“The Test Pavements?” Andrew said, pantomiming a backward electric guitar. “I called you but I think your phone’s off.”
“The other way,” I said, and he grinned and switched hands. My phone was not exactly off. Broken and lost somewhere forever was more like it. “I forgot about that,” I added. “Shit.”
“How could you forget about the Test Pavements?”
I rubbed a hand over my face, also forgetting, for the millionth time, about my cheekbone. “Sorry,” I said as I winced. “Let me get ready.” I turned around and went back into the bedroom.
“Rox, are you okay?” The floor creaked as Andrew walked past my open door and back to the kitchen.
“Yeah,” I said. My clothes were scattered all over the floor, in various states of cleanliness. I looked into my closet and saw nothing but bare hangers. I sat down on the bed and sighed and it started me on a coughing jag, my lungs still scratchy and tight from the smoke.
“You sound terrible,” Andrew said. He reappeared with a whiskey bottle and two shot glasses. He filled them and handed one to me. “Are you getting sick?”
“I’m fine.” I put the shot glass on my nightstand without drinking it and shook my head when Andrew looked at me quizzically. I took a slow, deep breath. “I think I need to pull back, where that’s concerned.”
It was scary to say it out loud, especially to my brother. But he just looked at me for a second and poured himself another shot.
“To each her own. You may change your mind later on, though,” he said. “The band that plays before the Test Pavements is apparently a Christian rock group.”
“Orange Barrels for God?” I guessed.
Andrew laughed. “Divining Roads,” he said.
“We cannot go to this,” I said. It suddenly seemed impossible that I was even here, laughing with my brother. Last night had happened to someone else. I had just fallen asleep during a horror movie and woke up unscathed, credits playing.
“Are you kidding me? It’s going to be fucking amazing.”
I started coughing again.
“But look,” he said, “as much as I want to make fun of him all night with you, if you’re sick, it’s okay. Mom would understand. She’d ask if you saw a doctor yet, naturally, but she’d understand.”
I placed my good hand over my chest, trying to coax my lungs into stillness. It would be so easy to say yes, I was sick, and sleep for another seven hours. But I didn’t want to, I realized. I wanted to be around my family tonight. “No, I’m good. I just need to change and we can go.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I am,” I said.
Andrew took the whiskey bottle back into the kitchen and I put on a bra and a cleanish shirt. I ran a brush through my hair without looking in the mirror. I didn’t even want to know at this point.
“Mom told me yesterday that she sent Tom an e-mail about tonight,” Andrew said from the hallway. “Inviting him. I hope that even he has the good sense to stay away from this important family event, but who knows.”
“Hey,” I said. “Do you think we could lay off Tom?”
Andrew leaned into my bedroom. “What?”
“He’s good people,” I said. “And he was probably closer to Dad than either of us ever was. I think he’s just doing the best he can.”
He raised his eyebrows but he didn’t ask. “Sure,” he said.
“We can still make fun of Matt, though, don’t worry.”
“Good.”
Andrew was waiting by the front door. “Do you want to put these in water?” he said, with a nod to the roses from Catherine. “Who are they from, anyway?”
“Mind your business,” I said. I slapped his hand as he nosed through the folds of cellophane for the card. “And no. I don’t think it was meant to be a lasting sentiment.”
He looked at me. “What’s really going on?” he said. “You look beat to hell, your door has a pizza box taped to it, what happened?”
I tossed him his car keys. “I have a story,” I said, “but I only want to tell it once tonight.”
“Fair enough,” Andrew said. “Ready?”
This was one of the reasons I loved my brother. He was kind, and not curious. He didn’t need to know every last secret. He would trust you to tell him in your own time. In that way, he was my exact opposite, and it meant that he could find peace. I wasn’t sure that I could ever do that. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to. Not if it meant completely turning off the part of my brain that made me go into that house. But maybe there was a way to do both. I thought about what Tom had said earlier, how you could leave behind the parts you don’t like. He meant the parts of my father’s memory, but I wanted to think the same could apply to parts of yourself, that you could choose who you wanted to be, that every moment could be different. That, like I told Sarah, nothing counted, not unless you wanted it to count. I said, “Ready enough.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would be nothing without Kellye Garrett, whose support, guidance, humor, plotting brilliance, and reminders about thought process were nothing short of transformative to the story and to me as a writer. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thanks also to Brenda Drake, for everything she does to support emerging writers via Pitch Wars. And speaking of which, I’m so grateful to everyone I’ve met from the PW community, especially Elle Jauffret and Jenny Ferguson for their rational advice when I was in full freak-out mode, Sonia Hartl and Roselle Kaes for their generosity and feedback on my manuscript, and Lisa Schunemann, my writerly drinking buddy.
Massive gratitude to my agent, Jill Marsal, and to my editor, Daniela Rapp, for believing in this story and for all of their work on my behalf. Also, thanks to Marla Cooper for putting me in touch with Jill in the first place.
Thanks to Bill Kerwin, for always reading.
I also want to thank Jessica Adamiak for her sharp editorial eye and her patience while reading approximately one zillion of my stories, novels, and pieces and parts thereof over the years. And for teaching me that getting ink means don’t give up yet.
And finally, thanks to Joanna Schroeder, my best reader, listener, sounding board, and my partner through this and all other adventures.