Page 3 of Big & Lily

“Condoms,” she says, crumpling the receipt into a ball and tossing it across the table. It falls on the floor and bounces off my shoe.

“Oh, Lily, honey. This is bad. This is really bad.”

Chapter Two

Twelve hours later, lights from a car in the driveway roll across my bedroom ceiling. That’s been my wakeup call, like a Bat Signal, ever since Annie got her driver’s license; me waiting, not able to sleep until she was tucked up in her own bed. I pad downstairs in my bare feet, knowing both my kids are in for the night, sure there is only one other person it could be. Lily is at my front door. She looks like shit and smells like a brewery. I glance over her shoulder and am relieved to see a ride service pull out of the driveway and head down the street.

“Where have you been?” I ask, pulling her into the house by her sleeve. “I’ve been calling and texting you.”

When Lily and I left the coffee shop, she was going to Sweet Dreams with the CVS receipt she’d picked up off the floor, smoothed out, and shoved back into her pocket. She was planning to have it out with Eric then and there. I hadn’t heard from her since, and I’d been getting worried.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she grumbles, throwing her bag on the floor and kicking off her shoes. One skitters across the foyer and lands with a thud against the metal baseboard, waking up our cat Tiger, who had been sleeping on his chair next to the fireplace. He decides he wants no part of my sister’s mood and saunters off up the stairs, flicking his tail as a reprimand for disturbing him. Lily throws herself into Tiger’s vacated chair. I follow her into the livingroom, but not before I pick up the shoes and the bag and place them on the bench by the door, where shoes and bags go.

Lily puts her hands up to her face. “Can you get me a drink?”

“I’ll put up some water for tea.”

“Big, come on,” she groans.

I take a beer out of the fridge and bring it to her, passing her a coaster from the stack on the coffee table. She makes a fist around the neck of the bottle and takes a long drink.

“Lil. Please tell me what’s going on.”

She puts the bottle on a side table—sans coaster, mind you—and wipes the condensation from the glass on the arm of the chair. I die a little inside.Focus, Bridget, that’s not important now.

“He’s a fucking asshole,” she yells.

I flinch. She’s going to rouse the whole house. I walk to her chair, slowly, like Tiger stalking a bird in the yard, and kneel next to her, putting my hands on her knees and speaking in a quiet tone I hope she’ll mimic.

“Lil, tell me what’s going on.”

She wraps her hands around the beer bottle again. She looks both so young and so very tired. “I went to the store. Mad as hell. I was so stupid. I thought buying these stupid condoms was his way of telling me he didn’t want to try anymore. Like he’s over it. Doesn’t care if we ever have a baby.” She wipes her nose on the back of her sleeve. “He doesn’t get to just decide that.”

My heart breaks for her in the same million ways it’s been breaking over and over again all these years.

“We’ve been trying for so long. I’m sick of it too. I’m sick of the disappointment every damn month. But this was a shitty way to tell me. Buy a box of condoms? That’s cruel. So, I was going to go straight to the shop and tell him. Tell him it was fucking cruel.”

“Yes, that’s what we decided you should do. You should go talk to Eric before you jumped to any conclusions. And?”

“And I got there and asked him to go out into the back parking lot with me, and he told me he was too busy. Told me that I was late, and why wasn’t I dressed for work, and they really needed me on the floor.”

“Did you show him the receipt?”

“No, I did not show him the fucking receipt. He was being an asshole. And who the hell did he think he was talking to? I’m not one of his employees. It’s my business, if you recall. My concept. I got us the funding.” She pauses for a flash, and I want to assume it’s because she knows exactly whose concept and funding it was. “So, I told him to fuck off, and I left. Let him deal with the fucking customers, and he can go fuck himself.”

“Bridge? You okay down there?” Tim is at the top of the stairs. I can see his bare feet and the bottom of his pajamas from where I’m kneeling by my sister’s chair.

“All good, hon. Lil is here. I’ll be up in a sec.”

Tim knows better than to wander into the fray, especially when the f-bombs are flying. This isn’t the first time Lily’s midnight visits have woken him up.

“Hey, Lil,” he says as if she’s stopped by for a morning coffee.

“Hey, Tim,” she grumbles. We wait to hear the bedroom door close.

“Then what happened? That was still, like, twelve hours ago. What have you been doing?”

“Then I went back to the condo to find the damn condoms and put a pin through every single one of them.”