The Foster Family, page 3
“I fell asleep.”
“Asleep? ’Scuse me?”
“On the beach. Someone robbed me. Took my wallet and cell.”
“And keys.”
“Yeah.”
He slumped. “They took everything, dude.”
“We have renters’ insurance. We’ll be able to replace it all,” I said, hopeful even as my guts twisted into knots.
“Brand-new computer,” he agreed, nodding. “Too bad the last three years of grad studies and my thesis are on the old one.” He shot a glare at me. “That they took!”
“You didn’t back it up?”
He tilted his head and I followed the movement to look at his fish tank. It was clogged with paper, the ink already soaked off. They’d killed his fish.
“USB?”
“Maybe they thought the Green Works box I had all my memory keys and disks in was yours. They microwaved it.”
“Shit, dude.”
He glared at me harder. “You owe me a microwave.”
I sagged against the back of the couch. “Add it to the list,” I muttered. The list of things I already couldn’t afford.
A knock on the front doorframe startled me, and I turned.
The cop who stood there was not the same woman from the yard. This one was probably almost a foot taller than me. He was even taller than Matt. He looked good in the uniform, but that observation went out the window when he pulled out a little black notebook and flipped it open.
“You Kerry Grey?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Your roommate, Mr. MaKey, seems to think you know who did this?”
“I….” I held up my free hand, helpless. I had no idea what was going on.
“We should get a statement, Mr. Grey,” the cop said.
“Now?”
He managed to look slightly peeved and apologetic at the same time as he glanced at the front yard. “Is there a better time?”
“I suppose not.”
“Okay, then.” He took a pen out of his pocket. “So do you know who did this?”
“I have no idea.”
“And yet your friend thinks you do.”
“Well I’m sorry, I don’t.” I wasn’t trying to sound like an idiot with an attitude, but I had no idea who would trash my life like this and no idea why. As the thought sank in that it maybe wasn’t random, all those knots in my stomach began unwinding and flailing about like restless snakes.
“Do you know anyone who might have a grudge against you?”
I shook my head.
“Anyone who wants to hurt you?”
I shook my head.
“Anyone who dislikes you?”
I pushed my glasses up my nose. “I’m a faggot biology geek. What do you think? Half my high school got their jollies beating me up. Did any of them dislike me? I doubt they cared enough about me to dislike me. I was just an easy target.”
“And you haven’t given anyone a key?”
“It’s against the rules. I’m not the only one who lives here.” When I looked up at him, he was watching me and waiting, almost patiently. “No.” I tried to temper my tone some. “I fell asleep on the beach last night. When I woke up, my wallet, cell, and keys were gone. I have no idea who took them.”
“You were alone?”
I nodded. When he didn’t say anything else, I added, “There were a lot of people on the beach last night, I know.”
“The frat party. Yes. Were you there?”
I would have loved to have lied. But he was a cop. “Yeah.”
“Did you meet someone?”
“No. I went to talk to someone, but they took off before I got a chance and I left.”
“To wander the beach.”
“Yeah.”
“Had you been drinking?”
“Yes.”
He nodded this time. “That would explain why you didn’t wake when your pockets were rifled.” It wasn’t a question, so I kept quiet. “Okay, well, I guess that’s all we can do for now. As I told your partner—”
“Roommate,” I automatically corrected him.
“Roommate. As I told your roommate, make a list of everything that was taken. With serial numbers if you have them, and I suggest you call your cellular carrier and see if they can trace your phone. It might help us find who did this.”
“Sure.”
“And you can clean up the yard. We’ve taken a few items that will give us the best chance at fingerprints. The rest can be cleaned up before it rains again.”
“Rain,” I mumbled. “Perfect.” I hadn’t noticed that it had rained the night before. Between the ocean water and the frigid shower, it hadn’t really mattered.
“One of your neighbors was complaining about the mess. Would you like me to speak with them?”
“No.” I pointed to the climbing roses festooning our fence. “That’s Mrs. Klein. She complains if the newspapers dangle out of the mailboxes all afternoon. The whole rest of the cul-de-sac exists as a backdrop for her roses. We’re used to it.”
He chuckled. “I had a neighbor like that once. Very fond of his petunias. Not so enamored of my creeping dogwood. Something about it infecting his garden with its sprawling attitude.” He tucked his notebook back into his pocket. “I moved to a more tolerant neighborhood.”
At least he got me to laugh.
“Listen,” he said, “we’ll do our best, but I can’t make any promises. Please, if you think of anything else that might help, call the downtown precinct. Ask for Officer Steven Karl. That’s me.”
“Yeah, sure.”
I exchanged my boss’s work number for his badge number and he headed for his cruiser. His partner was already in the passenger seat and he climbed in and drove off.
I let out a long breath and leaned on the porch railing. The yard was a mess. Everything I owned had apparently been tossed out my bedroom window. Half my clothes had landed on the carport roof. They lay there still, misshapen blobs of color against the gray shingle.
Just as I was about to head down the steps and start picking things up, Mrs. Klein appeared around the end of the fence that separated our yard from hers. “You going to get this eyesore cleaned up today?” She peered at me over her glasses, waiting for a response.
I turned my back, went in the house, and slammed the door. Was it out of line to want to punch an old lady in the face? Or only out of line if I actually did it?
“Hey.” Matt straightened the framed Evil Dead poster on the wall above the computer table. “So. You got stuff on the roof—”
“I know.”
He peered out the window. “She’s gone. You want to start out there and I’ll get your shit off the car port?”
I managed a tiny approximation of a smile. Maybe he remembered my issue with heights. “Thanks, man.”
“Sure.” He hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. “Ker….”
“Yeah?”
Pulling in a breath, he opened his mouth and held up a hand like he was trying to indicate whatever he was going to say wasn’t his fault, but then he only sighed, shook his head, and went up the steps.
He was in my room folding clothes into a laundry bag when I got there with an armload of damp jeans and underwear. “Do you believe they actually took the time to rip my books in half?” I dumped the clothes into the pile on the floor. “Every single one of them. Did they go in your room?”
“Yeah. They took my iPod and the docking station. Most of my PC game disks and the console games. Didn’t really touch anything else, though.”
“Good.”
Doubly good, since most of my textbooks were on the bookshelf in his closet, and I couldn’t afford to replace them. The fiction books I was going to miss, the computer I could replace with insurance money, but the textbooks were too expensive to lose.
“Listen, Kerr, you know I love ya, right?”
I picked up a pair of jeans and folded them for the laundry bag. “Sure.”
“Dude, you’re going to have to find another place to live.”
My hands continued the motions of putting the jeans in the bag. I watched as though the movement had nothing to do with me. I couldn’t quite feel most of my body for a moment. Only when I realized I was getting light-headed and needed to breathe did I straighten and look at him.
“Seriously?”
“Look, I’m sorry. I know the timing is shitty.”
I huffed and puffed a bit. “Um.”
“I was going to bring it up last week. Then the rent thing came up and I didn’t want you think it was about that, because it’s not, I swear.”
“Hey, I just asked. It didn’t end up mattering. I paid my share on time.”
“I know, I know. This time. But what about next month?” He flicked the strings on the laundry bag. “You have to wash every stitch of clothing you own, man. That’s going to cost a fortune.” He glanced around the room, at my slashed mattress and the broken drawers of my dresser. “I’m being an asshole.”
“Fucking right you are.” I grabbed a T-shirt out of his hands and stuffed it into the bag. “You already have someone lined up to move in?”
“No.”
I stared at him. “How you going to pay for this place on your own?”
“I’ll talk to my folks.”
“I thought the whole point of asking me to move in was so you didn’t have to ask them for help.”
“Well.” He slumped against the wall. “That was when I had a year of school left and my thesis half-done. Now I have three months and I have to start from scratch. I can’t really afford distractions.”
“I’m a distraction?”
“You….” He closed his eyes. “You’re a little lost, Kerry,” he said when he finally looked at me again. “Blowing school so you could blow some fresh-out-of-high-school jock asshole.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“You know, when I came out to my folks, I ran up here because I figured that’s what they would want. After spending my entire life squeezing my gay ass into their perfect all-American mold, Lamar Redskins, athlete of the year!” He punched a fist in the air as he mocked a cheer. “Prom king. Fuck, it was hideous. I thought, ‘Now they’ll leave me the hell alone. They’ll want me as far away from their socialite friends as they can get me.’” His lips crooked up into the perfect half-smile that always got him second glances. “Man, was I off the mark. I had my scholarship, and my valedictorian speech, and my prom crown, and all they wanted was more. They wanted to make me the poster boy for gay rich kids all over the country. I was so fucking sick of being their perfect little social tool.”
He sank onto the ruined mattress and began playing with his watchstrap, pulling it loose and doing it back up over and over. “I came up here and I was going to do it all myself. No money from them, no backing from the rest of the Houston social scene. I left all my friends behind.” He glanced up at me. “I miss them, Kerry. I miss my family. I spent how many years pushing them away and blocking them out. Couple weeks ago, my sister called. Allison. She’s eighteen. She wants out, just like I did. She told me she’ll move wherever she can to get away from them. She’s as desperate as I was at her age.”
“But you can help her.”
“I have to. She can come here and be safe, I can look out for her, and mom and dad will make sure we don’t end up begging in the street. It’s the timing, Kerry, that’s all. It has nothing to do with the break-in. And I hate that I’m putting you out now, but….”
“Mommy and Daddy won’t let her come if you’ve got another guy her age living in the house.”
He laughed, but it was weak and sad. “Doesn’t even matter you’d rather sleep with me than her.”
“Oh fuck that, shit for brains!” I pushed his shoulder, but it was too gentle a shove to really move him far.
“Don’t be mad, ’kay?”
I laughed at him, and it sounded sour. “Fuck you. Help me fold the rest of this.” I picked up a shirt and stuffed it in a ball into the laundry bag.
I couldn’t not be mad. I couldn’t argue. He’d offered me a room when he found out I was sleeping on a mutual friend’s couch six months ago, and it had been an uneasy alliance that only got worse when he found out about Andrew and who he was to me besides the guy nailing me. I think he’d only offered me the place to get me off his friend’s back. I hadn’t seen much of the guy who had lent me the couch since.
I didn’t have sisters. Or brothers, for that matter. I didn’t have parents either. Not ones I remembered, anyway. I’d been lucky to not to have the worst foster families ever, but I knew what it was like to have no family. I didn’t know what it might be like to have a family and not be talking to them. I imagined it was probably pretty terrible.
“Can you give me to the end of the week, at least?” I asked.
“Yeah. ’Course.” He didn’t look at me.
“Thanks.”
“Sure. No problem.”
Silence.
“I… um.” I dropped a sweater onto the bed. “I’m gonna go clean the yard. Are there garbage bags in the pantry?”
He nodded.
I left.
Chapter 4
LISSA WAS more than helpful. She was an angel, offering me her spare room—which was really a corner of her living room blocked off with a movable screen and her extra futon couch—until I found a place, and letting me use half my shift the next day to make phone calls. I canceled my cards, called to make apartment-viewing appointments, and rerouted my mail to the shop. I had to cash my paycheck advance at the bank in person, which took up most of my lunch but left me with cash so I could wash some clothes at the Laundromat. Matt was right. It cost a fortune. I stopped before I was even half-done.
Nice as she was, Lissa cleared a corner of her mudroom for my kitten’s carrier box. Miss Claire couldn’t have the run of the house—Lissa was deathly allergic—but she could come to the shop and wander the warren of greenhouses to her little kitty-heart’s content. When Lissa also offered one of the nursery’s display sheds to store my stuff until I could find an apartment, I realized just how clean a break from Matt’s I was making. It was nice of her, but unnecessary. All I had left after the cleanup were my clothes and the textbooks Matt let me leave in his closet until I needed them. Whoever had trashed my stuff had been very thorough.
“And you have no idea who it was?” Lissa asked, waving her gloved hands as she spoke. Clods of damp earth flew and plopped on the table, the ground, and both our clothes.
I shook my head, gently guiding her by the wrists back to our work. “And I don’t really want to talk about it anymore, okay?”
She shrugged and handed over one of the plants we were moving to bigger pots. “I just thought if you talked about it, something would spark. Some memory or—” she flicked a hand and a bottle-cap-sized lump of black soil splatted onto my cheek.
“Why does it fucking matter?” I ground my teeth, swiped at my face, and shoved the plant into the bigger pot. “They did me a goddamn fucking favor. Lightened the load. And what else can they do? They already destroyed every fucking thing I owned.”
She patted my hand. “I know, sweetie. It sucks.”
The teeth-grinding at least helped me to hold back the hysterical laughter. “Fucking right it does,” I muttered.
“Still swearing, I see.”
The rumbling male voice crawled up my spine and I shivered as I turned around.
“Malcolm.”
He smiled. Oh boy, did he smile, right at me, and the hairs on the back of my neck lifted. “Hi, Kerry.”
“Wha-what are you doing here?”
Rather than responding, he reached over and rubbed my cheek where the blot of earth had landed. “You do get into your work, don’t you?” His gaze traveled down my front, and I was hyperaware of the spots of soil trickling down my white T-shirt.
I couldn’t stop myself from shooting a damning look at Lissa.
She grinned at me over her shoulder as she walked away, disappearing toward the smaller, weatherproof enclosure where the cash register was.
“It’s been a busy day, I guess,” I said, plucking at the shirt and leaving behind only more black smudges from my gloves.
“You’re not sure?” He lifted both eyebrows and peered at me over his sunglasses.
“It’s been a day from hell, okay? Did you come to bother me, or are you here to buy something?”
He placed a bag on the counter between us and smiled. “I came to bring you your things.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he stood back, and I felt like one of the bugs Lissa and I might find and begin to pick apart to figure out what it was. He didn’t need tweezers. He had that glare.
“Thank you.” I pulled the bag a few inches closer and dropped my gaze.
“Better,” he said softly, and dammit if that gentle mixture of praise and admonishment didn’t twist everything inside me into unexpected knots. “Here. We found these in a tidal pool this morning on our jog. I think they’re pretty much finished.”
He placed my ruined phone and salt-encrusted wallet next to the bag.
It was all I could do not to grab at the scraps of cowhide and pry the stiff leather open to see if there was any cash left inside.
As if reading my mind, he shook his head. “Nothing in the wallet. We checked.”
I shrugged and wrapped my arms around my middle. Not much protection from the hollowed-out space already inside. “There wasn’t much in it in the first place,” I muttered.
He had one more item for me, though. My driver’s license snapped against the counter as he set it down. It had been defaced, my image obviously very deliberately scratched over. One more thing to add to the list of things I couldn’t afford to replace.
“Is everything okay?” he asked. His tone hadn’t changed from that warm, low baritone, and I glanced up.
“Fine.” I touched a finger to the ID and twirled it around a bit, wondering who hated me that much.
Silence settled between us for a few minutes.
“Okay,” he said at last. “No reason you should tell me. You don’t know me.”
I glanced up into his gentle smile. “Thanks for my things.”
“Well, I am here to shop too. Do you have time?”
