I shrugged a shoulder, tryin’ not to be moved by the fact that my mother was alive and so beautiful in the anemic moonlight filterin’ through the big window over the sink she nearly took my breath away. It was a stark reminder that Dane and Lila’s mum was dead. That they’d never have their mother’s comfort again.
“Nearly eighteen now,” I reasoned.
She snorted softly as she set the kettle over the burner and took the wooden chair across from me. “Honey, you’ve been raising yourself since you could cogitate.”
This was true. There was a disconnect between me and my folks, between me my brothers too. It was complicated, but easy to summarize: they were better people than me.
I liked chaos and askin’ hard questions that created discomfort.
I liked fuckin’ with authority because it was fun, and I was arrogant enough to think I was better than my teachers and the cops, that what I wanted to do was in the spirit’a fun and growth, so if it didn’t hurt anyone who the fuck should care?
I’d stopped goin’ to my parent’s church when I was seven, tyin’ myself to the tree in our old backyard with lengths of my dad’s fishin’ line so I wouldn’t have to leave with them. It had taken hours for Dad to cut me free of the transparent fibres with his pocket knife.
The apple didn’t just fall far from the fuckin’ tree.
In my case, it wasn’t an apple at all.
But I was blessed because they got it. They got that I was painted in different strokes and contrary colours, and they just let me be.
My heart burned in my chest as I thought of Dane and Lila again, parentless and so fuckin’ alone.
“We gotta do somethin’ about this, Mum.”
She sighed gustily, restin’ her head in her hands as she stared at me. My fingers itched to draw the curve of her cheek and the three lines fannin’ out delicately from her wide eyes. “I know you’re feeling this hard. I know…” She struggled to find the words, reachin’ for my ink stained hand to hold even though it was still streaked with black. “I know witnessing what happened isn’t something you’re ever going to get over, even with Dr. Canterbury’s help.”
I tried not to flinch at the mention of Meredith’s name. She was helpin’ plenty, just not in the way Mum mighta thought.
“But we have four kids on a fisherman’s salary,” she continued, face twisted with shame. “I’m sorry to say it, but we have to be frugal as it is. How would we possibly care for two more kids?”
“You and dad always say money doesn’t matter. Love and family do,” I reminded her, my voice as hard as the edge of a blade.
I was bein’ an asshole. If anyone would want to take in the less fortunate, it was my mum. But the painful weight of my privilege compared to Dane and Lila ached like a lance struck through my ribcage.
Mum winced and looked down at my hand in hers, tracin’ her thumbnail through the black pigment until it formed a misshapen heart. “I know what we said, and we meant it. You know, your dad’s parents disowned him for marrying me? I was pregnant out of wedlock, Canadian, and disrespectful of their customs.” Her laugh was uncharacteristically hard, chewed off, and discordant. “I thought for sure Diogo would stay in the Algarve, and I’d go home to Ontario to raise you by myself, nineteen and alone.”
“But Dad wouldn’t let that happen.”
Her smile was small and tender, an expression of some memory I couldn’t see. “No, he wouldn’t.”
“So he won’t let this happen now,” I surmised. “He won’t abandon them. Because, Mum, you can bet sure as fuck I’m not goin’ to.”
She laughed lightly as she studied me, eyes gentle against my face. When she cupped my cheek, I let her, because I was too old for affection like that, but I knew she needed it then.
And maybe I did too.
“My dark horse,” she whispered. “So unique and brave and wild. I didn’t doubt for one second that you would. I don’t know how, but we’ll find a way to make it work, honey. We always do.”
* * *
* * *
Three weeks later and the paperwork was movin’ through the ranks of government like molasses in the cold. There was a permanent itch under my skin, a restlessness I couldn’t fuckin’ curb.
I needed to do somethin’.
I was seventeen, man enough to take action myself.
Dad was workin’ harder than ever tryin’ to expand the business to bring in more money just in case they got approved to foster Dane and Lila. I’d seen Mum at the computer in the den, clickin’ at the keyboard with each pointer finger as she searched for part time jobs online.
Why did it have to fall to them?
Short answer? It fuckin’ didn’t.
Which was why I was walkin’ away from the parkin’ lot of Entrance Bay High instead of goin’ to class, searchin’ down Main Street for job postin’s in windows. There was somethin’ in the kitchen at Stella’s Diner, but I wasn’t hot on the idea of washin’ dishes until my hands were too raw and red to draw.
Still, I’d gone in and convinced Stella to give me a trial right then and there. If she wasn’t satisfied, she didn’t have to hire me. If she was, she didn’t have to go through the hassle of interviews.
She’d agreed.
Mostly, I thought, because a group of college girls had trailed in behind me and stayed the whole time I worked in the back just so one’a them could snag my number.
So I got a job that would go a long way to help payin’ the bills for a family of six gone to eight soon as we got Dane and Lila back. Like hell I’d tell my parents I quit school to help out, though, and I wouldn’t have to as long as mum kept lettin’ me do the books. She hated numbers somethin’ fierce and had put me in charge at thirteen when I kinda showed a penchant for math.
When I finished my shift four hours later, my hands were singed from the steaming water and hard, industrial soap, my skin burnin’ like a low-grade buzz of electricity. I hissed as I exited at the back of the diner the handle pokin’ the new blister on my palm as I pushed into the cool night air. Stella’d hire me so I shoulda felt some sense of satisfaction. Instead, I flipped open my phone and stared at the photo of the dirty alleyway Dane had captured in Vancouver outside his foster home, then the cluster of indigo berries Lila had sent from her blueberry farm in the Okanagan.
It’d been a few days since I’d sent them anythin’ myself, and I knew they lived for the glimpses of home. So even though I was tired as fuck and my hands ached, I hefted my backpack over my shoulder and headed out of downtown Entrance to find somethin’ to tag with graffiti.
I was thinkin’ they’d like a mock-up of The Three Caballeros because it was one’a the only movies they’d had growin’ up, and Lila liked to call us that sometimes, like we were some kinda boxset.
Who woulda thought, two seventeen-year-old guys and a six-year-old girl they both woulda died for.
It was weird as fuck, somethin’ I never mentioned at school to the friends there who didn’t matter because they’d never get what family meant to me or mine.
But they were mine.