Page 11 of Virago

Bo had led her around the house, explaining all the things, all the work, and who’d done what, and Gia had followed him silently, too stunned to speak. Mom and Dad followed behind her, and she could feel their worry increasing. Bo was too excited to notice, but their parents were wondering if she didn’t like this massive gift.

The truth was kind of complicated. The house was beautiful, and they’d picked out every element, every detail, with obvious understanding of her taste. She would have chosen all these things herself, and the color scheme—a simple, neutral foundation (plain pine, white, and steel) with lots of pops of bright colors—was exactly her style. Perfect. She loved it.

But in the deepest center of her dazzled gratitude and wonder for this breathtaking show of love was something dark, like finding a beetle in the middle of a candy bar. She didn’t understand that darkness, she felt guilty about it, and that kept her quiet.

This gift hurt a little, which made no sense at all. Her family had gone way out of their way to do something astonishingly generous for her, and they’d knocked it out of the park. How could that hurt? What kind of mutant was she that she wasn’t on her knees weeping with joy right now?

“What do you think?” Bo asked, his cheeks flushed with the joy Gia should have been feeling herself.

There was only one correct answer to that question, whether it was true or not. But Bo would know if she was lying, and she couldn’t ruin this for him. So Gia pushed that darkness down, drew up all the sweetness, and made the right answer the truth, if only for this moment. She smiled as big as she could and said, “I love it! Oh my god, you guys! This is amazing! Thank you!”

Bo clapped his hands with glee. Dad grabbed Gia and squeezed her tightly. “Welcome home, squirt. We missed the fuck out of you.”

“I missed you too, Daddy,” she said into his shirt. “Thank you so much.”

When he let her go, Gia turned to her mother. Mom was smiling at her genuinely, but she did a little head-tilt, and her eyes narrowed subtly. She was picking up on Gia’s reserve.

“Thank you for this, Mamma,” Gia said and went in for a hug. “I can’t believe you did all this.”

“We mean it with love, cara. Great love for you.”

Gia nodded. “I know. Thank you. I love it.”

With a squeeze and a kiss to the side of Gia’s head, Mom let her go.

Chapter Three

Zaxx woke to bright sun burning his eyelids off. Groaning, he flailed an arm around until his hand landed on something—a throw pillow—to cover his face with. That pillow reeked of about twenty years’ worth of weed smoke, and with that, Zaxx remembered where he was.

It had been too late last night to collect Zelda’s ancient Honda Prelude from impound, so he’d brought her home. Mom and Pop had brought home a KFC feast—they considered grease one of the food groups—and Zaxx still hadn’t eaten anything but the yogurt and fruit he’d had for breakfast, and half a chocolate concrete, so he’d hung around. He’d ended up smoking a bowl with Pop, so he’d stayed the night.

Blinking the blear from his eyes, he checked his phone. There was a text from his nearest neighbor, Trudy: Saw you didn’t come home, so I grabbed Doof. He’s fed, watered, and had his morning constitutional. You need me to check in on him this afternoon?

Doofus was his Husky-Shep rescue mutt and best friend. The shelter had called him Maury, and Zaxx got a kick out of pets with old-person names, so he hadn’t officially changed it. The vet’s office called him Maury Bello, but no one else used that name. Within the first few days of living with that dog, who had the energy of a Husky with a meth addiction and the intellect of a German Shepherd who’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, Zaxx was calling him Doofus. In the years since, his list of nicknames had grown considerably and now included: Doof, Doofie, Doofalingus, Dingus, Dingleberry, Dorkomatic, Dorkus, and the Duke of Dork. Doof answered to them all, but he heard ‘Maury’ and ran.

Zaxx loved the shit out of that ridiculous pup.

Trudy had a dog of her own, a thirteen-year-old, seven-pound Bichon Frise named Queenie, for whom Doof had a deep, slavering lust. Luckily, they were both fixed, and Queenie enjoyed having an eighty-pound mutt to boss around, so they were besties. Trudy and Zaxx were good friends as well and stepped in for pet- and trailer- sitting when one or the other had need.

Trudy was a sixty-nine-year-old retired kindergarten teacher, so Zaxx had need more frequently than she did. However, she loved senior-citizen travel packages, so when she went away, she went for a week or more. Zaxx mainly needed coverage for an overnight here and there.

No, he answered Trudy. I’m in town and just had a thing last night. I’ll be home in a few hours. Thanks, T!

She sent back a sparkle heart—that was her favorite emoji. The knife and dead-eyes emojis were a close second, tied because she used them together. Trudy had two speeds: Zen and homicide. Zaxx also loved the shit out of that nutty broad.

Fully awake now, he set his phone aside—noticing that it was about twenty minutes to nine—and sat up on his parents’ broken-down sofa. He stretched as he looked around the sun-soaked room.

Like him, his parents lived in a trailer. Unlike him, they did not live in a trailer park—or, as his trailer park was called, a ‘manufactured home community.’ By the time he was about fifteen, they’d had their shit together enough to buy a little two-acre bit of land and also buy a 70s-era trailer.

The thing had been a huge piece of shit, and only two bedrooms, so Zaxx and Zelda had had to share a room until Zelda got old enough that it started to get weird, at which point Zaxx had been relegated to the sofa he was currently sitting on. He hadn’t minded. His parents had finally put down roots and begun acting almost like grownups. For that, he would have slept on a bed of nails if he’d had to.

Now the place was pretty nice, all things considered. He’d helped Pop (okay, more like the other way around) make the repairs, and then the improvements, inside and out so that it was livable, and he’d helped Mom put in a garden—of vegetables, not weed—that actually got some decent food in their bellies. And Mom sold the excess on the weekends at a farmer’s market in Rolla. Zaxx had built her a nice stand for inside the commercial tent she’d gotten cheap off Facebook Marketplace.

Mom was big into the new-age thing, astrology and Tarot and the gentler aspects of the occult, so she also did star charts and card readings from her vegetable stand on the weekends, and she had some regulars in town, too.

They’d struggled hard most of Zaxx’s childhood, but they were doing okay now. They both had real jobs that paid their basic expenses—Pop was an assistant manager at the Signal Bend Price Chopper, and Mom waitressed at Marie’s, the town diner—and Mom’s side hustles kept them in weed and ‘splurge’ dinners of takeout. His folks had their shit together better now than ever before.

All that was hard to see in this moment, however. In this moment, living room and kitchen were both messy and filthy. Piles of shoes, discarded jackets and shirts tossed wherever, empty bottles, ashtrays full of roaches (the weed kind, not the bugs, though they’d had plenty of battles with the bugs), rolling papers and other works scattered over the coffee table, dirty dishes in the sink and on the counters, the table still covered with the detritus of last night’s fried chicken.

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