14
RUNS IN THE FAMILY
LOVELY BROWN’S HANGOVER was epic. It drove around her head like teenagers on a joyride, ramming into her skull and blowing the horn. Her stomach roiled, empty except for the acid that boiled away her insides. This hangover rated somewhere among the top ten she’d ever had.
The dreams had been horrific. Matti on the floor, holding up her hands in fear, and Lovely leaping forward, and then the pain.
Still, the dreams and hangover failed to distract her from the other pain. The white bandage that covered her throbbing left hand up to the wrist contrasted with her dark skin.
The doorbell rang, and Lovely groaned. What asshole would come by her place at nine on a Monday? Didn’t they know she’d be at work?
(She wasn’t at work. But people should assume she was.)
She rolled out of bed and struggled against a head rush as she got vertical.
After exactly twenty seconds, the bell rang again. “Fuck me, they won’t take a hint,” Lovely said, pushing the heel of her right palm—her good hand—into her forehead. It didn’t relieve the pain, but the pain did get worse when she stopped doing it. That made no logical sense. She returned the hand to her head to hold it on straight.
Through the bedroom door, cradling her hurt left hand to her chest. Through the hall, rubbing her forehead. Through the kitchen, pausing to wince at the mess. Overturned and mostly empty bottles of wine had dribbled drops of red regret on the counter. This would be murder to clean, and her visitor wouldn’t help things.
If her bedroom door lurked, the outside door loomed. Another twenty seconds had gone by, and now it was time for the firm knocking.
Rap rap rap.
“As if I didn’t hear you,” she grumbled. Then she sighed and opened the door. “What the hell—” The protest died on her lips and for a moment’s shock she forgot even her hangover.
A tiny lady stood there looking up at her. She had light brown skin, tight steel-gray curls framing a firm face, lines etched around her dark brown eyes that told everyone she clearly tolerated no bullshit, a brown overcoat buttoned up to her chin, and hands that clasped a black purse in front of her. A good six inches shorter than Lovely, she looked up at her and crossed her arms. “This is the welcome I get?”
“Gran! When did you—” Lovely fell on the old woman’s neck as if it were a life preserver. Her tears surprised her.
“This morning,” Gran said, patting her almost professionally. “And I wanted to come straight here to check on you. I heard about that,” she said, pointing to the injured hand. “I didn’t think I’d find you horribly hungover, but I can’t blame you.”
“I’m not—” Lovely said, and then stopped when Gran held her at arm’s length and silenced her with a stern look. “Fine, yeah, you’re right.” She felt indignant, even though she couldn’t argue at all.
“Are you going to let me in, or continue feeling sorry for yourself while making me stand out in the elements?”
Lovely squinted at the horrible sunlight. “It’s a beautiful day, Gran.”
“Sunshine is an element. I don’t want skin cancer,” Gran said, and pushed past Lovely to get inside.
Lovely sighed, but a smile pulled at her mouth for the first time in days. “Come on in, Gran.”
MRS. ELIZABETH BROWN unbuttoned her coat and put it and her purse carefully onto a kitchen chair. She placed her hands on her hips and surveyed the mess. “How much did you drink?”
“Half a bottle,” Lovely said.
“Don’t lie, Lovely.”
“Fine. Two bottles. Maybe three. It’s hard to count after the first.”
“Did you drink alone? Did you black out?”
“Jesus, Gran, this isn’t an AA meeting. I had friends over.” Before she could ask, Lovely added hastily, “Nadia and Bob. We watched TV and I watched them play video games. We drank a lot of wine. They called cabs and went home.”
Gran unearthed a few mugs from the sink and started to hand-wash them.
“Gran, don’t clean up,” she said weakly, but sat down in the empty kitchen chair, defeated. Gran would do what she wanted. She couldn’t fight her on a good day, much less struggling through a hangover.
“For bad injuries, I allow two weeks to wallow,” she said, her back to Lovely. “From what I understand, you’ve already used a few days. You’ve got, what, another week and a half of healing and then you start physical therapy? You can use that for moping as well. You will need to be over it by the time you see your physical therapist.”
“Don’t patronize me, Gran,” Lovely said, putting her head in her hand. “Tell me about you. I didn’t expect, well, to see you for a while.”
“I’m not patronizing,” Gran said. “I’m serious. When your grandfather would get rejected or have a bad show, we’d take a bottle of whiskey and sit on the couch together and he would moan that his career was over, he was always terrible, and he would never amount to anything. The next day, after our hangovers cleared, he’d start again. The few times he didn’t take those nights to wallow, it took him a lot longer to get over things. So I allowed it. But no more than one night.”
This was news to Lovely. “I never knew Grandpa had trouble getting started.”
“All creative types do,” Gran said, putting water into a kettle and rummaging around the pantry. “Every comic starts in a small club, gets heckled and booed, has the worst nights. Just like you and your auditions. Except people are less likely to outright heckle a violinist,” she amended.
Lovely thought about all the comedy shows her grandfather had been in, the places he’d headlined, the fame he’d achieved. Her gran had once whispered to her that Grandpa being a famous comedian had led to her father being an accountant, because there were few ways a kid could rebel when Dad was a comedy legend and was famous for the “Six-Headed Shaggy Dog Story,” not to mention turning his own family’s bad press and hardship into comedy bits.
“Anyway, just be smart, and always hydrate before bed,” Gran said. “I don’t want to lose you to alcohol poisoning. You’re all I got left.” She set up the French press coffee maker and poured the hot water in. She cast an appraising eye around the kitchen. “And you may want to rethink this filthy pit.”
“You wanted me to wallow; then you say I shouldn’t live in a pit,” Lovely said, looking down at the table. “Which is it?”
A glass of water appeared in front of her, followed by two brown pills. “Take that. See if you can keep it down. If you can, I’ll share some of my coffee with you.”
Lovely muttered a thanks and swallowed the pills, closing her eyes and willing her stomach to accept them without incident.
“It looks like you’ll want to skip breakfast,” Grandma said. “So in that time, why don’t you take a shower and then I’ll braid your hair?”
Christ, I’m not seven anymore. “No, I can do my own—” She bit down on her bottom lip and looked at her bandaged hand. No, she couldn’t.
Grandma put a tiny hand, strong and steadying, on her shoulder. “Indulge an old lady,” she said. “I stopped doing your aunt Ava’s hair when she was seventeen. And your mama always did yours.”
Mama and Grandma had been polite, but there had been little love lost there. Her mother never allowed Lovely to spend the night at her grandparents’ house, and never let Gran do Lovely’s hair. She was highly irritated that Lovely had grown close to Gran despite her passive efforts to keep them apart. Gran had never pressed the issue, but she had always been there when Lovely needed her.
Lovely had been surprised, later, when the cancer and its treatments had taken most of Mama’s strength and she had asked to see Gran alone. The pastor was coming to visit her, and she wanted to be presentable. Gran had gone into her bedroom and had stayed there for an hour, with Lovely and Daddy swapping nervous glances.
When the pastor had arrived, Gran had opened the bedroom door, her eyes wet and the typical firmness to her lips. The rest of the family had gone in for the visit, and Mama lay there, smiling, with what hair she had in braids, and if she had some shiny parts of her scalp showing through, then no one mentioned it. Gran had applied a bit of makeup around her eyes, and they looked bright and shining.
“You can face anything with your hair done and your eyes on,” Gran had said, carefully touching up the mascara on Mama’s remaining lashes. She sat back and surveyed her work. Mama was still too thin, and her skin was ashy. Grandma had not braided away the cancer, but she had made the day a little more bearable.
“Not perfect, but close enough,” she’d said, and Mama had laughed.
Mama had made a full recovery, but after that, she and Gran had a different relationship. No one would be crass enough to talk about how the cancer helped heal whatever rift was between them, but they all thought it.
But now her parents were overseas with Dad’s job. She’d told them about her injury but had downplayed its severity.
And now Gran implied that the hairstyling was for her own benefit, not Lovely’s. The old woman seemed to always know what Lovely needed, even when Lovely wanted to rebel against Gran’s anchoring force. She rose from the table and walked to the bathroom, only to return briefly to accept the plastic bag Gran held out to her. “Keep your bandages dry,” Gran said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
SHE THOUGHT SHE was going to get away with not talking about it, but when she sat down in her robe for Gran to braid her hair, Gran dropped a newspaper—an honest to God paper newspaper—in her lap.
“So what are you going to tell me about that?” she asked.
The headline read, “Police Still Hunt Macy’s Heroic Vigilante Bride,” and the story used an awful lot of words to describe the very little bit they knew about the robbery at the local Macy’s. Robbers had terrorized the place, killed a few cashiers, and were hunting the customers when a mysterious woman in a bridal gown took the robbers down and then escaped before the police could arrive.
“I don’t know anything—” she said, but Gran yanked on her hair firmly, shutting her up.
“Don’t bullshit me, Lovely Grace. I may be old, but I can put together story pieces. You didn’t get that”—she gestured to Lovely’s wrapped hand—“by cutting avocados.”
“The doctor in the ER bought the avocado story,” Lovely grumbled. “I didn’t want to go into the whole Macy’s story. And you’re not going to tell me why you’re here?”
She got another yank for her attempts at deflection. It made her eyes water as her hangover attacked her from the inside at the same time.
“I’ll tell you my story if you will tell me yours,” Gran said.
“Fine,” Lovely said. “I was going out after rehearsal with a girlfriend.”
“Nadia?”
“Matti, the first violin,” Lovely corrected. “We were working on the Ben Franklin ‘Open Strings’ quartetto after rehearsal, and then she wanted to try on some bridal gowns at Macy’s because of some sale. She’s insecure and I’m pretty sure she shouldn’t be marrying this guy, but I didn’t say that. She asked me to try on dresses with her so she wouldn’t be so alone. I think she wanted some kind of girl bonding.” Lovely rolled her eyes, wondering what would have happened if she had been able to take care of the problem in her street clothes.
“We were both in gowns when the gunshots started.”
“Did you hide, or run out to save the day?” Gran asked, disapproval in her voice.
“Come on, Gran, we hid,” Lovely protested. “Despite what you read in the news, I don’t have a death wish. But a gunman came into the dressing room and started kicking in all the doors. I climbed up on the partition between my stall and Matti’s and told her to be quiet, and stayed where the stall door would hide me. When he kicked in the door and pointed the gun at her, I shoved it closed and knocked him backward, and then I went out and disarmed him. Tied him up with the veil.”
“You make it sound so easy,” Gran said.
“Well, I was taught by the best,” Lovely said dryly.
“What about your friend Matti?”
“I told her to take the gun and lock herself in the dressing room again. She was close to losing it. The others came looking for the first guy, and I—stopped them. The only thing was, the last one had a knife and I was expecting a gun. I got sloppy, and he got a good one in.” She held up her bandaged hand.
“And then?”
“We dumped the dresses in a trash can and Matti and I managed to get dressed before the cops got there. We told them the vigilante had run off.”
“Why didn’t you tell them what happened?” Her voice was firm as if she knew the answer but wanted Lovely to say it out loud.
“Because one of the gunmen died of a broken neck,” she said flatly.
“How?”
Lovely’s face grew warm. “You know how.”
“They would soon find out that you weren’t the first person in your family to kill someone in self-defense,” Gran said. “But the police didn’t assume it was you?”
“They assumed the vigilante had ditched the dress and run off during the chaos. And the remaining gunmen didn’t identify me; they were distracted and could only remember the dress . . . I actually think the cops suspected Matti at first, but they decided she was too short.”
“How did you explain your hand?” she asked.
“I told them I didn’t remember, that it was all a blur, but he attacked and I tried to hold him back and got stabbed or something,” she said, wincing. “He had stabbed a few people so he couldn’t identify me that way.”
“And how is the hand?”
Lovely stayed silent.
“Lovely?”
A tear rolled down her cheek. She bent her head. “Tendon’s severed. Pinky is gone. They did what they could.”
Gran was done with the braiding. “All right. We’ll talk about that later. So, ask your questions.”
“Why are you here?” she asked, after taking a moment to compose herself.
“I finally got some free time and wanted to see my granddaughter,” Gran said. “I figured I’d make it a surprise.” She came around the table and sat down, cupping her coffee mug in both hands.
“No kidding,” Lovely said. “I didn’t think I’d see you for several more months.”
“I got off for good behavior,” Gran said, and winked. She took an empty mug and poured coffee into it, sliding it across to Lovely.
“Well, I’m glad you got me up; I just remembered I have to see my doctor today,” Lovely said, holding up her injured hand and grimacing.
“Should I ask about your musical future now or later?” Gran asked softly.
“Later.” Lovely blinked the threatening tears away. She had called the conductor on Saturday but hadn’t reported in since then. She was pretty sure she’d lose her position, but there wasn’t much she could do about it until she talked to the doctor.
The ironic thing was that she could still work on at least one song with her injured hand. She and Matti had agreed to join a quartet that played novelty music for a museum. Currently they were working on music that Ben Franklin had written for three violins and a cello. The strange thing about it was that each instrument was tuned so that the musicians could play using only open strings. One of the few songs in existence that she wouldn’t need her left hand for, except to hold the violin steady. You couldn’t even say that about “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” So she didn’t have to quit music just yet.
It was nice knowing that there was one piece of music she could still play, and that kept her from drowning in utter despair, but she couldn’t play that one piece forever.
“I’ll go with you to the doctor,” Gran said. “I want to make sure you ask the right questions.”
“No, you don’t need to—” Her protest died at Gran’s stern look. “I’m not a kid anymore, Gran,” she said weakly.
“No, but strangely I am still a grandmother even when you grow up, and I still worry. And I don’t have anywhere else to be.
“I’m staying with you for a bit, by the way. I hope you don’t mind,” she added in an offhand manner.
Lovely choked in surprise but wiped her mouth and nodded. If there was anything Gran had taught her, it was that you stand up for the people you love. If Gran needed a place to stay while she was in town, she’d have it. “I’ll need to clean up,” she said. “You can have my bed.”
“I won’t be any trouble. And it looks like you’ll need some help while you recuperate,” Gran said. “And if—who were they, Nadia and Bob? If they want to come over I can read or crochet in another room. I won’t harsh your young person’s vibe.”
Lovely laughed out loud at her gran’s obvious attempts at retro current slang. “Don’t worry about it.”
THE ORTHOPEDIST WHO’D operated on her in the ER wasn’t the same one she was following up with. This guy looked like a bartender from a sports bar: white, stocky, with short brown hair, and an easy smile that felt insincere as all get-out, as Gran would say. Lovely had disliked him on sight, but she pretty much hated everyone through her hangover-tinted glasses.
He greeted them with the boisterous energy of doctors who didn’t expect an honest answer when they asked, “How are you?”
“I’m Dr. Waites,” he said, sticking out his right hand. “You’re Lovely Brown?” He smirked. “That’s a ‘lovely’ name.”
Lovely shook his hand and smiled mildly in response to the comment nearly everyone in the world thought was original when they met her. “Yeah. This is my gran, Mrs. Elizabeth Brown.”
“Ms. Brown,” he said, shaking Gran’s hand.
Lovely winced inwardly. This guy wasn’t scoring any points with Gran already.
“Mrs.,” Grandma said firmly, but the doctor was already absorbed in Lovely’s file. He squinted as he paged through her history.
“Says Dr. Howard operated on you after the injury; she’s a good one. You got lucky she was on call. How did you manage this, again?” he asked.
“Slicing an avocado,” Lovely said woodenly. She barely remembered the trip to the ER or the doctor, hidden behind her mask, who soothed her while she operated on Lovely’s hand.
“You severed your pinky while cutting an avocado?”
“Yeah. I have really good kitchen knives.”
Gran smiled slightly at the lie, but the doctor didn’t even register it. He motioned for her to show him her left hand.
He may have looked like a bro hitting a kegger, but his hands were those of a professional, at least. He carefully unwrapped her bandages and gently inspected the laceration in the center of her hand. Lovely didn’t want to look but knew she had to. The ugly cut across her palm had gone deep. The finger had been severed at the first joint. The stitches were tiny, tight, and precise, but she wondered if she’d ever regain full use of her remaining fingers.
“You cut a rather important tendon there,” he said. “The notes here said it was severed completely. With these injuries, you’ll be lucky if you regain much strength in your remaining fingers. I’ll see you in a week. In the meantime, keep the bandages on, keep them dry, and change them every day,” he said. “Can you wiggle your fingers for me?”
She commanded her fingers to wiggle, but the middle and ring fingers barely twitched.
“Some of the mobility and strength could come back,” he said dubiously. “With proper PT.”
“ ‘Could’?” Gran demanded.
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “But it’s not a probability.”
Lovely grimaced. This wasn’t news.
“Good thing it wasn’t your dominant hand, right?” he added, grinning. He looked like he had introduced her to a new craft beer and was waiting to hear her opinion on it.
“Will she play the violin again?” Gran asked.
Dr. Waites laughed. Lovely and Gran stared at him blankly. This asshole clearly hadn’t read her patient file.
He sobered when he registered their faces. “Oh, you’re serious. You play the violin? I guess this wasn’t a workplace injury, huh?” His hopeful grin faded fast, and he continued, “Moving forward, you can go through physical therapy, but I don’t think the chances are good. You’re right-handed, so maybe you can learn to switch hands?”
“You don’t switch hands—” Lovely began, but Gran was already up.
Gran had begun to gather her things after the doctor said “workplace injury.” She had been holding both of their belongings, and she handed Lovely her hoodie and said, “All right, thank you, doctor, we’re done here.”
Dr. Waites stood too, looking baffled. “I’m going to want to see you in a follow-up, and then we’ll prescribe some physical therapy and get you playing again.”
Gran gave him a cold look. “We’ll take your suggestions into consideration,” she said, and Lovely followed her out.
Gran seethed, a tiny force of nature that everyone stepped around when they saw her coming. She walked past the checkout desk without a word.
“Gran, I need to make a follow-up appointment,” Lovely said.
“Not here you don’t,” Gran said over her shoulder, and kept walking.
When they reached the sidewalk, Lovely finally grabbed Gran’s shoulder with her good hand. “Gran, he’s supposed to be the best hand doctor in town.”
“Either this is a shitty town, or those online ratings are useless,” Gran said. “A good hand doctor would know what their patients did for a living. A good hand doctor would understand a musician’s needs, and would understand you can’t just switch hands on an instrument. Any good doctor would have read your file and known what you had done to get the injury in the first place!”
That had been fair. Lovely had just been bristling at his patronizing attitude, but Gran had a point. Who was this asshole?
“The avocado story was good,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is going to look too deeply into that. But that doesn’t fix you.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she said. She deflated a bit. “Gran?”
“What is it, honey?”
“Do you really think it runs in the family?”
“Does what run in the family?” Gran asked, unflinching.
“Violence.”
Gran leaned in, looking straight into Lovely’s eyes, and placed her hands on Lovely’s shoulders. “Lovely, do folks call a bear violent when she kills a man threatening her cubs? Or do they call her a bear?”
“So I’m an animal?”
“No.” Gran sighed. “All right, if a man had killed someone while defending a weaker friend, would they call him violent?”
“No. He’d be a hero.”
“Right. Call it instinct, or heroism, or violence. Our family doesn’t take any shit, and that’s what it boils down to. You’d have better luck resisting the tide than sitting calmly and letting someone walk all over you.”