The Familiar Dark(52)

“You think if I knew anything about what happened I’d be sitting here drinking beer and shooting the shit with you?” She lit up a new cigarette with a neon-pink lighter. “I don’t waste time making threats, Eve.” Accusatory squint through a scrim of smoke. “I don’t talk. I act. Whoever hurt her would already be dead in a ditch.”

I pushed my chair back hard, and it went over halfway, crashing into the wall behind me. “We’re done,” I told her. “Not for now or for today. For always. Pretend you don’t know me.” Even as I spoke, I had the sinking feeling my words were coming too late. Junie’s death had set events in motion that couldn’t be stopped. I crossed to the front door, paused before stepping out. “Pretend you never had a daughter. It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.”

I wanted it to hurt her, but I knew with unflinching certainty that it hadn’t. As soon as I was gone, she’d open another beer, screw the guy on the sofa, and throw a frozen dinner in the microwave. End her evening with heroin between the toes. And the daughter she’d just lost, the daughter she hadn’t wanted to begin with, would never even cross her mind.





TWENTY-ONE


I couldn’t face Cal yet, look him in the eye and hear his stumbling, shamefaced apology. The combination of words that would never be big enough to cover the depth of his betrayal. The worst part was, I already knew I’d forgive him. He was all I had left. My only tether to the world. And as much as I didn’t want to, I understood why he’d done it. Understood how sometimes he was powerless to resist our mother. The piece of him that remained a little boy, desperate to prove his worth. But still . . . Junie. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around him bringing Junie into the mix. He must have thought he could control Mama, control the way she inserted herself into Junie’s life. But I knew better. There was no controlling Mama; there was only containment, and even that was fraught with danger as she constantly evaded your well-established perimeters. She was like a weed: You’d stomp her out in one spot, but when you turned around, she’d already be growing again.

I still hadn’t recovered my taste for alcohol. In truth, I probably had never had one, even when I was younger. But back then, a few too many beers had made the rest of my life easier to swallow, too. But when I passed by Jimmy Ray’s strip joint, the sun beginning to fall into the horizon, I pulled into the lot. I told myself I wasn’t going inside to see Jimmy Ray, that I didn’t care one way or the other whether he was there, but the self-destructive song in my blood sang a different tune.

This early in the evening, the place was virtually empty. Only one stripper out on the stage and a single occupied table, two guys who eyed me as I made my way to the bar. I was surprised to see Sam working behind the counter, and it took me a second to remember that Matt was dead. Blown to smithereens right in front of my eyes.

“Hey, Eve,” Sam said, shy smile easing out from under his beard. “What can I get you?”

“How about a vodka on the rocks.”

Sam nodded, but kept his eyes on me a second too long. “How’re you doing?” he asked as he spun a glass upright on the bar, scooped ice inside.

“Been better,” I said. I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to drink. And forget everything for a little while. I needed relief, and I’d take it from the bottom of a bottle if that’s where I could find it.

“Jimmy Ray’s not here,” Sam said as he slid my drink across the bar. “He’s kept himself scarce lately. Rumor has it, you about busted his nose clean off his face.”

I drained half the vodka in one go, choking a little as I set the glass back down. My eyes burned, and heat spread inside my chest like tentacles. “Yep, that was me.”

Sam laughed. “I would’ve loved to witness it.” He leaned closer, lowered his voice. “But you didn’t hear that from me.”

I gave him what passed for a smile, finished my drink, and motioned for another. I could tell Sam wanted to say something about my newfound taste for alcohol. But this wasn’t the kind of place, and we weren’t the kind of people, for a go slow, take it easy speech. You walked in these doors to get wrecked, not to have an umbrella-adorned cocktail with your friends. I went a little slower with the second drink, but not by much. Turned around in my chair to stop Sam from trying to keep a conversation going. Of course, then I was forced to stare at the lone stripper, a woman about my own age with a greasy tangle of bottle-red hair and wide, stretch-marked hips. The tassels on her pasties swung in half-hearted arcs as she gyrated.

It wasn’t until the song ended and she was climbing down off the stage that I recognized her. She’d been a brunette when I’d known her, living with her older sister a mile or two down the road. We hadn’t been friends, exactly, but we’d stuck together in junior high. Not because we particularly liked each other, but because we were painfully aware that we came from the same place and there was safety in numbers. As far as I remembered, she hadn’t continued on into high school.

“Hey, Crystal,” I said when she got within spitting distance. There was a faint slur to my words, my voice a little higher than normal. The vodka was sitting in my gut like a sparking fire. She looked at me blankly, and I wondered if I’d gotten her name wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Crystal after all, although that was a favorite in my mama’s part of the world. It could have been Diamond. That one got a lot of play, too. As if the shimmer and shine of the names themselves could make up for the sad stripper lives they were destined to precede. I guess I should’ve counted myself lucky that my mama had picked up some Bible learning along the way and had written Eve on my birth certificate instead of Sapphire or Destiny.