ’79 Camaro, probably drinking, people said. I could only remember one thing about Uncle Richard. It was at his funeral. Jin was crying, but Mom was crying louder, and she went up to Grandpa for a hug. He turned away from her, and she stood there, looking sadder than a lost baby.

I asked her about it once, about why Grandpa wouldn’t hug her. She said I was too young to remember anything from Rich’s funeral, and besides, the past should stay in the past.

“I think your mother is the most beautiful woman in the world,” Dad said in the here and now, rubbing Mom’s shoulders while she closed her eyes and made a dreamy face.

“Fine by me,” I said. “Just get a room.”

Dad swept his arm in a wide arc, his smile tipped sideways. “I have a whole house. Maybe you should learn to relax. I’ll rub your shoulders next.”

My eyes cut to Sephie. She was flicking a bent corner of a playing card.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“Sephie? Your neck tense?”

She shrugged.

“That’s my girl!” He moved to her, laying his hands on her bony shoulders. She was two years older than me but skinny no matter what she ate, all buckeroo teeth and dimples, a dead ringer for Kristy McNichol, though I’d eat my own hair before I’d tell her.

Dad started in on Sephie. “It’s good to feel good,” he murmured to her.

That made me itch inside. “Can we play another game of cribbage?”

“Soon,” Dad said. “First, I want to hear everyone’s summer dreams.”

I groaned. Dad was big on dreams. He believed you could be whatever you wanted, but you had to “see it” first. Hippie-dippie, but I suppose a person got used to it. Both Sephie and I swapped a look. We knew without saying it that Dad would not approve of our plan to transform ourselves into blondes. Girls should not try to be anything for anyone, he’d tell us. We needed to command our own minds and bodies.

Again, gross.

“I want to visit Aunt Jin,” I offered.

Mom had been going half-lidded, but her eyes popped open at the mention of her sister. “That’s a great plan! We can drive to Canada for a week.”