Homewrecker

19 ~ 𝓫𝓸𝔂

He was still wearing the camouflage jacket from earlier, although now it was partially unzipped, and he was holding the broken remains of the lawn chair he used to sit outside in every night after working nine hours at a deli meat factory. The fabric was torn, and the metal legs had been dinged. He was also very purposefully not looking at what I had vomited onto the grass.

"I'd offer you a towel, or maybe some Pepto, but I don't know where any of those things are right now," he said finally, letting out a small laugh as he looked behind himself at the shambles of his own trailer home. The yellowish white walls looked to be sturdier than ours, still somewhat upright, but I could still see glimpses of his bedroom from where I stood, the wet and unmade bedding piled on the mattress without sheets. His awning was completely gone too, the door to inside dangling by a hinge, and he had cardboard boxes on the grass around him. Then he looked back at me, something uncertain coming over his expression. "I'm really sorry about your mom. I . . . I texted you that, when you told me. But I never—I never heard back from you."

He sounded hesitant as he spoke to me, which was something he normally was not, and that might have meant something more to me if my mom hadn't been murdered, strangled. But now I just shrugged. "I was mad at you."

"Oh," he mouthed, just the slightest hint of a whisper in his breath as he kept his gaze on me, something filling his stare that made my stomach flip but not like I was going to vomit on the ground in front of him again. He looked nervous. Like me being mad at him was something that could do that to him. "Why were you mad at me?"

"I thought my mom died because you stopped me from helping her," I admitted, stepping away from the pile of regurgitated macaroni and cheese and over the cinderblock front steps. I brushed the wet clumps of leaves from the concrete and tentatively sat on the middle step, vaguely aware that I was still wearing Taylor-Elise's most likely expensive dress. "But I guess I was wrong about that." I looked up at him, at the insecurity in his posture I wasn't used to seeing, the uneasiness in his expression as he stared back. "Sorry."

He shoved his hands into his pockets. "It wasn't like I wanted to leave your mom like that," he said, taking a step closer to him, gravel crunching under his shoes and the sharp scent of his soap broke through the wet earth I breathed in. "I got scared, man. I thought we needed to leave, like, right then."

"I know. And you were probably right," I said back to him. "If I went inside, we'd probably be dead. I mean, she was."

I had glanced away from him, letting my gaze drift away from where he stood on the gravel path that separated our deconstructed mobile homes and toward one of our neighbors as he brought a laundry basket of seemingly random objects—a cross-stitched pillow, a cake plate, slippers—to the bed of a nearby truck. I shook my head, knowing those weren't just random pieces but probably all he had left to carry with him wherever he had to go, knowing my mother was strangled, knowing somewhere the Solidays were looking for me, even though it wasn't like they actually wanted me. Everything felt tangled and broken and out of place, even just from where it was a few hours ago.

"What do you mean she was?" Kingston asked, taking his hands out of his pockets and a confused crease forming above his nose in his forehead. "What are you talking about?"

"There were detectives at her funeral. They said it looked like she . . . like someone strangled her before the tornado even touched down."

"Wait—" he said, sounding even more confused and alarmed than he had before. "That she was what?"

Then something jolted in my chest and became alive in my veins as I looked up at him, realizing that when she was murdered, I probably had been at school, but he would've been across the path from her in his own trailer. He might have seen something, maybe heard something, or someone, but the tornado and everything after made it look small and normal. "Did you see anything that day, before the tornado?"