Guilty Secrets. Virginia Kantra
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He reached again for his cigarettes. Hell. Crushing the empty box in his hand, he lofted it across the living room toward the wastebasket.
He missed. Loser.
In his front hall, the doorbell rasped like the final buzzer at a Bulls’ game.
Joe hobbled across the bare hardwood floor to the door and peered through the security glass at the side. Two men, one in uniform, occupied his front stoop.
Joe yanked open the door. “What the hell are you doing here?”
His middle brother Will walked in without asking. “Ma was worried when you bailed on dinner.”
Mike followed, thrusting a round Tupperware container into Joe’s hands. “She sent us with leftovers. Got any beer?”
His family. He loved them, admired them, let them down… And right now, he wanted them to go away.
“No.”
No alcohol. It was something else he was learning to deny himself.
Mike snorted. “God, now I’m worried about you, too. What about coffee?”
“Instant. And you’ll have to make it yourself.”
“Okay. In the pantry, right?” Without waiting for an answer, Mike snatched back the covered dish and carried it through to the kitchen. A cupboard door banged. A drawer slammed.
With a curse, Joe limped after him.
“You’re not walking too good,” Will observed behind him. “You hurt your ankle again?”
Joe gritted his teeth. He supposed it was too much to hope Will wouldn’t notice. “Nope. Just overdid it the past couple days.”
“Is that why you blew off dinner?”
“No. I told Ma. I have a deadline.”
“You still have to eat,” Will said.
Joe regarded his brother with loathing. “You sound exactly like Ma, you know that?”
Will grinned at him, five feet ten inches of compact, confident Chicago firefighter. “Say that when you’re on both feet, paperboy, and I’ll take you down.”
It was the kind of threat he used to make before the accident. Even with his brother’s qualifier—when you’re on both feet—the taunt improved Joe’s mood.
The microwave pinged from the kitchen.
“Dinner’s ready,” Mike called.
The scent of Mary Reilly’s lamb and onions permeated the hall. The house was small, with one bedroom on the ground floor and a couple of others upstairs that Joe had barely seen. Eight months ago, when he bought the place, the layout had been the house’s key selling point. He still couldn’t negotiate the stairs easily.
Stumping into the kitchen, Joe dug a spoon from the drawer. Will filled a kettle with water. Mike rescued the plastic container of stew from the microwave and slid it across the table.
Joe lowered himself cautiously onto a chair, cupping the Tupperware in one hand. The smell reminded him of decades of Sunday dinners eaten off his mother’s lace tablecloth in his parents’ dining room. The solid weight of the container in his hand was warm and comforting.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly.
Will lifted one shoulder in a shrug. No big deal.
“Mom made us come,” said Mike. “She and Pop are worried you’re not getting out enough.”
“Oh, like you do,” Joe retorted. “You still live in their basement.”
“I like saving money.”
“You like Ma doing your laundry,” Joe said.
“Yeah, well, a year ago she was emptying your bedpan and bringing your meals on a tray,” Mike said. “So I don’t want to hear it.”
An awkward silence fell.
Mike meant well, Joe reminded himself desperately. He always meant well.
But neither of his brothers understood how Joe’s crash-and-burn return from Iraq had crippled him. He prayed they never did. To lie at the mercy of his doctors, to wake crying in pain, to rely on pills to function and his family for the most basic human needs had been a devastating comedown.
He was the oldest, the leader, the one who did well in school. The foreign correspondent, the world adventurer.
Now he was back to eating his mother’s leftovers and fretting over writing a feature on a hole-in-the-wall clinic.
Will’s chair scraped back. He grabbed the whistling kettle and poured boiling water into two mugs.
“Want some?” he asked Joe, lifting the kettle.
He wanted a drink. He wanted his life back.
He cleared his throat. “Sure. Thanks.”
Will snagged another mug from the cupboard and added instant crystals.
“Don’t worry about Mom,” he said, stirring the coffee. “I told her you weren’t getting out because you were finally settling down.”
Joe pushed his half-eaten stew away. “And she believed that?”
“She didn’t,” Mike said, helping himself to one of the mugs and bringing another over to Joe. “But then I told her you were seeing somebody.”
Joe didn’t “see” women. He had sex with them, to fill the time and dull the pain.
“Yeah?” he asked, almost amused. “Who did you tell her I was—”
Oh, no.
Mike wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
He had. He was trying not to wriggle like a puppy who’d missed the paper, but it was clear he knew he’d made a mess.
“Nell Dolan,” Joe said flatly, answering his own question.
“She was the only one I could think of,” Mike said.
“A blond nurse with an Irish surname,” Will put in, a gleam in his eyes. “She’s perfect. Mom was thrilled.”
Nell was perfect, Joe acknowledged. That was her problem. Or rather, it was his.
She would fit too well into his family and into his parents’ expectations for their disabled son. She had the idealism and commitment they admired and he had lost. On top of that, she was Irish. Catholic. A caretaker.
She could take care of him.
The thought was as bitter as his brother’s coffee and much harder to swallow.
Joe forced himself to take a sip and turned the conversation. “What were you doing there today, anyway? At the clinic.”
“Your girlfriend called us in,” Mike said. “Somebody’s lifting narcotics from the clinic pharmacy.”
Joe felt the tickle of interest like a spider on the back of his neck. “Is it serious?”
“Not yet.” Mike waggled his eyebrows. “It wouldn’t hurt you to keep an eye on things, though.”
It could, Joe thought. He didn’t want to get involved with Nell or with her clinic. He was going to turn in his fifteen-hundred words and be done with them both.
But as he sat waiting for his brothers to finish their coffee and leave, he couldn’t stop thinking this could be the hook, the angle his story needed.
The hell with it.
Frustration bubbled and seethed inside him. Despite the time he’d lost with his brothers’ visit, despite his aching ankle and looming deadline, he needed to get out of the house tonight.
He needed