Bang (6 page)

“I'm glad you invited me,” Mari tells him in the voice she uses for lies. Outside the window the leaves are turning for real now, explosive reds and oranges and yellows all along the side of 90. “It's, you know. It's been awhile since I saw them.”

“Yeah,” Jack agrees. He just barely resists adding a sour
No kidding
, which is dumb because it was his own fault. “I swear, Mari, I wouldn't have invited you if—” He breaks off, frustrated. She's ashamed clearly, but Jackson can't tell if it's because of these past four months or because she's worried what his family will think of their screwing around. “No one knows anything about anything.” Terry was the only one who called him out on it, how Jackson constantly had an excuse for Mari not being at the hospital. Jack told him to go screw.

“Rocko still loves me, at least,” Mari says, picking the cookies back up off the floor and setting them resolutely in her lap. “Rocko forgives and forgets.” And that's how Jackson knows she's ashamed for not visiting him in the hospital, not for the sex.

Jack swallows. He feels warmer toward Mari, but thinking about the hospital makes him think about what came before it, and now he can practically feel the weight of the Glock, the jerk of the kickback once he started firing. “Well, Rocko loves bird shit, so.”

“Me and Rocko both,” Mari announces. Jack tells himself to watch the road.

The rest of the drive does pass in silence, more or less, but it's companionable. At around an hour in Mari opens up her Tupperware and hands him a chocolate wafer before taking one for herself.

“Thanks,” Jack tells her quietly. Mari reaches across the gearshift, wipes a crumb off his chin.

Jack grew up in a house straight out of a cheery romantic comedy, a big white farm number with red shutters and a porch with a rickety swing. There's a basketball hoop in the driveway that Mari always likes to imagine him practicing at. She used to love coming over here before she got married, Sunday dinners or barbecues in summer, all of them drinking sweaty bottles of Harpoon and playing Cornhole. His dad and mom are both principals, middle and high school respectively.

Which could, Mari guesses, explain why she feels overwhelmingly like she just got called to the office.

“Quit stalling,” Jack says mildly, nudging her ahead of him on the flagstone path to the back door. It's not quite late afternoon but the autumn sun is already fading, this pretty golden cast to the light. Jack's skin looks healthy again, Mari notices. He finally got most of his color back.

Barb spies them through the kitchen window, her round face breaking into a smile. “Kids are here!” she yells. Before Mari can even slide the door open all the way, Rocko comes careening down the front hallway, leaping up on his hind paws. The weight knocks Mari back into Jackson.

“Down, boy,” she instructs, holding the cookies out of reach and kneeing Rocko gently in the chest. She's better with dogs now. The Fords' last lab, an elderly lady dog named Duck, scared the living crap out of her when she first started coming over. Jackson teased her mercilessly. “Dogs are a white people thing,” she remembers telling him once, embarrassed and annoyed. “She's just an animal, Jack. She eats her own barf, for God's sakes.” She regretted it later, when Duck was finally put down. That day to this, it's the only time she's seen Jack cry.

“Hey, Rocko,” Jackson says now, dropping down onto his knees. “Hey, man.” Rocko whines.

“Mari!” That's Meredith, coming down the stairs at a run. “Oh my God, hi!”

It's been over a year, Mari realizes, looking at Meredith's glowing, happy face. A full year since she saw any of these people, at a GB police fundraiser last fall. Even longer since she's been to this house. “Hi, you,” she tells Mer, swallowing her unease and holding out her arms. “Missed you.”

“Missed you, stranger,” Meredith says, taking the Tupperware. Meredith is as tall as her brothers and boney-wide, like hugging a boy. She's maybe a little thinner than last time Mari saw her, maybe not. “Ooh, are these from Patty?”

“Yup,” Mari tells her. The whole house converges then, Terry coming in with his girlfriend Arielle and Jack's dad Bruce at their heels, everybody talking at once and Rocko going bananas, running around in a circle so tight he's basically chasing his tail. Mari tells Bruce happy birthday and gets a kiss on the cheek for her trouble. But Terry barely looks at her, just a tip of his chin and a “Hey”. Mari swallows. She used to be so totally at home in this family. She used to feel like they were at home with her too.

“You want wine, Mari?” Barb asks her, appearing from the kitchen just in time to hand a plate of cheese and crackers off to Meredith as they all head to the den. Barb's got a smart gray pageboy haircut and a curious expression on her face, like possibly whatever's going on here she can smell it.

“Sure.” Mari slings her jacket over the back of a chair. Jack's chatting with Arielle about her job at the Palladium downtown, friendly. When Rocko pushed Mari into him his body felt warm and safe and solid against hers, like something she wanted to grab onto and hold. Despite everything, she's always liked watching him at home. “Can I help with anything?”

Barb shakes her head. “Already in the oven,” she says cheerfully.

Mari follows her into the kitchen anyway, ducking away from the bustle and noise. She likes the house itself almost as much as watching Jack in it, how old and lived-in it is. Bruce and Barb are always threatening to move, complaining about the ugly cracked linoleum and peeling beadboard, the chipped apron sink, but in the decade since Mari's known them, they've never so much as spoken to a realtor.

Then again, they could have by now. Mari guesses she really doesn't know anymore.

Barb pours her a glass of white without asking, well over the standard serving size. “It's not chilled,” she warns, handing over an ice cube tray.

They love you
, Jack had said. Mari pops out two cubes and makes herself breathe. “Thanks.” She could stay in here with Barb the entire time. That would be okay, maybe. “So how have you guys been? How's your school?” Barb's high school is huge, this multi-floored brick building down near the highway Mari and Jack have spoken at a couple times. It's way outside their precinct, but Barb says they do a better job than the local cops, so they always come when she asks. All the Ford kids attended back in the day. Jackson tells a great story about the year Meredith tried to change her last name to deny any association.

Barb sighs. “Well, this week I had a ninth-grader in my office for trying to strangle a classmate, so.”

Mari flinches. Sometimes she thinks Bruce and Barb see worse stuff at their jobs than Mari and Jack. “Jesus.” She takes a chilly gulp of the slightly sour wine. “That's terrible.”

“No injuries,” Barb says, shrugging. “They look younger every year to me, feels like.” She gathers a few decorative napkins from the holder on the counter, fluffing the edges with a thumb. “Listen, though.” She drops her voice and comes around the counter to face Mari full-on, suddenly a different flavor of serious. “Before we go back in there, I wanted to talk to you. We haven't really had a chance to catch up since everything happened.”

Oh God. Mari knew it. They hate her now, of course they do. She left their son to rot in a hospital bed after getting him shot. She braces herself against the rush of guilt and shame and embarrassment, is so busy bracing herself that she hardly registers what Barb is actually saying, the tail end of which is “—to thank you for taking such good care of him.”

Mari blinks. “I—for taking care of him?” she repeats uncertainly. What?

“He'd kill me for saying this, but I honestly don't know what he would have done without you,” Barb confides. “I can't believe we kept missing each other at the hospital, but he told me how you came and sat with him, kept his spirits up. Kept things normal.”

“Kept things—” He lied for her, Mari realizes slowly. He lied so his family wouldn't know. “Oh.”

“You're just like Jack, the pair of you.” Barb laughs, mistaking the look on Mari's face. “So taciturn. I'll leave you alone, but honestly Mari, it really made Bruce and me feel better, I can't even describe it. You helped us too.” She reaches over and squeezes Mari's thighs, warm and motherly. Mari feels physically sick.

“Yeah. It's, uh. Good to have him finally back at work,” she manages, standing up and grabbing at the first excuse she sees: Barb's stack of napkins, maroon with patterned birds on a line. “I'll do this, okay?” she tells Barb. “You just relax.”

Barb shakes her head and smiles, like Mari's being silly but Barb is willing to indulge her. “It's great to see you, Mari,” she says. “Really great.”

Mari trips out of the kitchen and into the empty dining room, hands shaking. There's a rubber tree plant in the corner, a
Bless This House
needlepoint on the wall. Everyone will be down in the den, drinking and chatting, being a family. Mari slides the napkins under each fork nice and slow and tells herself to get a grip. She's here now. She's in it. And she's going to stay calm.

It doesn't work. When she joins everyone in the den, Jack catches sight of her. Right away, his eyebrows go sky high.

Mari ignores him and starts talking determinedly to Bruce about the politics behind this year's curriculum fair. When Jack first invited her coming here felt like a way to atone somehow, visible evidence of how sorry she is, but now she feels like the worst kind of interloper.

She looks over at him, parked lazily on the cracked leather sofa beside his brother, jeans and his plaid button-down open at the collar so just the edge of the scar is visible, a bottle of Coors dangling from his long fingers. She feels a pull of desire so strong it's like someone's reached into her chest and squeezed.

She always thought she'd lose him to another woman eventually. For as long as she's known him, Jack has been dating almost perpetually, one skinny blonde girl after another, each on six- to eight-month rotations. Mari figured one of them would stick and that would be that. He would still be her partner, yes, he would still buy her coffee, but that something extra would be gone. When he stopped inviting her out so much after she got married, she thought it was only a matter of time.

She's so deep in it that she doesn't realize Arielle's talking to her until the blonde says her name like a question, “Mari?”

“Sorry,” Mari says. “Spaced. Here I am.”

Here she is.

Dinner is a series of mismatched casseroles, from cheesy macaroni to baked ziti to green beans, plus something called King Ranch Chicken that Mari's only ever eaten here, tomatoes and chiles and tortillas topped with shredded cheddar, a delicious tex-mex monstrosity. “My favorites,” Bruce confesses to her quietly in the serving line, looking almost embarrassed at the riches before him. Mari laughs in spite of herself. Dessert, they are told, will be ice cream cake.

“Courtesy of Dairy Queen,” Meredith adds. “Dad's other favorite.”

It's almost eight, so Mari calls Andre before she sits down and does Sonya's tuck-in routine over the phone. Every night she tells a different bedtime story, which is proving more and more difficult the older Sone gets. Her smart baby girl has no tolerance for re-runs.

Tonight's story is about a robin who lays red eggs instead of blue. The other birds make fun of her, but come summertime, out hatch three beautiful peacocks. Mari thought it up in the car on the way over.

“Was the daddy a peacock?” Sonya asks. She's been asking a lot of questions about animal daddies lately. “Is that why the eggs were different?”

“Maybe,” Mari tells her, wondering if Andre is listening over the other line. She didn't tell him where she was going tonight. “Or maybe the robin was just magic.”

The call means she's the last one to sit down at the supper table, no chairs left except for the one beside Terry. Mari thinks of how cold he was at the front door and for two nasty, horribly entitled seconds, she's actually pissed Jackson didn't think to save her a spot.

Then she snaps out of it. He already lied to cover up how terrible she was, he doesn't have to babysit her too.

“What number's that?” she tries, nodding at Terry's Coors. It's an old joke, from back nearly a decade ago when Terry was living in Boston. Jack and Mari went to visit him and wound up at the diviest of all dive bars, where Ter drunkenly announced his intention to consume one million beers before the night was over, then promptly tripped over a curb and sprained his ankle. The reference is usually good for at least a smile, but tonight Terry only shrugs.

“Just two,” he says blandly, reaching for a napkin.

“No, I know,” Mari backpedals, embarrassed. “I just meant—”

“Yeah, I know what you meant,” Terry says, with enough of an edge in his voice that Arielle and Jack both glance over. Mari feels herself blanch. “Good of you to come out, by the way.”

Oh Jesus. He knows. What or how much is anyone's guess, but he knows. “Am glad to be here again,” Mari manages, her skin gone clammy.
But that part's not my fault
, she thinks.
Jack stopped inviting me.
Then, because Terry might as well have said it, “It's been awhile, huh?” She raises her wineglass in Bruce's direction. “Happy birthday, sir.”

Bruce smiles as warmly as if Mari was his own child. He bought Jack's story too, clearly. Hook, line and sinker. “Well thanks, kid,” he says, picking up his glass. “Thanks for coming.”

They all toast. Barb walks all the way around the table to clink with Mari, pressing a kiss against her cheek. It's immediately clear to Mari that she fucked up again. She should have kept her damn mouth shut. This feels too much like rubbing it in, like a dare.
See? I fooled all of them.