Things We Didn't Say_ A Novel - Kristina Riggle [61]
But I may tear out my throat otherwise. So.
I dread the cold, though the wind appears to have subsided, as the snow is falling still heavy but now more or less straight down instead of sideways.
So I leave Angel to her nap and Jewel and Mallory to their channel flipping on the couch and step out to the front porch, which is more sheltered than the back patio.
I test the cut on my lip with my tongue. It seems to have scabbed over, so that it must look like hell but will probably not split open, if I’m careful.
After several tries to light up, my cig finally catches and I suck in, both loving and hating that pinch in my lungs that comes before the light-headed relief.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t contact Tony again this weekend, not until I’d had a chance to decide what to do. How much to tell Michael and when. Ideally before Angel decides to let fly with my secrets.
But it’s too much to hold this all in. There aren’t enough cigarettes in the world to make this feel better. I’m a boiling pot with the lid bolted.
So I text him, as it’s safer than calling.
Dylan found. He’s fine. Thx.
Moments later, a return text: PTL—which I recognize as Tony’s texting shorthand for Praise the Lord—what happened?
Ran away. Long story.
Glad he’s OK. U?
SHE is still here. Makes me crazy.
Hang in.
I pause in the texting, finishing the last few drags of the cigarette, deciding what else to say, what I can reasonably type with my thumbs that will sum up everything.
Don’t know if M. still wants me. Want to stay. Hope I can.
Minutes go by with no response. He’s a volunteer firefighter, so he probably got called to a wreck.
I feel better having said it to someone, even though Tony may not have gotten the message yet, even though Tony is a relic from my past, a secret.
We were neighbors during my JinxCorp days. We’d get home at about the same time many nights. He was bartending and operating sound for local bands, so I not only saw him in the hallway in front of my apartment but some nights going out I’d go to his bar. Sometimes I’d see him with a band, fiddling with those knobs and sliding buttons for the budding rock stars who called him Gramps. He called them “Assholes” and smiled, so they assumed he meant it affectionately. For some of them, that was true.
He would later tell me that my rock-bottom moment was also his.
“You’re young, Edna Leigh,” he told me, when my stitches were itching under the bandage and he’d brought me some stuffed grape leaves and baba ghanoush from Olive Express. “If I did that, I bet I’d be dead, or paralyzed or something. I’m sixty-some, and I’m not made of rubber like you.”
“Ha, I only wish I’d bounced,” I said back, sounding cockier than I really felt.
He quit his bartending gig and gave up working sound. He went to work for his brother, though there’d been bad blood there for the longest time.
The cold finally gets to me. I should also check in with my mom. She never used to be the “checking up” type, but after Billy, everything changed.
In the house, Jewel has fallen asleep in her mother’s lap. Mallory’s asleep, too, her head tipped back on the couch. Not sure why she should be so tired, since she seems to be the only one who slept last night. Rather soundly, in fact. So soundly she couldn’t hear me knocking on the door just a few feet away, when I was locked out.
I prefer privacy for talking to my mother, anyway.
These two halves of my life will have to mesh if we get married, but I find it hard to imagine this.
The phone rings a few times before she picks up.
“Hi, baby,” she says.
“Hi, Mom.”
“How was your day?”
“Ummm . . .”
There are tears, now.
“Honey? What’s wrong?” I hear her clunk a glass down on the table. I imagine her sitting forward in her chair, concern written in the lines on her face, lines put there by me, Dad, Billy.
“It’s okay, now,” I tell her, wiping my face hard, shaking my head. “It’s just been a hard day.”
“Oh, sweetie.”
Her concern does me in.
I do tell her, some of it,