Return (Coming Home #1) (9 page)

A slow dawning of understanding pours in me.
The cold starts to fade. “You wanted this job?”

“No shit, Dumbass.” Nice. The Claw always did have a potty mouth.

“I didn’t know,” I answer. It’s all I can think to say.

She snorts. “You come along, begging for a job, and everyone moves heaven and earth for you. Suddenly it’s a ‘conflict of interest’ for my dad to bring me on as the admin.”

Conflict of interest. Oh, no. Is it a conflict of
interest for the man who turned state’s witness against my dad to be my boss?

I can’t lose this job. I just can’t. Two years and I get my student loans under control and with free tuition, finish my degree. For all that, I can handle The Claw.

“I am sure Human Resources made a decision in the best interests of the university,” I say, the words smooth and flowing. My mouth even feels surprised.
It’s like the words came from someone else.

I’m never that calm and composed when confronted.

The sound of a cell phone buzzes in her purse. As she looks for it, I step into the hallway and head for the IT department.

Her eyes follow me until I hit the stairs, where I collapse into an overwhelmed heap on the landing, my knee and ankle throbbing.

Why would The Claw need a crappy entry-level
job like this? Even the job ad
that someone from the alumni association sent me, after they called,
said someone with an associates “or two years of college” was sufficient.
The Claw
graduated with Amy in May. Claudia had options. Why this?

And the dean. I c
an
manage this for two years, even if my head scream
s
every time I
am
around him. My dad
i
s dead because people lied. I was orphaned because
Landau lied.

My life ha
s
been ruined by him.

My shoulders relax and my head’s throb change
s
. Pain fade
s
. A clarity emerge
s
.

This
i
s even better than my original plan.

“Anchovies!” I exclaim, excited. My stomach growls.
I’m wearing my old, grey, stretched out yoga pants and a loose baby blue cami. The trailer gets hot. Late summer in southern California is like living in dry soup. Christina Perri sings in the background out of my tiny old laptop speakers. Three fans in the small trailer windows make an attempt to blow air around.
 

I’
m sweating
like a pig, but I’m happy.

“On
your
half,” Amy groans. “Keep them there.
They taste like s
alty pieces of shoe leather that crumbles.”

“
Delicious salty
pieces of shoe leather!”
I shoot back. My mouth is so happy as it bites down on the corner of a piece of pizza bigger than my head. Sicily’s Pizza is the hometown college favorite. For three years I’ve suffered without. No more.
 

“Vicki Santi
says ‘hi.’” Vicki’s parents own the pizza place. She’s worked there since, I don’t know, kindergarten? Seems like it. I loved sitting near her in school because she always smelled like oregano and basil. Made my mouth water and want more pizza.

“How’d she know I’m in town?” I ask through a huge mouthful of luscious perfection.

Amy eyes my anchovy, artichoke, feta cheese, banana pepper and sausage
pizza. “Oh, she guessed,” she says, laughing.

I want to join in,
but
my tongue is doing a dance.
A happy, tasty dance of joy. Ordering a big old Sicily’s and sitting around in our fat pants is our thing. Me and Amy.
 

Next up, pints of ice cream and entire seasons of
Sons of Anarchy
. We know how to party.

“I can’t believe The Claw showed up on your first day of work!” Amy mumbles through her
own mouthful of feta and tomato pizza.

“First minute
of the job
! Like she was stalking me,” I mumble back. A long, stringy piece of mo
z
zarella ricochets down my chin. My tongue finds it, winds it around and I eat it.

Amy laughs. “You and that tongue. Still tie cherry stems with it and it alone?”

I blush. “Yep.”

“Find a guy yet who can appreciate that?” She wiggles her eyebrows and leers.

The pizza nearly chokes me. “Um, nope.”

“You still haven’t—ah, come on! Of course you...” Her voice goes still. “Carrie?” she asks softly.

All the joking has faded. I feel stupid. Twenty-
two
and a virgin?

A virgin who can tie a cherry stem with her tongue?

What a waste
,
my roommate
Janie had said when I showed her and her friends
back in Oklahoma City
.
No guy’s ever gonna benefit from that
.

“
Nope.” I’m shutting down, but I don’t want to. Talking is what I need. Bearing my soul. Pouring out how I feel about life and my dad’s death. My new job and, yes, Mark. I still haven’t told her anything about him. She knows all about our past. I’m dying to tell her about his visits to my trailer.
 

Amy is slumped on my tiny sofa, dressed like me, her hair messed up and her makeup wiped clean.

W
e’re back to being Carrie and Amy, and that’s all I want.

“You’re still
a virgin
?” she asks, breathless. “I’m not.”

“You had sex in ninth grade with Zach Burham, Amy. Of course you’re not.” And of course I know, because she cried in my arms afterward. Didn’t have sex again for two years, until she fell in love with Dane Crawford. Captain of the basketball team.
H
e was six-six. Did I mention
Amy is five feet even when she stands up straight?

They were cute. Until she caught Dane having sex with another girl when she went to visit him at his college. Long distance relationships are great. Amy learned a lesson:

Don’t surprise your boyfriend with an unexpected trip
to his college
on a Friday night.

I’d held her in my arms while she cried then, too.

“No one, though?” Amy prods.

“Not anyone worth...that,” I say. Too true. The men who worked midnight shift at the check processing center weren’t exactly the dating type. Pale and older, with bellies and balding heads, they looked like my dad’s generation. Except my dad was way healthier.

“Yeah, that is pretty important. What about Mark?” she sputters.

“You know we never did it!” I give her a look that asks
WTF?
 

“But
he lives here now,” she adds, jerking her thumb toward the cabins.

“You know that?” I ask, and then I stop before I say another word. Of course she knows that. Everyone in town probably knows that Mark lives in Brian and E
l
aine’s cabins. Just like they know I’m back in town.

And the gossips have already started wagging their tongues.

A wave of smallness and shame wipes my appetite away. In
Oklahoma City
, no one knew me. No one cared. I never told my roommates where I went every Saturday from noon to three. The one hour I got to visit Dad was the highlight of his life. We couldn’t hug. I couldn’t feel his strong, protective arms around me. The deep rumble of laughter in his chest was long gone. A tight hug, an embrace of holding on to me and telling me it would all be okay never happened
in those three years.

And it would never happen again.

At least living
thirteen
hundred miles away
from my hometown,
I didn’t have to deal with judgment on top of it all. And now he’s dead.

But the shame lives on here in Yates.

“
Of course I know it,” Amy says, setting aside the pizza box. There’s enough left over for me to take a slice to work for lunch.
 

I can’t eat any more right now.
My throat is too full of my unresolved past.

“Townies always know,” she says, digging in my tiny fridge to grab her pint of ice cream. Without looking at me, she peels off the top and scoops an enormous piece of what looks like cookies and cream into her mouth. She turns and freezes, her mouth open. The ice cream is a blob in her mouth.

“
Carrie
, you look like you’re about to pass out,” she says
around the cold blob.

“
What have I done?” I whisper, finally safe enough to break down. “Coming back was a horrible idea. The Claw. Mark. The dean. My dad. All of it.” My voice drops and so does my body as I move fast to the bed, laying on my back and staring at the fiberglass ceiling.
 

“I shouldn’t have come back. But after Dad died, what was I supposed to do?” My throat is full of salty tears
and regret.
I
t’s the taste of bitterness at having no choices. “I wasn’t getting anywhere in
Oklahoma
. Elaine kept telling me I always had a place here. The alumni association called and asked if I wanted to apply for the job. Free tuition and a full-time salary with benefits sounded like it was the right move.” My voice cracks. I’m rambling.

I don’t care.

Amy finishes her mouthful.
T
hose eyes
are warm and nonjudgmental. Caring and just listening. I remember why I came home again. Is having one friend, one tried-and-true BFF enough, though?

Enough to put myself through
a
ll this?

“You didn’t just come home because of that, Carrie,” she whispers. She says it so quietly it’s like a threat. A threat to say what she really means.

I’m all fed up with feeling threatened. Been there, done
that. “You think my plan is crazy.”

“Getting a job at the college and snooping around to find the real person who was doing all that drug smuggling? To try to clear your dad’s name? No. It’s fine. That’s a smart plan. Why not jump out of a plane without a parachute or travel back in time to be Jack the Ripper’s mistress?” Her voice has this strange blend of compassion and sarcasm that only Amy
can manage.

“It’s not dangerous,” I protest. Weakly.

“The hell it’s not! Carrie, the cops investigated. They found evidence.” She held up a palm as I started to argue. “Mark was part of the team. Don’t you think that if there’d been any kind of clue that could have freed your dad, he’d have found it?”

And now we
a
re back to Mark.

Everything le
a
d
s
back to Mark.

“Maybe Mark missed something.
My dad kept trying to tell me—”

“
I don’t think you’ve had time to grieve properly, Carrie,” Amy says softly. The fast change in topic cuts me off mid-sentence.
 

“What does
that
mean?” I ask. My tone is more vicious than I want it to be. I can’t help it. She doesn’t take it personally. “People say that, but how do you ‘properly’ grieve? Why are there rules about how you’re supposed to act when
your only parent dies?”

An unspoken extra hovers in the air, because what I’m
not
saying is harder to deal with.

“And the
way
he died,” she says, putting the unspoken to words. What I thought would hurt to hear actually doesn’t. I’d forgotten that Amy was real. Honest and human and
real
.

More tears fall down my cheeks. I let them. It feels good to cry in front of someone else, for once.

It
feels good to be able to.

My dad was found stabbed in prison, right through the heart, his hand on the knife. The authorities ruled it a suicide. His death happened a few days before he was being called to give yet another deposition about the Yates drug trafficking.

Timing is everything.

The photos the medical examiner showed me when I insisted are burned in my brain. The sight of dad on a
slab, in the morgue, is my last view of him.

He’s with me now, though. I unpacked his urn last night, after Mark left.

Dad is next to the little aloe vera plant Elaine left next to my sink. A silly place, but where do you put your dad’s ashes?

I don’t think there real
l
y is a ‘good’ place.

Amy reaches in to the freezer and pulls out my pint of cherry cordial ice cream. “Frozen therapy,” she
says.

I try to laugh, but it comes out like a choking snot bubble. Then I really do laugh.

“God, I’ve missed you,” I confess. Our eyes meet and she isn’t sleek, corporate Amy. She’s just my old friend.

My
now
friend.

“You are so strong, Carrie,” she says, digging in to her own pin
t
, fishing out a chunk of cookie.

“I’ll trade some of my strength for cash,” I reply.

She snorts. “You’d have
a lot of cash.” Through a mouthful of ice cream she asks, “You seriously going to be okay? I don’t like the idea of you trying to take on the dean.”

By the time I answer, the silence is so thick it feels like a cloud between us. I pierce it. “The dean put himself in this position. He could have fired me before I started.”

Her eyes pop open suddenly, like an owl’s. “Oh, my God, why didn’t he?
Maybe he’s not guilty.”
Her eyes plead with me to consider the idea. “Maybe your dad was wrong, and Landau isn’t part of all this.”
 

I
make a skeptical sound.
“Claudia confronted me because she was pissed she didn’t get the job,” I explain. “
Something’s really not adding up there.”

“Why would she want it?”

I shrug, then take a small taste of my ice cream. My appetite comes back. Yum.

“And
why would they give it to you instead of her?”

I give her a
bitch, please
look, complete with one upturned eyebrow. “Because I am awesomesauce and she’s a skanky ho!”

That gets us into a giggle fit. The seriousness is fading. Good. Spilling my guts helps, but only in limited quantities. If I talk about my dad too much in one long conversation, I’ll be useless for days. Depression comes in giant
waves with no relief in sight. I can’t be useless now, hiding in my room in dar
kn
ess and calling off work, like I did sometimes in
OKC
.