“Yeah, but—”
“Then don’t be difficult,” I said. “If you two are having a row, eating a little humble pie and making a two-minute call is a lot easier than sneaking around here forever. Just pick up the phone, take your bitty finger, and—”
“She’s dead,” Josie blurted in two stubborn syllables.
Her words echoed in the empty dining hall and registered slowly. All the hope of neatly solving this problem leached from my chest at about the same rate.
“She’s dead,” she said again, her voice barely a whisper and curdling with hurt.
Carl wheezed out a painful little burst of air. I sank into my chair, not sure what to feel about him losing a daughter I’d never once heard him speak of.
But before I could decide how best to console him, his huff warped into a strangled word. “When?”
Josie held her head in her hands, and the tremors I’d spotted earlier in her fingertips were now quakes. “God, I don’t know. A couple of weeks?”
His eyes went wild. “How?”
“She was sick.”
“Sick?” Carl said, baffled. “Of what?”
Her head popped up, and she snapped, “You want the gory details?”
“Please, no,” Carl said, the words knotted together. “I want you to tell me it’s not true. Tell me—”
“Tell you what? You want me to pretend like she’s going to walk in and say, ‘Hey, Dad. Long time no see. Where you been?’”
At first, this lashing stunned Carl, but once the pain registered, he let loose a single cry, then covered his mouth to keep the rest inside.
“Mom wouldn’t have come here anyway,” Josie muttered.
“Oh my word,” he blubbered, turning in his chair, looking like he wanted to run away. Out of the room. Out of Centennial. As fast and far as possible. But physically, he could only stand in place, gripping the edge of the tabletop with one hand while reaching for his walker with the other.
“Help him get it,” I commanded, expecting Josie to jump. But she didn’t move. Didn’t even blink.
I wrestled my chair back, but by the time I’d stood, Carl had already taken an unassisted step and was leaning into his next unsteady stride. It was only by the grace of God that he landed in the arms of his walker, and he stood there for a second, head hung, white-knuckled, crying without making a sound. And then he started moving, jerking the walker forward with every heaving breath, all the way to the edge of the dining hall.
He clearly needed help, but I didn’t move and I didn’t dare call for it. I knew him too well. Knew him like I knew myself. And in these moments, we were the same. When weighted down with a sorrow so large it didn’t fit inside me, I had to be alone with it until it shrank or I grew.
So as he struggled on, I caught my breath and leaned my weight on Josie’s chair, where she sat vacantly watching him go. At some point, she got tired of the sorry sight of him shuffling toward the hall and closed her eyes. But not me. No. I kept guard, with my thumb hovering over that damn call button hanging from my neck—but only because Carl was the one exception I would always make.
4
It was unbelievable that a tiny thing like Josie, who was hardly big enough to cast a shadow, had done so much damage in so little time. We’d have been better off housing a tornado, though you wouldn’t have guessed it by the looks of her now. She’d come out of her stupor enough to quietly tend to her nails, alternating between biting them and picking at them. And with me staring her down, there seemed no end to the amount of manicuring that suddenly needed doing.
When I couldn’t watch her go at it anymore, I clapped the armrests of my chair and said with lawyerlike authority, “Are you telling the truth?”
She edged out a glare over her knuckles. “Are you for real?”
“Are you?” My heartbeat ticked up a notch. “You barge in here, barefoot as a yard dog, dump a load, and expect us to buy it. How do we even know that you’re Carl’s granddaughter, or that his daughter’s really dead?”
She locked eyes with me, like I’d offered her truth or dare and she’d picked both, and leaned forward to dig into her tight back pocket. She drew close enough for a moment that her breath feathered across my face, and the sharp smell of it sliced right through her bubble-gum coating. It hooked my attention, jogged my memory. It suddenly became the most important thing in the entire room, even more so than the paper she fished out and tossed onto the table.
I cut the distance between us in half, my nose twitching. “What is that?”
“That,” she said, holding her ground and tipping her head to the page, “is your proof, though I didn’t bring it along to show some random asshole.”
The smell on her breath bloomed with every word she spoke, building on itself, germinating, until it was a dense, distinct cloud that could be made from only one damn thing: alcohol.
I reared back as it registered, but by then it was already too late. Everything in me had seized up: my brain, my blood. It all stopped to make way for an old, well-known want that spread with the quiet efficiency of a gasoline fire.
Between gritted teeth, I said, “There’s no way in hell you’re staying here. I don’t care what that thing says.”
“Actually,” she said with a smile, nodding to the paper, “that’s my reservation.”
I hardly heard her. I grabbed the paper and fanned my face to clear the air, which took a dozen wafts, plus a dozen more to really collect myself.
“Be careful with that. It’s old,” she said, prompting me to finally stop and take a look. As it turned out, my fan was actually a birth certificate for a baby girl whose name I didn’t recognize: Kaiya Mori. Eight pounds, six ounces. Eighteen inches long. I rolled the name around in my head a few times like you would a magic spell, hoping it would conjure up a memory. Kaiya Mori, Kaiya Mori, Kaiya Mori. It jangled nothing, meant nothing. But suddenly Carl’s full name came into focus, written with poised pen strokes on the line reserved for the proud father. And that, I recognized.
When I peered up from the sheet, Josie had her chin propped up in both palms, and her feet were rattling the entire table. Her shakes from earlier had moved south to her toes and picked up steam.
“I have my mom’s death certificate too, in my apron back at the room, if you want it,” she offered casually, but there was a hitch in her voice that gave her away.
I ignored the flutter of pity in my gut and snatched the table edge to keep her from vibrating it. “Fine,” I said reluctantly. “But for your information, this little piece of paper doesn’t somehow turn Centennial into the Biltmore.”