“I dunno.” Mercy smiled back. “I think I’ve got most of the shit straight. The important parts, anyway.”
Ghost snorted. “Parts?”
Maggie slapped her palm down on the table. The plates and glasses and flatware jumped, clinking against one another. “That’s enough!” she snapped, her eyes going scary-large, her jaw clenching up until the tendons stood out along her neck. “This ismytable, boys.Mine. The table in the chapel? That’s yours. You can cuss, and insult, and rip into each other around that table all you want. You can butt heads at work, on runs, in the clubhouse. You just hate the hell out of each other. But this ismytable, and I will not eat dinner with you two sniping across my beautiful chicken while I digest. So knock it the hell off!”
Her eyes moved between the two of them, daring a challenge.
The tension held for one long second, then both nodded.
“Sorry.”
“Sorry, babe.”
Maggie pulled in a deep breath and calmed visibly, nodding to herself. She straightened her glass and plate and picked up her utensils again. “It seems,” she said in a calmer voice, “that there’s enough people out there who hate us all. We shouldn’t be arguing over the fact that we love each other.” She looked at Ava. “Seems stupid.”
Ava took a deep breath and let it out in a slow stream through her nostrils. “You’re absolutely right, Mom.”
“Of course I am.”
And thus the queen had restored order to her kingdom.
After dinner, Mercy and Ghost exchanged awkward handshakes and Mercy kissed Maggie on the cheek as he was pulling on his jacket. “Dinner was great.” He gave Ava the most unmistakable look before he slipped out the door.
Ava plunged her hands into the soapy sink water and scrubbed at the potato pot.
“Oh no,” Maggie said, plucking it from her hands, pulling it dripping from the suds. “You go on and say goodnight.”
Ava stared at her mother. Would this disbelief never end? Or would Maggie continue to prove the most unmotherly mom in the world forever? “But…”
“Don’t worry about Dad.” The TV rumbled in the next room; he’d settled in for a beer and some mindless channel surfing. “He needs to chill out. And you know you want to, so run outside and tell him goodbye.”
Ava shook her head as she toweled off her hands. “You know how you always say you’re a bad mother?”
“Watch it.”
Though it didn’t seem possible, she felt a pattering of nerves against her heart as she slipped on her leather jacket and let herself out the back door. She smelled the smoke first, the cigs Mercy had never been able to quit. He didn’t smoke that often, but when he did, he took his time, savoring all the way down to the filter. She closed the door behind her, folded her arms against the chill, and left the patio, following the scent of smoke around the corner.
Mercy was sitting on the ornamental concrete bench situated between two azalea bushes against the side of the garage, head tipped back against the siding, smoke pluming from his nostrils up into the air like dragon’s breath. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, hands relaxed on his thighs. The moon caught his profile, the ridge of his nose, turned it silver.
Ava kicked at the grass with the toes of her boots as she made her slow approach toward him. “Get lost on your way to the driveway?”
He didn’t answer, drawing on the cigarette and then holding it between bared teeth while he exhaled again, long streams of smoke leaving his nose. She found it wildly arousing, a delighted tremor starting in the pit of her stomach.
“I never could see it,” he said, eyes cast upward.
“See what?”
“That hunter guy you talked about. The one with the belt.”
“Orion.” She smiled as she remembered the night beside the James house, the stars the only witnesses to what had been so fierce and new between them. This moment now, bathed in starlight, felt plucked out of time, a hold on all the worry, a portal back to a simpler state.
“Yeah. Him. Is he up there now?”
Ava let her head fall back, scanning the bright pinpricks in the indigo velvet night sky. “There.” She pointed. “Those three stars are Orion’s belt. And those others make up the man himself.”
Mercy stared. She loved the way the pale light played on the strong, exposed lines of his throat.
“Do you see it?”
