Page 47 of Bent Heavens

“Wait, what?”

“We’ll talk later,” and even this lie was rancid: They might never talk again, not if this night played out as it probably would. By morning, her photo, more salacious for being drawn from BHS yearbooks, might be splashed all over the news, and not just local media, but national, international. The whole world would know. No college, no future. She’d felt sick a lot over the past month, but this was different: Her innards melted into lava, and her head dunked under it. She slapped a hand to the door and powered down the window so that rain would pelt her.

“Liv, don’t hang up. Talk to me. If there’s anything—”

“Don’t call me back,” she pleaded. “Don’t call me back.”

The tears she wouldn’t let her eyes leak came running from her pores. The phone, slick now, began to slip from her palm, and she jabbed at the screen’s red button, three or four times, until Bruno’s name winked out, and then a truck horn was blaring, and she was way over the center line, and she wrenched the wheel, and cars behind her laid on their horns, too, and her heart burst through the hot sludge of her chest, but she was alive, still alive, or something close to it.

22.

Fifty yards from her house, Liv rolled past a single red car parked on the Custer Road shoulder, just visible in the rainy twilight. A soft glow meant that the person was killing time on their phone. Given the patchy distribution of Doug’s invite through what Liv imagined were emails and texts, confusion could be expected, and this person was ninety minutes early. Another would arrive soon, then another. But she still had time: She’d put the whole thing off, nail boards over the shed door, whatever it took. She just had to grab a couple of things, then get out to the shed and get to work.

But her return to the house was met with a surprise as unpleasant as any invading army of skinners: her mother thumping a knife against a cutting board while two pans sizzled on the stovetop. The place was a fog of rich smells that, to Liv at this moment, smelled worse than blood. Mom was not supposed to be here. She could not be here.

“Mom,” Liv said, and continued in her head: You have to leave right now.

“I took the night off, baby. Going to make us a special dinner.”

Her mother grinned gaily, once again the young woman Liv had seen in the photographs she’d shoved in A’s face. It felt like a knife was sliding in and out of Liv’s gut. Aggie Fleming was trying to work past the destruction of her family, trying to turn around the mess of their lives. It was the most worthwhile of ambitions—but why did it have to be tonight?

Liv smiled or nodded, she didn’t remember, and floated toward the living room window.

She stared from between curtains, heart racing. Everything was about to explode. In the kitchen, her mother was starting to plate food. Out front, kids would keep arriving. If Aggie didn’t hear them congregate, she’d see them once they began amassing at the shed, and then Aggie would go back there, she’d have to, and she’d make Liv unlock the door, and Liv couldn’t take that. And then there was Doug, the night’s wild card. Liv checked her phone every thirty seconds for a return call, but the last notification was still Bruno, its paltry three-minute-and-forty-six-second length belying the call’s blunt force. She fumbled out her phone, started to text Doug, MOM HOME PLEASE STOP, but only got one word into it before Mom was tapping her on the shoulder.

“Food’s up,” her mom sang. “A twenty percent tip will be added to the bill.”

Liv let the curtain fall and moved, dreamlike, into the kitchen, her brain bruised and whirling. She could see no way out—every door seemed blocked by trays of food. Liv sat at the table, her vision doubling until there were not two place settings but four, as if her father might yet amble in from the bathroom, only to be joined by Doug, the old Doug, who’d regale the table with how his latest corn maze design best applied his patented Trick.

The special dinner Aggie had promised was just that: beautiful baby spinach salads with sherry-sautéed Bosc pears, glistening bits of bacon, pecans candied with sugar and cayenne pepper, a balsamic-and-olive-oil dressing, and a sprinkling of parmesan, with two side plates of homemade rolls, homemade herb butter, and fanned slices of Gruyère cheese. Liv didn’t think she could feel anything but dread at this point, but she was wrong. Heartbreak cracked her in half. Aggie Fleming could cook. She could do lots of things. She’d once been a person with skills and aspirations, not a broken-down cash gatherer whose life, already falling apart, was just about to be smashed flat.

Aggie smiled, lifted her glass of water in a toast.

Water, not wine—and like that, Liv knew how to remove her mother from the pain of what was about to come. It was worse than what she’d done to Bruno. Save for the harm she’d inflicted upon A, it was the worst thing, she felt certain, she would ever do to anyone. She drew her water glass back, withholding the toast. Her lips trembled as she forced out the hideous, betraying words.

“We need to have wine with this,” she said.

Aggie’s forehead tightened. “Oh, honey.”

Liv’s fake smile felt like flesh peeling from her face.

“Come on,” she teased. “If there’s one meal to have wine with, it’s this one.”

It was clear that Aggie wanted to object. Liv banked on her mom’s insecurity, fully aware of the cruelty of it. He mother, understandably, might think she and Liv had drifted too far apart to have comfortable conversation. A little wine might smooth the edges, set her mind and stomach at ease, and so Aggie shrugged, capitulating to the easier path. She climbed the kitchen stool to reach the cabinet where she’d banished the bottles.

“Chardonnay.” Her voice tried for camaraderie. “Good for salads. We’ll have to add ice.”

She poured a small glass for Liv and a full one for herself. An ugly yellow color: A’s terrified urine, the pus of split tumors. These were the liquids Liv deserved, and she completed the toast and drank, and over the rim watched her mother do the same.

“I know we missed Thanksgiving last year,” Aggie said. “Should we say what we’re thankful for?”

“That’s okay,” Liv said, because there was nothing to say.

Liv pushed food around. Her mother ate. When Aggie went to the bathroom, Liv took the last Vicodin she had, ground it between spoons, and stirred it into Aggie’s glass. When her mom returned, she took bigger gulps than before. Liv refilled her mother’s glass and checked her phone and glanced at the front window, wondering if more people had arrived early, and when she turned back around, her mother’s glass was half-empty and Liv refilled it again. Instead of a dinner it was euthanasia, with Liv the loyal nurse feeding toxins to her beloved, but terminal, patient.

By the end of dinner, Aggie was sloppy, her mouth over-wet, her eyelids heavy, her gestures large and erratic.

“Tricia told me,” she said. “You know Tricia. Amber’s mom. Tricia told me you were going around with a different boy now. Not Doug at all. Is that true? Or is Tricia a liar? My daughter the man killer, I said.”