Chapter Eleven
Charlene
Bob looked like Bob. Sweet, average-looking, sports jacket wearing, balding, and boring to the bone Bob.
Gibson looked like Gibson. Badass, tight black tee-wearing, muscles on display, harsh look on his face, smoking hot Gibson.
The difference between the men was not lost on Beth, and she started coughing so violently that I turned to her and saw she was laughing helplessly.
“Sorry,” she murmured and pressed her face into Will’s side, and he looked down at her, fighting a grin of his own.
“Who are you?” Bob asked.
“Oh,” I said, turning my attention to my ex-husband. “Hello, Bob. This is Gibson.”
“Charlene?” he asked again.
“Yes?” I said, but it came out a little like a question too because it was who I was, and we’d been together for a long time, so he’d know that.
Had he lost his mind? Perhaps he’d had a mini-stroke?
“Backfired,” Gibson muttered.
“What?”
“I guess your plan seems less fun now,” Gibson said, not putting this as a question. “Let’s get this done, we have places to be. Get her boxes, and we’ll leave.”
“They’re upstairs,” Bob said looking from Gibson to me and back again.
He hadn’t even hauled them down the stairs? He’d expected me to run up and down to get them while everyone watched? What a jerk.
“Either you get them, or we walk through your gathering to get them. I’m good with either. Your call.”
“I’ll get them,” Bob said immediately.
“You do that,” Gibson said and took a step back. “Beth, Will, nice to meet you. We must do it again sometime.”
Before anyone had a chance to move, a voice called out from inside the house.
“Bob, who was it at the door? Bring them in here!”
Janie-Mae. Or maybe Marianne, I couldn’t tell.
Bob stood frozen, and she yelled slightly louder and with a decided snap in her voice, “Bob. How about now?”
“Bob?” I prompted. “You might want to go and get –”
“You’d better come inside,” he sighed, turned and disappeared.
“Jesus, babe,” Gibson murmured. “Why the fuck you stayed married to that dude for-fucking-ever I do not know. His balls must be the size of raisins.”
I raised my brows, took hold of his hand again and pulled him along with me.
“Not raisins, Gib,” I said calmly. “Grapes. Or perhaps cherries.”
Will snorted out laughter, and Beth giggled as they followed us into a living room full of people, most of which I knew.
“Hey everyone!” I called out breezily when no one said anything at all. “Don’t mind me. Bob got the dates mixed up and asked me to come today to pick up a few boxes that are mine. We’ll just grab them, so I’ll be gone in a minute.”
I avoided looking directly at anyone, hoping this would make everyone say nothing at all and just let me run upstairs to get the boxes. Most of all, I avoided glancing at the woman standing next to my ex-sister-in-law because Ms. Skanky was the one I really wished would keep her mouth shut. Getting into a discussion with her would be beyond tacky. It would also lead to absolutely nothing except making me angry. Or make Gibson angry which was something she seriously did not want to do.
“Charlene?” Marianne said loudly.
So much for being ignored, although I wasn’t surprised.
“That’s me,” I said, faking a cheerfulness I did not feel when I looked at my ex-sister-in-law for the first time since I walked into that party wearing a beige tent and no makeup.
When I saw the look in Marianne’s eyes, I could see she’d been behind the idea to bring me in to humiliate me, although when I glanced at the woman now living with my ex-husband, I was pretty sure they’d come up with it together. She raised her chin defiantly, and I shrugged. I honestly didn’t feel anything when it came to her. She could have Bob for all I cared.
“I don’t know why you wanted me to walk in here today, but Marianne,” I said, ignoring Janie-Mae and everyone else. “I also don’t care.”
“What?”
I almost laughed at the look on her face. She was not used to people voicing their objections to her behavior, and even less to people ignoring her.
“Your plan backfired,” I said quietly, using Gibson’s words from before. “I’ll go get my things now.”
Then I walked through the room, and up the stairs without looking back.
***
Gibson
Jesus, what a group of people, he thought as he surveyed the room. Trying so hard to seem sophisticated in their fancy but probably bought on discount clothes and immaculate hair-dos. All the men wore ties, and some had sports jackets. In the fucking summer.
Lee had said that they were going to suburbia, but he’d thought it’d be the kind of suburb he’d lived in. The one with backyard barbecues and neighbors cheering friendly from their parking lots as he walked his dog. Where people weren’t trying to get one up on each other all the time.
They were all staring either after Lee’s disappearing back, or at him. He recognized the barracuda from the bar, and when she moved to follow Lee, he murmured to Will, “Go help Lee carry the boxes, will you?”
Then he moved to block her path as she surged forward, followed by another woman who he assumed was the one taking Lee’s place. She looked just as unpleasant as the barracuda if you asked him, which no one did. When neither of the women slowed down, Gibson cursed quietly, planted his feet apart and crossed his arms over his chest. To his surprise, Beth placed herself next to him, also crossing her arms in a miniature badass move that had him look down at her with a crooked grin. She grinned and winked at him before turning back to scowl at Marianne.
“Well hello again,” Marianne said. “This was unexpected.”
“Who are you?” Gibson asked.
She paled, and her face turned hard, and the pinchy-sour look was not an attractive one.
“I’m Charlene’s sister-in-law.”
“Ex.”
“What?”
“You’re Lee’s ex-sister-in-law. And, yeah. I recognize you now.”
“Lee?”
He didn’t respond to that and turned to Bob who was hovering in the background.
“Get the bitches outta my face,” he growled.
The man paled and actually took a small step backward. For a split-second, Gibson thought he’d start laughing, but pushed it back until it was just a twitch at the tips of his mouth. He could laugh later when they were on their way out of that goddamned place. Bob saw it, though, and swallowed visibly, but didn’t say anything. This caused another lip-twitch.
“Step back,” Gibson said to the furious woman in front of him. “Yeah, I know who you are. Remember the bar, and how you tried to shove your hand down my pants.”
Someone made a hoarse sound of protest, but he heard snickers too.
“Please, Ward,” Will said behind him, sounding a little muffled behind the two boxes he was carrying. “Please tell me you didn’t –”
“Fuck no,” Gibson cut him off, still staring at the woman. “Took my brothers and me half an hour to get away. Don’t know if someone else felt like dipping their toe in barracuda waters that night, though.”
There was definitely laughter in the room, and he almost felt sorry for the woman in front of him. Her so-called friends were apparently friends of the kind which weren’t very good.
“Charlene, really?” Marianne asked, looking over his shoulder with an unattractive sneer on her face.
He turned to find Lee standing next to Will and wondered how she’d take the ugly scene. She looked okay, he decided. Thoughtful.
At Marianne’s question, she suddenly smiled, and Gibson’s gut filled with warmth when he saw happiness bleed into her eyes.
“Oh, yeah. Really,” she said with a small shrug and started moving toward the door. “Let’s go, Gibson, they’re not worth our time.”
“We’re leaving too,” Beth announced suddenly. “Lee is right. You’re not very nice people, and you are not worth it.”
They trooped out of there and walked in silence to Gibson’s car.
Halfway there, Will suddenly murmured, “If you’re ever in Chicago then let us know. Dinner’s on me.”
“We’ll let you know. No need to spring for dinner,” Gibson said, which made Will bark out laughter.
“I don’t have to hang with that crowd in a long time, man. If ever, so I owe you for that. The look on Marianne’s face when you called her a barracuda added a very expensive red to the tab, and you bought yourself dessert when you showed everyone Bob’s lack of spine.”
After the scene in Lee’s former home, he didn’t feel like laughing even though the man was kind of funny, so he just muttered, “Bunch of assholes.”
“They are,” Beth agreed, not laughing either. “I’m so sorry, Lee. My cousins, crap, most of my family… What a bunch of shitheads.”
“Bethie,” Lee said softly and stepped in close. “I always knew what they were like. I married Bob anyway because he wasn’t like them. Not back then, and you know it.”
“Yes,” Beth said quietly. “What the hell happened to him?”
“Life,” Lee simply said. “I always knew you weren’t like them either, Beth. Come visit us, yeah?”
“Absolutely,” Will said, and turned to Gibson. “Thanks for coming with her to deal with this shit, man. Okay if I tell the guys back in Chicago about today?”
Jesus, Gibson thought. He must have had a bigger rep back in Chicago than he’d known if the thought of telling a bunch of cops about him growling a little to some fuckers put that look on the face of a man his own age.
“Sure,” he said and was about to tell Will to say hi to his oldest son if he met him, although since he hadn’t shared the boy’s existence with Lee yet, he settled for, “Knock yourself out.”
“As long as you don’t knock me out,” Will said, and the laughter came then.
The joke had been silly, but the tension eased and Lee was still grinning when they drove away, which with how the afternoon had turned out, Gibson thought was better than expected. It couldn’t have been easy to walk in there, but as usual, she’d taken in what happened, processed it, and rolled with it.
He put his right hand on top of hers and squeezed gently.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“It wasn’t always like that, Gibson,” she said quietly. “We were different when we were younger. Didn’t spend so much time with his family. Did things. Traveled…” She trailed off and stared ahead, and he waited for her to go on. “I didn’t see it happening, but it started changing when I changed to my office job. At first, I was sick a lot. Got the flu, the cold, whatever shit that went around, I caught it. It got better, but I was so tired all the time and didn’t have the energy to plan outings and activities. And slowly, we got stuck. Him on the couch and me with a book or in the garden.”
“Wasn’t your job to activate him, babe. He’s a grown-ass man.”
“I know, but I’d been the one doing it since we’d met. And it happened slowly, so I wasn’t even aware myself that I stopped. If we’d had kids it might have been different, but we didn’t and we just… slid into what we became.”
They hadn’t talked about how she’d told him that she couldn’t have children. He’d wondered about it, but she hadn’t brought it up, and he hadn’t wanted to ask. She’d been on her hands and knees, giggling with a bunch of kids when they replaced Eddie and Billy’s fence and he hadn’t seen a hint of sadness, but he still wondered.
“We haven’t talked about that,” he said gently, hoping she’d let him in.
“Kids?” she said, sounding a little surprised.
“Yeah. How you feel about that.”
He glanced over at her and to his surprise, she was smiling softly.
“You’re such a good man, Gibson,” she said.
“What?”
That was not what he’d expected her to say, and she chuckled.
“Honey, you could have just asked. I’ve always known I can’t have children. Or, not always. Since I was fourteen. There’s a long, complicated diagnosis involving among other things my ovaries, and I’m pretty sure it would bore you.”
“Since I’m the man who’s physically been closest to your ovaries in a very long time, and like spending time there, nothing you say that involves them could possibly bore me,” he retorted and got another chuckle. “Fourteen?” he prompted.
“Yeah. I’m not gonna say it was an easy message to get, not for me and even worse for Mama. It took away my future children, but also her future grandchildren.”
“Only child?”
“I had a brother, but he died when I was six. Measles.”
“You talk to someone about it? Go to therapy?”
That got him full throat laughter, and he blinked as he turned to look at her.
“Sorry. But really, Gib? I grew up in a town much like Wilhelmine. Who would a fourteen-year-old girl have talked to about something like that back when you were young?” He opened his mouth to let her know he got her point, but she answered her own question for him. “She’d talk to her mama, and her grandma. Her daddy if he was that kind of man, which mine wasn’t. Aunts. Girlfriends. So, that’s what I did. We talked, and there were tears, and a few ugly words. God got himself an earful too. But in the end, it was what it was, so all there was to do was to accept and move on with life.”
He suddenly got that this was a huge part of who she’d become. It had marked her, but not with bitterness or constant grief. It had made her stronger, he thought.
“Besides,” she added. “There was no money for something like it, even if the thought had occurred to my parents.”
“Why didn’t you go back there? Why Wilhelmine?”
“There’s no one there from my family anymore. I haven’t been there since my parents died, my cousins are more than ten years older than me, and they moved away as teenagers. Visited them in Florida, and it was fun to reconnect but…. You know? Florida?”
“Gotcha,” he snorted. “Too much sunshine.”
“Too many golf courses,” she corrected him. “Which my cousins all love with a passion that I’d label as an obsession.”
They both laughed at that. Gibson took hold of her hand, brought it to his mouth and kissed it softly. Then he murmured, “Let’s go to our small town in the mountains instead.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Let’s go home.”
***
They still had three hours to go when the brakes stopped working.
It didn’t’ start out as a big deal because they were on the outskirts of a small town in a flat area, so he simply let the car keep rolling until it stopped by the side of the road.
“What are you doing?” Lee asked.
“Gotta check on something, baby,” Gibson murmured and went to do just that.
And that’s when it became a big fucking deal because the rubber hose leading fluid into the brakes had been cut. The cut was not big enough to make the brakes stop working immediately. It was just a small tear, and it could be from natural causes, but Gibson didn’t like it. He did not like it at all.
“Is something wrong?” Lee asked.
“Yeah,” he sighed. “We’ve been leaking brake-fluid for a while, and now we’re out of it.”
“Which means our brakes don’t work,” she concluded calmly. “Should you or I walk back to the gas station we passed a mile back?”
I love you so much.
He stopped himself a split second before blurting it out, not sure how she’d react. The dusty side of the road outside a dinky town on the plains wasn’t the place for it either, but he felt it, deep down to the core.
Because his woman was standing next to him on that dusty side of the road, after an afternoon like the one they’d had, and simply dealt with whatever shit happened.
“We’ll go together,” he murmured.
When they were back on the road again, after a change of hose to something Gibson hoped to God would take them home safely, Lee fell asleep. He glanced over at her a couple of times, lowered his speed, just in case the mechanic at the gas station had been wrong about the quality of the hose and started making phone calls.
He called Paddy, who lost his mind and said so many crude words Gibson started chuckling. Then he called Mac who kept his temper in its usual firm grip and told him to report it in as soon as he got back.
And then he called Will, who he’d just met but who also was on the force and had been to the same gathering as them. The other man didn’t lose his mind, but his wife did in the background, and Will agreed with Gibson that it was unlikely the damage had been done while they were in Lee’s ex-husband’s house. It could have been, but it was unlikely. He promised to ask some questions anyway, to see if he could find anything out.
As the miles rolled by, Gibson started to go through the last couple of months in his head and he structured it the same way he had worked his cases as a detective, which was something he hadn’t done in five years. He hadn’t needed to, or perhaps hadn’t dared, and certainly hadn’t wanted to, but the thought of what could have happened pissed him off. If the tear in the hose had been done in Wilhelmine, and they hadn’t left to go and pick up Lee’s things, he would have been somewhere on a road in the mountains when the brakes stopped working, and it might have been okay. But it might have been disastrous.
And it could have been disastrous with Lee in the car.
So, while he drove them home, slowing down every now and then to make sure he still had brakes, he thought about all the things that had happened in the past weeks.
Two idiots performing a half-assed break-in at his house.
Joke seeing an unknown car turn around in his driveway.
A dead man found floating in the city where he’d been a detective.
The roof caving in on the house Paddy’s company was building.
His brakes suddenly not working.
Then he picked up the phone and called Paddy again.
“Don’t know what it’s all about but there’s too much shit swirling around, Pad. Bumping my radar and doing it little too hard, so I don’t like it. I don’t like it one fucking bit,” he said when he’d walked his friend through the things that had happened.
Paddy didn’t lose his shit, and his voice was just a low, soft growl when he finally spoke.
“I’ll start making some calls.”
“Yeah,” Gib said. “I don’t get it, Paddy. It’s just petty shit.”
“Getting you killed is not petty shit to me, Gibson.”
“It isn’t the clubs, Paddy. They’d come straight at me. Or just shoot me.”
“I know. Will call a few of them anyway. Make sure. Get their ears on the ground.”
“Don’t give them any markers, Pad. Not yet.”
“Wasn’t born yesterday.”
“Right,” Gibson muttered, but he did it with a grin. “We’ll sort this.”
They would because they had to.
“Talk to you tomorrow, drive safely,” Paddy said.
“Will do.”
Lee stirred, but she kept sleeping, and he put a hand on her thigh, gently to not wake her up. Needing to feel her warmth as they drove home through the dark night.
What in the fuck was going on?