All of Us and Everything (28 page)

Parks Cabinetry was a stand-alone store next to a small strip mall.

“What if Liv's right, and Darwin doesn't recognize me?” Esme said.

“Let's go,” Ru said. “Come on.”

“Atty!” Esme called.

Atty slowly crawled across the seat and out of the station wagon. She squinted at the Parks Cabinetry sign and said, “Personally, I don't like this.”

They walked into a showroom with various cabinets on display. The ceiling had wood beams, the flooring was parquet. The showroom was empty except for a young man idling at the center kiosk.

Atty headed for the unisex bathroom. She hadn't yet felt much effect from the Valiums and decided to check her pupils under fluorescent lights.

Augusta had done so much remodeling from the flood, she was honestly drawn to some bookcases as if she'd come to shop.

Ru and Liv stuck together. They wanted to give Esme a wide berth, maybe even some emotional privacy. They flipped through flooring samples and Ru said, “Do you think that on some level, I wanted Nick Flemming to read my Teddy Wilmer book and be hurt by the lack of father figures in it? The lack of father figures really does a lot of damage to the main characters in the novel.”

“I'm one of the main characters in the novel,” Liv said. “And I didn't like being used so that you could play out some weird therapy session in front of the world. You've never apologized for it. Do you realize that?”

“Apologize for making art? Artists don't apologize for that!” Ru said.

“I will do this right here and right now,” Liv said. “If that's what you want.”

“Do
what
?” Ru said.

“You took my…You're like a cherry-picker of
lives
…and…”

“And what? This is what writers do.”

Liv froze. Her arms went limp and her back stiffened.

“I'm going to check out the bamboo flooring,” Ru said.

Nick hovered near the front door, the nearest exit.

Esme noted that there was a room in the back with a glass window to keep an eye on the store and a heavy door marked
OFFICE.
She assumed that if Darwin Webber was here, he'd be in that office, maybe ordering wood on a phone.

She walked up to the young man with shaggy hair and a white buttondown shirt sitting on a spinning chair at the kiosk.

“Welcome to Parks Cabinetry. I'm Matt. What can I do for you?”

“Is the owner in?” Esme asked, and then she looked around for her father. Spotting him near the door, she waved him toward her.

“Is there a problem?” Matt asked.

“No,” Esme said. “It's just that my father has something he'd like to tell him.”

“Is this about a renovation?” Matt asked.

“No. It's not about cabinets at all,” Esme said. “Or wood.”

Nick stood beside her, and Esme locked her arm around her father's. It was the closest she'd ever been to the man—he'd never walked her to a first day of school or down the aisle. It felt surreal to hold on to him now after all these years.

“I don't know what his schedule is like.” Matt glanced toward the office window.

Now there was a man, standing on the other side of the glass, his back to them. He was wearing a light-blue buttondown and he seemed to be talking to someone else in the room, or maybe on speakerphone.

“Just tell the owner”—Esme leaned forward and lowered her voice—“we're looking for
Darwin Webber.
”

“No, no,” Nick said, shaking his head. “Don't tell him that.”

The young man recognized the name, which gave Esme a charge. Matt's hands disappeared under the counter for a moment, and Esme assumed he was going to pull out a big old intercom of some sort to page his boss. But instead he handed them an enormous catalog about kitchens. “Make yourselves comfortable while I go get him.”

Esme looked at the office window again.

The man behind the glass turned quickly—as if he sensed she was there. As his eyes swept the showroom, Esme saw that it was Darwin. His hair was gray, close cut, and he was thicker and older. And then he seemed to fall to his knees, disappearing from sight.

Matt was walking quickly toward the office but veered at the last minute and took an exit that Esme hadn't noticed before, one that might lead to a warehouse.

“Where's he going?” Esme said.

“Our friend Matt tripped a silent alarm under the counter,” Nick said and he called to the others. “Everyone out!” He spun around. “I'm going to get Atty. She went to the bathroom.”

“What?” Esme was trying to piece together what the hell was going on.

Nick put his hand on his daughter's back and slid her to the far side of the kiosk. “Webber's probably been waiting all these years.”

“For what?” Esme said.

“What's going on?” Liv said.

“Get out of the store!” Nick shouted. “Or at least crouch down!”

“Did he say
crouch
?” Augusta said. “I can't
crouch.
”

And then Esme heard the office door bang open. She stiffened against the kiosk. “Has he told every stupid employee to ever work the floor to watch out for us? Does he show them photographs? Does he tell them to hit an alarm if anyone ever says the words
Darwin Webber
? What did you do to him?” she said to her father. “My God.”

Atty tweeted,
My body has no bones in it. #valiumisgood

Then she leaned over the sink, an inch from the mirror, and whispered to her reflection, “If you could see me now, Maeve Brown, super-hateful Brynn Morgan and Lionel Chang and Myrtus
Ballbuster
!” Myrtus's actual last name was Ballister. “How'd you like to invite me to one of your little petting parties now?” And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she wasn't angry at the kids in her boarding school. She wasn't even angry at her mother and father for sucking at marriage or her father for leaving them for a French dentist.

She wasn't even angry at herself.

She pulled away from the mirror and stared at her full face. She ran one fingertip around her eyes like she was outlining an invisible mask.

She noticed techno-sounding 1980s music being piped in, and she danced just a little bit until the bathroom started to swim around her.

Then she stopped and thought of all of the little orgies that Brynn Morgan didn't invite her to because she'd failed the initiation. She'd kissed Lionel Chang with “duck lips,” as he put it, and talked dirty in a way that he found “hostile.”

All she'd said was, “Do it to me before the uprising!” She was thinking of an apocalyptic romance she'd read and he thought it was racist because of his Chinese heritage.

That's when the quacking started and the mean looks and the snickering behind her back. It wasn't Lionel Chang's girlfriend who got it rolling. It was Lionel Chang's girlfriend's best friend, Brynn Morgan—not that they all didn't kind of share one another in sexually explicit ways that Atty couldn't understand and was never educated on
because of
the failed initiation. Brynn Morgan roamed the edges of the herd and her vulnerability made her particularly evil. Brynn even started making fun of the win-back in
Trust Teddy Wilmer
because they knew it was written by her aunt.
The dog dragged her in
became a favorite line whenever she walked into a room, those effers.

Atty was sure her French teacher knew about the orgies. Mrs. Brodsky lived on the same floor as Brynn who hosted them, and Brodsky wasn't deaf! She could hear an unrolled
r
murmured in a booth in the language lab. Why didn't she go shit in a hole?

“Why don't you all go shit in holes?” she said now into the mirror.

Then there was the day when Atty had actually walked into Little-Head Todd's house to change the litter box—she'd been cat-sitting while he was at a conference—and she stole the musket out of its unlocked glass case mounted on the wall. (She'd planned on returning it before he got back.) She took it to her dorm and, within hours, she had her plan.

But when she showed Brynn the antique weapon, Brynn didn't care. “You're so weird to steal that. You should put it back already.”

Atty watched her walk out of the dorm and onto the lawn, where her parents had come to visit for parents' weekend. Brynn's parents held hands and were highly regarded doubles players. They were beautiful, but corroded. Brynn was beautiful too, but a horrible human being. Atty fitted the gun into her STX bag and swung it over her shoulder. She couldn't leave it behind in her room, and she wanted to feel the weight of it, something holding her down, a protection. That's all it was at first. The speech came along later. The speech—a blur to her now—was truly inspired.

And now she felt guilty. She'd fantasized about Brynn's face being blown open with musket fire. She just wanted them to feel threatened. To know what it was like. “Why don't we all shit in holes?” she said now, implicating herself, taking responsibility.

She wasn't thinking about her mother or her mother's college boyfriend or her long-lost grandfather, returned, or her aunt who had been suicidal and was still a druggy, or her other aunt, the writer who didn't seem to be writing at all, or her grandmother who looked at her with a slight palsy or was it a head-shaking disappointment?

She was thinking that she lacked the basic instinct for violence and that she'd have to find some other way to get back at people. The best way she knew to get back at people was to make them jealous. And so, first of all, she would have to find her own greatness.

Her own greatness.

She wanted to tweet
My own greatness,
but she knew she didn't have the eye–hand coordination. The Valium had surely kicked in. She felt gelatinous.

She opened the bathroom door and, at first, saw no one.

The showroom floor was empty.

She could still hear the 1980s techno pop. She looked up, wondering where it was coming from and what it could possibly mean, symbolically. Just as she started to dance again—it was a timid slow dance that was only slightly lewd—she saw some movement out of the corner of her eye.

A rush of pale blue—like the sky coming at her. But the parasailor was then small, just man-sized. In fact, it was a man—his face bright and wide. And loosely attached to him, on one side of his body, a hand—with a gun in it.

The man grabbed her shoulders, pinning her arms to her body.

“No, thank you,” she said, meaning that she didn't want to dance with him—on political grounds (she was pro gun control) but also on personal ones. He was much too old for her.

“What?” he said. “What did you say?”

“I said no thanks. To the dancing.” But now she heard the echo of her words in her own head and she knew she was slurring.

“What's your name?”

“Atty,” she said, “Atty Rockwell-Toomey.”

“What?” He shook his head and then shouted at the nothingness of the cabinets and flooring. “I know what you're here for! You let me and this kid go. No one will get hurt.”

Atty realized there had been some mistake. Her own greatness had been misunderstood. “I'm not an actress,” she told the man though she'd always thought she'd be a really good one.

He wasn't listening. He was looking out at the showcase floor. Atty thought his face was so flushed it looked like a giant heart, pumping. There was a bright-blue vein on his temple. She wanted to touch it.

“It's okay. We're not here to hurt anyone.” It was Nick Flemming.

“Are you armed?” the man holding her shouted back.

Atty saw her grandfather, his hands on his head. She wondered what she should call him. Grandpa? Pop Pop? Gramps?

“Jesus H. Christ!” Her mother's head and upper body popped up. “It's me, Darwin, and that's my daughter. Just let her go! My father's here to apologize. He's not armed, for shit's sake!” She wheeled around, facing her father. “Are you? Goddamn it! Are you packing?”

“He's always packing,” Augusta said, stepping out from behind some floor-to-ceiling poster.

“I'm surprised to hear my family use the term
packing.
” It was Liv, scooting out from behind a wardrobe.

Ru was standing next to her. “Something's wrong with Atty.”

Atty was droopy but happy. She let the man hold her up now like her body was filled with flour. “My greatness!” she said.

“Is she having a seizure?” Augusta said.

“Gah,” Liv said under her breath. “She's high.” She squeezed her forehead. “This isn't good.”

“Atty!” Esme shouted.

As she started to run to her daughter, Darwin Webber shouted, “Stop! Don't come at me!”

Afraid Esme was about to get shot, Nick leaped forward to tackle her.

And as he sprang, Darwin Webber, who'd been going to target practice for two decades, took aim, tightened his one-armed grip on the girl, whispered, “Hold steady. It's going to be all right,” and then shot the old man exactly where he meant to—in the meat of his shoulder.

Nick hit the ground hard and rolled to his side, curling up.

Esme, Liv, and Ru screamed.

Atty smiled. “Noisy,” she said. “In my ears.” And her body remembered what it was like to lift the musket over her head at the penultimate moment of her speech and pull the trigger. The small jolt, the smell of a damp fireplace—the sadness of it all. This was what a gun should sound like, she thought abstractly, not really fully aware that one had just gone off.

Augusta didn't scream. She'd been waiting for this all her life—to see someone shoot her husband in front of her.

“You shot my father!” Esme said.

“He was here to shoot me!” Darwin said, still holding on to Atty. “I've got proof!” And then Darwin stomped his foot. “I didn't kill him.”