“Let’s find out where they live and torch their cars.”
“You frighten me,” I told her.
“What’s his name? Rivers what?” she asked.
“Tara, I’m not telling you that. I don’t want you to get arrested for arson.”
“Emmy, please. I would never get caught.”
“Let’s see.” I looked at the online class list. “Rivers Mlynarczyk.”
“Oh, shit! What are the parents’ names?”
“Craig and Tammy. Why?”
“Emily! Craig Mlynarczyk was one of your sister’s, uh, special friends in high school!”
Oh, sweet Jesus. “So that’s why the mom hates us? Because my sister—” I glanced around the store and lowered my voice to a whisper— “screwed her husband?”
“Man, you are going to have a load of trouble on your hands if all the wives of the men that Cassie fucked come back to get revenge on you. I think that number is in the hundreds.”
I laughed, then felt guilty for talking about my dead sister like that. “We won’t be at swim this week. I’ll talk to you soon,” I told Tara.
Charlie read quietly in the breakroom, and in between customers I emailed Mrs. Ferber to fill her in a little, then started researching custody laws in Michigan. I didn’t think Mike’s letter that I had found in Cassie’s bedside table, in which he disavowed paternity, and said he didn’t want to take care of Charlie, would be enough for CPS and the courts if it came down to it. I needed official, permanent guardianship, or if I could, I would adopt him.
“Time to go,” I finally told Charlie, when my shift was over.
He rolled off the breakroom couch. “Time for swim?”
“No way, pal. You don’t get to swim for the rest of the week.”
His mouth dropped open. “What?”
“Yep, that’s your punishment. I understand that he made you angry, and he was very wrong to say those things to you. But that’s no excuse for fighting. So no swimming.”
Charlie cried all the way home.
Luke came over while I was working in the yard, viciously trimming back some shrubs that had been allowed to overgrow.
“What did that bush do to you?” he called, as I wrestled with another branch. The clippers weren’t sharp enough so I stomped into the shed for a saw and started hacking. “Bad day?”
“Charlie was fighting in school today,” I informed him, wiping my forehead with my sleeve. “Freaking Rivers Mlynarczyk tormented him by saying that I worked in the whore bar, and that Cassie was a slut who got what she deserved.” I took the branch in both hands and pulled with all my weight, until it broke off and I fell directly on my ass.
“You all right?” Luke offered me a hand up. “Mlynarczyk. I knew a guy in high school with that name. What did you do?”
“I picked him up from school, and I punished him with no swim for the rest of the week.” I rubbed my butt. That hurt.
“It’s hard on Charlie to keep him out of swim when he wasjust standing up for himself,” Luke remarked.
I stared at him over the top of the brown bag I was filing with the results of my foliage wrath. “I can’t let him get into fights. I can’t let him end up like Mike, king of the bar brawl and useless as a human! Cassie trusted me with him. I already let her down so much.” Luke picked up the bag, and I threw my clippers, saw, and gloves into the shed to deal with later.
“What does that mean?” he asked me. “How do you think you let her down?”
I walked into the moon garden, and sat on the bench. This is where Cassie had told me. “I knew what she was going to do.”
Luke looked shocked.
“I mean, she didn’t tell me she was going to kill herself, not in so many words, but I should have known.”
