Chapter 7
I sat uneasily in the bleachers at Ian’s practice, hiding a little behind the gaggle of high school girls also watching, giggling, pointing, and laughing. Every time Ian touched the ball, they all turned to a pretty, dark-haired girl sitting among them. She had to be Maryam, his girlfriend. Ian, of course, had never brought her home to meet the family.
He had been very, very surprised to see me at the gym. “I wanted to see what you’re always complaining about,” I told him.
“Ha ha.”
“I needed to get out of the house,” I said. He knew that I was being punished. “I need a little space. And I may be meeting someone.”
“Here?”
“Maybe you can meet him, too.”
“Him?” Ian called, as his coach blew the whistle and he ran to join his team.
Digger wasn’t there yet, and my eyes were on the door more than they were on the players. The practice was winding down when the gym door flew open, just like it did in his garage, and Digger came in.
“Oh, shit!” one of the girls said. “Who is that? He’s...beautiful. Like some kind of angel. Or devil.” She gave an exaggerated shiver. “He’s scaring me,” she said, a huge smile on her face, eyes locked on Digger.
“He’s coming over here!” another girl hissed. “Oh my God! How do I look?” I noticed that even Ian’s girlfriend, Maryam, was checking him out as he sauntered over.
I stood, nervously running my hand over my hair. Digger climbed up the stands to me, oblivious to the fact that the girls were watching him, drooling. He was grinning and he picked me up to hug me. I hugged him tightly, even though it ached a little to do it.
“Hey, Cinderella.” He kissed me and I heard the girls sigh. “I got stuck at work again, I’m sorry. Christ, I missed your sweet ass.”
I melted against him. “I missed you, too.” He kissed me again and I noticed the girls all watching avidly. “Let’s go in the hall,” I said, holding his hand and leading him back down the bleachers. I saw Ian almost get hit with a ball, he was so busy watching us.
Digger picked me up around the waist and sat me on top of wire ball cart. He stepped between my legs. “Now, you’ll tell me what’s been going on.”
I pulled his head down to mine. “Kiss me, first.” Who was this wanton woman?
He did, very thoroughly. When he brought his hands down to my butt to lift me against him, I pulled back and leaned my face against his chest. That had hurt. I sighed out a long, trembling breath.
“Rebecca, what the hell is happening? You’re going to have to tell me, or I’m going to have to go back to your house and—”
“No!” My head snapped up. “Look, Digger, it’s…” I couldn’t use the “complicated” excuse again. “I told you that my dad would be angry about the hearing aid, and he was.” I ran my finger over the letters on his t-shirt. “My family has a lot of issues, bigger than me and my hearing aid. My older sister ran away, left home a few years ago and ever since then, my dad has had major problems trusting me.” Really, Margot leaving had only made a bad situation worse.
“What did you have to do with her running away?”
I sighed again. It was such a long, bitter story. “I knew she wanted to leave and I didn’t tell anyone. I knew a lot of stuff that I didn’t tell. She told, and it was bad news for me.” I rubbed my eyes. It was just another item in the long list of reasons to hate me.
“What does that mean?”
“Margot had left a letter. She told my dad how we had tricked him. She had a girlfriend and not a boyfriend, and I had known. She said that I had helped her fool everyone, pretending that she was going to college to study art history so she could work at the auction house, pretending she was someone completely different from the person she was. My sister was angry at me because she thought I should have stood up for her when she needed me, needed my help.” I gulped. “I should have.” Maybe I hadn’t done enough for Margot, but I wasn’t going to let him hurt Ian.
“That wasn’t fair, to put that on you.”
“Fair or not, that’s what happened. Now my father is even more controlling of me, and my mom, and Ian. He got very angry when I came home so late on Friday because I have a curfew. And I wasn’t supposed to be out that night, anyway.”
“He treats you like a teenager.”
I shrugged. Actually, he treated his teenage son a lot better than he treated me. “It’s his house, and it’s just for another year and a half. Ian will go away to college. Then I can get a job—”
“What do you mean, ‘get a job?’” Digger interrupted me. “You work for the auction house.”
My voice dropped down to almost a whisper. This part made me very ashamed. “My dad doesn’t pay me. He says it’s an internship. He thinks I can’t be trusted with money, that I’ll run away like my sister, or get in trouble, so he gives me an allowance. I save what I can but it isn’t much. I didn’t do a lot at the auction house, anyway, nothing much to get paid for. He’s going to have me do another internship, starting next week, something in his office with more personal supervision.” I was dreading it so much the thought made me want to throw up.
“You don’t have any money of your own.”
“No.” I looked him in the eyes. “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters to me. I have to be at home for Ian.”
“Why? What do you think your dad’s going to do to him?” He was staring at me intently.
Now I couldn’t look at Digger. I thought that he would see how terrified I was. “It’s more what they don’t do for him,” I hedged. “No one has ever loved him except for me, not even my sister, really. My mom is too depressed and caught up in her own problems to care about anyone else. My dad doesn’t love him, he just wants Ian to be perfect so he can brag about him. He’s on him all the time. Whatever Ian does, it’s not enough. There are all these posters hung up around the school here, about anxiety and stress. Well, our house is a pressure cooker for my brother.” I took a deep breath. “And sometimes, sometimes my father loses his temper.”
“You mean he gets physical with your brother?” Digger’s chest expanded.
“He has in the past, a long time ago.” I had been able to stop it, to get in the way and intervene or deflect the anger to myself, every time it had escalated since. “I can’t let that happen again.”
“What can you do about it?”
“I won’t let him lay a hand on my brother. My mom won’t do anything, and the one time I called the police, I just made it worse.” For everyone. So the next time he hurt Ian, I would kill him.
Digger took my face between his big palms. “This is no good. No fucking good.”
“It’s not much longer.”
“One minute more is too much longer. You gotta get out of that house. We can take your brother, too.”
“Wait a minute, what?”
“Sure. He can live with me. We’ll get my house fixed up, so there’s heat in another bedroom. Get a refrigerator.”
“Digger…”
“I work hard for what I’ve got, but I don’t know what the point is unless it’s doing good for somebody. Somebody like you.”
I thought of my father, who wouldn’t give anyone a thin dime if there wasn’t something in it for himself. Tears filled up my eyes. “That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I mean it.”
“That’s what makes it nice.” I reached up to pull him to me again and he kissed me hard, hungrily.
“Wreck!”
Ian was standing at the door into the gym, his mouth open, staring at us. The girl I had assumed was Maryam was peeking around his arm at us, her eyes huge.
“Oh!” I sat up straight, away from Digger’s amazing lips. “Hi.”
Digger stepped out from between my thighs. “You must be Ian,” he said, walking forward with his hand out to shake. “I’m Digger Brody.” Ian took his hand, his mouth still open. He seemed to be in shock. It was certainly the first time he’d ever seen me acting like this. “Hi,” Digger continued, now holding out his hand to the girl hiding behind Ian. She stared at him for a moment before shaking with him as well.
“Wreck, who is this?” Ian blurted out.
“I’m Digger.” He said it slowly.
“Digger is…” I started but trailed off. What was he? I had no idea, so I just stopped talking.
“Um, Rebecca?” Maryam asked. I nodded and smiled at her. “Hi, I’m Maryam. We all loved your raspberry bars,” she told me. “Ian took one for me before the guys ate them all. It was delicious.” I noticed that she was speaking clearly and had walked closer. Ian must have told her.
At one point not too long ago, I would have been embarrassed that she knew that I was having trouble hearing her. Now I realized that I was glad that Ian had thought to tell her and that his girlfriend was considerate. It made me like her. “I’m glad you liked them,” I said, still smiling at her. “I’m also glad to meet you in person. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“You have?” She turned to look at Ian. “You talk about me?”
I nodded. “All the time,” I told her.
She got a huge smile. After a second, Ian smiled back at her. My work there was done.
“Wreck, we have to go home. Practice ended five minutes ago,” my brother said.
“On a tight schedule?” Digger asked casually.
“More like a tight leash,” Ian scowled.
Digger nodded at him, then turned back to me. “I’ll be seeing you soon.”
It made me nervous. “Don’t—you can’t—”
He kissed me to stop my words. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it.” He kissed my forehead, too. “Don’t worry, Cinderella.” He slapped Ian on the back as he strode out. “Bye.”
Ian watched him go. “Wreck, who was that? How do you know that guy?”
He had gotten a ride to school that morning. “Come on, I’ll drive you home and explain. Bye, Maryam.”
She held up her face to my brother, expectant. He quickly bent and kissed her cheek, then glanced at me, embarrassed. “Talk to you later,” he mumbled to her.
“She seems nice,” I said, peering back at Maryam as Ian and I walked out.
“Yeah,” Ian answered, distracted. “How did you meet this Digger? What was he doing here?” He dropped his gear in the trunk of my car.
“I met him out one night. He owns a garage in Detroit, where he lives.”
“What else do you know about him?”
“I know that he’s a really good guy, Ian.” I looked over at him in the passenger seat, and he looked very worried. “This is a great thing for me, ok? You should be happy.”
“What about Dad?”
“He’s not going to find out.” My heart started to pound, even thinking about it.
“Are you going to tell me what really happened last weekend? Why Dad’s so mad at you?”
“I told you, I lost my hearing aid. They’re expensive and insurance doesn’t cover it.”
“Yeah, that’s what you said.”
“I snuck out, too.”
“To see that guy? Digger?” I nodded. “Does he know how much trouble you got into?”
No, and Ian didn’t know either. He just knew that I was in disgrace and had been confined to the house, that our father was insulting me every time he opened his mouth, that he spent dinner each night reciting the litany of dumb things I had done throughout my life, making each one a funny story with me as the punch line.
“He doesn’t know. I’d rather he thought of me as a normal person rather than a total idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot.” Ian paused. “You should ask that guy to come to my game on Sunday. You could see him there.”
“Dad—”
“He’s not going. There’s a big sale this weekend and he has to be there.”
“Really?” He never missed Ian’s games, and this wasn’t our usual weekend for an auction. But I had never totally kept track of that side of the business.
“Maybe there’s a team meeting afterwards, and you have to wait for me,” Ian mused.
“I don’t want you to have to lie,” I told my brother.
“I spend my whole life lying. Everything I do is a lie.”
He sounded so sad. I turned to look at him and my eyes brimmed with tears. I had been trying to make it to the end of Ian’s senior year, to keep him safe, to keep everything chugging along as usual so that my dad would continue to pay for Lamb’s and all of my brother’s sports and activities and he could get into the college he wanted. I had thought it would be the best thing for Ian. Looking at him, thinking about what Digger had said about living there one minute more, I began to seriously doubt that plan. Maybe Ian needed to leave immediately. Maybe I did, too.
∞
I hadn’t talked to Tracey since last Friday night. When I got my phone back, I saw she had filled it with angry messages about leaving her alone, about her night being ruined because she hadn’t been able to go home with the two guys she had been making out with at Nacht. Someone had decked their friend, the one who had liked me, so they had left with him to take him to the hospital and she had been alone and it had sucked.
I swallowed. Digger must have hit the guy pretty hard.
Then, after her anger at me about the night out wore away, she had started leaving messages saying that she was lonely and asking what was wrong with me that I wasn’t responding. This was very brief, because she quickly moved to another stage, calling me a bad friend because I was ignoring her when she needed me. They were mad at her at work again.
The worst one was the pretty incoherent message she had sent in the middle of the day on Tuesday. That meant she had been at work while writing a wandering, confusing message to me about running away together to another country, like Hawaii (she hadn’t been a great student either). The way she was writing made me sure that she had been on something while she was at work, again.
When Tracey called me that night, as I lay huddled in my bed after another terrible family dinner, listening to Ian throw his mini basketball against the wall, I picked up.
“Wreck! Where have you been?”
“My dad caught me sneaking back in last Friday.”
There was silence on the line. Tracey knew what that must have meant for me.
“I’m ok now,” I told her. “But he also took my phone for a few days.”
“Oh, that’s why you weren’t getting back to me! I thought maybe you were mad at me about something, but I couldn’t think of what it would be. It really hurt my feelings.”
Already, we were back to Tracey and how everything was about her. “You know, I was mad at you,” I told her. “You were acting terrible at that club. I was worried about you and you swore at me.”
She mumbled something.
“What?”
“I said that I don’t remember!” she said loudly. “I just remember the end of the night when I started to come down and those guys were leaving to take their friend to the ER. They were super nasty.”
“Yeah, they were.”
“You should have told me!”
“Tracey, I did! A million times! You tried to make me go off with their friend and he was even worse. He wouldn’t leave me alone and he broke my hearing aid.”
“Oh, Wreck, fuck!” Again, Tracey had an idea about what that meant. She had been privy to what went on with my father our sophomore year in high school when our maid threw away the retainer that I hadn’t put away in its case. This current situation had been a lot worse. “Why didn’t you tell me what happened?”
“Tracey, when we go out, you don’t care about me at all. I don’t know if you ever care about me at all.” I couldn’t believe that I had said it.
“That’s the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me.” She was crying.
“Trace, come on. Think about how you act! You meet someone and drop me right away, and then I’m either trying to pull you apart from some awful man or picking you up at some awful house or apartment. It’s always bad for me, no matter where we go or who you go off with. Next time we go out, we have to do something that I want to do.”
She didn’t answer at first. “Fine,” she said finally, then she hung up. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference in our friendship, but I was glad that I had said it. It might have just been a little thing, but I was proud of myself.
I thought I had to be hearing things when I came down the stairs the next morning. I had been feeling too sore to work out for the past few days but that morning I dragged myself up and forced it. It actually made me loosen up, as had the ridiculously long, hot shower I had just taken. I felt better than I had in days.
“It’s nice to meet you,” my mother was saying, and then I heard the same voice that had made me think I was hallucinating.
“It’s nice to meet you too.”
Digger. In my house.
“Rebecca has been a huge help,” he was saying. “With her connections to the school, it’s been a godsend.”
I walked into the foyer, my jaw hanging open.
“Oh, there you are.” My mother turned to me. “This man…what was your name?”
“Digger.”
“Digger came by. He says he looked at your car? You had mentioned at dinner you took it in. I didn’t know you were helping someone at his repair shop.”
“Lorelei Wynne,” Digger supplied. “Rebecca helped her with her application to the school and met up with a woman in the admissions office to plead her case, too. They have their interview today.”
“That was nice of you, dear.” Dear? Was this my mom? “I can make some calls too,” she was telling Digger. “My husband is a substantial donor to the school.”
He grinned at her and she actually smiled back. “That would be lovely.”
“I hope the car is all right,” she said. “Rebecca, aren’t you going to the audiologist today?”
I nodded, mutely.
“I’ll take her,” Digger said. “My car’s in the driveway.”
My mom smiled again at him and wandered out.
I turned to Digger.
“Everyone trusts a mechanic,” he said, and made himself laugh. “Right? I figured your dad would be at work, you’d be here. Or if he was here too, I’d get to meet him.”
“No. No, I don’t want you to. No. This was a bad idea.”
“I’m not hiding from your family, Cinderella. We’re both grown-ups. Now your mom knows me—”
“She thinks you’re a guy who came to our house to fix my car for some odd reason, she’s not thinking of you as my…my…”
“As your what?” Digger challenged me. “Let’s go. We’re meeting Joaquim and Lorelei to hear about the interview.”
I had been waiting on pins and needles to hear how it went. I chewed on my lip, considering.
Digger took the decision out of my hands. “We’re going. Where’s your coat, icicle? Notice even I’m wearing long sleeves today.”
“Ok, ok! I’m coming. I have to run and get something.” I went upstairs for my laptop as fast as I could go. Digger had found my coat in the closet and put it around my shoulders.
“Fancy house,” he commented.
The house was really my dad’s showplace. It was perfect, just like he wanted us to be. Ultra-modern and giant, from the outside it looked more like an art museum rather than a place people lived. Inside, he had furnished it with objects from all the Lindhart Auction sales, like expensive paintings originally purchased by a guy whose company had gone bankrupt—then he had killed himself, a piano from a family that sold off their grandmother’s furniture when she died to afford pay for medical care for their son. My father had proudly told us about the provenance of each item. I hated everything about this house.
“I like that you can walk on all the floors without falling through,” Digger told me. I turned and threw my arms around his waist, hugging him.
“I like your house better,” I said, rubbing my cheek on his flannel shirt. “I like the element of danger.”
Digger laughed and kissed the top of my head. “Come on, baby girl. Let’s see how fast we can go on a dirt road.”
Lorelei and Joaquim were already at the restaurant. He had a huge milkshake in front of him and was sucking hard on the straw. Lorelei jumped up and hugged me. “It went great!” she announced to me and Digger. “I think they loved him.”
“Of course they did,” Digger said, messing with Joaquim’s black hair.
“We met your friend Sylvie,” Lorelei continued. “I liked her, a lot.” She was leaning forward to talk to me, but Lorelei’s volume was never an issue.
“She had candy in her desk,” Joaquim noted. “I saw it.” He swallowed more milkshake.
“He’ll never eat his lunch, but we’re celebrating,” Lorelei told me. “The kid could run for mayor. I never saw anyone more comfortable in an interview.”
“That’s what it was?” Joaquim asked. “You said we were going there to talk to them.”
“And for them to make sure that they liked us,” his mom answered. “They did. They really did.”
“Tell me what you talked about,” I asked her, and she ran down the list of topics which went all the way from how she would support his learning to what his favorite books were and why.
“I’m so glad you told us to look at the school magazine,” she said. “I dropped a line like, ‘It’s really the history of Lamb’s Academy that fascinates me’ and then said something about a fête in the gallery in the school’s west wing the 1960s and how I would love to help recreate it. They ate it up.”
“Nice,” Digger said, and they slapped hands.
I found that I was starving. I ordered a huge lunch: cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake like Joaquim’s. I hadn’t been eating much for the past week.
Digger ate fast, very fast, then he started eating off my plate and Joaquim’s. He was sitting next to me in the booth, on my right so I could hear him well, and he kept his arm around me or his hand on my thigh. Sometimes high on my thigh, and I had to nudge it down a little. That made him smile at me. “Why’d you bring the laptop?” he asked, smearing ketchup on a fry from my lunch.
“I wanted to show you what I’ve been working on for your house. I made a timeline for the construction and I have some ideas for the rooms.” I took it out of my bag and put it on the table. “It’s just if you want to see, you don’t have to,” I told him. “It’s probably full of mistakes.” This was probably a bad idea. I stared to put the laptop away again but he put his hand over mine.
“I want to see,” Lorelei chimed in. “Somebody has to take charge of that he—heck hole. The last time I was there I nearly gotten bitten by a fu—freaking raccoon and Joaquim fell through a wall.”
“It’s not that bad,” Digger told her. “Don’t be a b—witch.”
“They’re trying not to swear in front of us,” Joaquim informed me. “But they have a hard time.”
“It’s ok. I’ve heard it all before,” I told him.
“Yeah,” he said, “me too.”
I flipped open the screen and showed Digger the construction timeline. “It’s not that bad, not too long to get it done, if you get some more help in there.” It had taken me hours to list all the various tasks and fit them all together. He studied it and nodded slowly. Then I opened the files for the rooms, showing them potential layouts, furniture, fabric and paint samples, everything I had thought of for every space in the house. I had taken a lot of my own dream house ideas and put it into Digger’s design, most of them, actually. Going through it all, picturing and arranging and planning, had been the saving grace of being laid up for the past week.
Lorelei was effusive, praising everything, and even Joaquim seemed impressed. Digger didn’t say a word, and as I went through room after room, showing him different features and ideas, I got more and more nervous. Clearly, he didn’t like it. I stuttered to a stop after the final guest bedroom, and closed the computer.
“You don’t have to use it,” I said. My voice sounded too loud. “It wasn’t very good.”
Digger turned to look at me. “That took you a long time.”
“No, not really. I was just playing around. It’s ok that you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter.”
“I can’t believe you did all this.” He opened the screen back up and looked again. “This is the best fucking thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe my house could turn into this.”
I started to smile. “Really? You like it?”
“I love it.” He was smiling back at me. “I love it, baby girl. I love that you did this for me, too.” He kissed me and Lorelei clapped.
“I knew it!” she said. “I knew you were perfect for him! You owe me fifty bucks, Digger!”
My face froze. “You bet that you wouldn’t like me?” I asked him.
He opened his wallet. “I bet that you wouldn’t like me,” he said, and handed her a five instead of a fifty. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” he advised Lorelei. “A girl like you?” he continued, turning back to me. “I didn’t think so. She made me run down the street after your car when you left the garage that day. Said maybe you liked slumming.” He gave her the finger behind his other hand.
“You owe me too,” Joaquim piped up. “You have to pay for the swears. You said the F word again. And I think you just flipped off my mom and that counts also.”
Digger handed him a dollar, then another one. “You want in on this?” he asked me, gesturing at his wallet.
I smiled and shook my head, happy to be held under his arm. I didn’t need anything more than what I had right then.