Lemon Icebox
Colton was still in the lobby.
June had been upstairs for forty minutes. From the look of him, he'd spent every one of them pacing the same ten feet of floor. His head jerked up the second the elevator opened.
He wasn't from Port Halloran. He'd grown up somewhere outside Columbus, gone to state school on scholarship, and moved here with Nadia four years ago, right around the time June got put on a plane. To him she'd always been Nadia's old student. The one who lived overseas. That was it.
He'd figured out the judge part on his own in the last forty minutes. He didn't know the rest. He didn't know the Reyes family had raised her or that the Dom she'd said on the phone was Dom Reyes, President of the Port Halloran Sovereigns.
Piper was across the lobby before June had both feet out of the elevator. "Well? What happened? What did he say?"
June gave a small shake of her head.
Piper's whole face dropped.
Colton saw it too. His shoulders came down from around his ears. He smoothed the front of his quarter-zip, checked his watch for no reason, and strolled over like a man who'd never been worried in his life. He stopped right in front of them, blocking the door.
"Told you. What did you think, Rook Mercer was going to bend the rules because you smiled at him? I don't care who your dad is. In this town, everybody ends up asking the Mercers for something. You went up there and made a fool of yourself, and now—"
"Can I ask you something?" June asked.
He stopped.
"Your idle's running high." She said it like a mechanic reading off a work order. "You've been revving since the second we walked in. Talking fast, can't stand still, checking your watch. On a bike, that's usually a vacuum leak. Somewhere there's a hole letting in air that shouldn't be there." She tilted her head. "You might want to get that looked at."
Colton opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Piper made a noise like a balloon losing air.
"I don't have time for this." He stepped back and straightened his lanyard. "Tell Nadia to focus on getting better. Whatever she thinks she's doing, she's not going to win. Not against me."
He walked out. The prospect at the door didn't hold it for him.
June had planned to sit on the news for a few hours. Think it over. See if there was an angle she'd missed upstairs before she told Nadia anything.
She hadn't planned on Piper.
Piper did Colton. The quarter-zip smoothing. The fake watch check.
The voice, which she pitched about half a step higher than his real one, which somehow made it more accurate.
I don't care who your dad is. By the time she got to the part where he walked out without anyone holding the door, Nadia had snapped a plastic spork in half.
"When I get out of this bed," Nadia said, very calm, "I'm going to make that man's life so small he'll need a magnifying glass to find it."
Nadia had always been good at endings. No screaming, no keying cars. Hand back the hoodie, split the Netflix account, and wish him well. Colton was the first one who'd ever made her want to throw all that out the window.
Piper slapped the bed rail. "Yes. Do it. Ruin him."
That seemed to light something in Nadia. She sat up straight. "Ask the nurse if I can do chemo every day instead of in cycles. Can they speed it up? I want out of here."
Piper was already half out of her chair. "I'll go ask—"
"Sit," June said. "It's chemo. Not a juice cleanse. If they did it every day, you wouldn't be getting revenge on anybody. You'd be lying on the bathroom floor asking God to just take you already."
Piper sat. "Oh. Okay."
Nadia looked at Piper. Then at June. Then she pointed at Piper with half of the broken spork.
"You know why Colton took six engineers and left this one behind?"
June suppressed a laugh, but failed.
"Because I'm loyal," Piper said, with a lot of dignity for somebody with grease on her jaw.
"Because you never stop talking. Go be loyal at him. Follow him around. Do the world a favor."
Piper said something under her breath that June was pretty sure was a word you couldn't say on a hospital floor. They were still going at it when June checked the time and got up.
"I have to go. It's Dom's birthday tonight."
Piper's eyes went huge. "Dom Reyes. That Dom. I looked him up on the drive over." She put a hand on her chest. "I wasn't ready."
"Nobody is." June grabbed her bag. At the door she pointed at Piper, then at Nadia. "You're in charge of her. Keep her in the bed and keep her mostly calm. That's the whole job."
"What if she tries to escape?"
"Sit on her."
The Port Halloran clubhouse used to be a cannery. Long, low, corrugated roof, right on the water at the end of Pier Street.
Tonight every window was lit, and bikes were parked nose-out down both sides of the gravel lot, maybe a hundred of them, chrome catching the string lights somebody had hung from the old loading crane.
A band was playing inside. Badly, but loud.
The air smelled beer and grill smoke and low tide.
June got out of Nico's Suburban carrying a pie with both hands. A lemon icebox pie in a glass dish, made that afternoon in Aunt Pat's kitchen from a recipe card in Dee's handwriting. Nico came around and held the door for her like the pie was a person.
Inside it was packed. Members in cuts.
Old ladies in leather and good jewelry. Hangarounds trying to look like they belonged. And a lot of women who'd clearly spent most of the afternoon getting ready to be looked at.
Boone was holding up the end of the bar in a Hawaiian shirt so pink it was almost a sound. His cut was on over it, which did not help. He had a beer in one hand and was halfway through a story when he noticed everybody near the door had stopped talking. He turned around.
June hadn't done much. A little mascara. Lip balm. The black dress she'd bought in Edinburgh for a work dinner she ended up skipping, and her old boots, because she was not walking a gravel lot in heels.
She wasn't trying to stand out. Maybe that was why she did. Her face was plain and even and open, and her eyes were the kind that made people tell her things in line at the grocery store.
Boone put his beer down.
"No way," he said, to nobody, and then he was moving. He got to her in about four steps and wrapped her up, pie and all. "Look at you! You were a pain in the ass when you left, and now you came back pretty? That's not fair to the rest of us."
June laughed and held the pie out to the side so he wouldn't crush it. "Hi, Boone."
"Five years." He let her go and held her by the shoulders to get a good look. "Five years, and you didn't miss us one time?"
"Not one time."
"Cold. Ice cold." He shook his head like he couldn't have been happier. "At least tell me you missed your brother."
She smiled and didn't say anything.
A guy farther down the bar leaned over with his bottle up. Patch from some chapter down south. "Hey, my turn. C'mere, sweetheart—"
Boone's arm shot out sideways and stopped him flat in the chest. "Nope. You want Dom to break your hand? Because that's how you get your hand broken."
The guy just grinned. "He'll break yours first."
"Yeah, well. I'm used to it."
June slipped away while they argued about whose hand Dom liked breaking more.
The dessert table was against the back wall under an old cannery sign. There were already seven or eight cakes on it. Big ones.
A sheet cake with the Sovereigns crown piped on top in black icing. A three-tier thing with a fondant motorcycle on the top tier, which must have cost more than her flight. A tower of cupcakes stacked into a lopsided crown.
She set her pie down at the end of the row.
She was about to go find Dom when she heard voices on the other side of the cake table. Low. Not meant to carry. They carried anyway.
"That's her? Huh. I thought she'd be prettier."
"She doesn't have to be pretty. That's not how it works."
"I don't know. She seems kind of sweet?"
"That's the trick. She's always been like that. Think about it. She's not really the judge's kid, not the way that counts. And she's not a Reyes, not on paper.
She's not anybody's. So she hooked herself onto Dom when she was little and never let go. Made sure he needed her around."
June turned to go.
She was good at this. She'd been practicing for years. She heard every word, but kept her jaw set and kept walking.
Then the voice kept going.
"I mean, the brother-sister thing. It's just weird. Right?"
"I don't know. Dom doesn't seem like—"
"You don't know what Dom seems like. Why else would a guy like that keep a girl like her around all those years? Maybe that's exactly what he wanted her f—"
There was a lot June had learned to let go of.
What people thought about her.
The story this town had made up about her life, and liked better than the real one. She'd made her peace with all of that a long time ago.
She turned around.
Two women by the end of the bar. One in a red halter top, one in a blue dress with cutouts. June had walked right past them on the way in.
They noticed her coming about a half second too late.
June stopped in front of them. She didn't say anything right away. She just looked at them until the one in red set her drink down.
"Like what?" June said. "Go on. Finish it."
