THIRTY-FOUR
“You’re going back to Hell right this minute?”
“I’ve got one stop to make first.” I had no interest in getting into that with Marc. With anyone. I didn’t dare; if I talked about it before I did it, I’d talk myself right out of it. “After that, yeah. I’m going back. But only for an hour. Or three days. Haven’t got the time thing worked out yet.”
“Betsy, you’ve been through a lot in a super short time.” Marc sounded more distressed than he did after a Giada De Laurentiis marathon. “People will understand if you hang here for a bit.”
People. Oh, sure. And who were people? The ones stuck there? Laura? No and no. People was me. And, in fact, people would not understand if I didn’t take care of this nasty business as soon as I could.
But it wasn’t the time to explain that to Marc. It might not ever be the time.
“It’s actually a good time to go.” As he raised the eyebrows of skepticism, I backpedaled a bit. “Okay, ‘good’ might be an exaggeration. It’s a not-terrible time to go, how’s that? We’ve found out what’s up with the babies, Dad’s out of my life, and I actually made a little progress in Hell last time.”
“But there’s so much to ponder! There was a lot even before your dad stopped by under duress.”
“Duress, huh?” I couldn’t keep the smile off my face and turned to Sinclair. Jessica had spotted my father earlier in the week, but I knew Sinclair had done the rest: followed up, found Dad, tracked him. Figured out what he had done, cornered him like a rat. Produced him at the right time for me to confront him—when there was a house full of loved ones to lend emotional, physical, and mower-based support. “How’d you get him over here, anyway? I can’t imagine he wanted to come.”
“I appealed to his family responsibilities,” Sinclair replied.
“Uh-huh, what’d you really do?”
“I appealed to his love of keeping his legs unbroken and his testicles unsmashed.”
I nearly melted; so romantic!
“I just realized, your dad’s a widower now.”
I grimaced. “So?”
“He’s back on the marriage market. Maybe your mom and dad will get back together—it’s the dream of every child of divorce.”
“Please stop,” I groaned.
“And maybe you’ll get a new brother or sister, too!” Marc enthused, which made me want to punch him and punch him and punch him. Before I could get started, we were interrupted.
“What are you guys doing in our room? Nope, don’t care,” Dick added as Marc opened his mouth to explain. “Go away. Jess and I need some alone time.”
Marc waved that away. “You’ve got all night to have ‘hooray, we’re engaged’ sex. You gotta check this out first.”
“Whatever it is,” Dick grumped, gently pushing past what he clearly considered to be an absurd number of people hanging out in his bedroom, “it can wait until—oh, cripes.”
Jessica, who’d followed right behind him, snorted and rested her forehead in the middle of his back. “Saw it when I woke up,” she managed, shoulders shaking. “Had to get moving after doing a quick check on the babies. Didn’t want Betsy’s dad getting away. But now I’ve got time to take it in.”
“We all do!” Marc added cheerfully.
After years of trying to encourage me to be more organized, my mother gave up in despair, but not before indulging in a handheld, battery-operated label maker. Marc found it in the attic and took to it like a long-lost best pal. He’d burned through two days labeling experiments, experimenting on labels, experimenting on labeled experiments . . . he’d had a blast. I knew where he kept the thing, and after apologizing to Dick I’d popped into the attic to grab it and got to work.
PROPERTY OF NICK BARRY was on everything in the room: the headboard, the pillows, the quilt. The tops of the dressers, each individual drawer. The framed photos on the walls. The end tables, and everything on the end tables (books, box of Kleenex, lamp, bottle of lotion, American Cop magazine). The walls, the carpet.
“Do you like it?” I tried and failed to keep the anxiety out of my tone. “I meant what I said about not screwing up your name anymore. I wanted to show you, because sometimes I talk and never do.”
Dick’s mouth, property of Dick Barry along with the rest of his face, twitched at the corners and his eyes went very bright. “You did. It’s great. You didn’t have to go to this much trouble.”
I was touched at how he was so obviously overcome. “It wasn’t much trouble.” Not compared to some of the other things I’d had to do that week.
“Really, really great,” he squeaked. Squeaked? Wait, was he overcome with tears of gratitude or trying not to laugh? Because it seemed more like he was trying not to laugh.
“That reminds me. I don’t ever want to wake up and find PROPERTY OF NICK BARRY stuck on my shirt and in my hair.” Jessica’s hand went to her pocket and she extracted a small ball of crumpled-up labels. “What kind of savage are you when I can’t take a nap without being labeled?”
“The worst kind of savage,” I replied, brandishing the label gun at her. I’d left it on the dresser when Sinclair and I went downstairs to deal with Dad. It felt sooo good to have it back in my hand. Perhaps everything in the house needed to be labeled. “The kind with no remorse.”
“Majesties, I wanted to advise you about the—the—” Tina peeked in the doorway, then let out a stream of giggles that were like verbal champagne bubbles. “Oh. Oh!”
“I was just telling her,” Dick said, and why was there a warning in his voice? “I told her she didn’t have to go to so much trouble and I thanked her and that’s the end of it.”
“What? Did I miss something?” I took another look around the room again. I was sure I’d hit everything.
“She’s gonna find out,” Jessica admonished. “Might as well be up-front about it.”
“Find out what?” In my exasperation, I accidentally labeled myself again. “Dammit! Don’t get any ideas,” I warned, yanking it off. “My leggings aren’t property of Dick Barry.”
“Nor is what’s inside them,” Sinclair advised. He had the small, familiar smile on his face that I particularly loved, the “I can’t believe this is my life now and it’s so great” expression. “Nicholas’s last name is spelled B-e-r-r-y like strawberry, not B-a-r-r-y like Barry Manilow.”
I digested that for a second. Peered at the label gun, looked at alllll the misspelled labels. “I don’t know what’s more upsetting,” I announced at last. “That I fucked this up so completely or that you know who Barry Manilow is.”
“The latter,” Marc said with a vigorous nod. “No question.”
“You could have warned me,” I snapped, glaring at Marc and my husband. “You both watched me do it!”
“Yeah,” Marc agreed.
“We could have,” Sinclair added. “No question.”
“You both suck.” I turned back to Dick Berry-not-Barry. “I’m sorry. I’ll redo the whole thing.”
“Oh, please don’t,” Jess groaned from behind him. “You made your point. We get the remorse at play here.”
Dick hugged me so hard my feet left the floor for a second. “Yes, please don’t. And Marc’s right, Jess and I have the rest of the night. I want to check on the babies, anyway. Putting portable cribs in the kitchen was the most brilliant idea you ever had, Tina. C’mon, I’ll make strawberry-banana-chocolate-chip smoothies.”
“You keep wanting to add candy to our smoothies,” Marc complained as they started out of the room. “At some point you’ll have to admit that your healthy smoothie has become an unhealthy milk shake.”
“Never! C’mon, hon.”
“In a second,” I said, though he hadn’t been talking to me. I fired off a quick thought to Sinclair—I need a minute with Jess, be right down after—so he left, too, after pressing a kiss to my palm.
“Uh-oh,” Jess said when we were alone. “Is it lecture time? Confession time? Worse, are you going to get mushy on me?”
“Me to know and you to find out. Why’d you do it?” I figured everyone else assumed her motive was petty vengeance on my behalf. But Jessica didn’t do petty anything.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t.” Her arm went around my waist and she rested her head on my shoulder. “I knew you wouldn’t kill him, and that’s fine. I knew you wouldn’t be able to make yourself hurt him, even, and that’s fine, too. Before he faked his death, you could hardly bring yourself to inconvenience him; you’d never be able to hurt him. You took crumbs too long, and told yourself it was a feast. That wasn’t fine, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. And I just . . .” She raised her head and looked at me, mouth set in a solemn line. “I wanted to see him suffer, even if just a little bit. I wanted there to be an instant consequence, not whatever might happen in a decade or two. He was too ignorant of what you are now to be properly terrified; that’ll come later, maybe. I didn’t want him to get to wait to be freaked. I guess you could put it down to my need for instant gratification.”
Yep. That was what I figured. I smiled at my oldest, dearest friend. “I love you.”
“Well, sure. I’m terrific.”
That one earned her a poke in the belly. She giggled, sounding not unlike the Pillsbury Doughboy, and then we were both laughing in a room riddled with misspelled labels.