Things We Didn't Say_ A Novel - Kristina Riggle [80]
Pete and the others strode up and with much tussling and struggle, pulled the two apart. In the melee, someone knocked over the kitchen table. Poker money and cards scattered.
“What the fuck is the problem!” yelled my cousin Rick.
Billy angled forward at his foe. I could see the bulging veins in his arms from all the way across the room. “You take it back,” he said to the man.
“You’re psycho,” the guy replied. “I was just jokin’ around.”
Billy lunged again, and that’s when I recognized him, the other guy. He’d grabbed my ass at the bar the previous week.
“Okay,” the guy said. “Fine, fine. I take it back. Sorry. Jesus.”
The hands holding Billy back relaxed. There was some dusting off among all the men, Billy and the ass-grabber, and the men who pried them apart. Someone righted the table.
Lisa finally appeared from a back room where she’d been screwing her boyfriend, hollering about her kitchen being a mess and how she didn’t want any fighting in her place. “I’ve got valuable things in here!” she shrieked, and lots of us giggled at that. Yeah, her shot glass collection. So precious.
“No problem, Lisa,” said the ass-grabber. “I was just telling Billy what a good fuck his sister is.”
Billy was across the room before anyone could blink, and then it was more prying-off and tussling.
Lisa yelled at them to get out, get the hell out.
I scrunch my eyes before I tell this next part to Mallory. She leans forward and squeezes my wrist. I look at her, and she bites her lip a little, shakes her head.
So Billy took off. He didn’t have a car, having smashed his up over the winter. He used to get everywhere on his bike, an old racing-style ten-speed you had to ride all bent over, only he’d perfected the art of riding it without holding on.
I assumed he’d just go outside, maybe head a few doors down to his friend Larry’s house, cool off.
Pete returned to the bonfire, bringing me along with him, his arm around my waist.
When we heard the sirens a few minutes later, no one even looked up.
Then Larry burst through the door, screaming, “Billy’s been hit by a car!”
I was drunker by then, so I tripped three times running down the road.
The cops wouldn’t let me near him.
It was dark, the road was narrow. The driver—a second-shifter coming home from work—was sober as a stone and just plain never saw him. The next day’s paper said, “Cyclist Killed in Laingsburg,” and police said that according to witnesses, he’d decided to go out for a refreshing nighttime ride.
“Refreshing nighttime ride,” I say to Mallory. “I laughed at that. Who rides for refreshment that time of night, I ask you?”
I imagine Billy next to me, laughing, too.
Mallory says, “But honey, if the other driver was sober, why does that mean you don’t drink?”
“My brother got in a fight because he was drunk, got thrown out because he was drunk, went on a frickin’ bike ride at midnight in the dark on a two-lane rural road with a gravel shoulder because he was drunk. He probably swerved in front of the car, too. Alcohol was not a factor, it was everything. Alcohol killed him.”
In the version of the story I’m telling Mallory, this is when I quit drinking. This is when I realize just how much I’ve been swilling, not just me but everyone around me, and how normal it all got to seem but how unhealthy it must be. I turn my back on it all and move on.
This is where I would be very brave and smart. If only that were true.
Instead, I drank more, and so did everyone else. We managed to hold off during the church service and the graveside ceremony, but back at the house, aside from the dark suits and dresses, the wake would have been indistinguishable from a Super Bowl party.
Pete had been distant since the accident. Girl crying had always freaked him out, and every sober minute, I was crying and sick with blame. Pete was inadequate to the task of convincing me otherwise.
Billy had gotten in a fight defending my honor, and then thrown out of the house