Singe (20 page)

“Okay,” Chelsea says. “I’m sorry. I know today is—”

“Yeah.” Eli raps the lid. “It is. It’s okay.”

Chelsea furrows her brow in sympathy. “Okay. Let me just go get her leash, yeah?”

Neither of them say anything else about the shoebox. Eli’s always liked that about his ex-wife. She doesn’t pry. She never did ask too much about the fire that killed Will.

“Hey, Hester,” Eli murmurs, bending down to greet the dog. “Hi, girl.” Her tail wags fast enough to blur. She’s looking good, his Hester. The shaved patch on her belly is growing in, no more conehead necessary to keep her from the stitches. She looks whole.

When he loads up the Outback, he stows the unopened box in the trunk, out of sight, out of mind. The leash and kibble and Hester herself all go safely into the backseat, Hester reclining on her pink blanket like a queen. “Bet you missed shedding in my car,” Eli tells her.

“She thinks she can run,” Chelsea says, standing outside the car window in her slippers. “She really can’t. And don’t let her chew on the splint.” She looks worried, like possibly Eli’s going to go on a bender, kill himself and the dog.

“I know, Chels.” Eli leans in the backseat and rubs Hester’s silky ear. “Expensive tastes, baby girl,” he tells her. Hester pants hot breath onto his face, grinning her dog grin.

Brooks’s house is large, a nice place in Great Barrington with a sprawling yard and a swimming pool Addie’s already made it clear she’s got no intention of getting anywhere close to. She crosses the lawn when she sees him pull up though, iced tea in her hand and a wide smile that until real recently she’d only ever let him see in private. “Grant,” she says, tipping her plastic cup in his direction.

“Manzella,” Eli replies. Over her shoulder the yard’s crowded full of firefighters and their families, Van Morrison on a CD player somewhere. All of a sudden his heart is beating unpleasantly fast and there’s a taste at the back of his mouth like he’s been sucking on a penny, like copper.

He looks at Addie, squatting on the ground rubbing his dog underneath her furry chin. He thinks of his past boxed neatly up in the trunk of his station wagon. He thinks of his brother burned up and buried in the ground in New Hampshire, and he shakes his head once, hard, to clear it.

“I’m gonna get a beer,” Eli says.

Addie knows something’s up with her brand-new boyfriend pretty much as soon as he shows up at the barbecue and shotguns three beers in fifteen minutes, but it’s not until halfway through the afternoon that she manages to get him alone long enough to ask him what it is.

“Hey,” she says, running into him in the big, stainless-steel kitchen on her way back from the bathroom. “You okay?”

Eli startles at the sound of her voice. He’s filling a red plastic beer cup with ice from the fridge dispenser, the banana shaped chips that Addie’s always worried she’ll choke on. They’re the only ones inside the house. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, hi.”

“Hi.” It’s hot out. Addie can see where the back of Eli’s white T-shirt is going transparent with sweat. Underneath her sundress, her thighs are sticky in the places they touch. “Switching to water?”

Eli crunches on a chip. His face is flushed, cheeks and nose. Addie would guess he’s had more than three beers by now. “Ice in the cooler looked dirty,” is all he says, shrugging. “Plus I think Hester stuck her face in there.”

Hester is outside tied to a tree with a gaggle of kids hanging off her tail, Addie can see her from the window. Jim O’Neill’s son is there, Bryan, grown at least a foot since Addie last saw him. “Looks like she’s enjoying herself, at least,” Addie tries. Something about Eli’s face is weirdly closed to her. “It’s nice that your ex-wife let you bring her.”

Eli shrugs. “I do what I want,” he says cheerfully, in a voice that might be joking and might not be. Addie feels her eyebrows arch.

“You do, huh?” she asks, taking the cup out of his hand and filling it with water from the tap, then handing it back to him. “You having fun?”

Eli makes a face. “Uh-huh,” he tells her, no hesitation at all. And like, maybe he is—she did, after all, witness him chicken-fighting with Sharpie, Parker and the candidate in the pool earlier this afternoon—except for the part where for some reason Addie really, really doesn’t think so. He isn’t drinking the water. When he makes for the back door he turns too quickly and lists suddenly and sharply to the side. “Whoa,” he says, righting himself with one hand curled around the granite countertop. “Who put that there?”

“Okay.” Enough is enough. Addie thinks of the night at the Perfect Pint with the blonde girl, remembers the very first time they ever hooked up. It occurs to her to wonder if this is a thing Eli does more than she originally thought. Either way, she’s not letting him anywhere near their boss’s barbecue until he’s sobered up at least a little. “Right. Come with me.”

Eli perks up a smidge when she hooks a finger through his belt loop. “Oh yeah? Come where?” he asks, letting his hip fall against hers. Up close, he smells like beer and sweat and that fake-woodsy soap of his. Addie likes the smell now, heaven help her.

“Get over yourself,” she mutters, towing him by the hand into the hallway. All the doors are shut tight except the powder room, standard party protocol. Addie isn’t about to get caught locked in there with Eli Grant when one of their coworkers comes a-knocking though, so she picks a closed door at random and scoots them inside.

“The playroom?” Eli asks, looking around at scattered toys and video games, stacked up books and shelves at child-height. Brooks has a boy and two girls, Addie’s pretty sure, all under the age of ten. “Not my first choice.” He wrinkles his nose at a kiddy-sized armchair.

“First choice for what?” Addie laughs and taps at the side of the cup in his hand, still completely full. “Buddy, you can’t even walk. Drink that.”

“I could,” Eli insists, taking a sip. “I totally could.” He sighs, then sinks into the tiny chair, scrubbing at the back of his neck. His hair is getting long again, curls threatening to creep into collar-touching territory. In a week, Brooks will write him up for a uniform violation. “I wasn’t going to embarrass you, princess,” he says finally, staring up at her with dark, flat eyes. “You know that, right?”

Addie shrugs delicately. “Was worried you might embarrass yourself.” She perches on a beanbag across from him, the backs of her legs sticking to the plasticky fabric. The AC is a nice break, at least. “Do you maybe wanna tell me what’s up?” she asks. She doesn’t know how to do this. That’s another thing Eli knows that she doesn’t, it occurs to her: how to have a serious relationship. “Because, like. It seems like something is up.”

Eli huffs out a breath. “Nothing,” he says sullenly. Addie waits. “It’s just when I was picking up Hester, my ex-wife, she—” He breaks off. Just when Addie thinks she’s about to hear another confession of the blonde-in-the-bar variety—just when she can
feel
her stomach plummeting—he switches tracks entirely. “Look, I had a brother.”

Addie keeps waiting, but nothing else comes out. “Okay. You
had
a brother?” The past tense is startling, sends her stomach back up and then down again. God, he was right about her. There’s still so much she doesn’t know. “Eli.”

“Yeah,” Eli says, rubbing distractedly at the back of his neck one more time. “And the anniversary’s today, so.”

“The anniversary of his death?” Addie asks. She wants to ask how old he was, the brother. She wants to ask how he died. She takes a springy Koosh ball off a shelf and picks at the strings, feeling awkward and out of her depth. “What was his name?” is where she starts.

“Will,” Eli says, no intonation to it at all. “His name was Will.”

“Will,” Addie repeats, committing it to memory. Okay. “Eli, what—”

The door to the playroom swings open just then and there’s the candidate, his pale blotchy face going stricken when he sees them. “Shit, sorry,” he says immediately. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I was looking for the bathroom.”

Just like that, Eli’s the Mayor of Funtown all over again. “You’re not interrupting anything, kid,” he says grandly, downing his water in two long gulps. “Trying to convince Manzella here to arm wrestle is all.”

Which is how they wind up playing drunk MarioKart with the candidate in Brooks’s kids’ playroom until Eli’s sober enough to stand without swaying. Addie slips out to get him another cup of water plus a cheeseburger, runs her knuckles over the back of his neck while Gaarder’s distracted by the game.

“Sorry,” Eli mouths. “I don’t think he knows.”

On screen, Gaarder’s character has lapped them and then some, a look of fixed concentration on his face. It never even occurred to Addie to care if he’d sniffed them out. “Don’t be sorry,” she tells Eli, watching him, his hands on the controller and the old pink burns on his arms. “I’m not.”

Back outside, Eli ducks away before she can talk to him, thrusting himself into the crowd of kids around Hester. Addie lets him. She visits with Parker and his wife instead, bending over to smile at their twins, buckled into a double-wide running stroller. They’re what Addie’s mother calls pudding babies, all squashed folds of skin. Jim O’Neill joins them after a few minutes, passing Addie a beer.

“Owed you one,” he says quietly. It takes Addie a moment to realize what he’s talking about, the funeral for Drew Beecher at the beginning of the summer.

She shakes her head as they sit down on the steps of the back porch, smiling kind of uncertainly—Jim’s lost weight, she thinks, is looking a little rough around the edges. The heat and work stress, Addie guesses. Everybody’s wound a little tight. “Bry looks great,” she says brightly, nodding across the lawn at where the kid’s wolfing down a hot dog covered with fluorescent yellow mustard. “I haven’t seen him in ages. He’s gonna be
tall
.”

“He does, right?” Jim asks. He sounds hopeful. “He got in trouble at his camp last week, some bullshit with some whiny rich kid. His mother’s crawling all over me. But he is, he’s doing good.”

Addie says her goodbyes not long after that, the sun and the greasy food taking their toll on her too. “You need to bring your dog back right this second?” she asks Eli, popping up on her toes to murmur in his ear, deciding she doesn’t care who sees them. She feels protective of him today, an unfamiliar ache inside her chest that’s making her want to wrap her arms around him and hold until it’s dark out. “Or can you guys come over for a bit?”

Eli raises his eyebrows. “She’s going to destroy all your carefully curated possessions,” he warns her, but he’s smiling. “She chews.”

“Yeah,” Addie agrees, looking over to where Bryan is making the retriever beg for bits of hot dog. “She looks like a real monster.” Then, as Bryan lifts his hand even higher to coax Hester up on her back legs, “Cut that out, Bry, she’s got a splint.”

For a second, Eli just watches her. Their arms are close enough that Addie can feel the heat coming off his, the prickly brush of hair. “I don’t like talking about my brother,” he says.

Addie shrugs. “Okay. So we won’t.” She has Mass in the morning. She needs to call Jenn. She needs to figure how she’s going to sit in a pew next to Aunt Marianne tomorrow and not slap her across the face and demand to know what kind of mother she thinks she is. But right now all she wants to do is lie on the futon with Eli and watch his sad, busted up dog chase Chicken Cat around her apartment. “We can talk about whatever you want,” she promises him.

Eli keeps staring, his eyes red and bleary. The sunset is catching in his eyelashes, picking out each individual lash in sharp relief. “And what if I don’t want to talk at all?” he asks quietly, looming a little.

Jill Buono is staring right at them. God, this is so against the rules. In theory one of them needs to ask for a transfer, if they’re serious about doing what they’re doing. At the very
least
they shouldn’t be doing it here. “Sure,” Addie says, not pulling away an inch. She touches the hem of his shirt with one finger and wonders how his brother died. Brother
and
father. It’s a lot of people to lose. “We don’t have to talk.”

Eli nods, exhaling. “Okay,” he says. His face is so serious. Addie doesn’t know how she ever thought he was a joke. “Thanks.”

Chapter Twelve

“We should go for Mexican tonight,” Eli tells Addie one morning a couple of weeks later, lying in bed with his head on the soft olive plane of her stomach. She’s got her hand in his hair, lazy, scratching lightly with her short, bare nails. “Guero’s, maybe?” he asks hopefully. “Coronas and guac?”

“Can’t.” Addie frowns down at him, shaking her curly head back and forth without bothering to lift it off the pillow. “Family dinner.” Then, running the sole of her foot up and down the back of his thigh, “I could skip it, I guess.”

“Skip family dinner?” Eli raises his eyebrows, though he doesn’t actually think she can see his face from this angle. But that’s new, coming from her. “Seriously?”

Addie sighs. “No,” she amends. “Probably not.” Her knees drift apart as Eli draws a curving line with one finger along the length of her inner thigh. She’s not nearly as guarded as she used to be, will let him look at her pretty much as much and however he wants. “I don’t know. I used to really love seeing them all every week, you know? Or like, even if I didn’t love it, I didn’t even think about it very much. But now I go over there and it’s just like, eating red sauce with a bunch of assholes. I don’t know. It sucks.”