Refusing to even acknowledge her and her betraying ways, I dug back into the box I was unpacking and took the paper off another dish.
The sheriff had ended up holding me in that place until the next morning when I’d told him through clenched teeth that I’d go out with him. Was I pressing charges or reporting him? No. Why? Our police went through enough as it was, and this didn’t warrant reporting him or causing him grief in my mind. I mean, if it had been someone else I’d have been laughing too. But I was holding a grudge, and I was a mean grudge holder.
Well, I was a mean grudge holder in my brain, but that freaking counted. The big ass wank – something which I had no idea what it was, but it suited him.
“You could do far worse,” Jose informed me, wiping away the tears that had run down her face. “He’s always been a great guy who’d help anyone and everyone, and the whole town likes him.”
“He put me in prison,” I reminded her. “Next to Rita Slutita.”
“I can understand that would’ve sucked, babe,” she sympathized. “But he also ignored her shit. I heard he told Larry he was to leave both of us alone, and if he didn’t he’d make sure both of us pressed charges against him for every single infraction, including a strand of hair falling out. He also threatened some other things, but no one would tell me what they were.”
Looking up from the plate in my hand at the tone in her voice, I looked over and watched the sister I’d never known about, but who I loved hugely already, as she folded a towel and put it on the pile beside her. She was due to have the baby at any moment, and she’d been through so much over the last couple of days. How was she even still standing?
“How are you holding up?”
Lifting her head, she shot me a grin, but it was obvious that it was strained. There were definitely similarities between us – the color of our eyes, the shape of our noses, even the slight cleft in our chins were the same. Personality wise, she had tattoos on her arms like me, except hers were more like floral and almost elegant, whereas I’d gone for fun ones and things that I liked. I appreciated art of all forms, but I was addicted to the more obscure stuff. In middle school, everyone had been going over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting and I’d been studying Salvador Dali instead, and that’s pretty much the way it had gone since.
The green zombie skull on my bicep had come about because of a wall of graffiti I’d found driving through Brooklyn. I’d snapped a photo of it on my phone and had taken it to my tattoo guy to put on my arm, bizarre but true. My Pepé Le Pew was symbolic of how beauty could be different and didn’t have to conform to our ideals and stereotypes, and I considered myself the perfect example of this so it fit. Everyone was beautiful in their own rights and ways either on the inside, outside, or both.
The one piece I had that was so personal that I felt the tattoo down to my soul when it was done, was the peacock feather on my right arm. It symbolized me and Mom. We were diverse, a billion elements made up our beauty, and we hid our full potential until we were ready to reveal it to people like a peacock does with its tail. Because she’d found so much of herself in the animals, Mom had collected peacock things for years, all of which I had in the large plastic tub in the corner of the room. My favorite piece in it was the framed drawing of a peacock feather that she’d done four months before she died. It was realistic, every detail was visible, and it was stunning. It was also the tattoo on my arm.
The irony was, no matter how hard she tried she’d totally sucked at drawing, so it was hilarious that for just that one day she’d found the talent to produce such a gorgeous piece of work. The tattoo was so special to me, and although it made me sad looking at it, I also couldn’t help smiling at the story behind it. Damn I missed her so much.
Jose speaking just then brought me out of the funk I’d been heading towards.
“I’m angry, I’m hurt, I’m disgusted, I feel guilty for my baby that I chose such a monumental asshole for her father, and I feel really freaking stupid for marrying him in the first place,” she told me, putting the dish towel she’d been folding down and rubbing her temples with her fingertips. “What gets to me the most is that I feel relieved too. It felt like I was walking on eggshells every single day of our relationship. He always went for the sympathy vote saying how his parents would be disappointed in him for this and that if they were still alive.” She paused and stared at the wall for a beat, and then continued, “I tried to call off the wedding you know, on the morning of the big day. I’d been trying to do it subtly for weeks because I just had this feeling that it was a wrong move for me. He went and buddied up to Mom, and she got on my case saying I couldn’t hurt him like that because he’d already been through so much heartache in his life. Like it was my responsibility to carry him or something.”