Page 18 of Better Hate than Never

Bill’s smile returns again, tinged with amusement. “Maybe I am. Or maybeyou’rewrong. You’ll figure it out soon enough, if you do what we’ve asked and try to make things right.”

“ ‘Make things right.’ ” I sigh as I massage my temples, which have begun to thud dully.

“Talk to her,” Bill says. “And then listen to her.”

“How about I just keep a low profile until she’s gone?” I offer, knowing I sound desperate, but too desperate to care. “She’ll leave soon. She always does.”

Bill shrugs. “She might leave. Or she might stay awhile. Who knows.”

My stomach drops. How am I supposed to share a city withthat woman when I can barely survive her typical four-day visits? We haven’t regularly coexisted in the same hemisphere since I was eighteen and she was twelve. Back then I was a teen on the verge of adulthood, Kate a kid who delighted in my annoyance. She’d jump out of tight corners to scare the shit out of me, stick fake spiders in my shoes, give me wet willies while I did homework at the Wilmots’, desperate for the comfort of a homemade meal and a parent to ask the occasional question. She was a menace whom I menaced right back, six-year age difference be damned.

Kate was still that menacing little girl when I left for college and stayed away all four years, letting my grandmother live her best cranky life alone in my childhood home. I rented an apartment with the disgusting amount of money left to me by my parents after their death and hid from the Wilmots. Because two days into being at college in the city, I realized how badly I missed them. And I feared what missing them meant—that they mattered to me, that I loved them, that I could lose them, and it would crush me. I’d sworn to myself after I lost my parents that I would never love and lose again. Distance was my only coping strategy.

That strategy lasted me through college and two years post-graduation, until my grandmother died. And then there was no one left in the home my parents had filled with memories. Their photos still lined the walls. My mother’s quilts draped across the beds. My dad’s family recipes still sat on their shelf in the kitchen. I couldn’t sell it, couldn’t let it sit empty, unloved, left to fall apart and be forgotten.

So I moved home. And there was Kate, out on her parents’ porch next door with some small helpless creature cupped in her hands. Tall and lanky like her father, with her mother’s sea-storm eyes. Freckles on her nose and streaks of auburn in her dark hair from all the hours she clearly still spent outside.

I looked at this eighteen-year-old in front of me, who’d shot upinto a woman, wild and electrifying, barely recognizing her, while a very different kind of recognition blazed through me.

I knew right then that peace was the last thing we were ever going to share.

“Christopher?” Bill presses. “What do you say?”

I blink, torn from my thoughts. “I’ll... try.”

And by “try,” I mean I’ll make myself scarce, even if Kate stays a bit longer than she typically does. I’ll stay away and she’ll cool off. It’ll blow over. Then she’ll be gone, and I’ll have kept my distance. No more fights will have happened, and that will appease our family and friends.

The sound of Bill’s name cuts through the uneasy silence at our table. Hearing Fee call him, Bill glances toward the bar, where she pats a to-go bag and offers him a smile.

“Well.” Bill stands slowly. “I’ve said what I came to say. And now my shepherd’s pie is ready to go.” He raps his knuckles gently on the table. “Don’t blame Jamie for this intervention, by the way. I asked him if I could crash your meet-up.”

Jamie scrubs his face.

“I am sorry about the other night,” I tell Bill. “And I’ll try to smooth things over.”

Gently, he clasps my shoulder again. “Thank you.”

As Bill walks away, Jamie sits back against the bench and rubs his eyes beneath his glasses. “Well, that was stressful.”

“Says the one who wasn’t in the hot seat.”

“God, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to feel like that.”

“It’s all right,” I tell him. “I appreciate your honesty. I think I’m just... wrapping my head around it.”

Two pints of Guinness are set at our table, then a shot beside my beer, which, judging by the smell, is a strong Irish whiskey.

Jamie frowns in confusion and says to the waiter, “We didn’t order these.”

“Compliments of Fee.” They jerk their head toward the bar. “She said you both looked like you needed it. You especially,” they tell me.

“Cheers to that, I guess.” I raise my beer glass and knock it with Jamie’s as he lifts his, too.

After tipping back our pints, we set them down on heavy exhales. “I’m not touching the whiskey.” I slide the shot toward Jamie, who slides it away from himself, toward the edge of the table.

“Me neither,” he says. “A shot and a beer, and I’d be laid flat. I’m too old for that nonsense.”

A laugh leaves me. We’re both only in our early thirties, but I feel the same way. “Hangovers in your thirties hit hard.”

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