May Our Broken Parts Heal, page 1
May Our Broken Parts Heal
L. Marie Seed
This is a work of fiction. Any characters, organizations, places, or events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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MAY OUR BROKEN PARTS HEAL
Copyright © 2022 by Linda Seed
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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The author is available for book signings, book club discussions, conferences, and other appearances.
L. Marie Seed may be contacted via e-mail at linda@lindaseed.com.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
About the Author
Chapter One
Jimmy
* * *
Jimmy never meant for Crystal to move in with him, yet here she is. It started as one night because, hell, they were fucking, and when you were fucking someone, sometimes they stayed over. But she stayed over a second night, and then a third after that, and then he had to have the awkward conversation about when she was leaving.
Crystal cried and told him her mother had thrown her out, which of course she did, because Crystal’s twenty-six and well past the age when you want your kid to fly out of the nest and find her own damned way in the world instead of expecting you to wash her sheets and bring home the crackers she likes from Safeway.
“When were you gonna tell me, Crys?” Jimmy asked, and Crystal cried some more.
He’d thought he would live with a woman eventually, maybe marry one, but that was some time in the future, and it was some hypothetical woman and not this real one.
Now the crying is long since over and she’s still here. She’s been bringing her stuff over little by little for weeks.
“I thought you had a bigger closet than this.” Crystal stands at the open closet door with a fistful of clothes hangers, each one holding a shirt or a dress or a pair of pants that Jimmy is somehow responsible for storing now.
“This is the closet I’ve always had.” The closet had been big enough for him, but now she’s talking about moving some of his crap into the coat closet in the hall to make room for hers.
Barry down at the shop says it’s a good deal for Jimmy: pussy, and she’ll cook for him, maybe scrub a toilet every now and then. If Barry knew Crystal he’d know she hasn’t scrubbed a toilet in her fucking life.
And now that you mention it, Barry’s never gotten laid except when he paid for it, so what the fuck does he know?
Jimmy’s got a choice: he can either keep his mouth shut like some wuss and let this thing happen to him, or he can find his balls and tell her no.
Throwing her out on the street isn’t an option, though, so one night after the closet discussion he tells her, “Look. I’m not sure we’re ready for this. For moving in together. I feel like we’re kind of rushing things.”
And she says, “Oh, I know.” Just like that, as though what he said is so fucking obvious he’s an idiot for having said it. “I’m not moving in, Jimmy. It’s just for now. Just until I find a job and a place.”
And what’s he supposed to say to that? Is he supposed to tell her to live in her goddamned Mazda while she sends out resumes? Does he really expect her to keep fucking him while she’s sleeping in her car? Does he expect her to go down on him and then head out to the curb to sleep all scrunched up in the back seat?
Not likely.
So he says okay. He says, “Just for a while. But you gotta figure something else out.”
“Yeah, of course,” she tells him.
Now here it is two months in, and he’s still got her shampoo in his shower, her shoes all jumbled up in the bottom of his closet.
This is how ninety percent of the shit in our lives happens, he thinks. It happens because somebody else decides something, and we’re too big of a pussy to say no.
Jimmy works longer days than he has to just so he won’t have to go home and see Crystal sitting on his sofa eating cold pizza and watching that crap TV she likes. Swear to God, if he has to see one more episode of Project Runway or Queer Eye or whatever the fuck else she’s into these days, he’s going to pitch the goddamned TV out the window, and who gives a shit how much he paid for it?
Barry says what he needs is a side piece so he can get away from Crystal a little, liven things up while he’s hiding out from her. But, hell. He’s cheated on her once already and the way she looked at him when she found out? Christ. Tears making those big eyes all shiny while she stared at him, looking so shocked and hurt you’d think he shot her.
Jimmy isn’t a monster, for God’s sake. He isn’t a total asshole. The part of him that loves Crystal can’t make her feel like that again. Can’t make himself feel like that again. He isn’t a good guy, but he’s kind of a good guy. Good enough that he isn’t about to stab her in the fucking heart again the way he did then.
Thinking about Barry, of all fucking people, as he lies in bed next to Crystal, neither of them touching each other.
“You started looking for a place yet?” he asks her, and it turns out that lying in bed next to someone isn’t the best time to say a thing like that.
She doesn’t answer at first.
“Crys? You hear what I said?”
She starts gnawing on her thumbnail the way she does when she’s upset. “I told you, everything’s too expensive.”
“Share with somebody, maybe.”
“Just not with you. Right?”
He reaches across the space between them, thinking to touch her, but she moves away, like there’s some invisible wall between them that moves when she does but that he can’t fucking break through, even if he had a goddamned sledgehammer.
* * *
OMAR
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Omar knew he and Iris were going to be together from the time he first heard their names said in tandem—Iris and Omar, the syllables rising and falling like the gentle swell of sand dunes on some particularly picturesque beach.
She was twenty back then and he was twenty-one, and God, how they’ve aged since then, the extra ten pounds around his middle, the tiny lines just beginning to form around the corners of her mouth.
Life has happened to them. College, then med school for him, a job for her so she could help him pay tuition. A wedding at the vet’s hall with a discount on the space rental because his dad served.
Parenthood once—Serena, smart and beautiful and girly with her pink dresses and her glitter nail polish—and then not again, but not for lack of trying.
When Iris came to him one night and said, “Well, it turns out I’m pregnant,” her delivery was so deadpan, so absent of anything resembling emotion, that he thought maybe he’d misheard. Or maybe she’d changed her mind about what she wanted. But then that smile—God, he loves that smile—and he whooped and picked her up in his arms and swung her around until her flip-flops dangled from her toes.
“What happened?” Serena ran in, a smile of expectation already in place. A smile that looks like her mother’s, wide and assuming only good things, only delights, in blatant disregard for the reality of the world.
“You’re gonna have a brother or sister, is what happened,” Omar said.
The last fully happy moment the three of them would have for a while.
“Jimmy’s going to hate this.” Iris smiled that smile. “All that middle-of-the-night crying.” The walls between Jimmy’s apartment and theirs are thin.
“He’ll adjust.” Omar picked up Serena and hugged both of his girls. All three of them, maybe, though he wouldn’t mind a boy.
Iris’s pregnancy was hard, hard enough that they wondered whether they were going to lose the baby. Hard enough that they wondered whether they might lose Iris.
She couldn’t eat without vomiting, couldn’t function because of how sick she was.
Hyperemesis gravidarum, or in layman’s terms, morning sickness jacked up to levels that would make a strong man cry, if it were men who had to go through such a thing. Which, of course, it isn’t.
Iris lost weight instead of gaining it, and Omar had to take her to the hospital twice for IV fluids. His sweet girl, his beautiful Iris, was gone, replaced by someone so sick and wasted and resentful of him—probably for doing this to her in the first place—that it seemed like he had a stranger in his bed.
The worst part was Serena, the way she tried to be brave but had grown-up worry in her eyes.
“What’s wrong with Mama?”
Omar explained about the hormones, the unpredictable way pregnancy affected some women. “She’s gonna be fine, baby. She’s just got to get through it.” But nine months feels like forever when you’re six years old. Nine months feels like something that’s never going to end.
It felt that way to Omar, too, and probably to Iris.
Serena would get into bed with Iris and tuck her body against her mother’s, and Iris would smell her hair and stroke her little arms.
Sometimes, Iris would cry and Omar would shoo Serena out of the room. “Go on, baby. Everything’s good. I’ll take care of your mother.”
He’d thought things would get better once the baby was born, but now here she is, a little bundle squirming in his arms, and Iris—his Iris—still hasn’t come back to him. He knows what this is, he’s a doctor. But knowing the name of the thing, knowing the words postpartum depression, doesn’t make it any easier to see his Iris lying in bed all day with the curtains drawn and tears in her eyes.
“Hold your daughter,” he tells her, pushing Jasmine into her arms, thinking if she can just smell this baby, just inhale that heady aroma of newborn child, then maybe she’ll come back to him, or just a few steps in his direction.
Iris holds her daughter for a minute and then says, “Take her.”
Omar sits on the side of the bed, one leg pulled up so his knee rests on the mattress. “Iris, baby, Jasmine needs her mother.”
“I said take her.”
So he does. He gathers his daughter into his arms and breathes her in, hoping that baby smell can heal some of the hurt he’s feeling. But that’s not Jasmine’s job, is it? To heal him? Her job is just to cry and eat and sleep and grow. Her job isn’t to save her father.
He takes Jasmine out into the living room and puts her down in the bassinet so he can make breakfast for Serena.
* * *
CAROL
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Carol isn’t sure how much longer she can clean houses for a living, what with her back and her hip. It had seemed like a good idea back when she’d started it—getting paid to do what she’d be doing at home all day anyway. Plus, with her high school education, how else was she going to start her own business, get to be her own boss?
The thing about being your own boss, though, is that nobody pays you when you’re out sick, and nobody gives you a big retirement check every month when you get old.
Sixty isn’t old—not really, she knows people who are still bicycling and playing tennis in their eighties—but it feels old, especially when her back seizes up and her hip aches.
Plus, she has to walk up all those stairs.
Half of the houses she cleans have stairs, and her own apartment is on the second floor—and that’s after you climb up to the front porch, which is a good ways up from street level. When she moved in, it hadn’t seemed like a big deal. The second floor’s cheaper than the first—the apartments are smaller and the kitchens don’t have dishwashers up here—and that seemed like a reasonable tradeoff. But now, when she has to climb up here after a long day of scrubbing other people’s toilets, well, she wishes she’d just put out the extra money when she had the chance.
She talked to the landlord, and he said she could have the first downstairs unit that came open, but that was a couple of years ago, and here she still is.
Jimmy doesn’t need the downstairs apartment—God knows he doesn’t—but the man just won’t see reason, even when she explains about the hip.
Can we just switch, is all I’m asking, Carol said to him. You’ll save on rent, and you don’t need the space.
Who says I don’t need the space? He looked at her with that smirk of his, that smart-ass glare that makes her want to slap him so hard it makes his ears ring.
Well, it’s just you and Crystal, isn’t it?
Yeah, and you’re just you.
Why don’t people have any compassion? That’s what she’d like to know. Doesn’t he have a mother? Doesn’t he care about an older woman who aches when she has to climb stairs?
She can’t ask Iris and Omar to switch because they really do need the space, with that sweet Serena and the new baby. Two bedrooms in their place, and Carol only has the one. So that leaves Jimmy, not that he cares. Not that he’d help her even if Jesus himself were asking.
Not that she can move to a different building, either. With the first and last month’s rent and the security deposit, and the cost of hiring movers? Well, she just can’t do it. Not to mention the fact that the building is rent-controlled, which means she’s been able to stay when the cost of everything else in the neighborhood has shot into the stratosphere.
It all comes down to Jimmy, and why won’t he help her? Why won’t he just do this one thing?
She’s coming down the stairs on her way to work one morning, early, because the Tomlinsons need their house cleaned in time for some club luncheon Mary Ann is hosting. She’s careful on the stairs, holding on to the railing with her purse clasped under her free arm.
Jimmy comes out of his apartment right then.
“How’s the hip, Carol?” he says, and he smirks. Like her pain is some kind of joke. She doesn’t answer him, just grits her teeth against the ache and walks past him, heading down the street toward the BART station.
* * *
LEONORA
* * *
Leonora isn’t sure when, exactly, things started going wrong between herself and Jenna. Teenagers, sure, things are bound to get difficult. But they’d been best friends, almost, right up until Jenna had hit thirteen, fourteen years old. They’d been through hell and back and they could still talk to each other about anything, it seemed.
The first time Jenna told Leonora she hated her, Leonora had shrugged it off. Typical teen angst. Kids had to blow off steam.
But things haven’t gotten better, and now Leonora’s pretty sure Jenna means it. Pretty sure the hate isn’t just a word—it’s a real thing, prowling around Jenna like a tiger poised to strike.
Steven’s poisoning the well, that much is certain. When Jenna goes to visit him, she comes back angrier, if that’s possible. More distant. More defiant.
As though he hasn’t done enough already with the divorce, with the affairs before that. As though he hasn’t already shredded Leonora’s life like a water bill from five years ago.
Well, Leonora has a couple of choices, she guesses. She can lie low, try not to antagonize her daughter, and wait out the two remaining years until Jenna leaves for college. Or she can try to repair things.
The problem is, how can you repair something when you don’t even know how it got broken?
“Honey,” Leonora says in the mornings before school. “Have a good day.” Or, “Have fun.” Or, especially, “I love you.” In response, she gets first a grunt, then a slam of the front door that’s so sharp, so forceful, that framed pictures rattle on the walls.
“Could you try not to slam the door in the mornings?” her neighbor, Carol, asked her maybe a week ago.
“It’s Jenna. I’ll talk to her.” But talking to Jenna is getting to be more and more of a perilous feat these days, isn’t it? Asking her not to slam the door would pretty much guarantee she’ll tear the damned thing off its hinges next time.
So instead of talking about the door, Leonora goes at it another way, like maybe Jenna won’t notice if she sneaks up on the topic from behind.
“Why don’t we go shopping?” she says one evening. Leonora’s in the kitchen, washing dishes by hand because the top floor apartments don’t have dishwashers, and Jenna’s sitting in front of the TV, slumped down on the sofa, watching one of those weight-loss competition shows, Leonora doesn’t know which one. “Just the two of us. We can go to the mall, get you some new outfits, maybe. We can get manicures.”
