Keep You (9 page)

             
Tam worked customer service for a Kennesaw-based office supplies seller. Arrowhead Office had not one store, but instead sold the entirety of their products online or via catalogue. Orders were shipped direct from the warehouse. This streamlined Arrowhead’s costs considerably by cutting out the retail link in the business chain, but no stores meant no person-to-person interaction, no chance for the customers to hold the product in their hands before purchase. Which meant there was a steady stream of complaints, everything from quality control and unmet expectations, to incorrect orders.

             
His workspace was a narrow plastic desk that was part of a twenty-foot long table in a windowless room of such tables. He was separated from the coworkers beside and across from him by foot tall felt-covered cardboard walls. He had a flat-screen desktop computer and a phone, a wheeled chair that knew nothing of ergonomics, and a laughable paycheck.

             
But college had never been an option for him. Mom needed him – Mom had always needed him – and he’d worked since he was sixteen, often times two or three jobs at a time. Two years ago, he’d taken out his tongue stud and invested in three cheap white dress shirts, some new shoes, and a couple ties, so he could land the job at Arrowhead. Selling the house had provided the means to set his mother up in the hospice. Medicaid was covering most of her medical bills, but he worked weekends as a bartender too; he lived at the foot of a volcano of debt. Just when he thought he was making headway, the world would shake and growl and fresh tides of lava would come sweeping down over him.

             
Taking a week and a half off for the wedding was not a vacation; it was a sacrifice. Mike knew it too, and had tried to cut him a check. “Your groomsman gift,” he’d called it, but Tam hadn’t been able to accept it. He didn’t want to be a charity case, especially not in the eyes of the family who’d done so much for him already.

             
Beth Walker had known about his home situation from the first, and she must have told her husband. Mike had learned when he’d shown up unannounced at his house one afternoon – possibly the most embarrassing afternoon of his life. He’d lived off and on with Walt and Mike over the years, needing an escape from the endless, pressing responsibility that was like iron shackles around his wrists.

             
Jo was the only one who didn’t know. Though how she’d never suspected anything, especially after the ruby, he had no idea.

             
She still had it, he knew, a hard knot forming in his belly. It was still safer with her than with anyone else.

**

Then

             
“He just wanted some money,” Melinda Wales protested, adjusting the ice pack against the side of her face. She had only just begun chemo, so her rich, black hair still fell in messy waves against her shoulders. Her always pale skin was looking sallow though, all save the darkening bruise against her cheek that was rapidly becoming the same color as her blue, blue eyes. “Don’t get upset, sweetie,” she said as she followed him down the hall, voice thready and frantic as always.

             
Tam’s hands were rigid, shaking fists at his sides as he stalked toward the master bedroom. He could tell his father had been here: the overturned chair in the kitchen, the spilled pot of pasta water. Of course the son of a bitch had come before Tam got home from his deli job. That was rule one in the Cowardly Motherfucker handbook: always beat on your cancer-ridden ex when she was home alone.

             
Melinda was still in her pressed brown slacks from work, her cream blouse half-untucked, the sleeve ripped. Tam could see her at the stove preparing dinner, fighting off a wave of nausea thanks to the chemo, sipping ginger ale as she added a pinch of salt to the water and brought it up to a boil. The noodles strewn across the kitchen linoleum were penne, his favorite. A thrown cast iron skillet had shattered the jar of Ragu on the counter, also his favorite. Mom always wanted to make people happy – her son, her husband.

             
“Do not defend him,” he said through his teeth as he entered the master bedroom. Nothing here looked disturbed: the fluffy white coverlet, threadbare and yellowing with age, was still in place. Her second-hand furniture, coated in a thin layer of dust, the vase of flowers he’d brought her dying and brown on top of the dresser, appeared untouched.

             
“What are you gonna do?” Melinda’s voice became shrill with fear. She had to be remembering the fistfight on the front lawn that had sent Tam and his dad to lockup for the night. “Tam, please.” Her bony fingers grasped at his sleeve.

             
Tam halted, took a deep breath, and forced himself to calm down, if only for her sake. His hands uncurled. It was painful to look at her watery blue eyes, her sunken cheeks, and see such weakness there. To know that the sweet, gentle woman who’d raised him was too sweet and too gentle to stand up for herself. To even lock the door against the man who would one day kill her, if the cancer didn’t take her first.

             
“It’s fine,” he said, covering her frail hand with his own. “He was looking for money, right?”

             
She nodded.

             
“Did you give him any?”

             
She didn’t answer, which meant yes, she had.

             
“What happens when you don’t have any money?” he asked gently. “Then what’ll he take?”

             
Her eyes widened. “Oh.”

             
Tam went to the popsicle stick jewelry box he’d made her in the third grade – it was on her dresser beside the rotting flowers – and lifted the lid, and then the piece of cardboard that served as a false bottom.

             
Melinda had one truly valuable physical possession. For generations, her family had passed down a necklace to the daughters. Since Tam was an only child, Melinda had once said that the necklace would be his wife’s, her daughter-in-law’s. It was a tradition that would never continue if Hank Wales decided the cash from the coffee canister wasn’t enough to tide him over.

             
Tam pinched the delicate gold chain between thumb and forefinger and drew the piece out into the light to the sound of his mother’s gentle sigh of admiration. A ruby the size of a nickel glistened in the shafts of incoming sunlight. It had been cut in the shape of a heart and was ringed with tiny diamonds, all set in a gold backing.

             
“You don’t think he’d take it, do you?” Melinda’s voice was a whisper.

             
“I know he would,” Tam said, slipping it in his pocket.

             
“Well…we, uh…I don’t think I can afford a safe deposit box, but we could…”

             
“I’ve got it.” He slid an arm around her narrow shoulders and squeezed. “It’ll be safe. Safer than any lock box somewhere.”

**

              It was a crisp, breezy April night, fresh-smelling air flooding through the open car windows as Tam pulled up to the Walkers’. It was almost eleven, but the lights were still on, bright yellow beacons inviting him in. If he closed his eyes, he could envision Randy rooted in his favorite chair, Beth at the kitchen table with the checkbook and credit card bills, reading glasses perched on her nose. Jordan would be in the garage, lifting weights. And Jo would be in her room, biology book open on her bed, listening to old school rock. They were a predictable bunch. Stable. Steady.

             
He swung the Malibu up into the drive and killed the engine, the headlights extinguishing, the backyard returning to its inky mosaic of shadows. Tam had called his manager and begged the rest of the night off – he would have a max of two more deliveries to make anyway – and had reached up to pull the Papa Johns suction cup light off the roof of the car at a red light. Now, he chucked his company visor, raked his hair into some semblance of its usual spiky order and peeled off his green and red polo, left in jeans and a plain white muscle shirt. He’d smuggled a pepperoni and sausage on his last run and pulled it out of the backseat before he headed to the pedestrian door around the side of the garage. He knew the way instinctively, where to step over the wide crack in the concrete, which low-slung branches to duck beneath. The garage lights were on and he rapped once on the window pane with his knuckles before he let himself in.

             
There was a floor-length mirror propped against the wall in front of Beth’s minivan and Jordan watched his reflection do bicep curls in it, face comically concentrated, dressed in red track shorts and a black tank top: Georgia colors.

             
“Yo.” Tam whistled to catch his attention as he heeled the door shut. “I brought food.”

             
Jordan was skinny as a rail and always hungry, a track star in the making addicted to carbs. “Food?” His head whipped around; the dumbbell dropped to his side. Tam watched his nostrils flare as he inhaled the scent of cheesy, greasy heaven in a cardboard box. “Sweet!” He was not at all surprised to see Tam at this hour because his arrival was not at all out of the ordinary.

             
They went into the kitchen and Tam set the pizza on the freshly wiped down table. The dishwasher was chugging away, its timer claiming there were only five minutes left to its cycle, the dinner pots and pans rested on a dishtowel beside the sink, clean and ready to be put away. He could smell Beth’s lemon pepper chicken hanging in the air. The kitchen itself looked tired, in need of a makeover, but still not as pitiful as Tam’s own kitchen. He had an idle wonder if his mother had scrounged up dinner for herself after he’d left. Probably not. She was probably curled beneath a blanket in front of the eleven o’ clock news, trying to beat back the nausea.

             
“Dude.” Jordan flipped open the box and pulled a piece loose, using his hand for a plate. “I’ve gained five pounds.” He quirked his eyebrows in excitement as he took a bite.

             
“Of water weight?” Tam guessed, and chuckled when Jordan flipped him off. “Where’s your sister? I wanted to ask her something.”

             
Jordan wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and gave him a searching look, eyes narrowing. “Ask her what?”

             
Tam blinked. Was he actually getting feedback? From Jordan of all people? “Ask her a favor,” he said, careful to keep his tone neutral.

             
The TV was rumbling in the living room, Randy and Beth’s voices an indistinguishable murmur just audible above the sound of a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial. Jordan glanced over his shoulder in that direction, took another bite of pizza and stared at Tam while he chewed. “Does this favor involve sticking your tongue down her throat?”

             
“What? No. What the hell are you talking about?”

             
His dark blonde head canted to the side. His brows quirked.
Really?
He asked without words. “Dude, I know, okay?”

             
Tam raked a hand back through his hair. “So, what? Am I gonna get some big brother speech or some shit?”

             
“Depends.”

             
“On?” He was beginning to be agitated, more pissed at being called out than guilty.

             
Jordan took another bite. He was trying to be coy or intimidating, something. If he was trying to get a read on Tam’s headspace, he wasn’t going to get anywhere. “Jo’s sweet,” he said at last, “and she trusts you and she’s got one hell of a crush on you. I don’t wanna see her get hurt.”

             
“She won’t.” Tam was firm, even if he was full of doubt.

             
A beat passed, then Jordan nodded. “Come on.” He pulled two more slices from the box and stacked them on top of one another. “I’ll take you up so the parentals don’t get suspicious.”

             
A caution Tam wouldn’t have thought of.

             
“Tameron,” Beth said, not looking surprised to see him. “You’re here late, honey.”

             
“He’s gonna borrow some CDs,” her son lied to her, leading the way toward the front hall and the staircase.

             
“I won’t be staying long,” Tam assured her, and felt her sad, pitying smile down to his bones.

             
“You gonna be here Sunday to watch the game?” Randy asked, eyes never leaving the TV.

             
“Gonna try to be.”

             
Neither of Jo’s parents suspected a thing as he followed Jordan around the newel post at the foot of the banister and up the stairs. Jordan hadn’t flipped his guilt switch, but he felt a twinge of it now; these people had been like foster parents to him. They fed him, had tried to gift him with things he couldn’t afford: Mike’s old laptop, a TV they “weren’t going to use anymore.”

             
He wasn’t betraying them, he told himself as he reached the carpeted hall upstairs. He wasn’t.