Girl Code (33 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

I put my big girl panties on, to some degree anyway. I checked in to a hotel for the night and booked a flight back to Philly for the following morning. Before I closed my laptop down, and after pondering on it for several minutes, I ordered a large bouquet of white lilies to be delivered to Leo’s for both him and Leslie in the morning. I didn’t include a note, just my name.

When Leo called me later that night, I didn’t ignore his call. I answered, and I kindly declined his command to return back to the house and told him I was flying up the coast. I was tired from all my traveling and then the confrontation at his house, so I didn’t stay on the phone long, much to his irritation.

The next morning, I returned the car and caught my flight. I did the responsible thing and called Leo to let him know I had arrived safely. By the time I got to my apartment, he and Leslie had received the flowers. Les texted me with a simple
thank you
and Leo called me to tell me how beautiful and perfect I was before he and Leslie headed to the cemetery.

I didn’t feel beautiful, or perfect. I was still mad as hell, though I wasn’t really sure where to direct my anger. At Leo? At Leslie? At myself? At the freakin’ universe?

That night I went to my parents’ for a rare family dinner. The dinner was rare because, well, it’s my parents. Togetherness wasn’t their brand, at least where I was concerned, and it was also rare because Tack was lucid. He looked sickly, old, and used up, and his hands tremored with need, but he wasn’t high and he wasn’t bullying the household with rage.

“I’m moving to Miami,” I said soon after dinner was put on the table. I almost added, “I think,” considering the circumstances.

Tack was only picking at his food, but he stopped picking and stared at me. My dad put his fork down, and my mom sipped her wine and looked at me blankly.

“To be with Pesciano?” Tack asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it that serious?” Dad asked. “You two only just reunited a few months ago.”

“Yes, it’s that serious,” I said, slightly irritated. “It was six months ago, but it doesn’t matter when we reunited. He’s still him, basically, and I’m still me, basically.”

“What about Leslie?” Tack asked.

“I don’t want to talk about Leslie,” I said sharply, stabbing at my meatloaf. “This isn’t about Leslie.”

There were a couple of minutes of silence. Tack stared down at his plate. I didn’t know what was wrong with him, why he was so quiet and melancholy. My dad ate quietly but contemplatively, occasionally glancing at me and my mom just drank her wine, leaving her food untouched on her plate as she looked at anything but her family. What a fucking mess we were.

Finally, my dad broke the silence.

“Are you moving away to get away from us?” he asked. Tack looked at him. Mom looked at him. I looked at him, and we all looked with surprise. It was probably the most personal thing he had ever said to me.

“Why would you ask me that, Dad?” I asked. My irritation was growing.

He put down his fork and leaned against the back of his chair.

“When you were living at home, you stayed in your room if you stayed home at all,” he said. “You didn’t even come down for dinner anymore. Then you moved for college, which is understandable, but you weren’t that far from home, and you almost never came back. Not even during the summers and holidays. Then soon after college, when I thought we would have you back for a little while, you moved clear across the country. You finally move back and we still never see you. Now you’re leaving again.”

I snorted. “If I didn’t stay in my room, I ran the risk of either getting roughed up by my drug addict big brother, or getting slapped in the face by my mother. Neither of those was very appealing to a teenage girl.”

Tack looked at me with a shocked expression, like he had no idea who the asshole brother I was talking about was. Like he didn’t know it was him. My mother looked at me like she was surprised that I remembered, surprised that I hadn’t forgotten.

“And why come home from college?” I continued with a cynical smile. I poured myself more wine and drank half of the glass in two gulps. “I was perfectly fine being alone during the summers and holidays. It beat being alone here with
people
.” I laughed darkly and drank more wine, poured more wine. “And to be blunt, I moved with Xander because I really liked Xander, but that wasn’t my biggest reason. My biggest reason was to get away from this soul-sucking family.”

“We gave you everything you could ever need or want!” my mother shouted beside me as her wine glass fell to the table. It broke into pieces and red wine pooled on the white cloth covering.

Nearly thirty years of anger and rejection and pain boiled over.

“Oh, thanks a lot for all of the clothes, the toys, the video games, the books, the televisions with cable, the stereos, the money for roller skating, and all of the god damn delicious snacks you kept in the pantry!” I shouted back at her and my dad. “Thanks a fucking lot! Because I needed and wanted all of that shit, but that’s all it was! Shit! What I
needed
and
wanted
was a father who stood up for me! Who took notice of me and took the time to talk to me and show me what I should look for in a man when it was time! What I
needed
and
wanted
was a brother who wasn’t trying to be my mother and father at the same time, who didn’t feel so pressured by his parents’ expectations that he turned to drugs to relieve some of the ache it left behind! What I
needed
and
wanted
was a mother! A mother who actually loved me and cared for me and nurtured me and talked with me about my body, my friends, my boyfriends!” With the next harried sentence, I spoke in a small, helpless voice as I tried not to break down and sob all over my plate. “A mother to hold me and kiss my hair and console me, and a father to go ballistic and try to kill the boy that almost raped his daughter in a dark room at a party.”

I sniffed, wiped at the few tears that had escaped from my eyes, and returned my gaze to my plate.

“That’s what I needed and wanted,” I whispered.

My dad stood up so fast, his chair fell backward.

“Who hurt you?” he demanded, several years too late.

“You mean besides you guys?” I asked flatly, refusing to look at him.

“Who was it?” he said, and when I didn’t answer, he slammed a fist on the table. “Damn it, Tabitha, who almost…raped you!”

I finally looked at him, drained after my outburst. “His name was Rico Havarez, but if you feel like suddenly being a parent and exacting justice on him, Dad, you’re too late. It was fourteen years ago, and Leo did enough damage to his mouth that Rico will
never
be able to forget my face.”

My dad stood there, chest heaving, glaring at no one in particular. Suddenly, he picked up his plate and threw it against the wall behind Tack, making the plate shatter. Everyone at the table jumped and gasped and watched with stunned silence as the mashed potatoes with gravy, meatloaf, and peas slid down the wall.

“What kind of family are we?” Dad demanded viciously. “What kind of parents were we, Kelly, when our
only
daughter couldn’t come to us to tell us that some boy violated her.”

“Almost,” I reminded him, my voice just above a whisper.

“There are no ‘almosts’ in life, Tabitha. There is and there is not. Did and did not. If he touched you in any way you did not welcome, he
did
violate you,” Dad snarled before glaring down at my mother. “And where were we? She’s our
only daughter,
Kelly!” He turned his eyes to Tack. “Your
only sister
, Tack!”

Another shock came when my mother suddenly stood up and something that sounded like a sob escaped from her. She hurried from the room, but she was clearly and audibly crying as I heard her footsteps retreat up the stairs. Dad dragged a hand over his face, and I really took note to how much older he looked than he really was.

“I’m sorry, kids,” he said softly. I didn’t miss the moisture in his eyes before he turned away to go tend to my mom.

“I told you not to go to that damn party,” Tack said as I stared after my dad, dumbfounded.

“I told you not to do drugs,” I countered.

“We have a fucked-up family,” Tack said sadly, resting his shaking hands on the table. “I’m the most fucked-up of us all.”

I poured more wine for both of us. “Well, let’s get drunk, because that’s how a fucked-up family solves their problems. Why are your hands shaking, Tack?”

“Withdrawal,” he said simply. “It’s going to get worse and I’ll break and hit up my supplier and the cycle will start all over again,” he said conversationally.

I had stepped into some alternate universe at some point during the day, because Tack was lucid and rather rational and my parents were the unstable ones.

“I thought you didn’t care to quit.”

“My girlfriend is pregnant.”

I didn’t skip a beat. “I thought your girlfriend was coke.”

“I’m sure Nora feels that way sometimes, too,” Tack said dryly before sipping his wine.

“You’re serious? You knocked someone up?” I asked.

“She’s three months along already,” he said, and then looked at me with a very serious expression. “I can’t screw this up, Tabitha.”

“No,” I agreed and sipped my wine. “You can’t.”

Days passed, then weeks. Before I knew it, we were quickly approaching the Labor Day holiday. Leo planned on coming up to New Jersey to the house he bought near the beach for a week or so. The plan was for him to return to Miami and I was to follow by the beginning of October. We were still doing it, moving in together and getting married. My fears had come to nothing, but my relationship with Leo felt off kilter. We didn’t talk any less than we did any other time we were apart, but there was definitely a rift between us and I wasn’t sure how to cross, or if we could cross it.

I had not heard from Leslie since she thanked me for the flowers. Leo told me that he told her everything about us, going all the way back to the night he meant to ask me out, but Leslie had asked him out instead. He told her about my aversion to him because of the pact I had made with her. I should have been the one to tell her, but it didn’t work out that way. I had no idea what she thought of me or Leo; he had not been clear on that because he didn’t know, either. I thought that I wouldn’t care, but I did care. I still didn’t want to hurt her.

My parents became weird and creepy. One Saturday afternoon, they showed up at my apartment with empty boxes, tape, and other packing materials. They brought a case of beer from a local brewery and my mom had made a shepherd’s pie to reheat for dinner later. My dad was enthusiastic about building a new relationship with me. My mom wasn’t exactly enthusiastic, but I knew she was really trying hard. Once, I caught her staring at me with tears in her eyes. It was awkward, but neither of us said anything, and I didn’t recoil later when she hesitantly hugged me.

I heard from Mayson that Emmy was in town. Apparently, a bar I didn’t even realized she owned burned down and she came to take care of some business with that and to visit Donya and her new baby. It was time for me to bury the hatchet with my cousin. I got the name of her hotel and room number from Mayson and made a surprise visit. I did not beat around the bush.

“I hated you for a long time,” I told her.

Her face flushed, but she remained silent and patient.

“You had a lot of money for a kid, and you were funding all of the drugs you, Mayson, and Tack were doing. Mayson and Tack, as you well know, got hooked really hard. I don’t know if you didn’t do as much as they did or you were just stronger willed, but you stopped, and that was good for you, but you stopped and you just…left them. Tack turned into a whole different person. He stole tens of thousands of dollars from my parents and he was always getting arrested and they went penniless putting him through rehabs that he didn’t want to do. Mayson, god, you know what happened with Mayson. Thank god, she finally cleaned up, but, Emmy,” I sighed and shifted in my seat. “That’s why I hated you. You had all of your fun and then when everything fell apart, you didn’t help clean up the mess.”