Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,92

what the lawyer had to say. Fern looked like she was going to hug me but I managed to telepathically fend her off.

“You better lawyer up, too,” Eric said to Max.

“Don’t worry about me,” Max said.

“Your boys in the club. They’ve already been talking and you’ll get pulled in on this and it will mean serious time.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

Eric stared at him hard, one last, long minute, and then slapped his hands together twice like he was washing himself clear of responsibility.

Eric and Fern left and Max and I stood there. I couldn’t speak for him but I felt hollowed out.

“It’s going to be okay,” Max said.

“Don’t say that.”

“What? Why?”

“You’ll jinx it.”

He rolled his eyes at me but I wasn’t joking. Good things were fragile in my life. Either I broke them on purpose or I broke them by accident. It didn’t matter. Good didn’t last. Not for me.

I was scared of breathing too deeply in case I might wreck something.

“Joan,” Max breathed. “Relax. I’m gonna get you a drink.”

“Yes,” I said. “A drink is a great idea.”

Max

She was strung so tightly I was scared to touch her. One wrong word and she might spook. Fuck. How had this happened? How had she gotten so used to eating worms and dirt and garbage that when something good came along she was terrified?

Well, I knew how that happened. I’d eaten my own share of dirt and called it dinner. After a while, it didn’t even taste bad. It tasted like what you deserved.

Clock and BLJ had talked in prison. I couldn’t even muster up the surprise.

I got Joan another glass of that punch and a beer to chase it down. Which I watched her do, like she was taking medicine.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Better,” she said.

And then, because I never saw her eat, not really, I loaded up a plate at the buffet table. I’d noticed she liked cheese a lot, so I grabbed a bunch of the little cubes all cut up on a tray. I threw on salami and some crackers. Helen had made tamales and they were going fast, so I grabbed two of them. There were plenty of peel and eat shrimp but Joan didn’t seem like she had the patience for that. A whole bunch of dips and chips. Some vegetables. I remembered she’d complained about there not being enough vegetables during the steak night and I grabbed even more. A plate full of carrots and shit.

My hands full, I headed back over to her just as she was finishing the last of her beer. She looked wild-eyed.

Completely unpredictable.

“What’s that?” she asked. Her voice had an edge like she was digging around for a fight.

“Food. When’s the last time you ate?”

“I’m not hungry.” She met my eyes square and I didn’t know if she meant to show me as much as she was showing me. But it was all right there. She wanted me to push so she could push back.

“Cool,” I said. I put the plates down on a wicker end table and picked up one of the tamales. My mom used to make tamales; she had learned it from her mom. Who learned it from hers. On her good days, when I was growing up, she talked about how she was going to teach me to make them. She never did though.

I wanted to tell Joan that story, break off that little piece of myself and hand it over. But I could tell by the way she was standing what she would do with that. I’d give her some other shit we could fight over, if that’s what she wanted. But not that.

Some things you couldn’t unsay after a fight. And my guess was me and Joan had plenty of experience with that. I wouldn’t give her the ammunition to destroy this little thing we had.

I took a big bite and the flavors were perfect. The masa melted on my tongue. “That’s good,” I said. “Really good. You don’t want that one?”

“No,” she said and put her beer down on the wicker table. “I’m gonna get another drink, you want something?”

There were tons of other people in this world who would not understand what she was doing. Who wouldn’t get it. But what I saw was a person who had no idea what to do with something that was bright and shiny and clean. Not when everything in her life was dirty. So, the only thing to do was to take the bright