Page 93 of The Woman By the Lake

“Honey, calm down.”

“I’m not going to calm down,” she shot back. “You’ve been worried about this guy. He sells you a bad bottle of wine, the kind of bad you have to sleep on your couch with a gun next to you, and you go visit him, and he’s mean to you?”

Mean?

All kinds of cute.

“He isn’t worth it,” he told her.

“Is he your friend?”

“He was. And I’m gonna tell you a story, and it’s not gonna make me sound good, but it’s going to explain that I should have been smart about Bubbles a long time ago.”

“Okay,” she said sharply, not worried about the story he was going to tell.

She was still pissed.

Oh yeah.

He had to find time to give the situation with Nadia some headspace.

“I met Bubbles in high school. He’s an odd kind of guy. A ball of energy. Always moving. Not sure how he can be like that and still be pudgy, but he is, and that’s not shade on people who carry weight. He’s just got that much energy. He always had thin hair, and now he doesn’t have much of it, and he wanted to be everyone’s friend. So kids, being assholes, took advantage of that. He was bullied, but he didn’t know it because he just wanted everyone to like him, so he took it. Though, maybe he did know it.”

“I’m thinking, he did,” she confirmed.

His mouth went up on one side, fortunately it was the side opposite her, just in case his humor might piss her off more, and he kept talking.

“That shit was shit. I intervened because I was feeling some of that, being twelve years old and a freshman in high school. Both of us in the same boat, we became friends. I learned pretty quickly that he’d do just about anything for anyone if they’d just like him, and it made him kind of a doofus, but also, bottom line, he’d do just about anything for anyone. And ‘anything’ comes in a lot of varieties. When my dad died, he slept on my couch for two weeks, and he had a live-in girlfriend then. Not to mention, I didn’t need moral support, but he did it anyway. When I found out Angelica was pregnant, he came over with a bottle of Jack, and we got drunk. That’s one kind of Bubbles’s anything.”

“I’m not feeling like I want to kick him in the shin anymore, that is, when he’s up and walking again.”

“Right,” Riggs murmured, tamping down his humor so he could get into his next.

Because it was going to be a lot harder.

“Other shit he did was just stupid. He got himself in a situation where he owed a favor to someone who wanted him to do something, and this someone was really not cool, so even though what he wanted Bubs to do seemed innocuous, it probably wasn’t. But Bubs had to get out from under this guy. Bubbles was freaked. I was freaked for him. And he asked me to go with him. He was making a delivery, and we were right, it wasn’t innocuous. The situation was dangerous, and it could have gone really fucking bad. Fortunately, they wanted what we were delivering more than they gave any fucks about us, so we laid it on them and got the fuck out of there. I don’t know what it was. It could have been ransom or drugs or illegal firearms. I just know it wasn’t Girl Scout cookies. It felt dirty, and it was the only time I felt like I was inching closer to being like my dad.”

“Riggs,” she whispered.

She got that feeling all right.

“Bubbles knew what that would do to me, so I know he didn’t stop doing stupid shit for and with bad people, he just never dragged me into it again.”

“Until the wine.”

“Of a sort,” he allowed. “But he felt he owed me a marker, and in his head, that’s part of how he paid me back.”

“He did owe you a marker, but selling you that wine was no payback.”

More training from her dedulya, no doubt.

“I didn’t hold a marker, honey, and I told him that a million times. But Bubs didn’t get it. He didn’t get friends have each other’s backs. I should have seen that, but I didn’t. Until today.”

“Just to say, now I want to kick him in the shin again because he used your friendship to drag you into doing something that made you feel dirty.”

“It was my choice.”

“You were looking out for a friend.”

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