The Hate Vow by Nicole French

Five

Iwoke up the next morning in the giant guest room in Brandon and Skylar’s house in Brookline, with the pitter-patter of little feet serving as my alarm clock. Except they weren’t really pitters or patters. They were quick, jerky taps up the hardwood stairs and down the hall, followed by loud, elephant-sized thumps. Brandon chasing Jenny, their daughter.

“Jen. Jenny. It’s time to go, hon.”

“No! I want to see Aunt Janey before she and Mama go to work!”

I pulled my sheets up to my chin and smiled. Jenny was basically a mini-me of Skylar—small, spunky, with bright red hair and a genetic ability to piss off her dad but command his devotion all the more for it. I loved my goddaughter to death, if only for her attitude.

She was really getting under his skin this morning, if his emerging South Boston accent was any indicator.

“Peanut, Jane’s asleep. She was up way too late last night with your ma. It’s time to go.”

“No!”

Come on, peanut. Up and at ’em. I smiled, hearing my own dad’s voice in the common nickname. It was from that, after all, that I’d acquired my penchant for them in the first place.

“Jenny, I’m not playin’. You need to get your ass downstairs in three…two…”

“Daddy.” Her voice dropped to a near-whisper, but was still loud and clear. “You said ass.”

I didn’t have to be in the hall to imagine Brandon’s face as his daughter corrected his language. The guy might have been a billionaire, but he had a mouth like a trucker from Dorchester, the neighborhood in the South End where he was born and raised. Brandon Sterling was as Boston as they came, but if you gave the guy a beer, or apparently, women in his life who pushed his buttons, he went from Ted Kennedy to Marky Mark faster than you could say “Red Sox.”

“I said arse, Jen,” he corrected her. “It’s different.”

“How is that diff’rent?” she asked in her tiny, four-and-a-half-year-old voice. “It sounds the same to me.”

I snorted. When Brandon was stressed, the middle r’s in his sentences basically disappeared, so “arse” really did almost sound like “ass” coming from him at the moment. Over the years, it sort of became a game for me and Skylar to see which of us could bring out that accent first. Skylar always won.

“Arse is British, pea,” he said. “So, it’s the fancy kind of ass.”

“So, can I tell Teacher Mandy that she’s an ass when she tells me to clean up the Pick-Up Stix?”

“Hell, no—I mean, heck, no, Jen. No!”

“Daddy!”

There was a bit of a scuffle, but I could tell by Jenny’s tinkling laughter that she wasn’t totally upset when Brandon picked her up, and from the sound of it, smothered his daughter in kisses.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he said. “Now come on, pea. I’ll be right here when you get back.”

I lay back into the pillows, listening as his footsteps and Jenny’s giggles receded. The sounds were oddly familiar, taking me back years. Back to when my dad and I would share similar conversations. When he’d be leaving on one of his many business trips, and I’d wrap myself around his ankle, letting him drag me across our long wood hallway as I clung to his leg, giggling helplessly while his laughter filled the air. I’d beg him to stay, and he’d promise me a treat—a sundae, a walk in the park, maybe even a movie. And he’d promise he’d be back. He’d always come back.

Until nine months ago, when he didn’t. He’d left for his last appointment at the VA, collapsed on his desk, and ended up dying there before the EMTs even arrived.

Peanut, you can’t be worried about that now. It’s the past, Jane Brain. Time to move on. Grow up.

Christ, this really was one hell of a hangover. I usually kept those moments firmly shoved to the other, nonconscious side of my brain, but just then, they rang like a gong. Fuck. Lunch yesterday led to dinner that night with Skylar, Brandon, and their kids, which turned to another two bottles of wine after the little ones went to bed. I was pretty sure all of us were probably nursing substantial hangovers this morning, but I’d freely admit that I had easily consumed at least a bottle by myself. Anything to take the edge off the game of good cop, bad cop the Crosby-Sterlings played for three hours trying to convince me not to get married.

My headache surged. Raggedy Ann and Andy probably worked off their hangovers running around the nearby reservoir—both of them were exercise junkies. I had no such morning discipline.

My phone, plugged in on the nightstand, buzzed loudly while L.L. Cool J proceeded to shout “Mama Said Knock You Out” until I slapped a hand over the speaker and picked it up. I didn’t even like that song, but since my mother hated all things rap and made a face like a screwed-up lemon when I told her about that one, it was only appropriate that I made it her ringtone. It was hilarious, really. Yu Na Lee Lefferts had no idea how appropriate a metaphor of boxing was for the way she’d been coaching me since I was little.

I rolled over. “Eomma, it’s eight in the morning. What the what?”

“What the what the what? What does this mean, Jane?”

My mother’s shrill voice screeched through the speaker, forcing me to hold the phone a solid four inches from my ear. Ten bucks said she had forgotten I was in Boston for the week already. She had been like this since Daddy died—scatterbrained and anxious. Without someone to fret over in her own home first thing in the morning, she had to transfer that nervous energy somewhere. And that somewhere was usually me.

“Where are you, Jane?” she demanded. “Four times I call you last night. Four times!”

Yep. Ten bucks some cosmic force was coming my way.

I set the phone on the bed and put her on speaker so I could cover my eyes with a pillow. “Eomma, I told you. Boston. Skylar. One week, remember?”

“Boston? You just saw Skylar two months ago. You need to come home.”

I examined a pink strand of hair while my mother prattled on about how I never told her anything, why did I do this to her, did I expect her to follow me around everywhere…Yeah, I stopped listening pretty quickly.

“Jane? Jane!”

“Eomma, what?” I asked irritably, switching to my side and rubbing my forehead. The room was blurry, and my head throbbed. I had absolutely no desire to bicker with my mother this morning.

“You are almost thirty, Jane. Roaming the world is no good. Bad enough your father never got to see you have babies. How are you going to have any now when your eggs are dried up like raisins, eh?”

Good lord. Was the woman a witch? How the hell did she even know that was on the menu when I hadn’t even mentioned the real reason I was here.

“Eomma, stop,” I croaked, glad she couldn’t see my face as I sat up and glared at the phone. “You act like I’m a decrepit old hag. I lost my job. I’m just taking some time to see friends and figure out what my next move is. Take a second to be free.”

“Free? What does this mean, free? What man is going to want a girl with no home, no job, no nothing, huh? Are you going to travel like a gypsy? Is your man going to catch you in the air like a butterfly?”

“You mean like you?”

A thick silence dropped. Shit. I knew better than to reference her past life as a flight attendant. Flying made her think of Korea, and all the people she had left there to be with my dad. Who was now gone, leaving her alone with a recalcitrant, pink-haired daughter.

Come on, pumpkin. Where’s your compassion? For yourself too.

“Eomma, I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I was wrong. Please forgive me.” To show her I meant it, I repeated the three phrases in my halting Korean. I knew enough to kowtow to the Queen Bee. I knew enough to make amends.

The silence continued, and I waited with her, knowing that she would push until the last possible moment before finally:

“It was my husband that died, Jane.”

I ground my teeth together. It always came back to this. Like she had some kind of monopoly over our grief because she was the wife, and I was only the daughter. Like I wasn’t allowed to feel sad. I wasn’t allowed to mourn.

“Well, he was my dad,” I said. “For some people, that might count for more. Blood and all that.”

Jane.

His voice was only a word, but his disapproving face appeared right in front of me. I smacked my forehead and closed my eyes.

Once again, there was a long silence. Fuck. I was an asshole. A real, bona fide asshole. They should give me a certificate.

“You need to come home,” she said finally. “Be a good daughter for once.”

I flopped back into the pillows. “Eomma, I’ll be home when I’m home.”

“No, Jane, you have to come now.”

“No.”

“Yes!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“Why?!” I exploded. “I’m gone for a few days, and I obviously drive you crazy! Watch your soaps. Get your nails done. Play some cards. You could just enjoy yourself, for Christ’s sake. Tell me, why the hell is it so damn urgent that I come home right this very second?”

“Because I have something to tell you.”

“Oh my God, then spit it out!” I shouted.

Silence. Nothing important to say, and she wouldn’t shut the hell up. Something with legitimate gravity came along? Suddenly she was Fort Knox.

Careful, peanut…

“Eomma,” I tried again. I leaned toward the phone, staring at it like it was a crystal ball that would reveal what in the fucklord’s name she was trying to say. “Just tell me. What’s so important?”

The babble returned. “I pray and I pray, and I don’t care what they said, I have to tell you, you need to know…no, you need to come back, Jane. Come home. I will explain.”

But I sat there, feeling crazy in the middle of these posh surroundings while the whole of me started to shake. This was crazy. She was crazy. There was something wrong with this woman, something that had broken in the last year, and now she was siccing her misery on me.

“Jane…”

Across the room, I stared at myself in the mirror. My hair was matted in the back, and I had dark circles under my eyes. Eyes that weren’t deep brown like my mother’s—or my father’s blue—but something closer to hazel. I had always chalked that up to being mixed. Hapa, like some friends from Hawaii called themselves. But as I stared at my face—the nose that was a little too long, the lips that were a little too full, cheekbones that were a little too sharp—I searched for remnants of Carol Lefferts in my face. A telltale stamp that he had left behind.

And I found nothing.

“I don’t have time to walk you through another breakdown, Eomma,” I said with a mouth full of sandpaper.

“Jane. Come home. We will talk—”

“I’ll see you in a week.”

* * *

Skylar and Brandonwere both gone by the time I padded downstairs. After spending most of the morning applying half-heartedly for jobs in Chicago (and perusing a few in Boston, and yeah, New York), I left the big house in Brookline and spent the rest of the afternoon poking around my old haunts in Boston, doing my best to ignore the decision I still had to make. I had coffee at Trident while I indulged in a novel (first one I’d read in years). Listened to the newest punk records at Newbury Comics, then took the Red Line to Porter Square and poked around some of the new boutiques that had appeared in the up-and-coming area. I visited Boston plenty, but I rarely had time to be alone here. I really did miss it.

Skylar and I met for drinks that evening, but I could tell she was in a hurry to get home to see her kids. I, however, still felt…restless. I wasn’t ready to go back to the Mansion of Marital Bliss and melt into pea soup out of jealousy. So, when she returned to Brookline, I resumed my wandering of the city under the moonlight and the streetlamp light that bounced off the cobblestones.

Okay, yeah. So I was jealous. Maybe I was annoyed that now, when I was twenty-nine, I was basically in the same place I was five years ago. I sacrificed the last five years of my life doing what I was supposed to do. I put away baddies in the great city of Chicago. I was the do-gooder that Dad taught me to be. Like a superhero, I used my superhero powers (which came by way of a Harvard degree) for good.

But what had that gotten me? Five years later, I was jobless. Homeless. Futureless. And…fatherless.

I considered the warm house in Brookline. Brandon and Skylar had thrown themselves into building the kind of safe haven for their family that neither of them had growing up. They would let me stay there as long as I liked. But it wasn’t my safe haven. It wasn’t my family.

I kicked a stray rock as I meandered through Government Center. I had thought, for the longest time, that family wasn’t in the cards for me. I was Jane. A weirdo. If some people marched to the beat of their own drum, I had my own damn orchestra. Family. Marriage. Commitment. Me and these things…we didn’t get along.

Except once. Once I had considered it. Once I had thought that maybe, just maybe, I had met someone who didn’t care that I had a tendency to speak before I thought. Eric had once made me feel like I was enough. Just me. Skin and angles. Big mouth, small tits. Spikes and high heels. Jane. Enough.

Until I wasn’t.

A flash of red. Fake silk. White sheets. Eric’s guilty face. My broken heart.

I turned to a shop window in Quincy Market and examined my reflection. I was casually dressed in jeans and my favorite black ankle boots, but my hair looked wild, a mane of color floating over the black and white polka-dotted top that spilled off one shoulder in a way that was very day-to-night. I pulled out my lipstick, drew on a fresh coat of red that matched my glasses frames, then blew myself a kiss in the window.

I had other ways of feeling like I was enough. I didn’t need a man, or any other person for that matter, to make me feel valid. And if I had a restless itch, which seemed to be coming on tonight, I had ways of scratching it myself before going back to doing my favorite thing in life: whatever the hell I wanted.