“Not just his mother. He did come here to meet you,” Birdwine said.
I made a scoffing noise. “So I can offer him an about-to-be-unemployed half sister with a bitch reputation and a fast-developing panic disorder.”
“When you put it that way . . .” Birdwine said, chuckling. “So find Kai.”
“She’s dead,” I said, sharp.
“I know, Paula,” Birdwine said, in a tone used for humoring lunatics. “I can tell by all the wheezing and shaking that you’re perfectly happy to leave it at that.” That made me smile. “Find out when she died and where she’s buried. You’ll feel better, and the kid’s a citizen. He’ll like having a place to plant Thank You for Giving Me Life daisies.” I nodded. That sounded like the least that Julian would want. Birdwine went on, “So, to bright-side it, it looks to me like Nick thinks you need some time off. I say we hit Worthy Investigations in the morning.”
That word, we, washed over me. In my own way, I had asked him for help twice now. This was Birdwine saying yes. He was offering something like a friendship, and all ye gods and little fishes, I could use a friend right now. His offer was a living thing between us, so new and pink and blinking that it made me nervous. I nodded, accepting it, and all at once Birdwine seemed as uncomfortable as I was.
“Pass me a legal pad,” he said. “The kid’s contact info is in the file, but give me a little time before you set a meet. I’ll take his Social down and do a quick background for you—just in case.” I got him one from my desk, and he spent a moment bent over the blue folder, jotting a few things down. Then he headed for the door, pausing in the doorway to look back. “Want me to pick you up tomorrow?”
I shook my head no. “Your car smells like a gym sock. I’ll get you. Nine o’clock?”
“Ten,” he said. “What are we, savages?” He closed the door behind him.
The workday was hours from being over. I should go find Nick and try to get right with him, or at least give the afternoon’s hours to a live file, doing something billable. I stood as if wavering, but I knew I was only delaying the inevitable. The double panic attack had left me too wrung out to concentrate on breaking up the fat estates of angry strangers.
So I gathered up my laptop, the note from Kai inside my returned envelope, and the blue file that Julian had abandoned, and I went home. I wanted to find out everything I could about my brand-new brother. After all, he’d just inherited the largest debt of my life.
CHAPTER 4
I incur my debt in Paulding County, Georgia, on a sweet spring night as my mother plays her mandolin and sings campfire songs. I am huddled and sunk into one of the ancient beanbag chairs on Dwayne’s covered porch. I have one of Kai’s sketchbooks open on my lap. I’m trying to copy the way she draws eyes, but it’s gotten too dark. The porch light is dead, so Kai has lit candles. I can’t concentrate, anyway.
I squinch my eyes to peer across the small yard, hemmed in by heaps of kudzu. It’s dirt and weeds, mostly, dotted with lightning bugs. They are all looking for true love, flicking their tails on and off in the gathering dusk. It’s hard to see past the candlelight, but it seems to me that someone is moving in the kudzu. Maybe it is only a deer. They come sometimes, hoping to eat some tender baby pot plants.
Is it a deer? I can’t tell if I want it to be a deer or not. I’ve been sick and scared down in my very pit for days now.
Kai, oblivious, is draped on the sagging back-porch sofa, her wrap skirt bunched up almost to her hips. She has her long legs draped across Dwayne’s lap, which makes her play her beat-up mandolin at an odd angle. The bug zapper backs her up with its irregular percussion. She’s not a great player, but her fat, lazy alto usually melts me into sleepiness. Not tonight.
Dwayne leans over her legs, digging in the ashtray to find the second half of a joint. He lights it with his Zippo, then holds it for Kai. She pauses the song long enough to pull in smoke and hold it.
“There’s a hole in the middle of the sea,” Kai chokes out on the exhale, smoke streaming, and Dwayne laughs. He joins her when her breath is back. “There’s a frog on the bump on the log in the hole in the middle of the sea . . .”
She acts like this is just another chapter in our endlessly mutable story, Kai towing me as she moves from man to man. I never fought or even questioned it, because of the truth at the root of our shared life: Kai doesn’t love me like she loves the boyfriends.