Chapter 14
Jake did drive fast, starting up old Progress and heading for the small three-bedroom house that Lila shared with Amelie, creator of Bridezilla’s first wedding gown. Thank God that Lila’s cat-strangling segued into gentle snoring within a couple of minutes. Her head kept lolling onto Charlie’s shoulder, but Charlie was just glad for the peace as they drove.
Lila’s shared house was made of limestone, and featured a turquoise front door with a fan-shaped glass window at the top. A lonely cedar tree stood guard in a yard that had a garden bed filled with river rock and was adorned with a single Mexican ceramic pot. A painted metal peacock sprouted from this, seeming to grow out of the soil. Evidently neither resident had the time—or inclination—for gardening.
Amelie greeted them with a mouth full of pins, her tight dark curls twisted into a knot on top of her head. Some had escaped and danced near her ears, her skin gleaming mahogany under the porch light. She rolled her eyes at the sight of her roommate passed out in Jake’s arms.
“Evenin’, Amelie,” he said.
“Mmm mmm mm?” she answered.
“Not sure how to translate that, but I believe it was something close to WTF.”
“Mmm hmm!” Amelie moved out of the way and gestured to them to come in, pointing the way to Lila’s bedroom.
“Hi,” said Charlie, following Jake inside past a dressmaker’s dummy clad in iridescent aqua mermaid scales. They had to step over her tail.
Amelie pulled the pins out of her mouth and dropped them into a porcelain dish on the console table next to it. She spread her hands wide and raised her eyebrows.
Charlie sighed. “Lila had a bad day with Bridezilla and a bad night with tequila. Her inner Leppard came out, and now we’re all Def.”
“Say no more. I’ll get water and aspirin.” Amelie headed for the kitchen.
“Thank you!” called Charlie, and braved Lila’s bedroom with Jake.
He’d deposited her on her queen-sized Victorian bed and was clumsily trying to unbuckle one of her Windex blue wedges.
“Here, let me do that.” Charlie took over.
“I’ll never understand women’s shoes as long as I live.”
She laughed and glanced over at him as she easily undid the straps and slid the shoes off. Jake’s expression said everything he’d probably never put into words to his little sister.
It was tender, exasperated, amused, concerned, and protective all at once. He adored her.
Charlie’s breath caught in her throat, and the familiar guilt that she’d come between these two haunted her. And that she’d allowed Lila to straddle the fence to her friend’s own detriment, while she, Charlie, had firmly sided with her own brother, Brandon. Loyalty came in many shades and forms, didn’t it?
Jake, suddenly seeming aware of her scrutiny, evaded it by grabbing Lila’s trash can and bringing it to her bedside as Charlie put the shoes in her friend’s closet. “Hey, Charlie,” he growled. “This boyfriendzilla thing Lila mentioned? If she needs someone to give somebody a talking-to about something . . . I’m available.”
She nodded at Jake, closed the closet doors, turned, and came face-to-face with a spindly shelf full of party planning books, among them Awesome Occasions! and Elegant Evenings. Then, notably: Weddiculous: An Unfiltered Guide to Being a Bride. Charlie smiled.
Lila’s room was similar to her office. Odd wedding and party accessories sprouted everywhere, a testament to Lila’s job. A yellowed antique wedding veil trailed from one of the bedposts. A painted cowboy boot filled with silk violets adorned her dresser, along with a pair of white elbow gloves. In the far corner of the room, a book lay sprawled as if it had been thrown against the wall. Charlie chuckled as she identified it as Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. Evidently, Lila had fallen short? What a shocker.
Jake found a blanket on a pale green French country–style chair in the room and draped it over his sister. “Let’s hope for her sake that she vomits.”
Ugh. But Charlie nodded.
“She’ll feel better in the morning if she does,” Jake said.
Amelie came in with a glass of water and three aspirin and set them on the nightstand. “So she sang?”
Jake scrubbed a hand down his face. “That’s a questionable verb.”
Amelie laughed. “I’ll keep an eye on her. Don’t worry.”
“Thanks. What’s with the mermaid costume?”
“Silverlake Middle School is doing a performance of The Little Mermaid. I’m helping out with the costumes.”
Charlie put a hand to her heart. “That’s so sweet.”
Amelie’s lips flattened, and she looked up at the ceiling. “It’s a pain in the butt,” she said. But the quirk of her mouth gave away that she loved doing it. “Not as big a pain as Bridezilla, though!”
“Amen to that.”
With Lila safely in bed under Amelie’s watch, Jake helped Charlie up into Progress’s passenger seat and got into the driver’s seat once more. Without his sister in the car, sitting here with Charlie suddenly seemed so intimate.
He inhaled the familiar smells of old vinyl, rusty metal, musty seat foam, and eau de gasoline. How many years had it been since he’d sat in this truck, tooling around with Kingston? He remembered the old man teaching him how to check the oil and the tire pressure, back when Jake had been “one of the family.” Before the fire.
Ha. Likely he had been their pet project, their charity case. He’d worn Brandon’s hand-me-downs and gladly taken his castoffs: the older-model Dell computer, for example. His old Nokia flip phone. Things that Deck couldn’t afford to buy for any of the Braddock kids. At the time, Jake had been over the moon to have them . . . but had those “free” items come at a price? The price of equality?
Jake fired up the engine abruptly. Progress roared, visibly startling Charlie. He’d almost flooded the engine as a wave of unnamed emotions flooded him. But he preferred them unidentified. They were easier to brush aside that way.
“Why so jumpy?” he asked Charlie. “You okay?”
“No,” she said baldly.
“Why not?”
“I can’t even begin to explain it.” She fiddled with the straps of her big tote bag and stared out the window.
Frustration mounted in him. “You could try.”
Silence.
They’d reached the firehouse now, but instead of hopping out, Jake parked across from the driveway and cut the engine. “You said you’d talk to me. About the past. So . . . ?”
She tucked some hair behind her ears and examined her fingernails. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Yeah? Well, I didn’t know where—or why—to end, Charlie.” The words escaped him, raw and harsh, without permission. Embarrassing after all this time. But since they were out, the hell with it. “One minute I was a part of the family,” he said, “an honorary Nash. And the next, I was an outcast. Shunned. Persona non grata.”
Charlie’s shoulders hunched. She let her bag drop to the floor of the cab and tucked her hands underneath her thighs. “I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’ve said that. You’ve said it more than once. But what I want to know is why! We put out that campfire, Brandon and I. I know it was out. Not a single ember. I even kicked sand over it. And I’m the one who got your dad out of the house, wheelchair and all—”
“I know,” she whispered. “It wasn’t fair,” she said, her voice breaking. “None of it, Jake. I know that. I’m so sorry. But . . . I couldn’t . . . All of it combined was like a force of nature that I couldn’t stop.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder, and Jake put his arm around her. At last, disjointedly, the story was coming out. The story nobody would tell him, the one he’d waited so long to hear.
“I was fifteen years old, Jake, and Granddad was raging and looking for someone to blame. There was an insurance investigator, a psychologist, all the police and the firefighters, everyone asking questions. So many questions, and so many fingers pointing . . .” Charlie shook her head, choking on fresh tears. “Pointing at you. It was awful. So awful. From the get-go, they forbade me to even talk to you, for legal reasons.”
Jake’s heart stuttered. The injustice of it was like a kick in the stomach. He let his arm drop away from Charlie, and he sat there reeling, fighting a sudden urge to smash the windshield. “Why? Why would they think it was me? The campfire was out! I swear it. Brandon saw it. He was there.”
Charlie refused to meet his gaze.
What? No . . . it just wasn’t possible. Had Brandon lied and said Jake was responsible? Aw, hell. Did it really matter at this point if he had? The whole town had whispered that it was probably Jake’s fault. Fair or not.
Charlie kept talking, even though now he wasn’t sure he wanted her to.
“The authorities had a theory. I don’t even know where it came from. And even when there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute, the idea just wouldn’t go away. Once it got in Granddad’s head, in Mom and Dad’s head . . .” Charlie was absolutely sobbing now.
“What theory?” Jake asked, his voice sounding cold and foreign in his own ears.
“Envy,” Charlie blurted.
Jake’s heart, having stopped, now resumed like a sledgehammer trying to crack his breastbone. Envy? What was she saying? That they’d thought—no. Not possible. Bile rose in his throat. “You thought I—? How could you think that?”
“I didn’t! The insurance investigator was trying to get me to say stuff about you. Stuff that would incriminate you. I told him that he was full of it. He suggested that I was romantically biased and naive. He suggested that we’d all taken in a lonely, unstable kid who had something to prove, who wanted to impress the family, cement his place in it. That you set the fire so you could be a hero.”
Jake heard her words as if from a great distance, trying to cut himself off from the vicious pain they caused. Lonely. Unstable. Something to prove. The truth of the insights hurt almost worse than the crazy supposition that the investigator had arrived at.
Impress the family. Cement his place . . .
“Because, you know, Mom and Dad had given us both a talk a few days earlier. Do you remember? Do you remember The Talk?”
Oh, yeah, Jake remembered The Talk.
“Jake, you’re like a second son to us,” Dave Nash had said, a regretful, tender expression on his craggy face. His hands, resting on the arms of the wheelchair, shook a little, but who knew whether it was from emotion or MS?
“Yes, darlin’, you are,” Maria Nash chimed in, enveloping him in one of her ample hugs. Jake loved her wide smile, the tiny smudge of coral lipstick that always ended up on one of her front teeth. He loved her messy, curly blond hair, the crinkles at her eyes, the way she looked at him as though she saw into his heart and approved of what was there.
This hug felt different, though. It felt . . . official. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he didn’t want to let her go, even though normally he felt a little awkward at the physical contact.
“Sit down, Jake,” Dave said, a little too gently.
So he did, a nameless dread rising in him.
“It hasn’t escaped our notice that you have, uh . . . feelings . . . for Charlie.”
Heat suffused Jake’s face, and his palms instantly became damp. Prickles of sweat started in his armpits, too.
“Or that she has them for you.”
Okay, this was humiliating, but not a crime. Maybe Dave or Maria had seen him and Charlie making out behind the rosebushes yesterday. They’d just—
“That’s fine, son, just fine. But you’re both at an age where, given the circumstances, it’s just, uh, inappropriate for you both to be living under the same roof.”
Oh God. This was beyond awful. His armpits were now full of glue. Sweat trickled from Jake’s nape down to his lower back, pooling there, soaking into his T-shirt. “I haven’t—uh, we haven’t—”
Okay, so he’d thought about it. More than once. Even often. But, no, he’d never pressured Charlie . . .
Dave Nash closed his eyes and flapped a hand.
“I mean, it’s not a problem!” Jake blurted.
Maria gazed at him in her kindly but firm way, her expression soft and at the same time steely. “It is a problem, honey. And that’s normal. But what’s not normal is . . .” She paused and looked to Dave, who took up her slack.
“For you two to live in the same house.”
He stared at them, these two stand-in parents whom he’d grown to love. “So—what is this?” Jake said. “You’re firing me from your family?”
Maria made a sound of pure distress and got up as if to hug him.
Jake jumped out of his chair and backed away. A lump had grown in his throat, one that made it impossible to swallow. “Please . . .” His voice cracked, and he hated himself for it. “Please don’t do this. When my parents died, you said your house was mine now, that I would always be welcome. You said I was family.”
But Dave and Maria just looked at each other and then down at the floor.
They were family. Not Jake. Jake was once and always a Braddock, not a Nash. And there wasn’t any Braddock family anymore. The familiar swell of loneliness that always seemed just a heartbeat away nearly swamped him now. There must be something he could say . . .
“I promise—” Jake began.
“Don’t make promises that you can’t keep, son,” said Dave.
The hurt got the better of him then. “Don’t call me ‘son’ if you don’t mean it!” Jake spun around on his heel and ran for the door.
“I do mean it!” Dave called after him. “Please try to understand the awkwardness of our position here . . .”
But nothing was more awkward than being a teenager in love for the first time.
Or being a teenager marked “Return to Sender.”
Jake had a sudden urge to find the creep investigator and choke the life out of him for seeing his sixteen-year-old weaknesses and for using them to build a completely fictional case against him. Employing sense to build nonsense.
Charlie’s voice brought him back to the present. “There may have been no conclusive evidence in the investigation, but the idea was enough. A psychologist told Mom and Dad to keep Brandon and me away from you, to not see you again, so that we could recover from the trauma.”
She stopped talking, thank God. They sat there in Progress without speaking.
“My God,” Jake murmured, still reeling. He felt empty, crumpled, turned inside out. “I’m sorry I ever asked.”
“Jake,” Charlie said softly. She put a hand on his knee. “I didn’t believe those jerks—the insurance guy or the shrink who agreed it was possible.”
He drew in a couple of shaky breaths. “Yeah, I think you did.”
“No!” She slid sideways across the old bench seat and gripped his arm. “I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you talk to me, then? Why, when I came to Dallas, did you shut the door in my face?” The last part came out as a bellow; he couldn’t help himself.
Charlie’s tears had dried up, but her skin was pale in the moonlight, and her blue eyes were haunted. “Because I had to make a choice: my own family or you. And Brandon had just threatened to kill himself.”
Kill himself? Brandon?
Her words sucked the oxygen out of him, out of the argument, out of the truck. “Oh, man. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” Jake leaned his forehead against the steering wheel.
“Of course not. How could you have known?”
“Why? Why would he do that?” But Jake knew. He knew.
“Everyone was asking him questions, same as you, about that campfire. I guess he felt responsible, somehow, for Grandma’s death. And he’d lost you, too.”
Jake’s heart clenched with pity. “That’s awful, and it’s untrue. George wrote up the report,” he said, carefully editing his words. The Nashes had been through enough. They didn’t need to know the whole truth. Including Charlie. “He’s told me to my face that it was just an accident. An accident that stole away a really wonderful lady. I wish I could turn back time and run a little faster. I’d do anything to have saved your grandma, Charlie.”
Jake dashed sudden tears away from his eyes.
“You didn’t fail Grandma Babe . . . You did the best you could for her.” She put her arms around him and laid her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat.
He slid his arms around her, too, and for a moment he rested his chin on top of her head. It was the best feeling in the entire world, holding Charlie in his arms like old times. “I swear to you by all that’s holy, Charlie, that I had nothing to do with the fire,” Jake whispered.
“I know that,” Charlie told him. “I know it deep in my bones. I always have.”
As he absorbed her words, a part of him that had been coiled tight for twelve years suddenly relaxed, leaving him weak inside.
He savored the warm, fragrant feel of her in his arms and found her lips with his own. Hello, Goodbye Girl. God, you taste good. His whole body hummed, and he wanted more of her. He deepened the kiss, pulling her tighter, savoring the curves of her body.
“Jake,” she whispered, her breathing quick and shallow.
“Shh.” He slid his hands into places he knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help himself. Warm handfuls of Charlie . . .
“Jake!”
He groaned and pulled her bodily into his lap. He wanted her naked in the worst way.
And of course that was when the firehouse alarm went off, at lust-destroying decibels.
That was when the floodlights came on and the garage door went up, exposing Big Red in all its glory. That was when Old George came running out first, a priceless expression crossing his face when he saw them.
“Well, that’s progress,” he called, in a tone as dry as dust. “But we got a night drill for a disaster-preparedness scenario, remember? Out near the Lundgren property. You coming or what?”
Jake looked down at the beautiful woman in his arms and sighed.