Nothing Left to Burn (13 page)

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—” I started to apologize but clamped my lips together when I heard a muttered curse from a familiar voice.

“What the hell are
you
doing in a Home Depot?” My dad looked at me like I’d just jumped naked out of a cake or something.

I waved a hand over my cart. “Mom wants to paint the bathroom.”

He folded his arms, examining the contents of my cart. “Did you tell them it’s for a bathroom? You probably didn’t. Come on.”

Without waiting, he swung around, strode back to the paint counter, and told the kid he needed some mildew inhibitor added to paint that he was already mixing. The kid slid me a look of annoyance but grabbed some bottles. Dad grabbed more stir sticks and tossed them into my cart.

“You got rubber bands?”

What?
“I don’t know. Maybe at home.”

“Put rubber bands over the can, and use them to scrape the brush.”

“Okay.” I blinked. I must have tripped on the space-time continuum and fallen into a parallel universe.

He reached into my cart and shoved stuff around. “This is the wrong roller. This is for popcorn ceilings. Stucco. You want a smoother nap.”

Oh.

He tossed the correct roller cover into the cart, threw the other into a bin of paint brushes.

“Here you go.” The guy behind the counter slid my two cans of mildew-resistant paint toward me. I hefted them back into my cart.

“Is all the wallpaper off the wall?”

I shrugged. “Most of it.”

He shook his head. “Not good enough. The walls have to be perfect. The better you prep, the better the results. Come on.”

I followed him down another aisle, where he snagged a bottle of wallpaper remover from a shelf and put it in my cart. “Oh, you need the thing with the teeth too. I don’t think we have one,” he muttered.

I froze midstep.
We?
He threw something called a perforating tool into the cart and followed that up with a putty knife.

“That should do it, I think.” He nodded, even managed an uncomfortable smile. “You know how to use the roller?” He picked it up and waved it in the air. “You want to make a big W on the wall, get a good spread of paint, then go back over it, fill in the spaces.”

A big W. Sure. “Makes sense.”

He stared at me—just stood in the middle of a Home Depot aisle and looked at me like someone had clubbed him over the head. Abruptly, he shook his head and said, “Well, I guess that’s it.”

“Hope so.” I took out my wallet and counted the bills Mom had left for me.

There was an eye roll. I didn’t know what that meant. “Here.” He shoved a hundred-dollar bill at me.

I wanted to crumple it up into a ball and stuff it down his throat. But I couldn’t. I’d never been able to stand up to him. I took it and slipped it into my wallet. “Thanks.”

His eyebrows went up, but he said only, “No problem.”

“Okay, well, see ya.” I headed for the cash register line and left him staring after me.

A couple of hours later, Tucker started barking the house down seconds before the doorbell rang. I was elbow-deep in scraping wallpaper. I wiped my sticky hands on a towel, jogged down the stairs to answer it, and gaped.

“Dad. What are you doing here?”

“Wondering that myself,” he muttered. “Thought I’d give you a hand with the bathroom. I did promise your mother I’d paint it but—” He trailed off, but I knew where he was going. Matt died, and the bathroom update suddenly got shuffled to the bottom of a very long list. “Problem with that?”

I snapped my mouth shut. “No, no problem. Come on up.” I headed back upstairs. “I’ve got that goop sitting on what’s left of the wallpaper.”

Dad surveyed the working site I’d arranged. On the large landing at the top of the stairs that led to all the rooms on the second floor, I’d laid out a drop cloth, the cans of paint, and all the crap he’d tossed into my cart. He lifted his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

This was a joke; it had to be. He couldn’t stand to be near me, and suddenly, he’s buying paint, offering to redo an entire room with me? I lowered my shoulders, picked up the knife, and started scraping. I’d gotten all of the paper scraped except for the wall behind the sink and toilet.

“You made a good dent in this.” Dad nodded, and my jaw dropped again. His eyes skimmed down my torso, and I had to resist the urge to squirm. But again, he didn’t say anything. He just took the putty knife from my hand and started scraping paper from behind the toilet. We worked in silence—him scraping wallpaper into confetti, me picking up the scraps and shoving them into a trash bag. He showed me how to disconnect the sink so we could scrape the paper behind that too.

When the walls were clean and dry, I grabbed a few rolls of tape and taped covers over the fixtures. Dad grabbed the drop cloth and spread that over the floor. I pried the cover off the first can of paint and was about to dip in a brush when I remembered the rubber bands I’d left in the hall outside the room. I grabbed a few and stretched one over the can of paint the way he told me. I dipped in a brush, scraped the excess off against the rubber band, and painted a wide border at the top of a wall. Dad watched me with a flicker of…of something in his eyes.

“What?” I froze in my return trip to the paint can.

He jerked and shook his head. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to stare. Just wondering when you got so jacked.”

Jacked?
Me?
I glanced down at my body. My shirt was wet in spots from the wallpaper removal goop. That shit was gross. “I don’t know. I’ve been working out.”
Passing
out
was more accurate, but I didn’t tell him that.

He didn’t say anything, just kept giving me that weird look. I painted another stripe.

“You got another brush? I’ll start this wall.”

It was my turn for a weird look. “Um, yeah, I think this was a three-pack.” I indicated the staging area. A few seconds later, he was back with his own brush. We cut in the borders on all the walls. I grabbed the paint tray and tipped some paint into the well.

“You should open the other can, mix them both. Sometimes the colors are off a bit.”

I nodded and opened the second can, catching another one of Dad’s weird looks from the corner of my eye. “What?” I asked, annoyed.

“Sorry, Peanut. Guess I’m not used to doing stuff with you without a fight or a hundred questions,” he said with half a smile.

I put the paint can down with some force. “Do you even like peanut butter cups?”

He shook his head. “Not really, why?” He tore open the plastic on the roller cover, slid it over the roller, and dipped it into the paint.

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

He stopped scraping paint off the roller long enough to frown. “I don’t know. Habit, I guess. It was cute when you were little.”

It wasn’t cute; it was mean. It’s always been mean. I took a deep breath and spoke my mind. “I hate it.” I used to cry whenever he called me that, but he’d laugh and say,
Toughen
up!

My shoulders tightened, anticipating his usual response, but it never came.

“Your grandpa? He used to call me Jackie. Fucking hated that.”

I almost dropped my paint brush. “Where the hell did he get
that
from?”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know who started it. I was John Junior, so I guess they called me Jack instead of John to tell us apart. He always called me Jackie whenever I did something he thought wasn’t manly enough.”

I stared at my dad in his work boots, jeans, and T-shirt that clung to his broad shoulders and revealed the tats he had on both biceps and wondered how the hell anybody thought he wasn’t manly. My grandfather died when I was little. I didn’t remember him. I knew he was an NYFD firefighter. Died of a cancer that was probably smoke-related.

“Do you—” I broke off, silently beating myself up for kicking the sleeping bear.

“What?”

“Nothing. I just wondered if you miss him.”

Dad angled his head and dragged the roller over the W he’d painted. “Nah, not really. You probably think that’s harsh, but my old man was a harsh guy.”

Ironic
much?
I said nothing, just poured more paint into the tray. I snuck glances at my dad while he rolled paint onto the walls. His shoulders were tight, and there was this rhythmic twitch in his jaw.

The reason why hit me like a kick to the groin. The paint can lid slipped through my fingers and landed on the drop cloth, sticky side down. He was nervous. No, no, he was anxious—as anxious as I was. So why the hell was he here? Was that story his way of telling me he’d quit calling me candy names? Did we actually
bond
over something?

A dozen possibilities circled my brain, including a fume buzz, but I shook them off. I didn’t care what his reasons were; I only cared that he was here. Maybe this was a sign. Maybe he’d move back in. We hadn’t killed each other. It was a good sign.

It had to be.

When he put the roller down to stretch his back, I picked it up and carefully rolled paint in a big W pattern so he wouldn’t start in on me. We painted side by side until all the walls were covered. It didn’t take long at all.

“Sage green, huh?” Dad took a step back and scanned the room. “Not bad. Where’s your mother? She should check it out, make sure it meets with her approval.”

“Out.”
Oh
shit.

“Out where?”

“Um, well, she had a—” Holy hell. Now would be a great time to start washing the brushes. I uncovered the tub, turned on the water, and got busy.

“Reece, she had a what?” He crouched to pick up a roll of paper towels and wiped paint off his hands.

I kept my eyes pinned to the green paint circling the drain. “Um, she had a date.”

He snapped up straight. “A
what
?”

I swallowed hard and turned to face him. “She had a date, Dad.”

His face went red, and he shot out a hand to clutch the door frame. He stared at the painted walls, at me, and abruptly turned away. “Unbelievable. Matt’s dead a couple of months, and she’s out with other guys?”

My blood started to boil. “Dad. She misses Matt—”

“Bullshit!” He exploded. “If she missed her dead kid, would she be—” Abruptly, he clamped his mouth shut and wiped a hand over his red face.

I thought it over for a minute and decided I felt bad for him. It took me a minute to decide, because it shocked me that I did. “Come here. I want to show you something.” I led him to Mom’s room—the bedroom that used to be theirs. I unmade the side of the bed she slept on. “Look.”

Dad crossed his arms. “What? It’s a pillow.”

“It’s Matt’s pillow, Dad.” Underneath the pillow, I showed him the folded square of blue cloth. “This is one of his LVFD shirts. She sleeps with these. Every night. And she cries.”

Dad shook his head, turned away, walked back to the bathroom, and stared at the paint drying on the walls. “She should talk to
me
. Goddamn it, she shouldn’t be dating other guys.”

My jaw clenched. This was so typical, blaming everybody else for the shit he caused. “You
left
. Remember?”

“Yeah.” His face fell apart. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them, I swore they were wet. “I remember.” He shoved past me, walked down the stairs, and slammed the door on his way out.

I stood in that bathroom, fists clenched and muscles trembling, trying to hold it all in, hold it back, but it was too much. Something deep inside me snapped, and I drove my fist through the sage-green wall.

Chapter 12

Amanda

At school Monday, I dodged slow walkers swinging backpacks and practically ran right into Reece on my way to my first period of the afternoon.

“Hey.”

“Oh, hey, Amanda.” He gave me one of those long, slow looks that was kind of like a slow-burning fuse.

“Meet us on the field right after school.”

He blinked. “What, today?”

“Yeah, Logan. Today. What’s wrong? You got a date?”

“No.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. A slow red flush crawled up his neck. My fingers itched to follow it. “I’ll see you later.”

For a minute, I watched him walk away. If I were a regular kid, I’d move in on Reece Logan. He was cute—all the Logans were. But I’m not a regular kid. I’m a rental. I didn’t have the luxury of a second chance when I screwed up. How many chances did parents give their real kids? What a stupid question. It didn’t matter how many times
real
kids screwed up, because I wasn’t anyone’s real kid. Anyone who wasn’t in prison, I mean. I could be returned at any time, exchanged for a younger model, and I could never afford to forget that, no matter how much I liked a boy.

Did I like Reece? Maybe I just felt sorry for him. Maybe it was just too personal for me, seeing somebody’s family shredded. Reece had this look of desperation that went from quiet to full-out violent storm levels. It drove him. I knew that much from the day he walked into the LVFD. I understood that; I felt desperate too.

And that’s why I was helping him.

I didn’t know much about family, except for the old reruns of
The
Waltons
Mrs. Merodie used to like to watch. Families are supposed to support each other, band together. Family forgives. Family always comes home. But real life was
way
different. My father wasn’t home long enough to become one of my memories, my mother wouldn’t get out of prison for at least three more years, and foster families traded me like a two-year-old cell phone.
Real
life
meant in fourteen months, I could be homeless.

A statistic.

Technically, I had until twenty-one before I aged out of the foster care system, but the sad truth is when parents rent a kid, they want them young and cute. Eighteen-year-old wards of the state who get kicked out usually end up in group homes.

In other words,
hell
.

I wanted to turn a hose on Reece Logan for having the nerve to show his face in the house where his brother used to work. So why was I suddenly imagining what it would be like to break some rules with him? Why was he so tempting?