He met my eyes. “I know you?”
“I’m—I mean, I was—a friend of Lily’s.”
“Huh.” He looked between the two of us. “Well, come on in.”
Rose looked at me, and I shrugged. Then we followed him inside, though “follow” isn’t exactly accurate, as he was already down the long hallway to the living room. By the time we reached it, he was in his favorite chair, his feet on the ottoman and a football game playing on the screen.
He saw me staring. “Classic,” he said. “Cowboys trampled the Redskins. A goddamned thing of beauty.”
“Right. Um, listen. There’s something I wanted to ask you.”
“Shoot,” he said, lifting the remote and increasing the volume.
“I want to take Rose home with me for a while. I, um, think Lily would have liked that. And I think it would be good for Rose,” I added, continuing my spiel at the speed of light, afraid that if he interrupted with a question or an argument, that I wouldn’t have a good response, and I’d lose before I’d even begun. “I mean, she’s got some pretty nasty memories here—her mom, then that stuff with Lucas Johnson, and now her sister getting killed. And I think it would be really good for her to get some distance, and I’m completely responsible and my apartment’s in a good neighborhood. She’ll have to take an incomplete this semester from school, but I really think it’s for the best and, well, that’s it.”
He hadn’t moved a muscle during my speech, just kept his eyes glued to the television, his finger resting over the pause button on the remote. For a moment, I feared he hadn’t even heard me, and I was going to have to go through the whole spiel again. More likely, he’d just say no. After all, he didn’t know Alice Purdue from Adam.
But then he pressed the button to freeze the screen, and he turned to me. “All right, then,” he said, before unpausing the picture and sliding back into his game.
That was it: “All right, then.” And I wasn’t sure if I should be happy it went over so easy, disgusted that he cared so little for his own daughter that he would wave her out the door with a near stranger, or sad for this man who had so little capacity for dealing with the blows that life had dealt him.
Not that I was inclined to hang around philosophizing. He’d handed Rose to me on a platter. Time to get out before he changed his mind.
I found her in her bedroom, shoving clothing into a duffel bag. “Don’t take too much,” I said. “We can always come back and get more.”
She looked up, her expression bland. “We can always buy more,” she corrected.
She stood and started to zip the bag. She stopped, though, then moved across the room to the small wooden desk that we’d painted the summer before she’d turned twelve. A cluster of framed pictures littered the desktop, and she picked one, moving back to the duffel so quickly I barely caught the image: Me, Rose, our mom, and Joe. Happier times.
I met Rose’s eyes, and she shrugged. Not really a whole lot we needed to say about that.
“Ready,” she said, hauling the duffel up onto her shoulder.
I reached out and took it from her, easily hefting its weight. “I’ve got it.”
She pressed her lips together, and I saw tears glistening in her eyes. “I know you do.”
I opened my mouth, wanting to say that I was sorry—sorry for every horrible thing that had happened to her, sorry for failing to protect her, sorry for not being the sister to her that I knew our mom wanted me to be.
I didn’t say any of that, even though I knew damn well the opportunity might soon be lost, that Johnson might be back any second. Instead, I just smiled, and said, “Come on.”
With the duffel strapped onto the back of the bike and Rose crammed in behind me, I gunned the engine and took off down the road. Twilight had fallen while we were inside, and the world was painted in shades of gray, apropos of my mood.
Rose squeezed me tight around the waist but didn’t complain, and I had the feeling she wanted away from that house as much as I did. There are all kinds of demons in the world, and not all of them come from hell. Those just happen to be easier to fight.
I rolled to a stop at a red light, idly revving the engine in time with my wild thoughts. The light changed, and I kicked the bike into gear, ready to peel out of the neighborhood.
I didn’t make it.
Because suddenly this dim, empty street at the edge of the Flats wasn’t so empty anymore. Suddenly, there was someone standing in the middle of the road.
He was huge—his head shaved bald, his face a mass of strange tattoos through which I could barely make out the cold, hard gleam of his eyes.