Precious and Fragile Things (11 page)

He gave her a guarded expression. “Why?”

Why did she want chocolate chip cookies, or why was she being nice? Gilly wiped carefully at the sprinkles of flour on the table. “Because I feel like it.”

The grin began on the left side of his mouth, where it twitched his lips until it reached the other side. “I make good cookies.”

“So do I.”

She hadn't intended a challenge, but there it was. Todd brushed the hair out of his eyes and looked at her thoughtfully. Gilly lifted her chin, staring back.

“Mine are better,” Todd said.

“Why don't we find out?” Gilly asked.

Wasting the eggs and butter seemed foolish when both knew there could be no more until the snow thawed. Todd didn't mention it, so neither did Gilly. Both gathered what they needed with an unspoken agreement not to peek while the other worked.

Gilly's recipe had come straight off the back of the store-brand chocolate chips she bought in bulk from the warehouse club. It was only a little different from the one on the package Todd had bought. With the exception of walnuts, which she despised and Todd hadn't bought anyway, she'd made the same kind of cookies for years with fine results.

She measured and mixed from memory, handing off the measuring cups and spoons without a word. There weren't any rubber scrapers and the wooden spoons looked to be of questionable cleanliness, so she mixed the dough with a metal fork that clanked against the edge of the bowl in a steady rhythm. As with cleaning, the mixing and making put her mind on auto-pilot.

Todd took a half-used jar of ground ginger from the cup
board. She heard him humming under his breath as he mixed and scraped. Ginger?

“Wanna lick?”

She turned to see him holding out a fingerful of dough. Gilly shook her head. “No, thanks. I don't want to get salmonella.”

Todd shrugged. “You don't know what you're missing.”

Gilly had sneaked spoonfuls of cookie dough and risked food poisoning more times than she could count, but she wouldn't have taken the sweet, sticky dough off his finger if he'd held his knife to her head again. It might be a matter of stilted, silly pride, but it was her pride. “No, thanks.”

“Okay.” He put his finger in his mouth and licked the dough. He made a groaning noise of pleasure and dipped again into the bowl for another fingerful.

Gilly shivered as she watched him. Something about Todd was as raw as the cookie dough he sucked off his finger. What made it worse was that he did these things as innocently and unselfconsciously as a child. He finished with the second glob of dough and held out a third to her.

“Sure you don't want any?”

Her voice shook just a little, probably unnoticeable to him. Gilly concentrated on her own mixing bowl. “I said no.”

They put the cookies on trays that had seen better times and slid them into the oven. The timer on the oven wasn't digital and took some figuring, but she managed to set it. Fifteen minutes was a very long time to sit and stare at each other. Todd thumped out a pattern on the table with his fingers, caught her looking and smiled sheepishly. He turned his hands palm up and shrugged.

“I'm a spaz. Sorry.”

Gilly herself hadn't moved, though she'd felt as restless as
his dancing hands had proved Todd to be. “My son is like you. Can't stop moving. It's like he runs on batteries that never wear down.”

“Like that rabbit in the commercials,” Todd offered.

She smiled before she could stop herself. “Yeah, like that.”

“I used to drive my teachers crazy,” Todd confided. He laughed and tapped out another rhythm on the tabletop, but consciously this time.

“I'm sure you did.”

The timer dinged, then, saving her from having to make more conversation. Both sets of cookies came out golden-brown and smelling like heaven. Todd unceremoniously dumped his on a tea towel, cursing when he burned his fingers on the edge of the ancient blackened cookie sheet. Gilly used a spatula to pry hers from the sheet, then set them carefully on a pink ceramic plate.

“Milk,” Todd said. “Gotta have milk.”

“I'll get it.”

She needed something fresh to breathe, some space. Gilly left the kitchen and went through the pantry to the back door, then the rickety back porch and the lean-to. Ten half-gallons of milk in white plastic jugs were lined up on one of the shelves alongside some packages of bacon, sausages, lunch meat, some cheese. Everything wore a thin silver coating of frost.

After the stifling warmth of the kitchen, the air out here was cold enough to burn. Her earlobes and the tip of her nose had gone almost instantly numb, and she was losing sensation in her fingers.

Despite all that, the cold felt good. Cleansing. Gilly didn't want to admit that she'd enjoyed the past hour, that it had actually been…pleasant. She searched inside her for the hate
but, just as she had earlier, came up empty. Like joy and terror, anger was too fierce an emotion to sustain for long.

Gilly grabbed a half gallon of milk and went back inside. Todd had put two of each type of cookies on two plates and set them on the table. He'd even set out glasses.

Gilly ran the milk under the water for a few minutes until it was at least no longer frozen solid. It filled the glasses in crystalline white chunks. Todd laughed.

As it turned out, his cookies were better.

Later, as night descended, she asked him for some candles. He gave her two, squat and half-burned and ugly. She lit them with the blessings that ushered in the Sabbath. Gilly waited for the calm that always filled her, but all that came was a sense of emptiness and sorrow.

G
illy marked the passage of time by the aching of her heart. Each day seemed like an eternity. How long had it been since she'd smelled Gandy's hair or helped Arwen tie her shoes? How long since Seth had kissed her on the way out the door, his mind already on his job and hers on how nice it would be when nap time came? Too long.

Gilly ducks into the pantry when the kids are mesmerized by relentlessly running cartoons. In the dark and quiet she breathes in deep. Scents of cinnamon and spices. Wooden floor cool under her toes. The door has a lock on it because Gandy will sneak sweets if she doesn't keep an eye on him. She locks it now and sits on the step stool she keeps there so she can reach the highest shelves.

She only wants a few minutes' quiet. Some time to herself. She's not hungry, not thirsty, but she is bone-achingly tired. She wants to take a nap but when she tried to lie down on the couch, Gandy had made her his personal trampoline. She can't go upstairs and leave them alone down here while she sleeps. They'll destroy the house.

She wants to simply sit and breathe but the patter of small feet happens almost at once. They're tuned to her, those precious angel-monsters. She might as well put up a red alert when she goes to the bathroom, because they're instantly there. A phone conversation is a certain beacon, bringing them clinging to her legs as she tries to get in a word with friends. And, oh, she dare not sit down at the computer to check her emails before little voices beg for time on the online pet store or whatever games the cartoon shows are promoting.

“Mama?” The knock comes. Shadows shift under the door as two small humans pace back and forth. “Mama? Mama? Mama!”

And for a few seconds she pretends she doesn't hear them. Doesn't answer. For one long, eternal moment, she hopes they will simply give up and go away.

“What do you want for breakfast?” Todd's words startled her out of her thoughts.

She left the window and slid into a seat at the kitchen table. “Nothing.”

He turned from the stove and looked at her critically. “C'mon. You got to eat something.”

“I'm not hungry.” She wasn't. Her appetite had ebbed and flowed, changing drastically over the past week. She blamed stress. She went from the edge of starvation to having her stomach want to leap from her throat at the very thought of eating anything at all, much less the skillet of eggs he was frying.

“You got to have a good breakfast if you want to get through the day.” His words sounded so scholarly, so fourth-grade teacherly, so damned smug.

She wanted to give him the finger.

“I'm serious,” Todd said. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

“Who told you that?” she asked cruelly. “Your dear sainted mother?”

The skillet clattered against the burner rings. Todd switched off the propane with a sharp and angry twist of his wrist. “No. Not from her.”

The word dripped with a vehemence so thick Gilly could practically see it. She found herself apologizing to him again for remarks she'd made about his upbringing. “Sorry.”

The set of his shoulders said the apology hadn't been accepted. Gilly told herself she didn't care. It was nothing to her if she hurt his feelings. Situation and circumstance should have given her the perfect reason to forget the sort of fake politeness she'd always hated and never been able to stop herself from offering.

Todd shook himself slightly, then set the eggs on the table. “Eat.”

“I'm not hungry,” Gilly repeated. “What are you going to do, force me?”

He cocked his head. “Uncle Bill always said if you had to force someone to do something it probably wasn't worth making them do it.”

More words of wisdom from Uncle Bill. Gilly sat back in her chair and fixed him with a glare. “Oh, really?”

He stabbed a pile of yellow fluff with his fork. Before he brought it to his lips, he paused. Searched her gaze with his own in a manner so forthright it brought heat to stain Gilly's cheeks.

Todd pointed with his fork to the snow-laden window. A drift had formed outside, one large enough to nearly cover the glass. “Even if I
wanted
to let you go, I couldn't.”

“But you don't
want
to.” She teased out this truth between them as though he'd tried to deny it.

Todd set down the utensil with its uneaten clump of egg still clinging to it. His eyes glinted but his voice remained soft when he answered her. “I can't go back to jail, Gilly. I just can't. Don't you get it?”

“I get it.”

Todd paused, gaze not shifting from hers. Serious. “And if I get caught for this, that's what would happen. They'd put me back in jail. I'd rather die.”

Her fingers tapped a random pattern on the faded tabletop before she stopped them. Her voice went tight and hard, unsympathetic. “You should have thought about that before you kidnapped me.”

His sigh was so full of disgust it made her flinch. “I didn't kidnap you.”

Gilly shoved away from the table and went to the sink. Nothing outside but white. She gripped the edge of the counter, forced herself to lower her voice. “Don't act like you picked me up in a bar during fifty cent draft night.”

She'd had moments like this before, days when every little thing worked at her like a grain of sand against an eyeball. One minute close to tears, the next ready to scream until her throat tore itself to bloody shreds. Seth knew to stay out of her way when she was like this, blaming it on her hormones or menstrual cycle with a man's bland acceptance that the mysteries of a woman's body could be blamed for everything. Her temper was hot but brief, and Gilly had learned to hold it in as best she could. She had to.

Her mother had screamed a lot, when she wasn't facing Gilly with cold silence that was somehow worse than the shrieking accusations. Her mother had alternated between rage and despair with such little effort Gilly hadn't known until adulthood there could be a difference in the emotions.

Counting to ten. Counting to twenty. Biting her tongue until it bled. Sometimes, most times, those tactics worked. It hurt, holding in all that anger, but she wasn't going to put her kids through what she'd gone through as a child. Some days that had meant hiding in the pantry, clinging to the very last shreds of her patience with everything she had, just to keep herself from flying apart.

She wasn't feeling very patient now. Not even counting to a hundred was going to work. Angry words wanted to fly from her lips, to strike him, to wound. She bit the inside of her cheek. Pain helped her focus. Fury wouldn't help her. Todd was right about the snow and their situation. He couldn't let her go, and she couldn't realistically, practically or logically escape. It was keep her temper or lose her mind.

“You should just kill me,” she said through clenched jaws, knowing even as she said it she was poking him too hard.

Todd shook his head, facing away from her. He hunched over the table, stabbing at his plate with the tines of his fork. “Shut up.”

But she couldn't. The words tumbled out, bitter and nasty. Harsh. “You could've let me freeze to death out there. You wouldn't have to worry about me, then. You should've left me in the truck. Then I'd be dead and you'd have nothing to worry about.”

“I said,” Todd muttered tightly, “shut up.”

She'd never pulled the legs off daddy longlegs, never tied a can to a puppy's tail. Gilly had never been the sort to tease and torture. But now she found a hard, perverse and distinct pleasure in watching Todd squirm.

“The only way you'll ever be safe is if I'm dead,” she continued, gleeful, voice like a stick stabbing him in tender places.
“So you should just do it. Get it over with. Save us both the hassle—”

“Shut up, Gilly.”

She slapped the counter hard enough to make some dishes jump. “Do it or say you'll let me go!”

He stood and whirled on her, sending her stumbling back against the sink. The chair clattered to the floor. The cold metal pressed against her spine; her elbow cracked painfully on the counter's edge.

“I only wanted the truck. I told you that. I was going to dump you off by the side of the road, but then you had the kids in the back. I didn't want to hurt the kids. I just wanted to come up here and stay away from people, to get away! I didn't want to keep you, for fuck's sake! But now here you are, right? Right up in my fucking face. Yeah, I could've left you out there to freeze, but I didn't. But that doesn't make me a hero, right? Just makes me an asshole. I'm fucked no matter what. So why don't I just kill you, Gilly? Why don't I? Because I don't. Fucking. Want to.”

She'd thrown her hands up in a warding-off gesture, but Todd didn't touch her. He raked one hand through his hair instead and backed off. It would've been easier if he'd hit her. She was waiting for it. She was pushing him to do it. She wanted him to hit her, she realized with sickness thick in her throat.

“Uncle Bill died. He left me this place, and the money. Five grand,” Todd said in a low, hoarse voice. A broken voice. “Not a whole lot of money, but nice. I was doing okay without it. I was making it. Doing whatever I had to, to get by. Working shit jobs, never doing anything but work and sleep. Shitty apartment, piece-of-shit car, mac-and-cheese for dinner four
times a week. And not the good kind,” he added, this affront clear. “The four-for-a-dollar crap from the dollar store.”

Gilly remembered the flavor of that kind, made with water instead of milk when her bank account had run low. She could taste it now, the flavor nostalgic and gritty on her tongue. It wasn't necessarily a bad memory.

“The money was going to make a difference, pay some bills, so that was good. I thought I might actually get ahead for once instead of always being behind. But it didn't get released right away. Some bunch of legal shit I had to sift through and I didn't know how. But I was doing okay.”

He shot her a narrow-eyed look, emphasizing it. “I was doing
okay.
Then they fired me at the diner for being late. I was late because my car broke down. My buddy Joey Di Salvo was going to sell me a car, real cheap, but he needed a thousand bucks. It was everything I had. I mean everything. Rent, food, everything. But no car, no job. That son-of-a-bitch took my money and ran off….”

The words tumbled out of him in a rush, breathless, but with the same precise manner she'd noted about him before. As though every word he spoke had been carefully thought out before he pronounced it.

Todd paced the worn linoleum. There wasn't really enough room for him to do that, not without bumping against her, but he didn't seem to notice or care. He stalked to the pantry door and slipped a crumpled pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. Without pause, he lit a cigarette from the stuttering flame from his lighter and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. It streamed forth from his nostrils as he paced. Her eyes watered at the acrid stench as he passed.

He talked and smoked, the cigarette tipping against his lip but never falling out of his mouth. “They fired me because I
was late,” he repeated. “One time. One fucking time. They wouldn't give me a second fucking chance, you know?”

“Because you'd been in jail.” The sight of him fascinated her. She was no less angry than she'd been a few moments before, but Todd had a way of defusing her fury that Seth, despite their years together, had never mastered.

Todd slammed his fist against the cupboard, rattling the dishes inside. Gilly jumped. “Yeah. Because of that. You want to know what I did? I robbed a liquor store because I owed some guys some money. I thought it would be an easy gig, right? Bust in, get the cash, get the fuck out. The state doesn't need that money, why the fuck do we pay all those taxes, right? Old man doing inventory wasn't supposed to be there. But he was. Shit, Gilly, my fucking gun wasn't even real. I bought it at a garage sale. It was a fucking
lighter.
”

“You robbed a store. Did you think that was someone else's fault, too, like it was my fault I have kids?”

Todd's lip curled, his dark eyes glinting. “You don't know shit about a damn thing.”

“I've never robbed a liquor store, I know that.” Gilly pointedly waved a hand in front of her face to disperse the smoke stinging her eyes and coughed, though she doubted Todd would care.

His gaze through the wafting smoke became assessing. “You don't know what it's like to be poor. That's what I know.”

She thought of college, living on ramen noodles and dollar-store macaroni-and-cheese to make ends meet, but always knowing she could go home if she really needed to. And of how living in near poverty was often better than going home. “There are plenty of disadvantaged people who don't turn to crime.”

He sneered again, taking another drag on the cigarette.
This time instead of letting the smoke seep from his nostrils he held it in his mouth and let it drift out one side. “I wasn't
disadvantaged.
”

“No?”

“I was royally screwed, that's what I was.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “What happened? Kids make fun of you at school because you didn't have the right clothes?”

“Sometimes.” Todd's gaze went flat. “Sometimes for other things.”

It was her turn for a curled lip. “Poor baby.”

“You don't know anything about what my life was like. Don't even try. You can't even guess.” Now his voice shook, just barely, and he swallowed hard before turning away.

She couldn't, actually. She had no experience with people who thought living on the other side of the law was fair compensation for the slights society had made against them. Her voice was hard and humorless, though not quite as poking as it had been before.

“Everybody thinks their lives are hard, Todd. It's human nature to think you're special. Especially when you're not.”