Heather's text came at exactly 12:05AM. Parked up in a drive-through restaurant, I'd eaten two hamburgers and three double cheeseburgers, but SHE'D KISSED CHUCK. I hoped it sucked. I hoped he'd lizard-tongued her, and she'd catch 'The Ick' all over again.

An image flashed in my mind of Heather and Chuck. The shock hit like a deliberate gut punch. Whenever they are linked in my brain, I'm nauseated. Beau and Heather were a million times less sickening. Love is like wasps or cancer, only because I'm thinking about the things I hate the most, so it's a lot like that.

A discarded lighter sat on the passenger seat. Heather smoked because James Dean smoked, and he was the coolest person she'd have an imaginary dinner with. I smoked because Heather smoked, and most of my cigarettes had touched her mouth.

My heart twisted in my chest. The sting it unleashed intensified and was reflected in the thinness of air I exhaled to prevent tears from forming.

Chuck wouldn't, would he?

A choked sob escaped before I clamped my mouth shut, but the torment lingered, looking for a hole, a weakness in my exterior, an opportunity to crush me.

When I turned the key in the lock an hour later and opened the door, the kitchen was dark. All the surfaces are European marble or stainless steel and cool to the touch. Mom had intended this space to be a welcoming family room, but blood should feel warmer than this.

We didn't have that refrigerator with the family Polaroids on. Instead, we had the dent in the wall that Chuck punched when Dad gave his diagnosis and the reddish stain on the floor where I'd spilled pasta sauce.

It was close to two in the morning. I yanked the pull cord and turned on the light. Chuck morphed in the brightness perched on a stool. I steadied myself to make it appear that he hadn't made me jump.

"You gotta stop taking the truck." He frowned. "You need to own your shit. Now. You're just mad at Dad; admit it."

My vision hazed, and I'm back to beyond raging. But again, I'm mad at the wrong things, and Chuck isn't apparently supposed to be one of them—neither is Mr. Thompson. Go figure. It seemed insane to be told by Mom that my anger was misplaced. If I didn't have that, what else was there to feel? I wasn't allowed to be mad at Dad, and I couldn't handle being angry at Heather.

"Why did you have to kiss her? Did you try to have sex with her?"

Chuck blinked back, confused, and I took it as an opportunity to launch a fist at his face because he never said no. The force sent him careening backward. There was a crack as his shoulder connected with the glass cabinet.

"Why are you fighting me?" Chuck gritted his teeth. "Do you think I wanted you as a responsibility? You're too fucked to help Mom. I feed you, wash your clothes—I have a life too!"

I masked the way my shoulders crumpled by straightening my back. "Why are you such an asshole?"

Chuck lunged with a gut punch that wasn't his best, but it still winded me where I stood, and he used his full weight to knock me to the floor. I hissed as a pang of nausea struck.

"Why aren't you trying?" I wrestled

him on the ground. "Thought you were an athlete?"

Chuck rolled to the side and stood. "Get it all out, Adrian, then just get up." He ran a hand down his face, the tethers of his patience already frayed.

"When I get up...you're dead...Chuck." The words would have proved more effective if I wasn't star-fished on the floor with a new asthmatic wheeze.

He let out a sigh. "I didn't kiss Heather."

I frowned, scrutinizing his response. Why would Heather tell me she'd kissed Chuck, of all people, if she hadn't? I wanted him to redeem himself, but he just kept disappointing.

"You tipped my beer over her."

"I was aiming for you. You can't spray paint 'Virgin Dick' on a buddy's car and not expect a little retribution. But you left, and it pissed Heather off that you left, leaving her with no way home."

Fuck Sebastian Goodward and his pretend dead mothers' grave...

"We walked there." I shrugged. "It's not like I stole her legs. Plus, she told me to go."

Chuck's slicked-back hair now stuck out at wild angles as he shook his head. "No, she told you, "Whatever. Dick."

His words left me confused, wondering whether that was the same thing after all.

"Mom thinks you're off your meds. Is that true?" The subject change took me a minute to register. My eyes betrayed me by welling up with tears of frustration at constantly having to explain myself.

"Does it matter?" I couldn't tell her it was the right time for me—Mom would interpret this as parental rejection, and I was exhausted from navigating my own grief around hers. I didn't need a pill to take away feelings, but she believed no problem couldn't be medicated into a corner and told to be quiet.

"She's driving right now trying to find YOU. Take them if you still need them."

Chuck's sudden concern for my well-being threw me off guard. Cracked from top to bottom, the mirror cabinet door that Chuck smacked hung from a hinge.

I deflected. "Look at the cabinet. She'll have a field day."

Chuck extended a hand.

"What on earth are you doing?" I asked, batting it away.

"Burying the hatchet." Chuck's eyes widened and became glassy.

The front door clicked. As always, mom was five minutes too early but smack bang on parental timing.

There was a gasp. "What's happened to the cabinet?" Mom took five stricken steps around Chuck to investigate the devastation.

I grimaced, my rib swelling, and the pain it emanated became thunderous. "Casualty of the hatchet you requested."

I smiled through the searing pain in my side before I realized Mom had reverted to Buddhist monk vow of silence mute, and her cheeks were wet. She had long stopped blinking. Mom never got my humor, but she always got Dad's, and he would have found that funny. Heck, he would have found the prostate oyster funny... eventually.

"I—"

"The cabinet was me." Chuck hung his head.

My eyes widened in shock, and I looked at him questioningly. I opened my mouth to interject, but he shook his head with a look that told me to be quiet. Chuck was navigating older brother territory. I nodded back in silence. For the second time in twenty-four hours, someone's actions had blindsided me.

Then Mom said, "The hospital called while I was out. Dad had the operation; he's awake."

And now I'm back to feeling shitty about something else because, for the last four hours, I'd allowed myself to forget, burying him under a snug blanket of things I would contemplate another day— the potential for loss so amplified it was visceral.

Burying the Hatchet

0 Comments