Page 86 of Fighting for You
“What is going on right now?” I cut him off then wince at my rudeness. Unable to voice my question in any other way, I throw a quick look at him before I move over to the sink.
I turn on the water to start on the dishes, but his quiet voice stops me. “Just leave those, I’ll run the dishwasher after dinner.”
“The dishwasher’s broken,” I say, turning the faucet off.
“Uh, yeah, it’s been—It’s fixed,” he stutters over his words, like he’s nervous. I look over at the machine as if I could see what had been broken before.
“Hayes fixed the dishwasher?” I ask, confused. I’ve been asking him to take a look at it since I moved back. What finally prompted him to fix it? And the stairs?
“Uh, no. Not, uh, not Hayes.” Dad pauses for a few beats before adding, “Your, um, friend. Brooks.”
“Brooks? He came by here?” I whirl around to face him. Dad looks sheepish, like he shouldn’t be telling me this.
“Yeah, a few days ago. He fixed it. Front steps too. Good kid, handy too,” he says with a small smile. My brow furrows. Brooks was here?
“He’s hardly a kid,” I say, though I have a million questions about what exactly transpired here while I was locked inside my house.
“Yeah, well. You’re probably right about that. Definitely wiser than he looks. Had some choice words for me,” he says. “Said I wasn’t fair to you. Needed to clean my act up. And he’s right. I uh… went to one of those meetings you’re always leaving flyers for. It was… well, not good, exactly. But it was something. Talked to someone about possibly sponsoring me.”
I have no words. Dad seems to have run out of them as well because he’s silent for a long moment. The revelations crowding in with us in the small kitchen.
“Leave the dishes, alright?” he finally says, standing up from the chair. “I’m going to go out to the garage and see if I can find aladder to switch out that lightbulb,” he says as he tilts his chin up to the burnt out bulb above me. “Maybe after we can have some lunch or something?”
“Yeah, Daddy,” I say quietly with a small nod. “That sounds nice.”
I’m left alone in the kitchen, my mind whirring with everything I just learned. Brooks came here to help my dad. Even though I was mad at him. I don’t think he did it as a way to get back in my good graces since he didn’t tell me about it. My heart squeezes at the thought of Brooks taking care of my dad, something even my own brother can’t be bothered to do anymore. Now more than ever, I can’t wrap my head around how he doesn’t see howgoodhe is, how selfless and kind. I wish he’d let other people see this side of him.
And my dad is sober. A few days sober too, if I had to guess. And he left the house for an AA meeting. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone, or maybe I’m still asleep in my bed, door barricaded.
After a few minutes of standing around, I’m feeling antsy. I never do nothing here; there’s always something to clean, to put away, to throw out. But my dad—or maybe Brooks—has taken care of everything.
With nothing else out of sorts in sight, I step on the pedal for the trash can and see it’s three quarters full. I pull out the bag and tie it off before replacing it with a new one. Grabbing the almost full bag, I take it out of the kitchen toward the front door. I can’t sit still.
Half way through the living room, I look up and gasp. The bag drops to the floor as I grab my chest where my heart thunders under my palm. My breaths stutter, and a solid lead weight drops to the pit of my stomach.
Julian stands not ten feet in front of me, his back to the front door. He looks wrecked, nothing like the confident, handsomesurgical god I knew him as eight months ago. His T-shirt is rumpled like he’s slept in it, boots covered in mud. His usually perfect hair is greasy and mussed. There’s stubble under the dark circles below his eyes. And his eyes. They look manic, bouncing around the room, over my face and body, not staying on any one spot too long. There’s a frenetic energy around him.
“Hi, pretty girl,” he murmurs, voice raspy, like he hasn’t used it in a while. “It’s so nice to have your eyes on me again.Fuck, this has been a long time coming.”
“J-Julian,” I breathe out. “What—What are you doing here?” I’m frozen to the spot. My mind is telling me to run, but my body won’t move. My knees feel like they might give out, and I reach out my hand to hold onto the couch for support. My scalp prickles, and tears threaten the backs of my eyes as I watch him shift around, his movements jerky.
“I came for you,” he coos in that same rasp. “I had a hard time leaving. Everyone’s always wanting something from me. But you—you left. I just wanted to get closer. I figured you came here for your brother; you were always talking about him… But then there’s that barback—what is that, why him? Screaming at you in the street like a fucking hillbilly.”
I can barely follow his rambling as he jumps from one thought to another. I scramble for something to say, for a way to get him to leave or to let me leave. I’m still not speaking as he reaches behind his back, and when his arm straightens out, I see a gun in his hand.
An involuntary sob bursts out of me, and my entire body shakes, trembling in fear.
“You seem scared,” he continues. “No need, I’ll take care of you, my pretty girl. He’s not going to get you again.”
“Julian, you can’t—”
“What’s going on here?” my dad’s quiet voice cuts through my words.
Many things happen all at once. I register my old boss and I are no longer alone. Julian startles and whirls around to face the front door where my dad just walked in, bulb in hand. I open my mouth to scream for him to run, to get out, but my words never come. Or they’re lost to the sound of the deafening gunshot, I can’t be sure.
It takes a second for all of us to recognize what’s happened. There’s silence between the three of us—or maybe I just can’t hear anything over the blood whooshing in my ears—as we stand frozen in place. But then it all comes rushing back as red blooms on my dad’s sweater, right under the palm he’s placed against his belly.
Without another thought, I grab the helmet Brooks gave me—my helmet—off of the side table next to the couch and swing it at the back of Julian’s head. The crack of the plastic against his skull reverberates around the room as he falls to the ground, eyes closed, unmoving.
