“Ha! You ain’t reached the pinnacle yet.” He slaps the island. “Let’s go talk about keeping that chin tucked. We obviously need to go back to basics. Then afterward, you can call up Faye’s niece and have her tell you why she was digging in your shit instead of spending that football player’s money.”
He winks, jumping up from the bar stool and belting out a whistle.
CHAPTER
SIX
LOVIE
I don’t thinkI learned how to run from a man until I fell in love with AJ. Who else could’ve taught me how to sprint out of Rich’s house like a damn fool instead of apologizing for breaking his stuff like a civilized person would have?
“You sure everything was good at Rich’s today, right?” Aunt Faye stares at me from her seat across the kitchen table.
It’s the third time she’s asked me since she picked me up from his house. The second time she asked was in Ms. Vera’s guest bathroom while I plunged her toilet as hard as I could to clear the mound of toilet paper her cat had dumped inside it.
“Mhmm. I told you it was.” I hum back with a mouthful of bland leftover mashed potatoes.
It’s the only response I trust myself to say out loud about Rich and his house, because I can’t tear his face or his smell from my memory. They’re both embedded in the fibers of my brain and now I’m stuck sitting under Aunt Faye’s gaze while I try to forget those muscles my eyes grazed over. He’s notanythinglike Uncle Kenny hinted at—at least I don’t think he is.
I shift in my seat.
None of Uncle Kenny’s fighters have miraculously made him and Aunt Faye millionaires, so Uncle Kenny still works the graveyard shift at the pipe yard. So that means it’s just me and Aunt Faye’s suspicious glances for the rest of the night, and lucky for me she detests eating in front of the TV when Uncle Kenny is gone, so the only thing she has to focus on is me.
“You told AJ you’re helping me clean while you visit? It’s just like the old days, huh?” she asks.
I stab my fork into my pork chop and nod.
“What’d he say? I bet he misses you up there in that big ol’ empty place y’all got.”
She’s only ever seen our “big ol’ empty place” on FaceTime. I’d been begging AJ to buy their plane tickets since we moved in, but it was never “the right time” and every time they tried to buy their own tickets they accepted my “the apartment isn’t ready yet” excuse. Eventually, they just stopped asking to come.
“He didn’t say much. It’s early season and you know how he gets with all the pressure. He doesn’t have a lot of time for anything right now, let alone my cleaning tales.”
Her stare burns the side of my face. “Well, that’s not like him. The AJ I know will sit and listen to you breathe on the phone for six hours—early season or not.”
My throat constricts.
She talks like she’s always loved AJ’s oddities when we both know better. It’s all in her tone. But I still don’t know how to tell her I up and left without saying a word to him. I don’t know how to claw through the block in my brain to blurt it out and then shut down all of her follow-up questions—like how, when, and why.
“Next time you get him on the phone, let me know,” she adds. “I wanna ask him something about the wedding.”
“‘Kay…”
“Smitty come by Rich’s?” she asks, leaning to the side in her chair and crossing her legs.
I shrug. “I don’t even know who that is.”
“That’s his neighbor,” she says between chews. “He came to your graduation party. He’s my classmate.”
She says all of this like I should know everything there is to know about Rich and the folks who hang out on Joliet when I’ve always been damn near banned from any street behind Lockwood.
I smirk, flicking a piece of corn with my fork. “Was Rich’s mama and daddy your classmates too?”
“Mhmm.” She hums, looking away. “They were.”
There’s a time in her life that she always seems to gloss over when we talk. Supposedly nothing significant happened during that time except for Grandma succumbing to kidney failure and Mama moving out to Pearland with Tony. Aunt Faye always tiptoes over the details from those years with terse responses. So I divide her life into two parts: life before me and Uncle Kenny, and life after. Rich and his parents must’ve existed in that time before us.
I side-eye her like she’s been doing me as she takes a gulp of her Diet Coke.
