Georgie, All Along (80)

“Levi and I have to leave,” she’d said sharply. “Harry, I’ll Venmo you our half of the check.”

“No, I’ll—” I’d tried to interject, but Georgie had given me a look that was like to slash my insides to ribbons. She’d stomped right past my siblings and back out the door I’d pushed my way through less than an hour before.

Then, she sat pressed over against that door in stony silence the whole way home.

I pause in the act of unhooking my seat belt, confused. I expected that we’d get here and she’d get out, go back to her parents’ place. Her Prius is parked only a few feet away, after all, and I don’t think she even had time for a drink at the bar.

“You’re not?” My voice sounds like I haven’t used it in ages. It wasn’t even that long of a car ride back here, but every second was an eternity.

For the first time, she turns enough to look at me, her eyes flashing. “No, Levi, I’m not. I want to talk about whatever that was back there.”

I swallow, part of me relieved and part of me still awful afraid of that trap door. I go ahead and unhook the seat belt. “Out here?”

“Yes, out here!” she snaps, then huffs, facing the windshield again. “I don’t want to argue in front of Hank.”

I face the windshield, too, mostly because I don’t want her to see that she’s given me a scrap of hope, saying that. I don’t want Hank to see me and her arguing, either.

“Tonight was important to Bel,” she says. “And you know what? It was important to me. I was so close to—”

She breaks off, shakes her head, looks down at her lap.

“To what?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She sighs heavily and starts over. “You treated me like I was something you’d called dibs on.”

I wince, rubbing a hand over my face, down my beard. “I’m sorry.”

“And you treated Evan like he was some random guy you were about to scrap with. You barely even looked at Olivia, and listen, I know you don’t want to talk about your family, but these are people I work with, and to me, they’ve been nothing but kind. If they’ve done something to you, and that’s why you acted that way, then you need—”

“Georgie,” I say softly. “I know I have to tell you.”

She quiets, and I spare a look at her. She’s still got her head tipped down, her arms crossed tight.

“I’ve been thinking about telling you.”

She says nothing, but I can hear her anyway. Well, you didn’t.

I take a breath, steeling myself.

“They haven’t done anything to me,” I admit, finally. “My brother and sister, I mean. I don’t talk to them because my dad asked me not to. Told me not to.”

She lifts her head and meets my eyes.

“There cannot possibly be a good reason for that.”

There is, I want to say, but also if I say that, I’ll be making the same sort of mistake I made out on that dance floor, not letting her decide for herself. I face the windshield again.

“That school my dad sent me to,” I say, a sick roiling in my gut, “it wasn’t a nice place. I thought I was pretty tough going in there, but I basically got my ass beat for the first few weeks, and that wasn’t even the worst of it. It was the kind of place where someone would take a shit on your mattress to teach you a lesson.”

“God, Levi,” she says, but if she’s about to offer up more pity, I don’t want it. I press ahead, not giving her the chance.

“You learn how it works, after a while, and then you get on with it. But by the time I got out, I wasn’t right in the head. I moved to Richmond with this guy I bunked with at school, Danny. Got a job, but also mostly—” I shake my head, grip the steering wheel. “I don’t know. Smoked a lot of weed to help me sleep, took a lot of Adderall I wasn’t prescribed to help me get awake enough to work. I wasn’t ever myself.”

I clench my back teeth, letting a wave of old, familiar embarrassment pass over me. I thought I’d let go of the shame about this part of my life, the way I was basically medicating myself twenty-four hours a day. It’s no different from what millions of people do, good people who are in pain or unsure of where to turn; good people who need a break from everything in this world that’s hard and sad and unforgiving.

But telling Georgie, that’s a different story.

She hasn’t moved over there.

“When I was twenty-two, I got it in my mind I’d come home for Thanksgiving. Danny and I had both been working construction for a few months, and I felt like some sort of big man, making decent money. I hadn’t been back here since my dad sent me away, and I figured I’d be showing him something. Evan was in his first semester of college, and Liv had just started high school. I thought I’d be showing them something, too, that I wasn’t the brother they remembered.”

I was worse, I know now. But I didn’t know that then.

“For all I thought I was being tough, coming back here, I was too chickenshit to come alone. So I brought Danny. I thought—”

I stop myself from saying that I thought he was a good guy. He was my friend; we had some laughs, and he helped me out when I came up short on utilities a few times. But that doesn’t make for a good guy, and I knew it. I knew Danny did harder stuff than me. I knew he treated the women he brought home like they were garbage that needed to be taken out the next morning. I knew he could cover my utilities because he wasn’t only working construction. I knew he had pain of his own, prob - lems of his own, but I also knew he was more trouble than me.