The Co-op

Chapter Twenty-Four

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

DEACON

“Nope. Stop the car,” I say after I’m whipped forward for the umpteenth time. At this rate Sal’s bound to get her neck broken before we even make it to her appointment.

“Fine,” LaRynn says haughtily, her lips pinching as she pulls forward in the empty parking lot.

I blow out a breath. “You’ll get the hang of it,” I tell her. “I just think we should practice when there’s maybe not a frail old lady in the car.”

“Kindly eat glass,” Sal replies from the back seat. “But I do have to agree, dear.”

“It’s fine. Really. I don’t need to learn it today. Or ever, I guess. Do they even make cars that aren’t automatic anymore?” LaRynn says, her voice too high to mean it. She doesn’t wait for a reply before she puts on the brake and gets out. I meet her at the back bumper, expecting her to step around me. She surprises me by pausing, the toes of our shoes nearly touching.

“You’ll get it,” I say again, quieter and more gruff than I intend.

“I know,” she says, one shoulder lifting half-heartedly. “It’s not… I’m really not concerned about that part.” She sighs and meets my eyes. “Honestly, it’s just the dynamic here that’s difficult for me. This”—she gestures between us, her hand hitting my chest before pointing to hers and continuing—“doesn’t come naturally to me. My own dad paid an instructor to teach me to drive in the first place.” She looks off to the side. “I don’t always know how not to be… abrupt about things. I’m not trying to be rude to you. I do recognize that you’re doing something nice for me. Spending any of your time to teach me something and also letting me use your car. I do know that, alright?” And then she walks around me and slides into the passenger seat before I can respond.

I’m left a little dumbfounded as I finish the drive to Sal’s doctor’s office. That was… a surprisingly forward response from LaRynn. Vulnerable, even.

But… her own dad didn’t want to teach her to drive? And I know—I remember some of the other things she’s let slip about her parents before, though it wasn’t much back then. Anything I put together on my own was based on overheard conversations, or the tense lines of her shoulders whenever she’d be on a phone call with her dad. Remember the general impression I got from my nana, based on what she knew from Cece. From the bits and pieces I’ve gathered overall, I know that LaRynn’s mom left for a time, and then left again. Moved out by the time LaRynn went to college after that last summer she spent here.

I like to keep people where I understand them. I typically choose to do that through friendliness. Keep them happy, but keep it surface level unless they want to confide something. Keep them just far enough so they stay in focus and I can see every move before it comes. Too close and they blur, too many things are easy to miss. When someone’s arms are wrapped around you it’s easy to miss the knife in their hands.

So, maybe LaRynn is more like me than I ever realized. Her methods are just different. She’d rather keep people away altogether. I’d always thought it was just because she didn’t think enough about me to share with me, but… I guess when the ones who are supposed to love you the most never made you feel safe or important, I’d assume the worst of people, too. I suppose in a way I already do.

Maybe she was making as many assumptions about me as I was about her back then.

We pull into Sal’s doctor’s office and the same jittery feeling I get every time starts shaking its way through me.

“You’ll have to keep an eye on him, LaRynn,” Sal says with a nod my way. I roll my eyes.

“Why?” LaRynn asks.

“You’ll see,” says Sal.

“Doctors make me nervous, alright?” I say.

“That’s all well and good, dear, but keep your nerves to yourself. You make everyone else around you anxious with the squirming and the pacing and the knocking old ladies out.”

“I did not—well, okay I did, but it wasn’t—”

“Explain. Immediately,” LaRynn tells Sally.

“The man can’t keep still and has to touch everything. His grandma used to tell me that even when he was little you could look at him and say, ‘Deacon, don’t touch that, it will burn you. It’s hot.’ And he’d look you dead in the eyes and touch it anyway. He spent months figuring out a mystery light switch at my house because it bothered him. Put holes in my walls.” She glares at me and I put my hands in my pockets as we stroll through the automatic doors. “When I left him alone in the waiting room for fifteen minutes the first time, he took it upon himself to repair a shelf.”

“It was already leaning. I was actually trying to prevent an accident,” I say, trying to defend myself.

“Someone wheeled in poor old Ruby Chester at the same time the whole thing collapsed. Knocked her clean out.”

LaRynn looks back at me with her lips pressing together. “I hope she made a full recovery?”

Sally laughs. “Oh yes, and then some. Deacon took Ruby and I both to bingo once a month for about three years after,” she says before she heaves a sigh. “She passed away a year ago now.”

LaRynn’s smirk falls. “Oh no, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be!” Sally replies brightly. “She was ninety-eight and ready—quite literally begging to go. And that hag won every time she came to the hall anyway.”

LaRynn snorts and I fail to suppress a small laugh.

We check Sal in, and the receptionist takes her usual jab at me and asks me to limit myself to the magazines available. But then we sit and my palms start to sweat. What if this is the appointment they tell Sal something terrible? Who else is here in this place, maybe just a few rooms down, getting the worst news of their life?

Sal gets called back quickly and LaRynn’s watchful eyes only add to my nerves.

“I’m going to go look for a vending machine,” I blurt, unfolding from my chair.

“Sounds good,” she replies, standing to join me.

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t love doctors’ offices, either,” she says flatly.

We make our way down the hall, past other practitioners’ offices and the pharmacy, before stepping onto an escalator that I know leads down to the cafeteria.

“So, is it a fear of needles then?” she asks from the step above me. “Whatever gets you nervous about these places.”

“My dad.” I sigh. No use tiptoeing around the point. “Not sure how much you remember of what I told you about him, but he died of colon cancer.”

She frowns, a little line forming between her brows. Her hair’s down today—something rare since she almost exclusively wears it up for work or for working at the house. “I remember, Deacon,” she says. And her tone is frustrated, like it upsets her that I think she forgot.

I nod and we step down onto the floor. “I was home from school when he went in for a routine appointment, so he brought me with him. He wanted to go get ice cream after or something… my dad was like that. Wanted to make a big deal out of everything. Now I know he was most likely just overcompensating.” I shove a hand through my hair. “Anyway. He was telling the doc some things that’d been coming up. He was playing it off like he thought they were no big deal. Part of aging, yada yada. But the doctor’s face got rightfully more concerned, and he ordered a gamut of tests.” We turn into the cafeteria now, so I try to push the rest out quickly. “And yeah. It all went to shit from there.”

“I’m sorry, Deacon.”

I shrug. “It was worse for my mom. Twice.”

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t painful for you, too.”

We study one another for a moment, and something about the honest sympathy in her gaze makes me feel like voicing the rest of my thoughts.

“I still don’t understand why, after getting a second chance at life, after we’d forgiven him and were the ones there while he was sick that first time… I still don’t get why we weren’t enough.” It’s the thing you’re not supposed to say. The man is dead, it’s not as if he “got away” with it. But it’s also the thing I’ve felt like saying out loud for so many years, and simply verbalizing it makes it feel like my chest is lighter, like I can gulp down a full breath.

It occurs to me that LaRynn and I keep wading through the ugly. Between revealing all these less-desirable parts of ourselves, and constantly falling back to the uglier versions with one another in that torn-apart house, we still keep going. Me with my phony charm and bad temper and her with her worse temper and cruel-toned apathy. I wonder if there’s some comfort to be had in being able to show those sides to someone and have them still stick around the way that we are, even if it’s out of obligation.

I also wonder what it’d be like if we ever got to the good. If we ever defaulted to the good versions of ourselves. If we didn’t keep expecting the worst from one another.

We pick out a few snacks and set them on our trays before we slide into a booth.

“Did you talk to him about the affairs before he passed? Did he apologize?” she asks. “I don’t think you ever told me that part—before.”

“Nah, we were usually too preoccupied to spend much time on the shitty stuff, I guess,” I say. “I mean my dad and I, not… not you and me.”

She tilts her head and levels me with A Look, but there’s no ire in it. And I actually appreciate that she doesn’t shower me with sympathetic words. Her gaze simply remains softer than normal, and so I decide I’ll stay chattier than normal in return. Each anecdote feels as satisfying as ripping down a literal wall, anyway. It feels reminiscent of our past, me sharing more than I intended and her keeping everything close to the chest. It should probably scare me, but right now the sharing just feels good.

I elaborate as I tear into my chips. “My mom is the type of person who desperately wants to hold on to all the good. I figured it was already heavier on her, so I didn’t need to add to it.”

“He never tried to bring it up when you were alone or anything?”

I shake my head. “In a weird way, I bet he thought he was doing that for us. We’d already grieved— differently, sure, but we still grieved two other times and would be grieving a third in that way.” Her brows twitch, something like anger passing over her face. It warms something in my chest to have her be anything on my behalf at all.

“And sometimes… sometimes I don’t know what I feel about it. It just— was. I get angry for my mom. Mostly I’m just confused. But then you start looking through all your memories and wondering what you were missing. Oh, that time at that tournament when he left the hotel room for a few hours. Was he off meeting someone? That sort of thing. And that’s when the anger shows up. I get angry at all the questions I’ll never have answered.

“And… I’m angry at all the parts of him I’ll never get. Then I’m angry that I even had to be angry at him when he was weak and dying. That I’m left with this guilt that’ll never resolve because I never even gave him the chance to apologize.”

“Deacon, you didn’t do anything to feel guilty about. He should’ve been using his remaining time apologizing, I don’t care if he had to use every breath,” she says sternly, the fine muscles in her jaw working. And I’m struck anew with how fierce and formidable she is. Bits and pieces of smaller memories slip through the cracks. All the verbal dressing-downs she dealt out on behalf of other people, or the time she threw some sleazy guy’s surfboard off the pier for bothering June, someone she wasn’t even close with back then. I wonder if she’s quick to want justice for other people because no one ever did that for her.

“Thank you,” I say, before we dig into our snacks some more. The silence feels companionable for a change.

Sal texts us soon after and tells us she’s done, that everything went well.

We park the car in the garage when we get home, but decide to walk to the taco truck for dinner. We laugh and eat greasy food at our bench while the sun sets, and Sal treats us to story after story of her and our grandmothers.

And when we get home and bid Sal goodnight, LaRynn and I take the stairs together, my knuckles accidentally brushing hers when we reach the landing.

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“It’s okay,” she replies.

I study my foot. “Uh, so…”

“So.”

I let out an agitated breath. “So, maybe tomorrow we could start looking at countertop slabs and tile? You could practice driving again?”

“Okay.” She nods with a small smile before she turns to head to her “room.”

“Goodnight, Lar.”

“Sweet dreams, Deacon.”

Let’s hope.