“You’re such a dick,” I say, but he’s already getting up and grabbing the weird whiskey off the shelf, pouring it into my glass.
“I’d like to submit a thought for consideration,” Levi says, settling back into his couch like it’s a throne.
“Submit away,” says Eli.
“I think this is why you like Charlie,” he says.
“Because she gets me in trouble and got Rusty hurt?”
“Daniel, we went over this,” says Eli. “Rusty could’ve fallen off the swings and broken her arm.”
“The swings have a rubber mat underneath them,” I say.
“You can be a dick all you want, but I know you understand the point I’m making,” he says.
“You like Charlie because she’s exciting,” Levi continues, acting like Eli and I aren’t bickering. “She’s fun. She’s unpredictable. She takes you on nude excursions.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Seth mutters into his glass.
“For all you act like you want safety and stability and a home life that looks like a Coca-Cola ad from the fifties, you’ve never liked someone half as much as Charlie and you never will,” he says.
I swallow hard and stare down, right into Jebediah’s glass eyes, his furry face forever frozen in a snarl. Levi’s right and I hate him for it, but that’s not the worst part. It’s not the real problem.
“She’s bad for Rusty,” I finally say, my voice quiet. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about it, she’s not — we can’t have a future if she’s not good for Rusty.”
There’s a brief moment of stunned silence, and I look up into three faces, all leaning forward and looking at me like I have two heads.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Seth asks.
“That,” Eli says, pointing at Seth.
“Charlie’s awesome with Rusty,” Seth continues. “So she fucked up. All parents fuck up.”
“I got a black eye once because I was riding on Dad’s shoulders and he walked me into a door frame,” Eli says.
“Mom forgot me at the grocery store when I was six,” Levi says.
“When Dad was teaching me to ride a bike, he steered me straight into a tree by accident,” Seth offers. “And didn’t Mom give you a huge gash on your arm once when you were hiding in a pile of leaves to surprise her and she raked you?”
“Oh, I remember that,” Levi says. “We all had to go to the hospital so you could get a tetanus shot.”
“They weren’t having a custody battle,” I point out. “Mom and Dad didn’t have some other parent just waiting for them to fuck up so they could use it against them in court.”
They fall quiet.
“I can’t fuck up,” I say. “I’m already the wrong parent, I already put her in public school and don’t live in a gated community and won’t give her a pony and don’t have a spouse—”
“You’ve got Charlie,” Eli says.
“Not a spouse, Eli,” I say.
“She’s been more of a presence in Rusty’s life than her own mother,” he says softly. “You think that other shit matters to Rusty?”
“It matters to a judge,” I say. “This school they want to send her to has a ninety-nine-point-nine college acceptance rate, last year they sent seven kids to Harvard and ten to Yale—”
“And Rusty was nearly a year old and barely able to sit up by herself, let alone crawl when you got her,” Eli says, his voice rising. “That’s in the file too. You know what else is in the file? That Swamp Thing has seen her about six times in the past year.”
“Don’t call her—”
“Rusty’s not here so I’ll call her garbage mother what I want, thanks.”
Somehow, my whiskey’s gone again. I stand up, then wobble, drunker than I was expecting.
“It’s on the table,” Levi says.
I pour more. I drink more. I sit back down on the couch, with my brothers, and lean my head back against the cool leather and close my eyes.
And I see Rusty, so small in her hospital bed, big eyes glassy from crying, still in her swimsuit, her wrapped arm propped up while she waited to get a cast put on. All I can hear is her soft voice saying hi, Dad.
Charlie on her other side, holding her other hand tight, looking ragged and terrified herself. Charlie who must have carried Rusty back through the woods, who must have been the one to get her into her booster seat, soothe her, get her to the hospital.
It suddenly occurs to me that when I got there, Rusty wasn’t crying, even though she was still in pain. She wasn’t scared even though she was in the emergency room, she wasn’t freaked out.
Even though her arm was broken, Rusty was fine, and it’s because Charlie was there. Because she loves Charlie and trusts Charlie and even if Charlie does dumb shit sometimes, she’s never once failed Rusty in the ways that matter.