“Yes, sir.”
“And tell your mom to come and see me. I’ll see if I can find anything for her.” In high school, back when I went, I’d hear people talk about my dad a lot. Some would call him the Coach Taylor (of Friday Night Lights fame) of our town: the man with all the answers. I didn’t really understand it until now. Niall should’ve been the first clue.
“I really appreciate it, sir,” Dumb Name responds.
“Kiss-ass,” I say, because it’s expected of me.
“Shut up, Logan,” says everyone. Again.
Dad sighs, tells Dumb Name while pointing at me, “Say hello to your supervisor.”
I kick off the wall. “Seriously?”
“Dad,” Lucas interjects, using the same tone he’s always used when it comes to decisions about me. Luke thinks he’s my dad—or at the very least—believes he has more power over me, a higher morality. “Do you think that’s the best idea?”
Dad shrugs, asks me, “Do you think you can handle it?”
“Yes, sir.” Now I’m the kiss-ass.
He says to Luke, “If Logan says he can handle it, he can handle it.”
I reach for my phone, send Aubrey a text:
Today is a good day, Red. And I’m pretty sure it’s all because of your cookies.
“What kind of cookies?” Cameron asks, reading over my shoulder. “And is that Aubrey?”
“Who’s Aubrey?” Lucas asks. “Is it that girl from the store Leo told us about?”
I open the door. “Get back to work, ya slackers.”
15
Aubrey
I need to come up with a name for Logan’s penis. Preferably food related. And something more creative than any make of sausage.
It’s been two days since he deemed my boobs cookies, and I’ve narrowed it down to Pork Sword or Yogurt Slinger—both things I can barely type, let alone say aloud.
The bell above the door chimes and Lachlan Preston is there. “Hi, Red! Bye, Red!” And then he’s gone again.
I release the breath I’d been holding, startled when I saw him, as if he could somehow sense that I’d been thinking about his brother’s penis.
A half hour passes—I’ve added Meat Popsicle to the list—and Lachlan Preston is back. He doesn’t just pop his head in this time. His entire everything walks through the door, hands grasping the straps of his backpack. “I’m watching you,” I say, doing that lame two-finger point from my eyes to him.
He laughs, mumbles, “Sorry about the other day. Swear, I won’t do it again.” He drops his backpack by the counter and looks up at me with those blue-blue eyes of his.
“How old are you?”
“Nine.”
“Huh. You getting your girl something else?”
“We broke up,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Sucks. I’m sorry.”
He shrugs. “She’s going with Snot Eater now, so whatever.”
“Snot Eater sounds like a real stud. And she picked him over you?”
“I don’t really care,” he says, his head tilting. “I mean, I’m nine. It’s not like I’m going to marry the girl.”
I lean on the glass counter. “So, you’re going to play the field, huh?”
“Nah. I’m a one-woman kind of man. Like Cameron. Or Leo. I’m not like Logan.”
Well…
“My dad makes me come to Lucy’s shop after school until he gets off work. He says I’m too young to stay on my own. Lucy just sits there and reads books, and Cam’s always working. You think I can hang out here?”
“With me?” I ask, my eyes wide.
“Unless you're busy.”
I shake my head. “I’m not busy.”
“Cool.” He smiles that gap-toothed smile. “You need any help with anything? I can, like, clean or dust or something.”
“Dude, it’s so quiet here, all I do is clean and dust.”
He giggles the way nine-year-olds are supposed to and picks up his backpack, points to the armchair next to the counter. “Can I sit there?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks, Red. You’re a good friend.”
Friend.
I now have multiple friends. Too bad they all share the same genetics.
Lachlan sets himself up on the chair, school books on the table next to him.
“They got you doing homework young, huh?”
“Tell me about it,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“Do you know what you want to be when you’re older?”
He shrugs. “I’m nine, Red. Don’t be asking me such hard-hitting questions,” he says through a smirk.
“Right on.” I get on the laptop, open Spotify. “You want some music on while you work?”
He gets to his feet quickly, starts tapping away on the keyboard. A second later: “My balls. My balls. Put it in your booty hole.”
I let Lachlan choose the soundtrack for the afternoon. Maybe I should filter what he listens to, but it’s obvious he’s heard them all before. And maybe I shouldn’t be playing that kind of music in my store, but it’s not like I have any customers. I let him go on with his homework while I rearrange the window display, the order of the pens, the angle of the notebooks. When I get back to the counter, his textbooks are gone, replaced with a sketchbook. His eyes are narrowed, his bottom lip jutted out in concentration. Between his fingers, he holds a graphite pen. “Whatcha doin’ there?” I ask.
He looks up, dazed and confused, and slowly turns the sketchbook my direction. On the page, in gray lead, is an anime drawing of a kid with shiny hair, a scarf around his neck, thick jacket, hands shoved in his pockets. It’s so detailed, shaded to almost perfection, that I gasp at the sight of it. “That bad, huh?” he asks.
“No. Dude. This is…” I take the sketchbook from him, lift it higher. “This is insane. Did you copy this from somewhere?”
“No. I just thought it and drew it. Do you like it?”
“Dude…” It’s all I can say. “You’re amazing.”
“Yeah?” He sounds surprised.
“You’ve never been told how good you are?”
He shrugs.
“Do you draw a lot?”
“When no one’s looking, yeah.”
“What do you mean?”
Another shrug. “I’m a jock.”
“So?”
“A jock can’t be an artist.”
“Don’t do that, Lachlan. Don’t stereotype yourself. Ever. You are who you are, and you like what you like.”
“But Lucas was a jock.”
“And Lucas is…?”
“My oldest brother. Two above Logan. We’re both sprinters. He trains me. My family—they all come to watch my meets. It’s like… the only time they come together when they’re not forced to. So…”
“So… you like the attention?”
“No,” he says, taking the sketchbook and closing it. He shoves it back in his bag, as if it’s something that needs to be hidden. As if it’s a secret. With his back to me, he adds, “I like seeing them all together, though. I was, like, super young when Lucy went off to college, and then Lucas moved out, and Leo moved to Raleigh.”
“You still have Logan… and the twins, right?”
“The twins have each other, Red, and Logan’s not home much on weekends, so…”
I get between him and his backpack, knowing he’s about to leave. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What do you like more? Running or drawing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Drawing doesn’t bring my family together.” He moves around me, shoulders his backpack. “I better get back before Lucy knows I’m missing.”
16
Logan
“You’d love college,” Dumb Name says, helping me nail up a frame. Being on supervisor duty means getting back to basics. “The girls there—they’d eat you alive.”
“I do fine right here,” I tell him.
“Yeah, but the options are limited here.”
No shit.
“Besides, they’re all the same here.”
Not always.
Luke approaches, checks out the frame sitting in the yard, then gets out his measuring tape. “I know how to frame,” I mumble, annoyed. “You gotta give me room to breathe, bro.”
Luke pockets the tape measure. “Sorry,” he says, then: “Have you guys seen my phone? I can’t find it.”
“Have you tried calling it?” Dumb Name asks.
That question earns him an eye roll from Luke. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“You ask stupid questions, you get stupid answers,” I tell Dumb Name. Then to Luke: “You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”
“What the hell does that even mean?” he murmurs, and then he’s off—probably to annoy someone else. As soon as he’s out of earshot, Dumb Name asks, “Where’s his phone?”
“In my pocket.”
He cracks a smile. “What are we doing with it?”
“We’re dry walling the bathroom this afternoon.”
“You’re putting it in the wall?”
I shake my head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Lunch comes and goes. Luke asks everyone at least three times if they’ve seen his phone. Dumb Name and I hang the drywall in the bathroom, patch it, paint it. The best part of the plan is that Luke will be so embarrassed he let it happen to him, he’ll repair the work himself when he finds the phone. If he ever finds it. Just as Dumb Name and I take a break to admire our work, Dad walks in, tells us he has to take off early. “Hot date?” Dumb Name asks, waggling his eyebrows.
Dad sighs, then smirks. “Yes. With yo mama!” And then he does this strange old man dance that he really only ever does with Lachlan. It’s rare that I get to see this side of him—the jokey, carefree side—and I laugh so hard, it makes me breathless.
“Seriously?” Dumb Name asks. His mom’s been single forever, about the length of time Dad has, but the idea of either of them moving on with each other, or at all, makes me a little uncomfortable. Not that I don’t want to see my old man happy. I just can’t imagine him with anyone else. And I sure as shit can’t envision anyone replacing my mom.
Dad taps at the doorjamb. “I’m introducing her to a friend of mine. I think she might do well in an office environment, answering phones and such.”
“She’s not very good on a computer,” Dumb Name says.
Dad smiles. “She’ll do just fine.” He switches his focus to me. “You can finish up early. I need you to pick up Lachlan, take him to training with that specialist sprint coach.”
“Isn’t that Lucas’s thing?”
“Lucas doesn’t know about it.” His words are meant for me. “We’ll talk about it later.” Then he points to the wall. “I hope you at least left the ringer on before putting it in there.”
My eyes go wide.
Dumb Name yells, “It was his idea!” Fucking traitor.
Dad just laughs.
I say, removing my tool belt, “So I’m getting him from Lucy’s shop?”
“Nah. Lucy mentioned that he’s been hanging out at some new store a couple doors down. Stationery or something. Do you know it?”
Aubrey
“Should I be calling your dad or something?”
Lachlan looks up from the pile of notebooks he’s counting and shakes his head. “Lucy already did.”
“And it’s okay that you’re here?”
“Lucy told him you were good people.” He goes back to counting, from the beginning. He’d come in after school again, backpack in tow, and made me come up with a task for him. To help me. As if he could sense that I needed help. I do, just not in the way he thinks. Besides Logan’s occasional text message, my phone has sat stagnate all week. I’m both lonely and alone, and there’s no remedy for that. No cure. There is, however, Lachlan Preston.
I get back behind the counter, pretend to be working as hard as he is. “What do kids around here do for fun?”
His shoulders lift with his heavy inhale, and he looks over at me, his eyes narrowed. I’ve screwed up his counting again. He’s clearly taking it seriously. Maybe my little speech about shoplifters, stock control and loss prevention really got to him. Oops. “Don’t worry about counting the books. Come talk to me.”
“You sure?”
“Yes!”
A smile breaks through, glorious, and there’s no doubt the kid’s destined to break hearts. “There’s a lot to do around here,” he tells me.
“Like what?”
“Like swimming, fishing, jet skiing, camping.”
“And where must one go to do all these?”
“Our house.” His eyes are huge. “You should come over to our house! Yeah! On Saturday! Please?” He’s nodding, hopeful.
“I work on Saturdays.” And that’s stage-six clinger activity, I don’t say.
“Then Sunday?”
Tempting… “Anything that doesn’t involve your house?”
“Batting cages. Movies. If you drive a little bit, trampoline park, rock climbing…”
“Hmm. I don’t have a car. Or a license.”
He eyes me warily. “Aren’t you, like, old?”
I flick the brim of his cap. “I’m not that old. What else? Any hidden gems?”
He adjusts his hat, but it’s clear he’s losing his momentum. “All the fun things to do are at my house. You should just come over. Lincoln—”
“Your friend?”
“My brother, one of the twins… he and Liam—”
“The other twin?”
He nods. “He just got a girlfriend.”
“Liam?”
“No. Lincoln. Come on, Red. Keep up.”
“Got it,” I laugh out. “Keep going.”
“Linc and Liam have been inseparable their entire lives. Like, for real. They even have this weird scar on their elbows, Liam on the left, Lincoln on the right. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I can’t remember. Some days, I can’t even tell them apart. Anyway, these scars—no one knows how they got them. No one. And so everyone thinks they were conjoined twins separated at birth. Dad says they weren’t, but I don’t know. Seems pretty suspect to me.”
A giggle falls from my lips. “I bet they were.”
“So anyway,” Lachlan continues, and I lean against the counter, loving the company. “Lincoln got a girlfriend recently. His first. And now he’s doing all this stuff without Liam. Which, I mean, I don’t really get it. Why can’t Liam go on the dates with them, right?”
“Right.”
“So Liam’s like, lost without Lincoln. He wanders around the house, and sometimes I catch him talking to himself, like Linc is right there next to him. The other day, I saw him have an entire conversation with Linc in the kitchen while he was making a snack. Linc wasn’t even home. And then last night, at dinner, he took two glasses out of the cupboard and set one next to him—”
“Where Linc normally sits?”
“Yeah. He poured the juice and everything. Even said ‘you’re welcome’, even though Linc wasn’t there to say thank you.”
I’m smiling so wide my cheeks hurt. “Your family is fascinating.”
“Not really.” He shrugs.
“Tell me more?”
“Hmm…” He’s tapping his chin. “Did you know I killed my mother?”
My stomach drops. So does my jaw. He said it so matter-of-factly that I stumble over my next words. “I thought your mom died of cancer.”
“Yeah. Right after I was born. Six kids before me, she was in perfect health. I come along, boom, dead.”
“Lachy…” I start, and that’s all I can get out because he’s looking at me with those blue-blue eyes, and I’m looking at him like he’s a poor, lost soul.
“It’s true,” he whispers, dropping his gaze.
“Lachlan, you know cancer… it’s just a really sucky disease, and there’s no—”
“Cure?” he cuts in.
“I was going to say reason.
There’s no reason. And if there was, if one day someone really, really smart finds that reason, I can guarantee it won’t be you. It won’t be having a child. Especially one as great as you.”
He’s looking at me again, as if he’s trying to work out if I’m telling the truth. I keep my eyes on his, hoping he finds whatever he’s looking for. I refuse to be the first to look away. I won’t. I don’t. Not even when the bell above the door chimes, my first customer for the day. I’ll lose the sale if it means this little boy understands that he did not kill his mother.
Lachlan looks up at the sound of a short, sharp whistle, so I do the same. Logan’s a foot inside the door, his hands in his pockets. “You playing that staring game?” he asks. “I used to love that game.”
“Yeah,” Lachlan answers for the both of us. “The staring game.”
“Dad had a thing, so I’m taking you. Get your shit,” Logan says, even though Lachlan’s already picking up his backpack. Logan hasn’t looked at me. Hasn’t said a word. Apparently, I’m invisible in the presence of anyone else. When Lachlan gets to him, Logan hands him his keys. “Wait for me in the truck.”
“Why?”
“I’ll let you choose the music.”
“Deal! Thanks, Red! Bye, Red!”
Logan’s still standing just inside the store when his brother moves around him, leaving us alone. As soon as the door’s closed, Logan focuses on me. He doesn’t say anything, just trails his gaze from top to bottom, back again. “What?” I say, crossing my arms. “Let me guess. I look like a unicorn? Or a peacock?”
His smile is faint. “Fuck, Red. You look good enough to eat.”
It’s only four-thirty, and it’s the first time I’ve ever thought of closing the shop early and maybe walking around town. Maybe catch a movie. I’ll probably be the only one there on a Thursday evening. Scratch that. I’ll probably be the only one there on a Thursday evening alone. For some reason, the idea of this doesn’t completely suck, and so I start switching off all the displays. I take what little cash is in the register and bring it with me down the short hallway to the small office. I’m at the safe when the bell chimes, and shit, I forgot to lock the door and flick the sign to closed. “Sorry,” I call out, rushing out onto the sales floor. “We were just closing up.”