“Hey, CJ,” I call out. The old man stops at the threshold and turns toward me with an expectant smile. “How would you feel about helping us clean up around here a couple times a week? We can’t put you up in a penthouse or anything, but we can get you a phone and a bus to see your daughter every once in a while.”
The window, the door, the shoes on his feet; he looks at everything but me, his lips shaking as he presses them together. When his head lowers and he gives it a shake, I worry that I might have offended him with my offer.
“I can’t take your money,” he tells me.
“Only one of these guys knows how to pick up a fucking mop; you’d be doing me a huge favor, honestly,” I tell him with a scoff. “You shouldn’t have to miss your kid so much. So let’s help each other out, alright?”
A bob of his chin is followed by his arms snapping around my body as he gives me one ofthosehugs. The kind that you’re supposed to get when you get straight A’s – not that I ever did – or when you finally reach a goal that you’ve been working toward for years, and your parents can’t contain the pride they feel.
I never got one of those. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in my family get one.
This one is nice.
“You’re a nice boy, T-Mo,” he says, clapping me on the back. “Your parents should be proud of you.”
“Tell ‘em that, will you?” I say through a forced laugh, patting him on the shoulder as we part.
I remind him twice on the way out of the door to come back in the morning. On my way home tonight, I’ll stop for a prepaidcell phone and see if I can find some clothes that might fit him. I don’t know why it’s taken me until tonight to realize that his daughter probably spends most of her days worrying about her dad; probably because it would never occur to me to worry about Abaddon and Beelzebub.
I’d worry about CJ, though.
I don’t remember the last time that I rode home, as Jules would describe it, ‘like a normal person.’
I don’t know that I ever have. But tonight, I did.
Watching the garage door roll itself upward, I chuckle at the light shining above it. The one that Connor got sick of flickering and decided to swap out himself, because it was taking me too damn long to get out here and get it taken care of.
If I had to guess, there’s probably a new set of batteries in the carbon monoxide detector in the garage, too.
Rolling my bike to a stop in the garage, I pull off my helmet and swipe a finger across the screen of the phone still clipped to its mount to answer the incoming video call. My brother’s face fills the screen, his focus on the road ahead of him, save a spare glance in my direction as I offer him my greeting.
“Why am I looking at your face?” I ask him, pulling my helmet to rest on my lap.
“Because you failed to respond to my text message,” he tells me.
Shit. I guess I did.
“Sorry,” I tell him, “I got busy. We’re good. We’re really good.”
At least I didn’t say ‘fine,’ I guess.
The look on his face seems to suggest much of the same, but he drops it where I leave it, opting instead to ask for an update on the shop. We’ve gone back and forth with this so many times,I know it’s really a veil intended to hide the question of ‘do you need money?’
The last time that he was in my shop, it was a wasteland; empty of bodies other than ours, and it worried him. Everything fucking worries him. I’m able to brush off his concern with a white lie about booming business, but as he reaches toward his phone to end the call, I stop him.
“Listen, while I have you, I wanna talk to you about something, and I don’t want you to get pissed,” I tell him.
Why am I worried about what he thinks? He’s a weirdo sex freak with a fuckingdungeonin his house. If anyone doesn’t have space to pass judgment on another person, it’s my brother.
“Would this have anything to do with a change in your relationship?” He asks. For only a split second, he meets my gaze with an arch of his brow. “You haven’t texted nearly as often since your stay here, when you do, you don’t offer me much information, and Dad has strayed from his usual ‘blasphemer’ description of you to say that you’ve ‘filled your home with sin.’ The math lends its own answer.”
“So how long until he tells you to stop talking to me?” I ask with an empty chuckle.
My body feels hollow when his tenses on the screen, his chin angling away from me as his jaw clenches.
“He already has,” he tells me plainly. The bottom of my chest opens up, and I can feel the weight of something dropping straight through the empty space left there. “I told him that not speaking to my brother is not an option.”
Air trapped in my lungs finally leaves by way of a heavy sigh, my eyes falling closed as the heavy pounding of my heart calms, and before I have the chance to say anything to him, Brody’s focus shifts back to me.
