FIVE
K I N D R E D
Maggie Biggs lay half passed out on the sofa with a mild headache. This was the least she could do. After all, three years ago, when Ed Palmer had fallen for her, he had sugared her stepmother’s gas tank and knocked out the front windows of her father’s house. He had paid for all of it, and lost fifty percent of the trust he would ever have from a great deal of people so, on his first night of classes, she could wait up for him.
Earlier on his mother, Liz, had come by, and Maggie had offered her a cup of coffee, some doughnuts she had made with little skill, and the truth that Edward was doing later registration.
“He’d be late for his own funeral, you know?” Liz told Maggie. Maggie suspected she was right.
So it was about nine when Ed got there and sank on the couch, legs wide apart, and threw an arm over her shoulder.
“You been waiting on me?”
Maggie didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep, and she crawled up to Ed and, wrapping her arms about him, confessed, “I’ve been waiting on you.
“Not cooking for you, because I don’t do that. But waiting, I did make doughnuts.”
“Well, that’s a sort of cooking.”
“Not if you taste them. Your mom tasted one. She ate the whole thing, smiled and said it was delicious. That’s why I like her so much. Now my mom?” Maggie shook her head. “That bitch would tell the terrible truth.”
Ed hopped up.
“I’m so hungry I could eat a human arm.”
“Gross.”
“Point the way to those doughnuts.”
“On the counter on the other side of the kitchenette window.”
Ed reached through the window in the wall from where the kitchen looked onto the living room, and pulled a glass top from a plate of doughnuts. He set it down without really looking and then took up the doughnut and bit into it.
“Oh, my God, these aren’t bad at all.”
“Really?” Maggie sat up.
Ed thoughtfully chewed on the doughnut and swallowed half of it before speaking.
“I’m not gonna lie,” Ed said, coming back to the sofa. “I’m going to need several glasses of milk with these, and they definitely sit in your stomach like lead.”
“Thanks!”
“But it’s tasty lead.” He winked at her, and she slapped him on the shoulder.
“Well, I wanna see you cook,” she said.
“Fair enough,” Ed said with a shrug.
“Whaddit Mom come by for?”
“She wants you to call her. She was really mellow about it, but I think it might be urgent.”
Despite the hint that it might be urgent, Ed went on slowly digesting the doughnut. The lazy son of a bitch hadn’t even gotten up to get the glass of milk he said it needed so badly. She shrugged and went to get it herself. Ed didn’t understand. She’d made such a colossal fuck up of things she needed as many members of her family to like her as possible.
There was her father, Milo, and his whole family, including not only her great-grandmother but, misfortune of misfortunes, Ed’s stepmother Meredith who was stepsister and close to Maggie’s own stepmother, Dena, whom she had made her enemy with a great deal of teenage concentration. She paused over this, tracing the family tree in her head. This made Meredith her cousin. Her possible stepmother-in-law one day, but definitely her cousin. She hadn’t known what a stupid idea it was to make an enemy of Dena Affren. She had not known the Affrens were so tangled in with Dena’s family. At the time she didn’t know that Ed would become her true boyfriend, and that his first cousin was raised in the home of Dena’s uncle, basically his son. She’d had no idea of the borderline incestuous ties of the residents of Rossford, Indiana or how when you screwed one over, you screwed about a hundred. Over time it had leaked out that she’d also encouraged a girl to sleep with and pretend to be pregnant by Bennett Anderson, and who was Bennett Anderson? Well, it just turned out his girlfriend, also possessed of a long memory and capable of revenge, was the first cousin to her stepmother Dena, the foster sister of good ole cousin Dylan. And who loved them both and looked after them? Elias Anderson, one of the scariest motherfuckers she’d ever met. And in some way, all of these people should have been her friends. They should have been family. Things were, at best, uneasy between her and them. It probably, she had to admit, had something to do with the fact that she had never said she was sorry. No one knew how hard that was, though.
“Call your mother!” Maggie said at last, so loud Ed almost choked on his doughnut. “For fucks sake, call her!”
“Alright, already,” Ed said, with a laugh. He had no idea what the stakes in this were for her.
They didn’t have a landline, which Maggie thought they should get. She wasn’t so convinced that she had sprung for one, though. She wanted them to go in jointly. Her mother had stopped paying for the apartment, and Maggie refused help from Milo.
Ed took out his phone and called his mother.
“Hello.”
“It’s me.”
“You?” Then she said, “Ed? Ed, Lord, what have I told you about that ‘It’s me’ garbage?”
“It’s Edward, Mother,” Ed Palmer said. “Maggie said you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes,” Meg remembered. “Yes, I did. By the way, have you had her doughnuts?”
“Yeah,” Ed looked over at Maggie. “They’re delicious,” his voice was louder.
“Oh she must be sitting right next you,” Meg said. “Well, they aren’t bad, that’s true. But they could be a little lighter. I’m coming over next week to teach that girl how to cook, so you all need to figure out a good time for me to do that. But that’s not why I called.”
Ed was reaching the wearisome point he often did with his mother, and he said, “No, Mother, it isn’t. So,” he prompted, “why did you call?”
“Well, you’re friends with Dylan, right?”
“We’re not close,” Ed said. “We talk, though. I guess we acknowledge each other.”
“Well, that’s what family does,” Meg said. “Look, I can’t blame him. Tom and Fenn are his parents and Eileen was so terrible to him. We just remind him of her.”
“Yeah,” Ed said. Personally, he was a little indifferent to his gay cousin’s personal drama.
“However,” Meg continued, “I need you to go talk to him for me.”
“Talk to Dylan?”
“Yes. Call him.”
“About what?”
“About his mother.”
“Oh, hell, Mom!”
“Just listen.”
“Mom, you want me to talk to a cousin who hardly acknowledges me about a woman he can’t stand.”
“Eileen is back. She’s here.”
“Then the last thing he needs is to hear about her.”
“She wants to see him and—”
“Mom,” Ed said. “I really don’t know Dylan that well. But I do know she tried to get into his life once and dropped the ball. I do know she dropped him off on someone’s door step and left for ten years.”
“But you don’t know that she’s dying!”
Ed stopped talking.
“That’s right,” his mother said. “If you’d just be quiet for a second, and let me finish then you would know that Eileen is dying.”
“Mom, can I go out with TJ?”
“At this time of night?” Layla Lawden looked at her son.
Liam, green eyed and dusky skinned, stood solemnly waiting on her word, though he wasn’t surprised when she said no.
“And don’t even think about asking your father,” she continued. “But, what you can do is stop running through your uncle’s house.”
“Hey!” Todd said, as Liam nearly bumped into him, running into the kitchen.
“Sorry, Uncle Todd,” Liam straightened up and walked past the tall, grey haired man.
“He’s full of nothing but energy,” Todd commented, coming into the living room.
“Will wants to have another one, and I’m still recovering from our nine year old. Who would have ever thought I’d say that?”
“Who would have ever thought that Fenn would be off visiting his twenty year old son?”
There was a knock on the door, suddenly, but, as Fenn so often said, it was merely symbolic. The door opened and red hair disheveled, long nose quivering, Bennett Anderson entered the house with his brother, Matthew, and his cousin, Riley Lawden.
“What’s going on?” Layla directed this more to her nephew.
Before the caramel skinned boy could answer, Bennett said, “Todd, do you know where your daughter is?”
“What the—?”
“Maia just up and disappeared,” Riley said.
“She disa—“ Layla began and Todd concluded, weak voiced, “disappeared?”
“Actually, they got in a fight and then she walked away,” Matthew said, levelly.
Bennett looked at his brother fiercely, but Matthew, who was dark haired and pale, cool tempered like Elias, was unaffected.
“You should call Fenn,” he told Todd.
Todd nodded at the sixteen year old and Layla handed him the phone.
“What’s going on?” Liam came out into the kitchen
Bennett opened his mouth, but Layla said, “Nothing’s going on.”
“I need to call Tara first,” Todd decided.
Solemnly, Matthew shook his head.
“You should not call Tara.”
Layla, thinking of Tara, and thinking of how she herself would react at hearing her child had gone missing, agreed.
“Hello… Fenn… What? Huh. Yeah, put her on.”
Todd cracked a smile.
“She’s in Chicago!” Todd said. Then, “What are you doing in Chicago? You don’t just get up and leave town without telling your parents! If you were right here, I’d turn you over my knee, Lady, and thrash you—”
“Well, she’s found,” Layla said, casually turning away from the rest of Todd’s diatribe while he took the phone into the kitchen.
A few moments later he returned to the living room. Bennett’s brow was furrowed and his eyes beady.
“Did she have anything to say to me?” he demanded.
Todd thunked him on the head not without affectionate.
“No, Bennett Anderson-Stanley, she did not.”
“Where is she?”
“Staying with your brother and Dylan.”
“I should go to her.”
“You should not,” Todd said. “Son-in-law, you and Maia have some serious shit to work out.”
“Did you dig those up from under the sofa?”
Elias was unpeeling caramels and popping them into his mouth.
“Yes,” he replied, his mouth full of candy. “Yes, I did.”
“Well, now it is his sofa,” Maia told Dylan with a shrug.
“Yeah, but we just picked that thing off of campus after some other students left it. Good God, Eli!”
“That is kind of nasty,” Maia commented. But Eli just held out his hand, and offered her a candy.
“It’s wrapped,” he said, mouth still full.
“I’ll pass.”
Dylan got up and went across the room to light a candle in front of the altar and muttered, “You all are impossible.”
“Is that your prayer for the night?” Maia said.
“No, that’s my declaration of faith.”
“Why are you here?” Fenn said, bluntly. “What did Bennett do to you?”
“He’s just driving me crazy.”
“You all shouldn’t be living together.”
“Firstly,” Maia said to Elias. “You and Dylan are living together, and living with Lance at that.”
“We’re more mature,” Elias said, straight faced. Maia could smell the stick of Nag Champa Dylan had just lit.
“You’re something,” Maia said. “But my second point is we are not living together. We just live together.”
“Oh my God, repeat that to yourself,” Dylan said, returning to the couch to sit on the other side of Maia opposite Elias.
“We have another roommate. We’re just roommates.”
“I think Layla and Will pulled that about a decade ago,” Fenn said.
“Actually, you and Todd pulled it thirty years ago,” Dylan said.
“Well, now there you go,” Fenn said to his son.
“Is everyone going to talk like I’m not here?” Maia looked at them.
They began to laugh, but Elias was first to stop, saying, “Sorry, Sis. Why don’t you go on?”
“I just need some space from him,” she said. “From his doing stupid shit and not thinking. From his temper.”
“Well, there is that,” Elias agreed.
“You’re the calm one. You’re the one who makes sense,” Maia said to Elias. “It’s like Ben just doesn’t think. And sometimes it’s beautiful. Like he gave away three hundred dollars to this charity. Only it was mostly my money, and then I had to ask Dad for the rent.”
“I remember that,” Fenn noted.
“And it’s boneheaded shit like that, that is driving me crazy.”
The phone rang, and though Fenn got up Dylan said, “I got it, Dad.”
A few minutes later, they heard Dylan cry: “Hey! What’s going on?”
He sat down on the counter and began talking, laughing, smiling wide, whispering for about ten minutes.
“Laurel,” Maia and Elias guessed.
“Alright, girl!” Dylan laughed into the phone.
It was endearing and odd to hear a somewhat butch, white boy with a military hair cut call anyone girl. It excited Elias a little bit.
“May, it’s for you,” Dylan said, coming back into the living room.
“All of that talk, and it was for me?” Maia muttered, taking the phone.
“Laurel?”
“I just heard that you left Bennett?”
“Are you serious?” Maia said. “Is my business all over the world?”
“No, just all over Rossford.”
“Where are you?”
“With Moshe. In New York. But Riley called me and told me, so now I’m calling you. What the nut, cuz?”
“I need space from his dumb ass,” was all Maia said.
Laurel thought about this, and then said, “Well, yeah. There’s a point to that.”
“Hold on, there’s a call trying to get through.”
“Alright.”
Maia switched over and said, “Hello?”
“Oh, my God, Maia, what happened?”
“Meredith?”
“Who else?”
“This is ridiculous. Meredith, I’m fine. Meredith, I would love to talk to you accept Laurel’s on the other line.”
“Well, if you ever need to talk…”
“I will remember that. In fact, I will call you when I’m off the phone with Laurel.”
“Alright, Sweetie. Love you. Bubbye.”
“Alright. That was Meredith.”
“How did she know?” Laurel said.
“It’s about five hundred possible ways she knows. Anyway, I’m fine, and don’t have much to say. Except I promised Meredith a call back, and right now all I want to do is go to sleep.”
“Alright,” Laurel said. “Well, I’m getting off the phone. Haven’t really seen Moshe all day. I’ll be back in a few days. Love you.”
“I love you too. Get the hell off the phone.”
Maia hung up, but just then the phone rang again.
“Oh, my God,” Fenn muttered, exasperated.
“Hello,” Maia said, picking the phone up. Then, “Layla!”
“Yes,” Layla said.
“You’re the one hundredth person to call about Bennett, and I’m fine. We’re both fine.”
“That’s good,” Layla said in a strange voice, “and of course you know I care about you and Bennett. But this is about Dylan.”
“I’ll get him—”
“No,” Layla said, soberly. “Could you get Fenn?”
Maia felt suddenly serious.
“Yeah,” she said in a low voice.
“Fenn, it’s Layla. Come to the phone.”
