I make it two steps out of the office before my legs go. I sit hard on the curb, pressing the tears back into my eyes with the heels of my hands, wondering why Arthur keeps trying to pay that unpayable debt, and why it hurts so much to see him try. And why I’m so damn relieved that he hasn’t fallen into Underland, at least not yet.
A shoe scuffs beside me, and I smell tobacco and Febreze. Bev settles on the curb next to me with the harassed sigh of someone whose joints no longer appreciate low seats.
We sit in sweaty silence for a minute before she says in a rough voice, “Remember when I first met you?” I shrug at the pavement. “You got yourself stung by a wasp, one of those nasty red ones. What were you, seven?”
I unpeel my palms from my face. “Six.”
“But you didn’t cry. You just sat there, biting your own lip, waiting it out.” Denim scrapes on concrete as Bev turns to face me. “It didn’t even occur to you to ask for help.”
“I was an independent kid.”
“You were a stupid kid, and now you’re a stupid woman.” Bev has called me stupid at least twice a week for most of my life, but she’s never done it with her jaw squared and her eyes pushing hard into mine. “How in hell is anybody supposed to help you if you won’t ask?”
Because asking is dangerous, I could tell her. Because to ask is to hope that someone answers, and it hurts so bad when nobody does. I stiffen my spine instead. “I take care of my own shit, okay? I don’t need anybody’s charity.”
Her lip curls. “That so?”
“Yes.”
She huffs like I hit her and I think: Finally. If I can’t shout at Arthur Starling then a good old-fashioned parking lot slap-fight with Bev will have to do.
I’m tense and ready, darkly eager, but Bev just watches me with that weary disgust. “Do you still think,” she asks, and I’ve never heard her sound so tired, “at almost twenty-seven years old, that I let you stay here all this time because I lost a bet?”
If this was a fight, I lost it. I’m laid out flat, gasping for air, feeling furious and ashamed and everything except surprised. Because I guess this is another thing I already knew. I knew Bev didn’t let me stay because she had to. She did it for the same reason she slapped wet tobacco on my wasp sting as a kid: because I needed help, even if I never asked.
I’m bent over, arms crossed around my own chest, as if I might come apart at the seams if I don’t hold myself tight. “Why didn’t you tell me? That I was—that Mom was a Gravely.” My voice is small in my ears, very young.
Bev sighs beside me, and her body sags into it. “I don’t know. Never seemed to be a good time for it, I guess.” She wipes sweat off her upper lip. “Or maybe I just didn’t want to tell you. Your mama was the only Gravely I ever met that was worth a damn, and they cast her out, and you too. I took you in.” I risk a look at her face and find it just as hard and mean as always. But she scoots her foot toward me until the sides of our shoes are pressed together. “Finders keepers.”
A weird warmth moves from her shoe to mine, chasing up my limbs, settling in my chest. It occurs to me that I was wrong, that Bev never looked away. She helped us even though we never asked. And if home really is wherever you’re loved—
I can’t finish the thought.
Bev is speaking again. “You should know. The day before your mama—on New Year’s Eve, she came over. We split a bottle or two and she told me her daddy was dying. She said she was going to talk to him, to make things right for you and Jasper. She said she’d pay me back for all those years in room 12.”
I exhale, not quite a laugh. “She said a lot of things.” I remember all the big talk, and all the broken promises that came after. It occurs to me, for no good reason, that Arthur has never broken a promise to me.
“I know, but this time seemed different.” Bev shakes her head and stands. Her knee joints sound like cap guns. “I don’t know what all’s going on with you, kid, but if you ever . . .” She trails into a sigh, having apparently exceeded her annual quota of public emotions.
She reaches for the office door with her neck bent and her shoulders heavy, and it strikes me that it’s been a long time since I saw her with her chin held high. The buzzed sides of her head have gone shaggy with neglect and the shadows under her eyes have deepened to a sleepless mauve, and I didn’t notice because I was too busy wallowing.
“So what about you?”