Fissure (16 page)

     Crossing the remaining distance, which was not far, towards Emma and her mother, I planted my best smile on my face and forced myself to act like there was nothing unusual, peculiar, or moderately terrifying about my surroundings.

     “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Scarlett,” I said, kneeling next to Emma. “Thank you for having me here tonight.” Placing a hand on Emma’s knee, I gave it a squeeze. I could feel the relief deflating from her like a balloon. Her eyes were glassy when they met mine. She didn’t say anything—she didn’t need to. It was all right there.

     A buzzer went off a few feet away from us, jolting the both of us, although her mother remained unaffected. Emma flitted towards the kitchen like she was overthrowing Paris, our moment passing us by.

     Defeated by the bell again.

     “Patrick?” Emma called out from the kitchen, as a racket of metal beating metal rang out. “Will you be all right in there? I’m just pulling out dinner and then we’ll be all set.”

     “I’m fine,” I answered her, forcing myself to look—
really
look—at her mom. “We’ll just chat for a few minutes. I’m planning to press her to divulge all your most embarrassing moments growing up.”

     “Ha!” Emma hollered from the kitchen, right before something clattered to the floor. For all the raucous, she could have been running a metal factory in there. “You’ll get nothing.”

     I wasn’t sure if that was because she had very few juicy moments of her past worth telling or if her mother’s lips were sealed, literally, on the matter.

     “Do you need any help?” I asked when another something clanged to the floor.

     “Just stay out of the way,” she warned, before uttering the first curse I’d heard come from her lips when something that sounded an awful lot like glass shattered. Even at her worst, the best curse word she could pull was crap. If that wasn’t proof for opposites attract, I don’t know what would have been.

     Turning my attention back at the inhaling and exhaling corpse slouching in front of me, I forced a grin. “It really was kind of you to have me here tonight. It’s nice to be able to meet the family responsible for making Emma who she is today.” Okay, a touch wordy and a tad sappy for a non-responsive person in front of me, but it was too late to take the words back.

     “You like my Emma?”

     I wouldn’t have believed the words had come from her mouth had I not been watching her. Everything else about her face and body remained unchanged except for the movement of her mouth. It should have been a relief, but instead Mrs. Scarlett just became creepier.

     However, she was Emma’s mom. And that made her good people. “Yes, ma’am,” I answered, lowering my voice. Not that Emma could overhear me with the cacophony of noise coming from the kitchen. “A whole lot.”

     Mrs. Scarlett nodded her head once, her eyes blinking for the first time. “She’s a good girl. And special too.” Her voice was tight, strained, like it would snap at the slightest disruption in the air, but the conviction behind those words was fierce.

     “Yes, ma’am. She most certainly is.”

     A commercial length silence ensued before she said anything else. “She doesn’t think so, though.”

     I wanted to disagree with her, to tell her the Emma I knew was positively bursting with self-worth and confidence, but I couldn’t lie to the woman who had birthed her. “I’d have to agree with you on that.”

     Mrs. Scarlett sighed, never once looking my way. When her eyes glazed over during the second sigh, I reached for the flowers about to fall from her lap to the floor. “Let me put these in some water for you.”

     I was smack in the center of the kitchen in three strides. It was more of a closet than a kitchen in what I defined as what one would prepare a meal in, but Emma seemed to be holding her own as she pirouetted between the stove, sink, and refrigerator. Her forehead was beading with sweat, and her brow was set in a
don’t mess with me
warning.

     “Vase?” I asked, short and sweet.

     “That cupboard.” Her elbow pointed at the one beside her as she decimated a head of lettuce. “Top shelf.”

     “Are you sure you don’t need some . . .” The word caught in my mouth when she spun at me, woman crazed look in her eyes, butcher knife raised in warning.

     “I’m. Fine,” she said, before turning back towards taking out her frustrations on leafy greens. “Besides, isn’t it your gender’s general opinion that my gender’s proper place is to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?”

     I laughed, a full, rolling one. I laughed at the way her weapon free hand had flitted in the air as she’d said it, I laughed at the irony that, in my time, that had been the way it was, although it wasn’t the expectation, it was just the way things were. And I laughed at Emma, trying so hard to be tough and choke her own fit of laughter back down.

     Opening the cupboard door she’d indicted, I pulled the chipped-mouth vase down and decided it was time to press a little luck again. Keeping an arm stretched on the open cupboard door, I reached my other arm around her, pressing myself against her just enough to feel the tension ripple through her body. The cutting board stilled, where it sat balancing precariously on the sink’s ledge, as my arm stretched around her further.

     Turning the water on, I filled the vase until it was spilling over. I couldn’t move, I was incapable of it. I had her in my grasp, protected, shielded, everything I’d ever wanted I held within the six foot span of my arms, and there was nothing the world could throw at me to break this moment.

     Nothing in the world save for her.

     Ducking beneath my arm braced over the cupboard, she dodged in the direction of the oven, but not before meeting my eyes. The widening of her pupils told me she was excited. The narrowing of her eyes told me she was upset, maybe even angry. But what couldn’t be read with everything I’d read and studied pertaining to physical tells was if she wanted to feel the length of my body against hers every day forward.

     “You could have made that easier on yourself, Gumby man,” she said with a half smile before flinging the oven door open.

     “I could have,” I answered in the peaked tone that insinuated everything I wanted to.

     “Patrick Hayward,” she said with a sigh as she pulled a tin-foil covered pan from the oven. “What am I going to do with you?”

     It was one of those rhetorical questions people tended to throw at me a lot, because, let’s face it, I was
the
rhetorical question, but she’d cracked open a door I was going to bust right through.

     Making sure she was looking at me before responding, I said, “Anything you want.” Peaking my brows a few times, I added, “As long as it involves scented candles and silk sheets.”

     Emma snatched the dishtowel hanging over the stove’s handle and pitched it at my face. “My mother’s in the next room,” she hissed, fighting her smile at every word.

     “And her brothers are coming through the side door,” a voice that was all bass announced immediately after a door screeched open.

     If that wasn’t a proverbial cold shower, I don’t know what could have been.

     Sweeping the chop sueyed lettuce into a bowl, she weaved through the five other, rather large, male bodies packed into the kitchen like we were rammed against the rail at a sell out rock concert.

     “The only time you’re not late is when food’s involved,” she said, situating the salad bowl on the plastic folding table.

     “That’s the only reason to be on time, Em,” Jackson said, dropping a kiss on her head. “Especially when you’re cooking pork chops a la commode.”

     “If you’re all going to cramp my already cramped work space, make yourselves useful,” Emma said, pulling a bottle of dressing from the refrigerator and tossing it at me. “Dallas, you set the table. Austin, you fill the glasses with water. Jackson, light the candles.”

     “We have candles?” Jackson mumbled, fishing a box of matches from a drawer beside the sink.

     “And Tex,” Emma said, elbowing him while she carried a steaming pan of  . . . something. “You’ve got mom duty.”

     From the ensuing groan, I knew this was the least desirable chore in this household, and I could guess why Emma had doled it out on the brother who’d been the majorette of my welcome parade minutes ago.

     “Pork chops a la commode,” I said in explanation, staring at the foreign grayish dish that looked the farthest thing from appetizing. But I didn’t care if it was laced with arsenic—if Emma took time to make me dinner, I was going to eat it. And ask for seconds.

     “Pretty, isn’t it?” Emma guessed at what I was thinking. “The boys called it toilet pork chops when I first starting making it because,”—she motioned at the main course—“that’s pretty much what it looks like. But, taking great insult that they were labeling my best attempts at feeding them such vulgar names, I threatened to never cook for them again if they called it toilet pork chops again. They promised, and I renamed it pork chops a la commode.”

     “Em?” I said. “Did you ever take French?”

     “Only four years,” she said, clearly pleased with herself. “But the boys didn’t.”

     “So you can call it toilet pork chops, just so long as no one else does or knows they are?” Devious wasn’t a word I would have placed in Emma’s characteristic bank.

     “Precisely,” she said, sharing a smile with me. “Just look at that. They are toilet pork chops, but they’re a Scarlett house favorite because they’re filling, cheap, a one pan meal, and most importantly—”

     “They’re freaking delicious,” Dallas offered, dropping the last fork into its spot.

     “Couldn’t have said it any better.” Emma smiled her thanks at her brother.

     “You know, Emma doesn’t make pork chops a la commode for just anyone,” Austin said, from his post at the sink where he filled seven plastic cups of varying sizes and colors. “This is a meal reserved for family birthdays and special occasions. I don’t believe you’ve ever even made this for Ty, have you?”

     There was nothing that hinted Austin was provoking Emma, but the squaring of her shoulders indicated that’s how she took it. “Since the last time Ty stepped foot in this house was the summer before I entered first grade,” Emma said, drilling holes into Austin’s back, “no, I haven’t cooked this for him. Kind of difficult to when he’s got a personal policy against even toeing the line of the bad side of town.”

     There were so many undercurrents in her tone, it was impossible to determine which was the most prominent—irritation, shame, anger—but I didn’t care. I’d take any mark against Ty Emma would give me.

     “Well, it’s not like you invite people over, just like the rest of us,” Austin said, dropping a couple of cups around the table. “In fact, I can’t remember the last time you had anyone—”

     “Austin.” That was all it took, one word, to silence her older, bigger brother mid-sentence. I didn’t doubt the same would hold true with the other three brothers, and that she would yield to them at their first name warning. I knew this because it was familiar, something my family had been forced to adopt as well. When secrets weave together your past, you have to keep the threads from being unraveled.

     Placing her hands over my shoulders, she steered me to a seat. “Patrick, you can sit here by me. As the guest of honor, you get to help yourself first.” She pulled out the metal folding chair for me, waving her hand at the spread on the table. “And you’d better hurry and dish up because as soon as the four hyenas arrive around the table, there’ll be nothing left.”

     “I don’t want to disagree with you, but my mother would probably reach out from the heavens and slap me across the hand if I even thought about sitting down and dishing up before you and your mom had,” I said, scratching the back of my neck. This wasn’t a rule I followed to the letter, but it was one I tried to follow most of the time, and it was one I was going to obey when in Emma’s house.

     Sliding to the chair beside mine, I pulled it out. “Miss Scarlett?” I said, gesturing to the chair.

     The skin between her brows wrinkled, but she was smiling. “Is this whole gentlemen thing you’ve got going on an act or the real thing?” she asked, settling into the chair.

     “Both,” I answered honestly, sliding her forward. “My brothers are more the natural gentlemen in the family where I’m . . .
less so,
if left to my own devices, so part of the time I have to remind and force myself to be a gentlemen. But the other half of my gentlemen air comes from growing up in the South with a very Southern mother who put manners in the same category as showing up for church on Sunday early. So a lot of it has been pounded so deep into me it comes naturally.”

     Standing behind my chair, I leaned down at her. “Why? Are you impressed?”

     “More like shocked,” she retorted, folding a paper napkin in her lap.

     “I’ll take shocked,” I said, lowering my voice. “As long as you
feel
something for me. And it isn’t disdain or loathing.”

     A clenched jaw-ed Jackson leaned in between us, clearing his throat as he lit the votive raised on an overturned water cup.

     Forging roads of romance between Emma and me was going to be impossible with four brothers an ear’s and arm’s length away. A thought struck me, one I didn’t want to give credit to, but one I couldn’t dismiss. Maybe, guessing the way I felt about her, and knowing the way her brothers felt about me, she’d invited me here because she knew me putting the moves on her would be as successful as Canada winning a world war.

     My mood and smile dampened simultaneously.

     “Hey, Ma,” Jackson greeted, nudging me further away from Emma before moving away from us.

     Tex helped the still as unresponsive Mrs. Scarlett into her seat and when I saw her in the full light of the kitchen, the flatness stifling her expression became familiar in a way that chilled me to my marrow. Despite Mrs. Scarlett looking nothing like Emma, she had the same dark skin and hair of her sons, that expression of nothing she wore was identical to the one I’d seen shroud Emma’s face before. That faraway look that had landed her in a land of living nightmares and a place that had been sucked dry of all hope.