Could I?
My impulse is to tell my brother to fuck off, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That he can’t possibly understand, but I swallow the words and don’t say anything.
“Do you want any more cookies?” I ask, pointing. “I’m gonna pack those up to take to the brewery tomorrow.”
Caleb grabs two more, one with each hand.
“Those croissants ready yet?” he asks.
“Still rising.”
“Any chocolate ones?”
“The fuck do I look like, a bakery?” I ask, and he laughs.
“Figured I’d try,” he says.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Delilah
The text said the party was in the back yard, so I park on the street and walk around Lainey’s house, six-pack in one hand. It’s quieter than I expected, but maybe this is the quiet kind of roller derby party.
But when I get there, it’s nearly empty. Just the fire pit and two people, casually talking.
Then I stop in my tracks.
“Wyatt?”
“You’re right, she is alive,” he says to Lainey.
He grins, leaning back in his wooden chair, a beer bottle to his lips.
“I had no choice,” Lainey says, straight-faced and solemn. “He arrived shortly before you did. I’m sorry.”
Wyatt laughs, his head back, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, and Lainey glances over at his reaction, the tiniest smile on her lips.
“What?” I ask, baffled from two directions at once: that Wyatt is here, and by that weird thing Lainey just said.
“She just called me Darth Vader,” Wyatt says.
“Lainey, be nice to Wyatt,” I tell her.
“He liked it,” she says.
“No, I didn’t,” Wyatt says. He’s grinning.
“What are you even doing here?” I say, putting the beers I’m carrying down on a table, then sit next to Lainey, leaning in toward the fire.
“I volunteered to make sure you were alive and all right,” he says. “Since you’re ignoring me, my sister, your sisters, and Aunt Vera. Do you know how many women you’ve worried?”
I grab a beer. Lainey hands over the opener, and I pop the top off, take a drink, lean back in the wooden chair.
“Sorry,” I say, and I mean it. “I just… I needed a minute.”
Wyatt sighs.
“Why?” he asks, sarcastically, and I snort.
“I love them, but they’re a lot,” I admit. “Have you ever had to tell them you broke up with someone? They act like you’ve chopped off your own foot.”
Wyatt just makes a grunt of disapproval.
“Anyway, we colluded to get you over here,” Lainey says. “It seemed better than taking your picture with today’s newspaper.”
“They’re not that worried,” I say.
Silence.
“Right?”
“Olivia swears that last weekend she was awakened at four in the morning by a crash and a scream,” Wyatt says.
Next to me, Lainey’s lips thin by a hair as she looks into the fire.
“She wasn’t,” I tell him, rolling my eyes. “She was on the warpath all weekend, though, and I’ve got no idea why. Hormones? Altitude? Too many hormones for the altitude?”
“Not how any of that works,” Lainey says.
“But you are okay, right?” Wyatt asks, leaning forward slightly.
“We just got in a fight,” I say, waving the beer bottle. “A word fight, I mean. Verbal? Whatever means we screamed at each other a bunch without any physical violence.”
Wyatt nods. Lainey’s still looking into the fire, stone-faced, but then she glances at Wyatt, then at me, then seems to snap out of it and take another sip of her beer.
“I’ll call Vera tomorrow,” I promise, then sigh. “I’m sorry, I just — it’s been the shittiest week…”
My phone chirps, and I jump. There’s a split second when my heart leaps, but then I pull it from my pocket and see Ava’s name.
“Shit,” I mutter.
Wyatt’s craning his head around to see the screen.
“Did you somehow just summon her?” he asks.
“No, it’s Ava,” I explain. “I’ll call her back —”
“Answer it,” Wyatt demands.
The phone chirps again.
“Answer it. Delilah. Answer it.”
“It’s the sweet baby angel, just answer it,” Lainey says.
I stick my tongue out at both of them, then answer it.
“Hey,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut. “I’m really sorry I haven’t —"
“Delilah?”
Ava sounds weird, like she’s out of breath or something. I sit up straighter, give Lainey and Wyatt an alarmed glance.
“What’s wrong?”
“Can I come over?” she asks, her voice wobbly.
“To where?” I ask, stupidly. “Are you okay?”
There’s a long, long pause.
“Thad and I had a fight,” she says, miserably, then sniffs. “We were out of pasta, and tonight was supposed to be spaghetti night and so I said I’d get some on the way home from work, but then I had to stay a little bit late and I forgot —”
She takes a breath, and I interrupt, gently.
“I’m at Lainey’s house,” I say, raising my eyebrows at Lainey. She nods. “Do you want to come over here?”
“Okay,” she says. “Thanks, Delilah.”
“Is she okay?” Wyatt asks, frowning, when I hang up.
“I think she and Thad got into their first fight,” I say, putting my phone away again. “And I guess now I’m the sister who’s good at fighting with partners? Fuck.”
“You’re the least likely to blow smoke up her ass and she knows it,” Lainey counsels.
“Agreed,” Wyatt says.
Fifteen minutes later, we hear someone shouting Hello? Around the front of the house, so the three of us call Ava back. She’s wearing jeans with knee-high boots over them and a black wool winter coat, somehow looking perfectly put together even though she’s obviously been crying.
I, on the other hand, am wearing jeans for the first time all week. I’ve worn leggings to work for the past three days, because the idea of putting on anything less comfortable than that just sounded like torture.
“Hey, y’all,” she says softly, then frowns. “Wyatt?”
“He’s making sure I’m not dead,” I say, pop the top off a beer, and hand it over as she sits. “What happened?”
Ava takes a deep breath. She stares into the fire. Then, she comes to some kind of decision, guzzles half her beer, and looks determinedly at the three of us.
“Tonight was supposed to be spaghetti night,” she begins.
The gist of the fight is more or less that Ava forgot to get pasta on the way home from work, Thad snapped at her about it, she snapped back that it’s always her job to get pasta, and things devolved from there until she was shouting about dirty socks and he was detailing all the times he’d turned her curling iron off for her before the whole house burned down, not that she ever bothered noticing.