Spring Tide (15 page)

CHAPTER NINE

O
n Wednesday, I was up at seven and high on caffeine by eight, movin’ with my music. I figured if Sarah could sleep through the vacuum cleaner she could sleep through my semi-noisy groove-a-rama. I was wrong. I woke her up, but she joined me and we were having a great time until Nick came out of her bedroom, catching me in a T-shirt and underwear yet again. But nothing, not even getting caught jammin’ in my panties, could keep me from my coffee-induced rock fest. And Boy Wonder was getting down, rubbing his nipples, adding to the fun.

There was a sharp knock and I made my way to the door funky style while putting on cutoffs. Jericho stood in the hall, his face as straight as his posture.

Party over.
“What’s up?”

“Ran into Freddy last night. He said Deborah was reopening The Bakery and you were going back to work. But that can’t be right because you wouldn’t do something so stupid.”

Stupid?
I walked to the living room and turned off my tunes. “And what if I am?”

“You’re going back?” Sarah said. “But—”

I coughed as a sign for her to shut up.

“Are you out of your mind? Explain how this makes any sense at all!” The volume of his voice rose with every word.

“I don’t like your tone. Ease up.” I crossed my arms and mimicked his stance.

“I really don’t care! You can’t go back there!”

“Where do you get off coming in here and talking to me like this? Oh my God, is that why you took me to The Landing, set up that little chitty chat with Jermaine?”

“Yes! You can’t be at The Bakery!” His eyes flared with bright blue light.

I looked at Sarah and Nick, who were following the argument but weren’t reacting to the glow on his face.

His voiced exploded. “Answer me! Why are you doing this?”

I sucked in a breath and looked to the corner of the room, concentrating on the fringe on the drapes.

_______

My father’s voice ruptured my eardrums.

“Answer me! Don’t stand there, get on it! I am so sick of you and your brother’s stupid shit! How fuckin’ hard is it to take out the trash?” He flung the garbage can across the garage and it hit the wall.

Brad was supposed to take the cans to the curb, but I was the one who was home when Dad noticed the mistake. I spent the day in my room so Dad wouldn’t have to look at me and then he ordered me to scrub out every trash can in the house to remind me to get my act together. I was ten years old.

_______

“Kris?” Sarah put her hand on my elbow.

My fingers rubbed hard against my shorts. Dad was still yelling.

“Kris?” Sarah said again.

I waited for Dad to storm out of the garage.

“He needs to leave.” I regulated my voice. “Nick, make him leave.” I went to the kitchen and took the yellow sponge from the sink.

Nick squared his shoulders. “She wants you to go.”

“I’m not leaving.” Jericho stared him down.

“You don’t want to start somethin’ with me, man.” Nick took a step closer to him.

“Don’t push me, Nick. You’ll lose.”

Nick pushed him. Jericho grabbed his wrist. In a blink, Nick’s face was flattened against the wall. Nick’s right arm was twisted behind his back that was held by Jericho, Jericho’s other arm hooked around Nick’s neck, immobilizing him. Jericho let him go.

“Enough!” Sarah took Jericho’s hand and tugged him to the front door. “You have no idea what you just set into motion. You have to go now. Please, for her.”

I heard a door close. She came to my room where I was kneeling on the floor, sorting the laundry.

“Kris, stop. I love that you clean, but not today, and not because of this.” She pulled me up and sat me on the bed next to her. “I know you can’t help it, but stop.”

“Why did he have to do that?” I bundled up the dirty clothes and stood. “I can’t be with him, can’t be with someone who goes off like that.”

“He cares about you. He didn’t handle it very well, but I can see his point. I wouldn’t want you going back there either. Sit down!” She wrestled a load of darks from me. “Whether you want to admit it or not, you care about him too. You yelled back at him. That means something. Why didn’t you tell him—?”

“I should’ve, I know. But he was being such a dick.”

She dropped the pile of shirts and shorts behind the chair. “Don’t clean. Put on your suit and let’s go down to the beach and be mellow.”

I started a load, made Sarah’s bed, and put on my bikini.

There was no wind or clouds, only baking sun—a true Texas summer. We sat at the edge of the shore and revisited other unpleasant memories, some that were funny then and some not, but we didn’t talk about her dad or mine. An hour passed, the sound of my father’s voice disintegrating with the waves.

Sarah suddenly jumped up. “Oh no! Crud, crud, crud! I have a massage appointment in fifteen minutes. If he cancels me I won’t be able to get in for weeks and he has the best hands in the Rio Grande Valley.” She broke into a sprint.

I was lost in a song when I saw Jericho standing fifteen feet away, his face calm. I really didn’t want to talk about Dad. But I wanted him to understand and rejected the lies I could tell him. He walked to me and I got on my feet.

He folded his hands under his chin. “I’m sorry I spoke to you that way. I’m so, so worried about you going back there.”

“Apology accepted.”

“You forgive me, just like that.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. I thought there’d be more arguing …” He turned his gaze to the waves. “What did I do? What did I set into motion?”

I tipped my head left. “Have you ever had a secret—no, not a secret—a truth that you hold closely?”

“You have no idea. Yes I do.”

“Then you’ll understand that when I tell you mine, you’ll respect what it means. My dad had a wicked bad temper. His policy was to punish first, ask questions later if he was gonna ask at all. ‘Answer me’ was something he said every single time. I hate those two words.”

His eyes were examining the discolorations on my forearms, burns from oven racks or grease. Then he zeroed in on the two-inch scar that ran from my right cheekbone to my ear.

“Stop right now. I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong. He never hit us or physically hurt us in any way. He got very angry, very fast.” My finger ran over the scar on the side of my face. “This I got having fun.” I turned my arms out. “These are from working.”

“He yelled at you?”

“He was really scary when he was fired up. I can’t say I wish he would’ve just hit me instead, but I’ve thought about it. And it’s not that I forgive easily—it’s that I know how it feels to not be forgiven.”

“You don’t get angry very often, do you?”

“I try very hard not to.” I took his wrist, prodding him to walk back to the building, the static shock so common then that I hardly noticed it.

“That’s how I’m trying to be.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

He took both of my hands in his. “It won’t happen again. I wish I could take it back.”

“Forgiven. Now stop it.”

“Is your dad why you’re so responsible? Why you act older than you are?”

“That’s part of it. I am over a year older than my friends because we moved to Austin halfway through kindergarten and my mom wanted to get me further along with the speech lady and do the grade over. But yeah, I studied and worked like a dog when I was younger because those were the two things I wouldn’t get in trouble for with Dad. Old habits die hard. Job and school, job and school, keep Dad happy.”

“Please don’t go back to The Bakery. It’s not safe for you. It’s—”

“Deborah’s closing for good. It’s too bad though. I met some really interesting customers there.”

He didn’t catch the inference but his face and body visibly relaxed. “Thank God. I had the worst feeling about you going back.”

“Like your bad feeling about Joel?”

“Yes, like that.”

“So your bad feelings are equivalent to seeing the future, traveling through time, what?”

“Call it intuition, instinct, whatever. From the day I met you, I had a bad feeling about you being at The Bakery. From the first time I saw Joshua, I had a bad feeling about him.”

“So you’re psychic?”

“Not at all.”

“I gotta get movin’ or I’ll be late.” I opened the lobby door for him.

He came with me into the elevator. “Isn’t this when we get to make up?”

“Can you save the thought? In about twenty minutes, I’ll be chopping things with big, sharp knives. If I’m still in a J-induced haze it’s likely I’ll cut off a finger and then your whole workplace safety argument will go right out the window.”

“J-induced—?”

“Your name has way too many syllables. I’ve taken the liberty of abbreviating it.”

“I like it.”

“I’m glad. What’s goin’ on with your eyes? I know it’s not my imagination.”

He rubbed his back teeth with his tongue. “I promise I’ll tell you. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but soon. Promise.”

At the door to my unit he kissed me, apologized again, and had started down the hall when he turned back to me. “And, Kris, about Jermaine, that wasn’t a setup. I genuinely thought you might be interested in the job and I wanted to take you there for your birthday.”

CHAPTER TEN

“She said he’s been around for over a month. He’s compromised the next door neighbor, is calling himself Joel.”

Her forehead creased. “You think Devon told him to keep an eye on her?”

“What does Devon know about her that would make him take his number one out of the game? It doesn’t make sense. Unless,” he covered his mouth with his hand, “unless he’s trying to get his hooks into our new awares. It makes perfect sense. They wouldn’t know any better.”

“This is bad.”

He yanked his hand through his hair. “I’m on edge all the time now. I’ve gotta tell her.”

“You can’t, absolutely not. You’ll alienate yourself from her and that’s the worst thing you could do right now.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “Are you sure it’s Devon’s signature you’ve been picking up? What about the other one? The one that likes to play games? The redhead. Agatha?”

“Ava likes to play hide-and-seek. She hasn’t been here and I’ve been scanning twice a day. Devon … it’s hard to tell. It just feels like him.” His head landed on his arms that were crossed on the table. “Kris is the only thing I need to feel right again. Why can’t I have this, Julia? Why?”

She put her hands on his shoulders. “Be strong for her. Be stronger for you.”

_______

S
unday was the best day of the week. I called it Happy Sunday because it was the only day neither Jericho nor I had work. Typically, I’d lay out at their pool and read, make lunch, and in the afternoon we played cards with Nick and Sarah or did whatever we felt like. He’d gone running out of the house with a short board hours earlier, mumbling something about big waves from oil tankers.

Over the past month my surfing instruction had covered duck diving, turtle rolling, or Eskimo something. Since my board was neither a short board nor a long board, he thought I should practice all the wave-evasion maneuvers on the paddle out. But my fear of jellyfish was on the decline with the knowledge that he had some freak way of communicating with them. I didn’t question it. I was grateful I hadn’t gotten stung.

With a towel spread out at the pool’s edge, I tried to read but my eyes couldn’t focus. He knelt over me and it startled me so that I shoved him into the pool. I didn’t remember falling asleep.

He came to the top. “Why?”

I covered my mouth and yawned. “You scared me.”

“Hey, I need to ask you something.”

“What?”

He grabbed my wrists and pulled me in. The water was on the cool side, spanking me awake.