He’d leaned in on that last sentence, and when he hit the f in unfair, she could smell his breath. Southern Comfort, maybe? A spicy, earthy thing, the kind of booze nobody sits down with a glass of, the sort of thing you only drink if it’s the very last thing in the cabinet and you gotta get a buzz on right this fucking minute. She saw the little red streaks in his eyes then, and she marveled at her defensive ability to miss things she didn’t want to see. The last two years of not seeing Rusty drunk had dulled some of her formerly razor-sharp observational skills. Of course he was fucked up, and of course he was scared and full of regrets, and she wanted nothing to do with it.
She attempted a neutral tone. “Thank you for checking on us. I hope you’re right about all this.”
“Oh, come on. Like you never wanted to smack the kid?”
“No. Never.” She picked up her groceries, glancing at the screen door. “Would you mind?”
With exaggerated gallantry, he reached out and opened the door for her. She stepped through, but instead of closing it, Rusty leaned in the doorframe, lingering.
“Look, it’s a weird time.”
“It is.”
She turned, bags still in her arms, hooking her foot under the front door to close it.
“And it catches me at just the worst possible moment,” he continued.
She paused, realizing what he was actually there for. She sighed. “How much?”
“I’ve got a twenty and a ten in my wallet and the ATMs are shut down. How much can you spare?”
“Wait here.”
She turned and walked into the house. He watched as she went into the kitchen, put the bags on the counter, and turned to the half-open door that led to the basement stairs. Leaning slightly to his right, he could just see her back as she spoke to Scott, who was still downstairs, probably loading up the freezer. Rusty frowned, wondering why on earth she was asking Scott before dipping into her own finances, but that was a puzzle he knew he was never going to figure out. Those two had been tight since the day he’d first brought her home, when Scott was seven or eight, and they’d been conspiring against him ever since.
The more he watched, the less Rusty liked the conversation. Aubrey was at the top of the stairs, gesturing, trying to make some kind of point to Scott, who must have been resisting it. He could hear the boy’s surprisingly deep tones countering her emphatically. Wait a minute, was this the actual situation here? Was Rusty a man standing on the threshold of what had once been his own home, watching while his ex-wife attempted to convince his fifteen-year-old son that it was OK to give him a couple of twenties?
Shit. That’s low, man.
After another heated back-and-forth, Rusty saw Aubrey dip into the doorway, heard her feet bang down a few stairs, then stop, turn around, and come back up. She marched across the living room and came back toward him, carrying something in her right hand. She extended her arm as she drew close.
“That from Scott?”
“None of your business. Do you want it?”
“Yeah, you got everything under control here.”
“Do you want it or not?”
He looked down. She was holding three bills in her hand. But they weren’t twenties. They were hundreds.
Rusty controlled his reaction as best he could, but his right hand shot up pretty quickly, wanting to secure the money before she changed her mind. He closed his hand around the bills and shoved them in his pocket. Far down, as if he was afraid she might come after them.
“Tell him his old man says—”
But the front door was already closing. “Please don’t ever come in this house when I’m not here again.”
“You left the goddamn door open. I was worried.”
She stopped, the door still opened a foot or two. “And to answer your question, no. You never hit me. I got you out before you had a chance.” In her pocket, Aubrey’s cell phone rang. She closed the door without another word.
Rusty turned, trying not to smile. The kid, for God knows what reason, had just forked over three hundred dollars in cash, at a time when those two chuckleheads were obviously convinced the world was about to come to a crashing end. That meant the little shit had, at a minimum, at least three times that much cash that he had not given over. Why on earth his moronic ex-wife had put a teenager in charge of their finances was beyond him, and unimportant.
This was a fascinating development that needed a good, long think.
8.
4:26 p.m.
Inside the house, Aubrey let out a breath of air and tried to lower her shoulders, which had been cranked up around her ears. She rolled them back once, pulled her phone from her pocket, and answered.