Consumed (Firefighters #1)(88)

She put her palm up to stop him. “Hey, you asked me. If you didn’t want my opinion, you should have kept quiet.”

“Sorry.” He scrubbed his face with his dirty hand, and his eyes stung from the sawdust on his palm. “The house is fine for Mom to move back in, by the way.”

“So I see.”

“You must be relieved.”

“I guess.”

Now he was the surprised one. “You don’t actually want her to stay with you.”

“Not really. But I want her safe above all. That’s what I worry about.”

“She’s not a geriatric who’s a slip-and-fall risk. She can move back in tonight.”

“Is the security system fully functional?”

“Not yet. They need to come and put contacts on the new window.”

“Then she’ll stay with me until that happens.”

Off in the distance, a dog barked and the neighbor on the right came home from work, plugging their Kia into their garage. He hoped they didn’t see through the bushes that there were people out here and decide to come over and talk about the tree falling.

“Are you okay?” Sis asked. “I’m worried about you. You’re too quiet.”

“Nah, I’m fine. It’s no problem. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Okay.”

In the back of his mind, he was aware that they were following procedure, and as he thought about Emilio in that hospital bed, and Danny going rogue-crazy, and Chuckie P’s drinking problem, he felt compelled to bang on the closed door of stoic privacy.

Not on his own, though. No, no, not tonight, motherfuckers.

“Can you please tell me why you hate her so much?” he asked. And before she could shoot him down, he put his hand up to his sister. “I just want to understand. I’m not asking to try to change your mind or where you’re at or to judge you. I just don’t get it. Maybe if I did, I could stop bugging you about her.”

As Anne’s eyes drifted over to the grill to avoid his own, he shrugged. “And if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine, that’s your business.”

The way she looked back at him in downright shock made him think about the mayor’s diatribe on his failings as a manager. Shit. He really was the problem, wasn’t he.

Anne took a deep breath, like she was bracing herself to lift a car off the ground. “Do you remember, two days after the funeral, when you and Uncle Aaron went on that biking trip? The one dad was supposed to go on with you.”

There was only one “funeral” in this context. And he hated the memories he had of that day, the hundreds of firefighters in dress, walking behind an engine bearing his father’s draped coffin. His mother red-eyed and tragic. Him, just graduated from college and ready to enter the Academy in the fall. Anne . . . stoic as ever even at thirteen, refusing to cry.

Funny, he hadn’t thought about it until now, but he’d considered that disrespectful of her. And he’d resented her because of it since that day.

He shook himself back to the present. “We were raising money for the benevolence fund. Dad was supposed to be there.” Images of him and their father’s best friend, “Uncle” Aaron, pedaling like hell through Connecticut reminded him of how they’d both had anger to work out on those ribbons of asphalt through the countryside. “We made like fifteen hundred bucks for them.”

“I stayed behind.”

“You wanted to go.”

“I was a girl, I wasn’t allowed.” As anger tightened his sister’s features, he realized he’d rarely seen her without that expression hovering close by, a driver waiting to take the wheel. “You were supposed to be home the next night.”

“We decided to hang at the campground.”

“Yeah.”

There was a long pause. “So?”

“A woman showed up at the house the next afternoon. She was young. Pretty for a townie. She was frantic, so Mom invited her inside. When I heard the voices, I tiptoed down the stairs and listened out of sight. The girl was pregnant. She said it was Dad’s.”

A cold shaft went down Tom’s spine. “What are you— who the hell was she?”

“She was his girlfriend. That’s what she told Mom.”

“Jesus . . . Christ. What did Mom do?”

“She wasn’t surprised.”

“Excuse me?”

Anne shrugged and sat back in the lawn chair. “I gathered this wasn’t the first time this had happened. That a woman showed up at the house. Also got the feeling that the girl had been banking on a very different outcome than carrying the baby of a dead fireman. She was looking for money. For an abortion. She’d just turned twenty.”

Tom stared at his sister, looking for signs that this had been blown out of proportion, improperly extrapolated, falsely reported.

“I’d spent my life trying to impress that man,” she said. “And he knocks up a nineteen-year-old? And then Mom . . . she gave the girl the money. She didn’t even seem upset. It was like paying off a yardman for godsakes. I didn’t sleep all night. I just kind of was done with them both at that point. Mom, I’d never had anything in common with. She was always pushing me into these frilly, flowery dresses, and trying to get me to go to dance class. I’d been sick of her for a while, but after that? I just lost all respect for the woman. Like, yell. Throw things. Stand up for yourself. Leave the bastard. But don’t roll over like you don’t have a voice in your own life. It’s like she was just cleaning up a mess for him—how the hell could she live with herself?”