Stay Vertical (5 page)

Madison’s reaction was immediate. “No. Not one. Not the tiniest one.”

I tried harder. “I remember when I was in kindergarten, she was a teacher’s assistant at our school. She would tell the most interesting fairy tale stories to the kids.”

“Yeah,” said Madison. “That was before Dad left her, before she became a few Bradys short of a bunch.”

I kept on. “So you
do
remember her, teaching us to ride bikes?”

Apparently not. “No. My friend taught me how to ride by pushing me down the hill on my bike.”

“And she used to sew us clothes. Of course I got your hand-me-downs, but Turk, you should’ve seen some of the stuff she sewed. She was really quite good. I remember this one cute little dress with blue flowers embroidered—”

“Give it a rest, sister,” Madison snapped, getting to her feet. Evidently thinking of our mother drove her to drink, for she went to a credenza behind Ford’s desk and unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Jack Daniels. “Again, that was before Dad left.”

“At least she struggled to hold it together back then.”

Madison shrugged. “It must’ve been a mighty big struggle, because the second Dad left, she became one accordion short of a polka band.”

Turk chuckled. “Maddy, you’re on a roll today.”

She took a sip from her glass. “I’ve got a million of them. Ah. Okay Turk, if you take Fidelia down to the parking lot, Lupe’s there in her Honda to take her home for a nap. I thought I’d take this opportunity to get my hair done.”

Turk took the cue. Standing, he let Maddy sling the baby whatnot bag over his shoulder while he took little Fidelia by the hand. It was an adorable sight, really, the juxtaposition of the bad boy biker, his dusty bicep covered with ink, holding the hand of the toddler with the droopy drawers. It touched some weird maternal part of me I hadn’t known existed.
I was an aunt!
It was almost as good as being a mother—another thing I hadn’t known I wanted.

When Turk left, Madison refilled her glass of Jack, as if prepared for a
really
good, long shopping and pampering trip. She looked me right in the eye. “I don’t want Fidelia knowing that old bat.”

I closed my eyes patiently. “I get it, Madison. Ingrid would be a horrible grandmother, anyway. Would she ever babysit, even if she wasn’t sick? No, she would not. She hates children, plain and simple.”

“You got that right.” Madison took her seat again.

“But look at it this way. If she hadn’t of had us, we wouldn’t know each other.”

That made Madison smile. “True that. I’m glad you’re back, June. How long will you stay before jetting off to some other godforsaken third world country?”

“Well, I didn’t finish out my contract in Kenya. I could always re-up for another two years anyway, I’m sure. I was building water irrigation schemes for tribespeople, which is really frustrating when there
is
no water. It hasn’t rained much there in years.”

Madison nodded knowingly. It was interesting that we both had gone into fields where we attempted to help people. “Water is the big thing everywhere, what with global warming. Listen. I know you’re here on a mission, June. You’ve got ‘mission’ written in giant letters all over your face. You might as well be carrying a giant wooden cross and wearing pauper’s robes, you’re so missionary. Tell me. What is it you want me to do about Ingrid?”

Relief washed through me that she’d guessed my goal. New panic set in about her reaction to it. “Well. You know she has no insurance, of course. Don got her onto Medicaid, but they only cover a certain portion of it.”

Madison’s mouth was a thin line. “I see.”

I blundered ahead. “I guess she stopped dealing crystal awhile back when she just wasn’t up to it anymore, so everything’s fallen to shit. The heat apparently hasn’t worked in a while which was fine over the summer, but not now.”

“Well. What did she expect? Even people from her generation need to save for a rainy day. It’s not just us young ‘uns who need to scrimp and save.”

“I know. I couldn’t agree more. She lived from day to day, and everyone knew the time would come when she’d have nothing to fall back on.”

“Yes. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Well. She obviously needs to be in some kind of facility.”

“How much longer do they estimate she has? If it’s that aggressive—”

“That’s the thing. There’s only a three percent chance she’ll survive five years. So we’re not looking at long-term care.”

I told Madison some of the options available with Medicaid’s help, but I could see her eyes were glazing over. I couldn’t believe that even the most neglected and abused child would not step up to the plate when it came to a parent’s death. I just couldn’t. She called me the chosen one, but I only had a marginally better lifestyle than her because I had more upscale friends. If Madison’s friends had been nerds and bookworms, she might’ve had better dining tables to sit at, too. As it was, she hung with the thugs-n-drugs crowd, so her nightly meal was a bag of Doritos around her campfire.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Standing, Maddy took her glass to the window and gazed out at the red rocks. I came up behind her, because I liked to look at those spires, too. “I hear you, June, I really do. See, the thing is. That old witch never did
one tiny thing to help me
.” She turned to face me, and her features were hard, determined. “Not the tiniest. She’d scream if I took the last banana. I only owned two pairs of pants, and I’m sure you remember how embarrassing that is to a teenager. Then she says we can’t even wash our pants because we can’t waste water? I was
starving
through my entire teen years, June. Whenever I couldn’t stay at Sabrina’s, I stole food from the market. Once, I even had a fight with Sabrina so I hitch-hiked down to Mexico. Alone, June, alone! I remember when it was, too, because it was that month that fucking serial killer was cruising up and down highway seventeen, and I was hitch-hiking in the
same place
on the
same day
as that chick whose arms he later cut off. When I got home, what did Ingrid say? ‘Oh, hi, Madison.
Gone with the Wind
is on TV now.’ She didn’t even notice I was gone. I was
fourteen
, June.”

“I know. I know. I know.” I didn’t know what else to say, really. I knew this was going to be a hard sell, but the more I listened to Madison, the more futile it felt. “We don’t owe her a thing. I couldn’t agree more. You’re preaching to the choir here, Maddy. The thing is…Could you really live with yourself if you didn’t help a little bit? It’s only for another year or so, and it’s only a couple thousand a month. I know nurses don’t make a lot, but it seems like Ford’s doing all right. He used to know Ingrid. He seems like he has a heart. Could you agree to help out for, say, maybe one year, tops?”

“No.” Just that one word, short and clipped. “No.”

“No? Because without it, Maddy, the only place we can afford to put her is one of those horrible, real low-budget joints where they put all of the drug addicts with no other resources. She’d be shoved into a ward with about thirty other dying meth heads who look like Auschwitz survivors and—”

“Well. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Now.” Madison strode back to the credenza where she banged her empty glass down. Heavy male boots were heading down the interior hallway that bisected all the hangar offices of various estimators, accounting types, and foremen. Lots of teamsters and truck drivers had been coming and going, but the hollow sound of these boots stood out with authority.

Even Madison turned around to face the closed door. Alert, obeying. I could easily read the excitement in her face before Ford even entered the room.
Jesus, what a man.
I had heard he’d been hit by some IED in Afghanistan or wherever he’d been patrolling as a SEAL. The ropey, thick scarring of his jaw didn’t even begin to detract from his innate beauty. His father had been Italian, and I guess Speed had told me he’d recently found out his mother was Apache, right before she died. Knowing that now, I could see it in the profile of his hooked nose as he gathered Maddy in his arms and bent a bit at the knees to kiss her on the mouth.

He crushed her lovingly, his lips lingering on hers. Jealousy burned in the pit of my stomach and I wanted to slap myself. This was my sister here! She deserved Ford, and everything that came with Ford, and then some. It was just a childish crush of mine, and an absurd one too, thinking Ford would ever be mine. Still, I had to turn away, and I even wished
I
could drink some of the Jack Daniels.

He turned to me. “I heard you were here.” He came for me with wide open arms. I wanted to scream and run away when he wrapped them around me, but instead I stood frozen like a statue, barely daring to breathe in his scent of sweat and exhaust fumes.

“Little June,” he murmured in my ear. “I haven’t seen you since, well, since you went away to college.” Thank God he drew back and held me at arm’s length to look at me.

“Well,” I breathed. “I’m not here for a good reason.”

He made a serious face out of respect. “I know. I heard. Are you doing all right behind that diagnosis? I mean, she’s your mother and all.”

That was Ford’s way of saying that Ingrid was knitting with only one needle. I briefly wondered if Ford was at all concerned that it ran in the family. He did just have a daughter with Maddy. “Oh, you know. We were never that close. Thank God I never relied on her for much. Her death won’t deprive me of anything. It’s just the…
getting there
that’ll be the hard part.”

Ford had wandered behind his desk and was fingering some papers, already tuning out my talk about Ingrid. He probably knew it was a sore spot with Madison, and I doubt they ever brought up Ingrid’s name at all. I didn’t want to babble on, so I started stammering some crap congratulating them on their wedding. I was hugely relieved when a big clattering in the inner hallway took the attention off of me.

Big men’s voices boomed out. All three of us stiffened, then quick as a whip, Ford snatched a pistol from where it had been secreted in his jeans waistband, underneath his leather cut. It sounded as though one man had busted through the heavy metal door at the end of the wing that led to the parking lot, and a few men were arguing with him, trying to get him to leave. Lots of hoarse, passionate yelling ensued—lots of “fuckers!” and “motherfuckers!”

Holding out his hand in the “stay” position toward me and Maddy, Ford took three long strides to the open door and braced himself against it, just popping his head out briefly to see what the tussle was. By the confused look on his face, I surmised he didn’t know the intruder.

Ford gazed down at his office floor, then back into the hallway. Then back at his office floor, his brows knitted. It was clear he was undecided what to do about the intruder. Maddy and I exchanged shrugs, and one voice rose above the others.

“
Listen
, motherfuckers! My name is Lytton and I’m here to see my fucking
brother
!”

“Ford doesn’t
have
a brother, motherfucker!” the tough construction or biker guy yelled back.

“Who
is
that?” Maddy finally asked.

Apparently the guy—Lytton—was no threat, for Ford was sticking his pistol back into his jeans by the time Lytton busted through the knot of men and gained entrance to Ford’s office.

I was frankly surprised how mildly Ford reacted to a presumed stranger busting into his inner sanctum. He allowed this pissed-off, fuming giant of a man to back him up against the door. Ford looked more mystified than angry when the guy poked him in the chest with a forefinger. A guy with waist-length hair who looked like his craggy face should be on an Aztec pyramid—I remembered him as Tuzigoot—grabbed the stranger’s shoulder, yelling,

“Boss! I told this fucker you didn’t have any fucking brother. You want us to take him out?”

“No, hold it,” Ford said. Ford
did
wrench Lytton’s finger away from his chest, tossing it aside like a grenade, and he got himself away from the irate guy, walking farther into his office. But he didn’t tell Lytton to get lost, or to fuck off, or anything like that.

Lytton poked the air. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you, asshole,” he roared.

It was then that I noticed—Ford and Lytton
did
bear more than a slight resemblance to each other. Lytton’s shoulder tattoo of a stylized eagle even resembled Ford’s shoulder ink of his club’s skull and bones. Of course Lytton didn’t wear a cut, but his figure was the same fine, muscular, long-limbed beauty of Ford.

Lytton had the same aquiline Roman nose with the same bump in the middle. The same full, lush lips, bowed as though an angel had pressed her finger beneath his nose. The same satiny black brows. You almost had to blink twice to make sure you weren’t looking into a mirror.

Lytton wore the plaid shirt with the rolled-up sleeves that could be the mark of any engineer or worker. His Nikes told that he could have even been a computer nerd, like so many of the boys I had grown up with. But the way he yelled was anything but nerdly. He had power and passion and enormous conviction of his words when he bellowed,

“You lying, sleazy motherfucker! You knew I was your brother this entire fucking time and you couldn’t be bothered to slink on down to the res and mingle with the rest of us dirt worshippers and tomahawk chuckers!”

Ford held his hands up, palms toward Lytton. “Wait, just wait one fucking second here. I’ve never seen you before in my fucking life.”

“Of course you haven’t! Because when you found out we had the same father, you refused to fucking acknowledge me so you could get his entire fucking inheritance!”

There was a brief silence then. You could practically hear everyone in the room—and rubbernecking out in the hallway—gasping in shock.

Lytton even stood still, panting, his arms hanging at his sides. The vein in his temple throbbed with emotion.

That was when my heart broke for him. He was tormented, stomped into the mud by shitty parents, too.