Chapter 31

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

ANTHONY

It turns out Christmas Eve is an inadvisable day to get hurt. We’re in the emergency room for five hours before they even take me back, and then another hour more before a doctor inspects my hand. My phone’s dead, so I spend the time sightlessly looking at a bunch of old magazines while my mother and sister alternately talk to each other and pay homage to their phones. When my time finally comes, I’m given three stitches, told to be less of an idiot, bandaged up, and sent away.

When we get out to the car, Emma hands me the keys to our mother’s sedan. “You should drive.”

Her breath smells slightly of whisky.

“Were you drinking at the hospital?”

“What was I supposed to do?” she asks. “Read Highlights magazine? I had a flask in my bag. Big deal.”

But it is a big deal. Emma can hold her alcohol, but she’s never been the type of the person to drink alone, in a public place, in the middle of the day.

My mother hiccups.

Okay, so she didn’t drink alone.

“How did I miss the part where you both got tipsy in the waiting room?” I ask in an undertone.

“You were sulking,” Emma says, giggling. That’s also unlike her. I can’t remember the last time I heard my sister giggle, but it must have been when she was six or seven.

“What’s going on with you?”

She waves a hand dismissively. “I’m fine. Let’s deal with your personal crisis. Bring us to that shitty bar.”

“Are you sure—”

She gives my shoulder a gentle shove. “You’re not my father, thank God. My father’s a tree.”

This leads to another bout of giggling. Nodding through it, she points to the car again. “Come on. We’re going to that shitty bar to make a war plan. Or maybe Anthony shouldn’t be part of the war plan. What do you think, Mother? Should he have plausible deniability?”

“We’re not going to do anything that’ll require it,” I insist, using the keys to open the doors. I get in the driver’s side, and my mother slides in beside me, putting Emma in the back right, the same position she used to sit in when we were kids.

“The Peanut Bar,” she insists.

I drive us to The Peanut Bar. The lights are on, but there’s only one car in the lot.

“Let me make sure it’s open,” I say.

I try the door, but it’s locked. I’m about to walk away when Dom’s face presses up against the glass.

He brightens when he sees me, and a second later, the door comes whooshing open. He draws me into an unselfconscious hug. “Oh, man, thanks for coming by, Sir…Anthony. No one came in this evening, so I decided to close up shop. It’s just me and Gene in here, shooting the shit.” And smoking pot inside the bar, apparently, because the whole place smells like a hotbox.

It’s only then that I acknowledge to myself that I was hoping Rosie would be here—that we’d be drawn to the same place like two magnets, the same way we were that first night. But she’s not, and there’s no way my mother will consent to having a subpar drink in a place that has peanut shells on the floor and smells like bad weed.

“You know, I only came by to say hi,” I tell him. “I’ve got my family waiting in the car.”

Gene grumbles from within the bar, “It’s cold as a witch’s tit out there. Shut the door.”

“Have a good Christmas,” I tell Dom, feeling a stab of guilt. Because even if I don’t claim the inheritance money, I’m probably going to have to sell this place. Without the money, I’ll lose the company, and then I won’t have a job. Selling the building would be the logical next step.

But I don’t know when that will happen or what it will look like, and I’m certainly not going to break the news to Dom on Christmas Eve. The fact that he’s here says a lot about how much he relies on this place.

“Same to you, friend,” he says. “Say, will you and Rosie be coming for Thirsty Thursday?”

“What’s Thirsty Thursday?” I ask.

“Oh, man, didn’t I tell you? I remember telling you.” He frowns and rubs his head. “Shit…this is some next-level déja-vu but, yeah, Women-Drink-For-Half-Off Wednesday was rad, no doubt, but my boss got a little pissed that we didn’t make more money. Because of the half off thing. Anyway…Thirsty Thursday isn’t discounted, but get this…we’re going to bring in some pretzels. And the condom bowl will be back, of course. I had five thousand made, so I’ll be handing those out for a while now. So are you guys in?”

“Yeah, maybe we’ll be there,” I say, feeling an ache in my chest. Because I’d like for it to happen. I’d like to bring Rosie to this shitty bar that feels like ours and help Dom make mediocre drinks for people who probably won’t appreciate them.

“Shut the damn door!” Gene calls, downright talkative tonight, and Dom pulls a grimace before doing just that.

When I get back into the car, Emma swats me from the backseat. “What took so long?”

“They’re about to close.”

“Oh well,” my mother says, fanning herself with a pamphlet on erectile dysfunction she took from the ER. “We’ll have to go home where we can drink comfortably instead of crunching around on refuse.”

“We’re going there some other day,” Emma says. “This list thing Anthony’s doing has made me think. You need to break out of your comfort zone, Mom. You’re like Boo Radley. You never leave that awful house.”

“Awful?” my mother says with affront. “It’s listed in Home and Garden as one of the finest private homes in North Carolina. That famous architect designed it.”

“Awful,” Emma repeats. “It feels like a crypt.”

My mother glances at me as if she expects me to talk some reason to my sister, but I nod. “I agree with her.”

“But it doesn’t have to be awful,” Emma says hotly. “I’m going to help you redecorate.”

“You’re going to do what?” my mother says.

Her shock is warranted. Emma has never expressed the slightest interest in buying so much as a throw pillow for Smith House. Nor has she wanted to stick around long enough that something like redecorating would be possible.

“Does this mean you’re staying for New Year’s Eve?” I ask cautiously as I take the turn toward Smith House.

“Yeah,” she says casually, leaning forward a little between the front seats. “But I’ll stay for longer if Mom needs help with the house. And if you need me, obviously.”

Our mother turns in her seat to better look at her. “Emma, have you lost your mind?”

But the expression on my sister’s face in the rearview mirror—upset but defiant and almost haughty—tells me she lost something else. Her job, maybe. Or a relationship she never saw fit to tell us about. Maybe both. She and my mother look so much alike. Their brows and mouths are alike, and their hair is thick and naturally wavy, but Emma’s is dark where our mother’s is light.

I’ve always resembled my father— like his shadow , people have said. Sometimes it makes me laugh to hear that. Because it’s as if I’ve spent so much time living in a shadow that I’ve become one.

“Yes, Mom, I think maybe I have. It’s not so bad, right, Anthony?”

“Thanks,” I say wryly. But I don’t mind the supposition that I’ve lost my mind, too.

It starts snowing, and by the time we get home, it’s snowing heavily, enough for it to almost be a whiteout. The guard is in the tiny gatehouse. There’s insulation and a space heater, but he’s probably freezing.

“Are you missing Christmas with your family to be here?” I ask when he comes out. I feel a stab of guilt. Emma, Mother, and I may have no one but each other, but maybe he has a wife and kids. People who are going to miss him tonight.

“No,” he says with a snort. “My wife cheated on me and now she wants half of everything. I’d rather be here than at home, looking at everything else I'm about to lose.”

I glance at my sister, expecting her to land herself a new client, but all she says is, “Tough break.”

“Would you like to come inside and warm up?” I ask.

“No, no.” He adjusts his collar. “I’m here to keep you good folks safe.”

I give him a couple of hundreds from my wallet on top of whatever my mother’s paying him, park our car, and then the three of us head indoors.

When the door closes behind us, leaving us in the dark foyer, lined with hideous wallpaper. I study my sister. “It’ll take a lot of work.”

“Good. I need something to occupy my time.”

“Did you lose your job?”

“Yes,” she says, slinging her purse over the banister for the stairway and pulling out a flask that’s got to be half empty given the way they’ve both been acting.

“What’d you do?” our mother asks. She sounds more curious than disapproving.

“I didn’t do anything,” Emma snaps. “My client seduced my boss.”

“What does that have to do with you?” I ask.

My mother studies Emma. A few seconds later, she pushes her lips out, her brow lowering. “Oh Emma, I thought you knew better.”

It takes a second for my exhausted brain to make any sense of the silent communication going on between them, but then it clicks. “You were sleeping with him?”

I try to remember if I’ve ever met Emma’s boss, but if I have, it was so long ago the impression didn’t stick.

“I’m very tired,” Emma says with a sigh. “Forget getting wasted and planning Nina’s untimely demise—”

“We’re not killing her,” I put in.

“Nina’s fall from questionable grace,” she self-corrects. “I’m going to bed. I’ll unpack my car tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I agree, because she does look tired, and sickly, as if she’s been hanging on by a thread for a long time and feels it fraying. I know a thing or two about that. “Should we expect you to sneak down here at four-thirty in the morning to look for Santa Claus?”

She gives me a sad smile and takes a swig from her flask. “We’re not kids anymore, Anthony. It’s time for us to put away childish things.”

Except she’s wrong, and if I’m a good big brother, I’ll find a way to prove it to her.

My mother and I watch as Emma makes her way up the stairs, and then she touches my shoulder. “I expect you’ll still have a nightcap with me, my boy?”

I nod and trail her into the drawing room, where I follow my unspoken orders and pour us both a drink. My mother sits on her favorite settee again and peers into the cold, dark fireplace.

I lift my eyebrows. “Want me to barbecue Santa for you?”

“By all means,” she says, glancing out the window. The snow is coming down more thickly now, so I start a fire behind the grate. It’s nice to have something to focus on. I like feeling that I’m doing some good for someone. But now that I’m on stronger pain medication and my hand is bandaged, it’s hard not to think about Rosie. What’s she doing tonight? Has she told her family about what happened?

If so, they’ve probably warned her to stay away from me.

The smart thing to do would be for us to stay away from each other. To give up. But she makes me want to be Rule Breaker, a man who takes risks without regret.

Glancing at my mother, I say, “I’m feeling pretty messed up right now.”

She sighs. “You’re probably not supposed to drink on the pain medication they gave you.”

I lift the glass to my lips. “Probably not, but that’s not why.”

Studying me, she says, “You’re not going to marry anyone else, are you?”

“No,” I agree. “It’s her, or it’s no one. And I won’t do it if it’s a big risk for her or her family. That’s something I need to figure out first.”

“Good,” she says firmly. “I knew I’d raised a man of principles.” She glances out the window at the snow, watching as the fat flakes fall. A few moments later, her eyes find mine again. “They all think I killed your father. They love to gossip about it. This person who’s running the website is bringing all of that up again.”

“No one’s seen it other than us.”

“How do you know?”

I don’t, although I have a feeling we’d be getting phone calls and messages if it were more widely known. I say as much, then add, “People in this town love nothing better than to gossip. But most of them don’t really believe it.”

“When I found out your father was hurting you, I wanted to kill him,” she says fiercely, her eyes glittering in the firelight. “I would have. I was going to.”

The glass nearly drops from my grip, but I set it on the table with a clink. The fire suddenly feels too warm, the lights from the tree too bright. “Mother?”

Wind whistles through the old windows, and somewhere upstairs a door shuts.

“Leaving wouldn’t have been enough. He never would have let us go. I had a plan, Anthony. I should have told you years ago, but I didn’t want to burden you after everything you’d been through. Maybe that was a mistake, though. I need you to know that I wouldn’t have let him keep hurting you.”

I nod, my throat swelling with emotion.

“Do you believe me?”

“I do.” Perhaps it’s not rational for such a revelation to bring a man comfort, but that’s exactly what it does.

“Shall we pretend Santa paid a visit?” my mother asks.

I smile at her, feeling different, although the situation I’m in isn’t any better than it was a few hours ago. “Yes, I’ll get some cookies.”

Rosie’s cookies, not that I’m going to think of her more or less if they’re sitting out in the drawing room.

“And I’ll get the packages,” Mother says, surprising me. For the past twenty years or so, we’ve exchanged gift cards or maybe a wrapped book. “But not just yet, Anthony. For right now, I think I’d like to rest and watch the snow.”

And we sit there like that, companionably sipping our drinks, as Christmas Eve slips into Christmas.