Page 4 of Meet Me in the Stars

“Our grandparents. Dad’s parents. He won’t let them in. He told Clarence not to let them in,” Teddy said.

“Do you want to talk to them?” I asked, ignoring the sour taste that coated my tongue whenever I thought about them. After all, they pretty much claimed I wasn’t related to them.

“No,” Teddy shook his head hard and fast. “I was telling you because I didn’t want you to worry. If you do see them and they say something stupid, just punch one of them. They’re not worth it. If they come around they only make everything worse.”

“I won’t let them bother you,” I said and meant it.

“I won’t let them bother you,” he laughed.

“Oh, that’s right. You’re their favorite,” I teased him.

“I must’ve been really bad in a past life to get that curse,” he managed a chuckle through his tears.

I stopped and hugged him again. Teddy and I didn’t grow up together all the time, but the flight and family links vibrated between us. I knew him in his egg briefly when Dad and Lotus showed up to save us all from a psycho when I was just a kid.

“Hey, did I ever tell you about the time your parents flew from Hemlock Academy and crashed through the roof of my grandparents’ house to save us from a psycho?” I asked Teddy but the rest of our small group stopped too.

“I don’t think you’ve ever told me how you remember that one,” Blithe chuckled, wiping his cheek with his shoulder.

“I knew he was there,” I started the story as we walked some more. “No one really believed me. They thought it was all bad dreams until he got there. I had Joy under the bed a couple of times because if I could do nothing else, I wasn’t letting him take the baby. I wasn’t in the house when Dad crashed through it but I remember the sound of everything splintering when he crashed through the roof. I was with Lotus because my carrier had a red-out because he needed blood. She was so bad ass.”

“She was,” Daliah nodded. “Handled her parents like a pro too when we were little.”

“Thankfully, we have parents that don’t need handled,” Sequin chimed in.

The fact that Lotus’s secret illness might’ve been the reason Dad wasn’t around much when I was little had already crossed my mind. That was something else to process later when the grief didn’t stick to our flesh and sink into our pores.

“Come with me to get him off the balcony?” I asked Teddy when we arrived at the house.

The others filed inside intent on getting something to eat. I wasn’t hungry any more than Teddy was. Sequin could say all he wanted that Dad didn’t need to be handled, but we all needed to be handled or wrangled at one time or another. We had to get him fed and put him in the shower before everyone else arrived. Sure, they wouldn’t care if he smelled like an ashtray, but he’d care later. I figured if I got Dad into the kitchen to eat, we’d eat too.

“I’ll wait in the bedroom, okay?” Teddy asked. “You don’t need both of us a mess on you. He’s so--- broken.”

I hugged Teddy one more time before we walked inside. It was as if we had to keep hugging each other or one of us was going to lose a broken piece of ourselves before we had the chance to glue everything back together. The others headed into the kitchen, and we started up the wide spiral staircase. There was an elevator in the kitchen that opened in the old maid’s quarters upstairs, but unless something heavy was being moved it was barely used.

I ignored the fact I walked through Dad and Lotus’s bedroom as I made my way out to the balcony. I didn’t look too hard. I hadn’t been in the room since I was a little kid. It felt as if I was crossing through a foreign land where I didn’t want to learn the customs. Whatever life they lived behind closed doors was none of my business.

“Duke?” Dad’s voice reached my ears before I ever touched the closed sliding glass doors.

“I’m here,” I said, sliding the door open and stepping back out into the sunlight.

Teddy was right. Dad did look broken. His hair stuck up at odd angles and he smelled like he set himself on fire to spite the rain. Still, he sucked on a cigarette.

“You know no amount of those will kill you, right?” I teased and actually managed to get a chuckle out of him before he took another smokey drag.

“Can’t blame me for trying,” he shrugged.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked, picking up the pack and looking inside.

I barely glanced at the brown butts of the cigarettes before he snatched them away from me.

“Not for you,” he shook his head. “You got a baby that’s part coyote. You don’t need this habit. Hell, your part wolfy-tail doesn’t need this habit.”

“Well, you’re smoking around me,” I shrugged.

He stubbed the cigarette out in the flowerpot and leaned back to rub his eyes with the heels of his hands. The flowerpot overflowed with cigarette butts. If I spotted the cleaner Medwin and Clarence sent over, I’d ask them to take care of it. Maybe if someone cleaned up the balcony he’d not come back out here and try to impersonate a chimney.

“Thank you for not apologizing about her,” he said. “Every fucking body keeps saying they’re so bloody sorry like they broke in and hacked her to fucking death. I’m so fucking tired of hearing that. I get it. They don’t know what to say. There is nothing to say. She’s gone and ---” he choked up.

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