We gaze at each other, and smile. The air shimmers with the raucous harmony of this table, these people.
For a long time, I didn’t believe that I could ever be happy again. But at this moment, I see that real joy is possible.
At one point, Kevin disappears into the kitchen and doesn’t return. I get up, wondering if he left, before I spy him through the open door to the sunporch. He’s lounging in a wicker chair, talking on his phone.
Light from the kitchen falls across his back. On his phone screen, a girl a few years younger than us, whose cropped hair is badly dyed, is chatting at him nonstop.
Kevin senses me behind him and turns. He unhooks his earphones and tugs me onto the chair arm. “Hey, Toby, this is my friend Sabine.”
“Hi, Sabine!” She gives me a little wave, but a sinister glint has entered her eyes.
“Hi, Toby.”
“Give her the phone, Kevs. I want to talk to Sabine in private.”
Now I’m intrigued. I reach for the phone, but Kevin hugs it to his chest. “You don’t have to talk to my kid sister. I can tell Toby you’re busy.”
“No, I want to. How else am I going to learn your secrets?”
“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I carry the phone down the steps into the yard. Whoa. I haven’t drunk this much in a long time, and I’m a little unsteady on my feet. “So what do you want to talk about, Toby?”
“I’ve heard about you and I know you’re after my brother.”
I catch my toe on the stone path and lurch forward. “I am?”
“Yes, Ms. Just a Friend from School. Showing up late at night with bagels? Inviting him to help you track down the Korean-Mexican fusion truck? Kevs may be dense when it comes to how girls hook guys, but I’m not.”
Kevin’s seeing someone?
My stomach goes sloshy, imagining him and a girl sharing kimchi. How did I not know? How did Taysha not know? Doesn’t matter, I tell myself. Kev deserves to be happy. “Yeah, you’re onto me.”
I wander into the driveway and peer out at the street. Someone is strumming a guitar nearby, not playing a song exactly, but trying out the strings.
“Listen,” Toby says. “You’d better treat my brother right, because if you hurt him like that cockroach-lipped Chantal, I will take you down. Maybe not me exactly, but I know how to access the dark net.”
“Did you just threaten to have me murdered?”
Her mouth drops open. “No. Not murdered.” It takes her a moment to recover her steely-eyed bravado. “I’d have them break your hands!”
The porch light snaps on and I turn back to the house. Kevin’s holding a guitar I didn’t know he’d brought.
“So, Toby, I hate to disappoint you, but I am not the girl seducing your brother with Korean-Mexican fusion. Kev and I are just friends. But I will help you exact revenge if she hurts him.”
“Why didn’t you just say it wasn’t you?”
“Curiosity, and a bunch of vodka shots. You want to say good night to your brother?”
I walk the phone toward the house, and the first notes of a song send ripples down my spine. Kevin sings so softly I can barely hear him, but the lyrics of the song are tattooed on my heart. I sing along in my head, hearing the ache in Mom’s voice.
“Cruel wind at my back and holes in my shoes…”
Mom hardly ever talked about leaving Oregon for LA, but on the nights she sang that song, I’d learn one or two more things about Grandma Betty, who turned her back on us.
I step onto the porch, and Kevin looks up. I hold out the phone and he strums a few more bars before he takes it from me. As he says good night to Toby, he fails to notice I’m frozen in place.
Red roses twine up the neck of the guitar he’s playing. It isn’t a copy of Mom’s guitar. It’s Mom’s.
I shake my head, openmouthed. “I can’t believe it. How did you know?”
“‘Broke Down in Stockton’? It’s a classic.”
He’s talking about the song, not the guitar. My silent confusion prompts him to try again. “Oh, wait,” he says. “Did your mom play that song?”
“Yeah, she did.” Nothing makes sense. How the hell did Mom’s guitar get here?
“God, I’m sorry. I should have asked before I touched her guitar, but when I saw the case, I wanted to see how the repair turned out.”
A sick feeling floods me. If Kevin didn’t bring me Mom’s guitar, then who did? The only person who knew I’d pawned it was Adam. I’m nauseous, imagining him creeping around the backyard early this morning and dropping it off on the porch.
“It’s okay. I’m not mad,” I tell Kevin.
“The guy did an amazing job matching the wood. I can’t even tell where he fixed it.”
I sink down on the chair beside him. It could be the endless vodka shots or my lack of sleep, but I’m so damn tired of lying about everything.
“The guitar wasn’t being repaired. I lied, because I was too embarrassed to tell you I pawned it.”
One thing about painting portraits is you learn to really look at someone’s face. If you’re not blinded by how you feel about them, you can catch small shifts in their expression that reveal more than they’d ever admit.
And what I see in Kevin’s face tells me he’s heard people talking about me, and he’s tried to ignore it, but he can’t any longer. I’m ready for him to ask me about Iona and the dress when he says, “Is it true you were homeless?”
It takes a second for it to register with me what he’s asked. “Yes. For about six months after Mom died.”
“I thought you said you lived with your friend.”
“I did, but it didn’t work out.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before?”
I shrink even farther down in the chair. “Because once you tell someone you were homeless, that’s how they see you forever. I don’t want someone looking at me and wondering if I lived in a crappy motel or a tent on the sidewalk next to heroin addicts and hookers, which I didn’t. I want people to see me as I am now, as an artist.”
He’s quiet for so long that it’s obvious he doesn’t know what to say. He thought he knew me, but now…
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he says.
My heart squeezes at the gentleness in his voice. His fingers are laced together, and he’s not quite looking at me. He knows there’s more I’m not telling him.
“People are talking about me and Iona Taylor. I should probably tell you the whole story.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” he says.
“No, I do.”
He’s mostly quiet as I share Mom’s final days, and what happened after with Iona, how I chose to sell what wasn’t mine, and how it’s come back at me.
“But you knew what you were doing was wrong,” he says, leaving the so-why-did-you unsaid.
“I can’t defend what I did. I knew it was wrong, but I needed to hold on to my car, and I was still unbelievably angry about how Iona treated Mom and me.”
He’s not looking at me, and any second now he’s going to get up and go in, thank Mrs. Mednikov for a lovely dinner, and drive off, never to trust me again.