Finding Joy (The Joy Series) (Volume 2) (3 page)

       With or without chaps, Burke was the farthest thing from John Wayne. His short dark hair stuck up from his head in an artfully arranged style that was intended to look maintenance-free though I knew that not to be the case. His uniform was head-to-toe black and reeked more of rocker than Old West. But it wasn’t the clothes that made the man. It was the colorful sleeve tattoos that covered each arm from shoulder to wrist that … regardless of clothing … would prevent anyone from ever mistaking him for a cowboy.

As the guys continued to goad each other over the impending wager, I relaxed a bit. There was little chance that the topic of two-bedroom apartments would rear its ugly head again this evening.

CHAPTER 2

Adam

“Let’s not go to bed yet,” Allie said as she tossed her purse and keys on the table just inside the door.

“You’re scared aren’t you?” I asked laughing.

She smiled weakly. “A little … I’ve always hated haunted houses. I mean really hated them. I can’t believe you made me do that tonight.” She bent down and scratched Rubber Cat on the back. He flipped over and threw back his head to expose his short, little neck. She giggled and sat down next to him on the floor in the entryway. As she scratched under his chin, he nuzzled into her thigh, and his trademark chainsaw purr filled the room.

“Well, I didn’t hate it. You were hilarious. I’ve never seen anyone run so fast through a haunted house before.”

As soon as we had entered the first room of the house, Allie had smashed herself up against my backside and wrapped her vise-like arms around my waist. Before the woman with the hatchet in her head had even started toward us, Allie’s head was buried in my back, and her feet were running. Using me as a human shield, she’d made it through in record time.

I hadn’t minded, though. I’d learned in junior high that scared girls were affectionate girls. To this day, I’d never met a girl who didn’t climb me like a tree at the first sign of a little gore. Honestly, it was the only reason I ever spent any money on haunted houses and horror movies. Time after time, they had always proved to be a good return on my investment, and Allie had not disappointed tonight. Even at breakneck speed, I’d enjoyed every second of her sprint through the House of Horrors. And if she needed to sleep a little closer than normal tonight, that’d be all right.

Alexis

“Sorry about that, but I needed you to guide me and make sure I didn’t run into anything … like a decapitated zombie that wanted to eat my brains.”

“You know it’s a whole lot worse when you close your eyes. Your imagination will conjure up something way more terrifying than what’s actually in front of you. That’s true of horror movies, too.”

“It is!” I said. “When I was in the sixth grade, I went to a lock-in at my church. And somebody please explain to me why a group of middle schoolers at a
church
lock-in were allowed to watch
Nightmare on Elm Street
, but we were. I hunkered down in my sleeping bag and refused to watch. It was the longest, scariest two hours of my life.”

“The original
Nightmare on Elm Street
from 1984 was only 91 minutes long, but I bet it felt like a decade,” he said with a laugh.

“How do you do that?”

“What?” he said, shrugging.

“Remember the year that a movie from three decades ago was made? In 1984, you were, like, 1 year old or something,” I said, ticking off years on my fingers.

Adam sat down on the couch and grabbed the remote. “I’m a wealth of superfluous information.”

“But only if it involves numbers or movies. Or numbers and movies,” I said, shaking my head.

   It was true. I’d seen him spill out dates and sports statistics like it was nothing at all. At dinner with Ethan and Jillian a few weeks ago, he had recited Pi to 25 decimal places and only stopped because we made him. Of course, the rest of the table had to assume that he was right. Ethan and I only knew it to three decimal places, and Jillian didn’t understand why Adam was reciting numbers when we were talking about dessert. “How is it, that as good as you are at numbers, you decided you want to make movies?”

“Well, I didn’t start out in film,” he said, still focused on flipping through channels on the TV. “When I was at UT, my major was accounting.” His face froze at the realization of what he had just said. It bordered on a topic that neither of us liked to delve into very often. It wasn’t that we couldn’t talk about it. It was just that we had already hashed through it, and neither of us liked to revisit the issue of why he had left school and had to take six years off. Since I’d been the cause of the hiatus that irrevocably altered his life, his words were like an arrow through my heart.

“Adam …,” I started.

“I didn’t want to spend my life crunching numbers anyway. This is a better fit,” he said, cutting off the apology that we both knew I would feel compelled to deliver. “And it’s a good thing you’re scared because we can’t go to bed yet. We have a project to work on.”

I realized then that he was looking for infomercials. “What you are looking is called city kitty or something like that,” I said, scratching
my
city kitty’s head. “Do you really think we can make it work?”

He gave me a sideways glance. “We are going to make it work,” he said, before pointing at the cat. “
You
are going to make it work. It will be a cold day in hell for you, cat, before Burke gets to drive my car.”

I patted the cat reassuringly, stood up, and stretched. “It would probably be easier to find it online. You could watch infomercials all night and never see it.”

“I’m not opposed to that. I’m surprised that you don’t want to watch infomercials all night.”

“As riveting as that sounds, I need to get some sleep tonight. I have a date with Lizzie tomorrow. I just hope I
can
sleep. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have nightmares.”

I sat down next to him on the couch and picked up the iPad from the coffee table. He absently patted his leg with one hand while typing with the other. Before I could get comfortable, Rubber Cat jumped up on the arm of the couch and strutted across it. After arching his back in a dramatic display, he hopped down and settled in on Adam’s other leg.

“There are eight videos on here.” He pointed to the cat. “Rubber Cat, watch and learn. Watch and learn.”

“Of course, you are going to watch them all,” I said, yawning.

“Why don’t you go to bed,” he said with a sly smile.

“I thought we already covered that. I’m just going to lay right here,” I said, resting my head on the only remaining real estate on his lap. “Wake me up when you’re ready for bed.”

My eyes were already heavy and my brain foggy when he started the first of the videos. I drifted off to the sounds of cat tinkles, Adam chuckles, and Rubber Cat purrs. Despite my fear of monsters, ghouls, and ghosts, the bad dreams never came. And it had everything to do with the guy next to me.

_________________________

I zipped up the steps of Lizzie’s building. Fall might be all around me, but there was a spring in my step and, despite my light coat, I didn’t even feel the nip in the air. I threw open the door and flung myself up the stairs with an energy I hadn’t felt in a while.

Today was going to be fun. Well, to be honest, I didn’t know how Lizzie was going to feel about the activity I had planned, but it was something different. And since I’d never get to do it for myself, I wanted to do it for her regardless of whether she got any pleasure out of it.

Before I could even rap on the door, Lizzie flung it open and threw herself into the opening, providing me with a full view of her. One look at her and I knew that today’s activity wasn’t just for shits and giggles. It was necessary. Despite its bulk and boxy shape, the heavy Columbia sweatshirt that I had given her last Christmas no longer adequately camouflaged her round tummy.

“Wow. Look at you!” I said. “You really popped this week.” I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. After all, she was nearly six months pregnant.

When she had first told me the news in August, she’d guessed that she was about six weeks along. So when the doctor had informed us that she was actually closer to 12 weeks, we had both been surprised. The lesson I’d learned was that you really couldn’t count on a 14-year-old to keep track of time or menstrual cycles.

She rolled her eyes and looked down at her little bulging tummy with annoyance. “I really busted a gut, right? I just woke up one day, and, I swear, there it was. Ms. Walker, my biology teacher, made me go talk to the guidance counselor on Friday.”

“How did that go?” I asked, covertly glancing around the apartment. This was our usual procedure when I picked her up. She allowed me to come in just long enough to take stock of the situation while she pretended not to notice. Part of my job as her big sister was making sure that her living conditions hadn’t degraded to a point that was intolerable. Unfortunately, my assessment of the apartment today raised more questions than it provided answers. The problem wasn’t that it was unlivable. In fact, it was the exact opposite. I’d never seen it look nicer.

The piles of dirty clothing and empty food containers that usually littered the room were conspicuously absent. The stove, which was typically covered with dirty pots and pans, sparkled as if someone had just taken a paper towel and some Windex to it. The trash that was usually sprinkled across the countertops was right where it belonged: in the trashcan. The kitchen was immaculate. In fact, there was no sign of food having been prepared or consumed here, and that was what worried me the most.

“Where’s your mom?” I asked, as smoothly as I could. “I haven’t checked in with her in a while.”

On Sunday afternoons, Amber could usually be found passed out on the threadbare velour couch that operated as the only piece of real furniture in the small living area. Typically, she was either hung-over and recovering from the night before or she was embracing the hair-of-the-dog approach and was already halfway to shit-faced. Either way, she didn’t usually venture too far from the apartment on Sunday afternoons. Of course, today, when I really wanted to see and talk to her, she was nowhere to be seen.

“Oh, she’s just down the hall at Diane’s apartment. They were going to make cookies or something.”

“Cookies?” I asked. “Seriously? Is she teaching Sunday School now, too?”

Lizzie sighed. “I just wanted to say something normal for once. Why can’t I ever just answer a question normally? ‘Where’s your mom?’ ‘I don’t know, probably passed out somewhere.’ ‘Where’s your father?’ ‘Yeah … again … I don’t know. I’ve never met him.’ ‘Have you gained weight?’ ‘No, that’s just a baby in my tummy.’ For once, I just wanted to say something that normal people say. I wish my mom would just make some damn cookies.”

Her answer was crass and bold, and broke my heart, but I knew Lizzie and that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“Language, please. When we get back, let’s see if we can find her, okay?”

“Sure,” Lizzie said, with little confidence.

“Let’s go then. It’s time to get you some new clothes.”

We walked out into the hall, and she pulled the door shut and locked it with a key that I’d never seen before. “You’re taking me shopping?” Lizzie asked skeptically, as she turned in the direction of the stairs.

The actions that I’d just witnessed caused the alarms to crescendo to a level that made it hard for me to hear what she had just said. In the four years that I’d known her, I’d never seen her lock the door. Never. It had been something that had really bothered me at first. In the beginning, I’d asked her to lock it every time we left. In fact, I’d begged her to lock it. But she always just laughed at me and told me that she had to leave it open for Amber. Apparently, Amber had a real problem keeping track of keys.

Keys and daughters, as it had turned out.

I shook my head to stop the ringing. “Yeah, I am,” I answered definitively. “And no arguments either. You can’t wear that sweat shirt everyday.”

“I like this sweat shirt,” she said, as we headed down the stairs at the end of the hall. “It makes me feel smarter than I obviously am.”

“I like it on
you
, too. Seriously, Lizzie, with grades like yours, you could go to Columbia one day if you wanted to.”

“Yeah, right,” she snorted. “Fat chance of that. I’ll be lucky to get my GED at this point.”

I grabbed her arm and turned her toward me just before she pulled open the front door of the building. I pointed a menacing finger in her face and gave her my best mother hen look. “I don’t ever want to hear you say GED again. You are going to graduate high school, and then you will go to college. I have big plans for you, missy.”

“I’m not scared of you,” she said, laughing. “You’ve done enough for me already. I’m not your responsibility. Besides, I know someone else who is going to need your help more than me.”

My heart stuttered a little, and warm fuzzies took over my stomach. I couldn’t stop the smile from spreading across my face even though I had to let her comment slide for the time being. This was not a conversation that I wanted to have right now. Not here. Not yet. Not before I talked to Adam. “Taking care of you would not be a responsibility, Lizzie. It would be a privilege.”

“Yeah, I hear that all the time,” she said, laughing lightly as she pushed open the door, letting in a cold blast of air.

The brisk fall air that had felt so full of energy and promise earlier no longer brought candy corn, roasted turkeys, and Christmas trees to mind. Instead, it mirrored the words she’d just spoken and was devastatingly depressing.

_________________________