Page 41 of All In
“Promise me, Kacey. Don’t ever disappear on me, okay?”
“I promise.”
He kept his gaze locked on me a moment more, then nodded, as if satisfied. “Good. Then we don’t need to talk about it anymore.”
He let go of my hand and hugged me. I walked down the gangway to my plane, turning his words, and the conviction behind them, over and over in my mind.
He’s intense because he has so much at stake, I reasoned. He can’t lose more time from work or school to bail my ass out of trouble again.
But it felt deeper than that. I tucked the hand he’d held under my arm to keep it warm, thinking about all the promises tucked into a goodbye.
Stay here,Theo said, the night we scattered Jonah’s ashes to the desert.
I will,I said.
I turned to the window as the plane took off and watched Las Vegas, and all its goodbyes and promises, grow smaller and smaller, until it was gone.
Promise me, Kacey…
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
To my sober eyes, my little shotgun house seemed shabby and dilapidated. With the beer (and vodka and whiskey) goggles off, I could see it was a cute little place with a lot of potential, if only I bothered to give it some attention.
I walked around, thinking about paint and curtains and rugs, when the doorbell rang. In the peephole was an African American woman with close-cropped hair. She looked to be in her early thirties. wearing a denim jacket. Her smile was bright white but for tiny gap in her otherwise perfect front teeth. A foil-covered pan balanced in her oven-mitted hands.
I opened the door. “Yes?”
“Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Yvonne Robinson. I live next door.” She inclined her head, then held up the pan, which smelled like tuna casserole. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
I frowned. “I’ve been living here six months.”
Yvonne gave me a dry look. “Honey, you may haveresidedhere, but you weren’t reallyhere,now, were you?”
I grinned despite a blush creeping up my neck. “No, I guess I wasn’t. Would you like to come in?”
“If you please. This pan is heavy.”
Yvonne strode past me, straight to the kitchen where she set the pan on the counter. Already the casserole was filling my little house with a delicious scent.
“It just came out of the oven,” Yvonne said, taking off the oven mitts and tucking them under her arm. “So you’d best wait a bit before digging in.”
“I’ll try,” I said, indicating for her to sit on the couch. “It smells amazing. Tuna casserole is my favorite. My mom made it all the time when I was a kid.”
“No offense to your mama, but I got them all beat,” Yvonne said with a laugh.
“So… How did you know…?”
“That you were in a bad way?” she finished, leaning forward on the couch. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
I searched my memory, then shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’ve been…out of it.”
“Honey, I know,” she said. Her words came out rapid-fire, every other sentence curling up at the end, making questions out of statements. “I used to see you coming home late at night, kind of stumbling? I wanted to help but I work all hours. I’m a nurse down at Ochsner Medical? A few days past, I heard you having a hard time. When your fellow was here? Theo? I thought he was the cause of it. I heard you yelling bloody murder and came over with a baseball bat, ready to knock his teeth in.”
She shook her head, laughing at the memory. “You should’ve seen the look on his face, poor baby.” Her chuckling faded. “But turns out he was helping you, not hurting, wasn’t he?”
I nodded, trying desperately to remember. The shame climbed up my cheeks because I couldn’t.
