Badger to the Bone (Honey Badger Chronicles #3) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,120
guys get into an argument or something?”
“Me and Stevie?”
“No. Charlie.”
“I don’t argue with Charlie. I argue with Stevie.”
“Well, something’s wrong. She’s depressed and—”
“Stevie?”
Now he was getting frustrated. “Charlie.”
“Charlie doesn’t get depressed. It’s her anxiety that really gets her.”
“I know that, but at this moment she’s thoroughly depressed. I’ve never seen her like this.”
Max thought a moment but finally shrugged. “As long as she’s baking—”
“She’s not baking.”
“She’s not baking?”
“Nope. She was just sitting in the kitchen with her head on the table. No baking.”
“Get the rest of the food,” she said, shoving the bag she held into his arms before running into the house.
* * *
Max found a miserable Charlie sitting on the couch with a miserable Zé, both of them watching The Exorcist III.
“What’s going on?” she asked her sister while turning off the TV.
“Nothing. Why do you ask?” But Charlie spoke with no strength to her voice. No animation. She wasn’t even annoyed that Max had turned off The Exorcist III !
“Okay, what the fuck happened?” Max pushed. “Is it Dad? Did he do something? Do I need to kill him before Stevie gets home?”
“No, no,” Charlie replied, suddenly appearing alert. Concerned. She sat up, clasped her hands in front of her.
“Max,” she said with great intensity, “it’s not your job to manage Dad. You shouldn’t feel that pressure.”
What the fuck . . . ?
Berg hustled by with several bags of Chinese food, heading to the kitchen.
“I don’t feel pressure,” Max said. “And it’s no one’s job to manage Dad, but we do it anyway because Dad’s a fuckup.”
“I never should have asked you to get involved. It was cruel and unfair to you.” She shook her head. “I’ve been holding you back from life, Max, haven’t I?”
“Actually, you’ve been holding me back from prison. That’s a good thing.”
“I should have done better by you. I should have been there for you. When you needed me. I didn’t even know you played basketball. I never thought of you as a team player.”
“I’m a team player with other badgers,” she said as Berg strode back outside to get more of the food she’d purchased. She’d assumed she’d be feeding the triplets as well. “Our general hatred of others makes us perfect together. But I don’t understand why you’d need to know any of that. It’s not like I came in every day and said, ‘Hey! I play basketball.’ We had other things to worry about. More important things.”
“How could such an important part of your life not be important?”
Wait . . . what?
“It’s like I turned you into some sort of cult member who blindly followed me around as I ordered you to drink the Kool-Aid.”
“Sweetie, we discussed this. It was Flavor-Aid that they drank and I would have drunk it, too, if I were a full-human with guns aimed at me. It wasn’t like they had a lot of choices. I, however, have many choices.”
“Do you, though?” Charlie asked in a tone Max hadn’t heard in more than a decade. Not since high school when Charlie’s English teacher had introduced her to philosophy. For weeks she read the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, Plato, even Karl Marx. Then she’d analyze everything in her life and the lives of Max and Stevie. It got so bad, even her grandfather stopped listening to her, taking to hunting down wild boars on the Pack property rather than sitting through another painful dinner with “Immanuel Kant-You-Shut-The-Fuck-Up?” as he liked to call her . . . to her face.
“Do you have choices,” Charlie asked, “or am I just making your life hell?”
“At this moment? Hell comes to mind. But I don’t think that’s what you mean.”
“You play pro basketball,” she said, “and I’ve never been to a game. I’ve never cheered you on. I’ve never pointed to you and said to some stranger sitting next to me, ‘That’s my sister.’ ”
“So?”
“That’s what sisters do, Max. They are there for each other, listening to each other’s boring stories, and forcing themselves to sit through a sport they detest just to support the ones they love. It’s called being family.”
Berg returned with more bags. “How much food did you buy?” he demanded, marching by.
“If we were remotely normal,” Max told her sister, “that’s what we’d do. But we’re not, Charlie. We’re not a normal family. So we do what we have to and that’s okay. It never bothered me.”
“It should have. It should have bothered you.”
Max’s gaze slipped over to Zé, who was no longer stretched out