Archive of Our Own

“Come on, come on,” she muttered into the phone. “Pick up....”

“J?” Dad’s voice came over the phone and she would cry if she did that sort of thing. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the county lockup! Pop took me to dinner and he got pulled over for not using his turn signal and did you know he has an outstanding warrant?”

“Oh my fucking god,” Dad said tiredly. “I did not know, but please imagine my surprised Pikachu face.”

“What does that mean? Dad, be serious!”

“Sorry! Oh sorry, sweetheart, really I am,” Dad’s voice shifted, softer and gentle. It made it even harder not to cry. “We’ll come get you, okay?”

“I can take the truck,” she denied. “I just wanted help to bail him out. It’s only five hundred and I have most of it in tip money-”

“Yeah, no that’s not happening,” Dad went still soft, and also with a hint of steel.

“But-”

“That’s your money that you worked hard for, J. You are not using it to bail him out. Trust me, he’ll probably talk his way out of it any- Hey!”

“Are you okay?” and that wasn’t Dad. “Where did he take you?”

“Nowhere! We were getting dinner and he just got distracted and didn’t signal! Fizzy, please, I just need two hundred to get him out.”

“No, J, I’ll take care of it.” And in the background, she could hear Dad yelling ‘like hell you will, give me back the phone!’

“He’s been doing really well, Dad!” she yelled. “Be nice to him!”

And Dad must’ve gotten the phone back. “I am nice to him! He still lives here!”

“In the basement!” She yelled back.

“Because he asked to!”

They both sat with that for a second and then very quietly, she could hear Fizzy say ‘Shit.’

“He what?”

Dad sighed, “He was going to say something himself, but then he never did and we covered for him like always, but yes. It was his choice. Guess we all needed some thinking time.”

“You’re lying,” she held her phone tighter. “He loves you guys.”

“You can love people and need time apart,” Dad sighed again, except more heavily this time and for longer. Like a balloon deflating. “You can love someone so much and still need that. I- yes fine- take the phone back.”

“J, just stay there, we’ll come get you. I’ll drive the truck home and we can talk, okay?”

“Yeah,” she looked down at her shoes. Her socks were mismatched. Had they been like that all day? One covered in sloths, the other a neon zig zag. “But what about Pop?”

Fizzy hesitated, a breath caught in the air, then expelled carefully, “We’ll see.”

She hung up and trudged back into the station and sat in the chairs. Fizzy always told her to mind her manners around cops because he always told her to do that around people he was deeply suspicious of (nearly everyone) and anyone he saw as ‘the enemy’ (same).

J: life sucks

Zinnia: tell me about it that guy i told you about yesterday is back and i think he’s stealing everything thats not nailed down

J: dont stop him

Zinnia: do I look dumb? No one pays me enough to stop anyone. I see no evil.

J: pop got arrested

Zinnia: cool, what for?

J: outstanding warrant

Zinnia: fuck why are your parents badass and mine are annoying

J: Jim is more badass than all three of mine put together

Zinnia: dad isn’t though

J: your dad is the best i will hear no slander

Zinnia: you don’t have to keep that up in texts it’s not like I’d tell him and he’d take your baked goods privileges away

J: not worth the risk

Zinnia: suck up. tell me all about it tonight?

J: yes

She switched over to a game, slotting together pumpkins into lines until they gruesomely exploded.

“Hey, sweetheart” Dad’s shoes, bright red suede today, appeared in her peripheral. “Izzy is talking to the bail officer.”

“Is he going to get arrested too?” Her head whipped up, seeing if she could spot him.

“Probably not? No promises.” Dad frowned, and followed her gaze, but the office was too far away to see. He sat down beside her. “You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

The silence lasted at least thirty seconds, before she cracked, “I just don’t get why you let me think you guys kicked him out of your room.”

“That was Izzy’s idea,” Dad shook his head. “You know how I feel about these things.”

“Honesty is best,” she sing-songed.

“Well it is,” he snorted. “Or you wouldn’t be mad at us in a prison.”

“That makes it sound like I’m the one in a jail cell.”

“You’re the only one in the family that hasn’t had a turn yet,” Dad said like that was a totally normal and reasonable thing to say yet.

“Still say yours shouldn’t count,” Fizzy walked across the room, hands shoved his pockets and shoulders hunched. “Sealed records and all.”

“I was the one who was in the cell, I think I get to decide,” Dad said tartly even as he found a grip on the back of Fizzy’s neck. Fizzy bent to him, flower to the sun.

“Do I get to find out why Dad was arrested?” J asked.

“No,” Fizzy and Dad said at the same time, though Dad sounded amused and Fizzy was staring at the ground.

“Did you bail out Pop?”

Fizzy didn’t look up.

J sprang to her feet, “God! I hate all of you sometimes!”

She beelined for the door and burst out into the fresh air. There was a lingering smell of microwaved lunch and sorrow leaching out as the door swung closed. She still had the truck keys. She’d just drive herself home, even if she hated driving the truck because it only liked Pop. Reaching into her enormous coat pockets (army surplus purchased by Fizzy, then enhanced with sharpie’d flowers by Dad) , she found her phone and her wallet.

No keys.

“DAD!”

“Sorry, kiddo,” he came up behind her, twirling Pop’s heavy key ring around his prosthetic finger. The keychain of a woman’s torso that had squishy boobs in a tiny bikini top danced around and around hypnotically. Then he tossed them to Fizzy, who caught them without looking.

“You’ll make it home by the turn of the century if you drive that thing,” Fizzy gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder. “I’ve got it.”

“The truck hates me.” She had to agree.

“I’m sensing a hate theme,” Dad put his arm around her shoulders. “How about we go home and work on less bitterness, okay?”

The drive was quiet. J looked out the window and Dad mouthed along to pop songs that weren’t new when she was born. Her phone buzzed, but it was just Zinnia sending a covert photo of her crush of the week pursuing the candy aisle and gleeful observations about how much he liked Starbursts like that was a revelation.

When they got home, she went straight to her room and closed the door. The rule was that no one came in if her door was closed. They could knock and it was up to her if they were allowed in. Fizzy had insisted on a caveat that if there was a real and present danger that he would come in purely to make sure she was safe. Considering that Fizzy was the only one who liked his own privacy as much as J did, that worked for her.

Except that apparently Pop wanted privacy now too.

J’s bed was a big four poster with gauzy blue curtains with flowers. She had wanted them desperately at fourteen and now at eighteen looking at them just made her a little sad. Things had been easier then. Dad was still working for Uncle Stede and hadn't been home as much which had sucked, but Pop and Fizzy had their own routines without him. Pop had driven her everywhere, listened to all her secrets and always bought her treats when she had a rough day. Fizzy had made her lunch and got her lessons in her million passing interests. When she’d settled on kickboxing, he’d taken over as her coach.

All those things still happened now that Dad was home more, working a new job. It had even made things better in some ways. But Pop came upstairs less and less. Fizzy’s mouth got tighter and tighter when he thought J wasn’t looking. Dad sighed like a rusty tea kettle all the time.

J: do you ever wish the world would slow down

Zinnia: are you kidding? I just want it to speed up so we can blow this town and never look back

J: i love this town

Zinnia: youre a mutant. Come over. I’m home now and there are muffins.

She went out the window. It was only a five foot drop and she had done it so many times by now that the bush under it didn’t grow leaves properly anymore. Dad opened the window and leaned out of it.

“Going next door?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, be home by midnight or give us a call, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“And J?”

She turned slowly, awaiting a scolding or a lecture. But Dad just gave her a tender look and said,

“I love you.”

“Yeah,” she dropped her gaze to the tips of her sneakers. Her socks still didn’t match. The word ‘hate’ was curdled in her belly, but she wasn’t ready to take it back.

Zinnia has lived next door for J’s entire life. Six months and six inches apart, Jim had said once and they lived by that rule. The houses were exactly the same layout, but J’s basement had always belonged to Pop, full of his projects and things while Zinnia’s parents had cleaned theirs out and given it to her when she was sixteen.

It was a pig sty, had barely any light coming in, still had the laundry machines in it that got used by whomever whenever, so it smelled like dryer sheets and Zinnia’s overzealous use of incense. J thought it was pretty much the best place in the world.

“So what’s the damage?” Zinnia’s bed was a mattress on the floor by choice and she was on it now, in a pile of blankets, wild licks of black hair reaching into every corner of the bed.

“I don’t know,” J crawled into the bed next to her, folded her arms together, and sighed gustily. “Tell me about the Starbursts again.”

“Okay, so this is just a theory, but I think he was maybe just trying to see what I liked because he kept picking up bags of things then looking at me and at first I totally thought it was random, right?”

J listened and made the right noises. Muffins appeared at some point and J opened her mouth. Zinnia rolled her eyes, but stuffed bites into her as the conversation drifted to trying to choose a movie to watch.

It was late by the time they picked something and J picked up her phone to text Dad that she was sleeping over, but there was a message on her screen from an hour ago.

Pop: sorry kid. Home now.

“I have to go,” J sat up, spilling crumbs everywhere. She’d feel bad about it, but Zinnia lived in a thin coating of crumbs anyway. That she looked flawless at school was one of life’s annoying miracles. “Pop came home.”

“I thought you said they wouldn’t bail him out?”

“Gotta go figure that out.”

“Okay. Driving in tomorrow?”

“Be ready on time.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

It was a little harder climbing out of the window, but J made it. She ran across the yard and checked the driveway. All the cars were there and none of them had moved, so she wasn’t sure how Pop had gotten home, but who cared? The sliding glass door led into the kitchen and Fizzy was sitting at the kitchen table. In the dark.

Shit.

“Everything okay?” She asked, choking. Had she done something wrong and forgotten? The oven clock said 10:45, so she hadn’t fucked up curfew.

“Yeah,” Fizzy rubbed at his eyes. “It’s fine. He wants to say sorry to you.”

“He doesn’t have to,” she crossed her arms over her chest, baggy sweater flexing around her.

“So tell him that,” Fizzy pointed a thumb at the basement door.

“Should I?” She hesitated.

There was a pained noise that came out of Fizzy's throat. It was the one he usually made when she took a hard hit in the ring. Like whatever hurt her, hurt him too.

Dad loved hugs. Pop had pretty much invented them. They both tended to wrap their arms around Fizzy whenever he stood still for too long like he needed a regular dosage. J figured it was family tradition. When she wrapped her arms around Fizzy these days, they went all the way. She was bigger than him. Had been for some time, but she kept forgetting.

“Stop,” he said with the same unconvincing tone he used on Dad and Pop all the time.

“I’m going to come home from college when you least expect it to do this,” she warned him, hugging him tighter.

One of his hands came up to rest on her forearm, clenching a little too hard. “I fucking hope so.”

Her chest ached.

When she slid away, the basement door loomed and she crossed the floor to throw it open. Just like at Zinnia’s house, there were laundry machines at the bottom of the stairs. Unlike her house, their basement was bright and, these days, pretty clean. The bed was really a fold out couch, but it was made up nice and the workbench was organized, a few projects left out. Most importantly, Pop was sitting in his green and yellow loveseat, the one he’d rescued from a curb years and years ago.

“Oscar the Grouch has better furniture than this,” Dad had sniffed.

“I skinned Oscar to make it,” Pop winked at a much younger J.

“Oscar the Couch,” Dad snorted. “Only in this house.”

In her memory they kissed after that. She was pretty sure they really had. They’d kissed a lot back then.

Pop sat there, with her spot empty and waiting for her. They’d sat down here a thousand nights, ‘sneaking’ movies and snacks. Tonight, though, he didn’t have a can of soda waiting for her or some oddity he’d picked up to show her. Instead he was sitting with his elbows planted on his knees, face buried in his hands.

J almost didn’t make it down the stairs. It was just Pop, but it felt like more too. A window had opened and she’d gone through it without checking the distance to the ground first.

“Pop?”

His head flew up and his eyes were red.

“J-bird!” he bellowed, mustache twitching into a smile. “C’mere.”

There was no safer place than in a Pop hug and she threw herself into it.

“How did you get out? I tried to pay the bail but-“

“Glad you didn’t,” he hugged her a little tighter. “It was a stupid mistake, their fucking fault. Wasn’t deleted from the system. Iz called Flint and he scared the law into justice like usual. All clear, just have to pay a ticket for a moving violation or some shit.”

She pulled away and sat down next to him.

“So it was just a mistake? Full truth.”

“Full truth,” he put his hand to his heart. “Sorry we didn’t get dinner. You eat next door?”

“Yeah. Zinnia had muffins and stuff.”

They both went quiet and she fidgeted with the friendship bracelet she’d made so long ago the color had all faded out.

“You’ve got questions,” Pop spoke into the heavy silence.

“I thought they kicked you down here. You let me think that! Why?”

“Less embarrassing,” he flopped back on the couch, his hair flopping a second later, time delayed. “I didn’t want you to think I was more of a failure than you already do,”

“You’re not a failure!” She protested. “I never said that,”

“Lucius has a fancy job and makes all that art, Iz has the gym and he can help you with all sorts of shit that I don’t get. Then there’s me. I can’t even take you out to dinner without getting arrested. You don’t have to say a word. World does it for you.”

“Fuck the world!” She glared at him. “I don’t care. You’re my pop. And anyway what does moving down here do?”

“First step.”

“To what?” She asked, dread flooding back in, replacing rage.

“Figure once you’re at school I’ll get a place. Luc and Izzy don’t need me to do anything for you after that. Seems like I should get out of their hair. Always worked best when it was just the two of them. Less screaming.”

That was true as far as it went. Dad and Fizzy didn’t fight the same way that Pop did. But they could start a cold war that would freeze over the house if they were in a mood with each other.

“But they laugh a lot less. I- did you break up?! Did you guys break up and not tell me? Are you- is it like divorce?” The word stuck in her throat.

“We are absolutely not getting a fucking divorce,” Fizzy growled from the steps. “I was going to come down and remind you that J does still have to go to school in the morning, but now I realize I should’ve brought an airhorn and Lucius.”

“Why an airhorn?” J frowned.

“So I could blot the word ‘divorce’ out of the fucking room. Maybe scare some sense into this dumbass while I’m at it.”

“I didn’t say it,” Pop mumbled.

“No, you’re just saying shit and doing shit that convinces our daughter of it. Figure maybe that conversation involves Lucius and me, not her. J, go to bed.”

“No! I want to know what’s going on!”

“We’re not going to figure it out with you standing there. Go to sleep, no one is leaving this house tonight.”

“But-“

“Now.” It was worse than yelling, that tight demand. Like Fizzy was on the edge of a meltdown. She had never been on the receiving end of a Fizzy meltdown, but she had watched them and they were nothing to tempt fate over.

J went to her bedroom. She listened carefully and heard a phone ping, then Dad’s footsteps on the stairs. She threw herself on the bed, straining to hear, but not even faint voices made their way up through the kitchen to her.

She fell asleep trying to catch a single word.

School started at an unholy hour. J was alone in the kitchen and while she was tempted to start checking doors, getting a few eyefuls in her early teen years had been a good reminder of why smart children did not go poking their noses into adults’ bedrooms. The Lingerie Incident had been particularly harrowing and just the thought of baby blue lace still made her want to die from embarrassment.

Everyone’s cars were there and someone had moved her little sedan to the front for her at some point in the night. Zinnia was already sitting in the passenger seat, buckled in and napping, head leaning against the window.

J got in and shut the door.

“We could cut,” Zinnia said without opening her eyes.

“No, we couldn’t.”

“It’s the last two weeks of senior year, literally no one gives a shit.”

“No,” J pulled out the driveway.

“But-”

“I’m not cutting. You can get out whenever you want.”

“The car is literally moving. Would you even slow down?”

“No.”

“You’re in a shit mood. Come on, it'll be fun.”

“No.”

“You suck.”

“No.”

“Yeah, fuck fine. I love you, let’s run away together.”

“No.”

Zinnia wiggled her phone out of her pocket and put metal on the radio. The bands screamed for them as J wound through still-sleeping streets.

It wasn’t that J was an ace student. She’d gotten decent grades, kept her head down for most of high school. She was in a club (ostensibly for art, but mostly they sat around and ate cheetos and used their fingerprints to smear up pieces of paper while their assigned teacher texted her ex-husband for an hour on the third Wednesday of every month), did kickboxing for a sport and had enough success to secure the state college of her mildest daydreams.

Cherishing time with friends wasn’t a big deal either. There was still summer for that and aside from Zinnia, she’d never felt really close with anyone else anyway (Fizzy always said she was like him that way. Then Dad took her aside and told her about HIS high school experience and honestly, J was just glad she had anyone at all).

Going through the motions of these last few days would just keep everything a little more glued together. A pattern that she understood. Two more weeks then it was summer. Waiting tables during the day, then spending her nights wandering up and down the streets with Zinnia and whoever they met up with at the park. Driving around in circles with the windows down. A lawless stretch of time where she was old enough to be living on her own soon, but not yet old enough to escape worried text messages about her whereabouts.

No, she wouldn’t be skipping out on these last few days. The routine caught and held her.

She had a shift at the diner after school, slinging pie and burnt coffee to other kids, who were already in killing time mode.

Usually when she got home from a shift, only Pop would be awake. Dad and Fizzy tended to head to bed early these days.

Tonight, she braced herself for some kind of confrontation. All three of them maybe, laying in wait.

Instead the house was quiet and dark. There was a note on the fridge from Fizzy, telling her to warm up a plate if she wanted to eat. A hesitation mark above the little smiley face tacked on by Dad.

She wasn’t hungry.

The next two days went like that. All of them missed each other for the most part and J couldn’t bring herself to ask a follow up question. As she washed up on the shores of the weekend, she realized she hadn’t seen Pop at all.

The basement door was closed. The truck was gone. She stood in the kitchen, the floor cool on her bare feet and stared at the door.

“Trying to set things on fire with your mind again?” Dad wandered in. He had on sweatpants and his eyes were red-rimmed.

“I was six!”

“Sixteen maybe,” Dad snorted and turned on the coffee machine.

“Did Pop leave?” She asked into the ensuing silence. “I haven’t seen him in a few days.”

“No, he’d tell you if he was going somewhere for more than a day, you know that,” Dad took down a mug. “He’s just out with Anne today.”

“Oh,” J had...feelings about Anne. They were all stored in a box in her mind labeled ‘Do Not Open’. Early on they had all tried to make ‘Aunt Anne’ happen, but there was something about the label that simply would not stick. That was in the box too. “Are they working?”

“Jack says no,” Dad sighed. “He’s trying to keep his nose clean. I shouldn’t- the bail thing-”

“You didn't believe him about wanting to do better.”

“I believe he wants to do it right. You know that...well maybe you don’t. But Iz and I never cared that he was still getting up to stuff,” Dad said it so casually that J didn’t process it right away.

“Wait. What? Of course you care! It’s illegal!”

“I mean, I wasn’t excited about it. I didn’t like the attention it brought to us, but considering everything me and Izzy got up to, it's hard to hold a moral high ground like that. Hell, Izzy probably would still be doing it if he hadn’t opened the gym and started making more money doing legit things.”

“But-”

“We worried about him being bad at it,” Dad turned to face her. “He used to never get caught, but he started making mistakes. We didn’t want him to go to jail and miss your life. It would’ve crushed him. Still would.”

J wanted to hit something. It would be so much easier if there was just something she could hit.

“I don’t care!” The feeling just welled out of her, too loud for the first thing in the morning. “I just... I don’t want him to leave.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

Dad hugs were not as all encompassing as a Pop hug. They did, admittedly, tend to smell better and Dad always held her like he thought she might need to get away. It was how he hugged Fizzy too. When he and Pop hugged it was kind of like a wrestling match of affection.

“I don’t want him to go.”

“He’s not going anywhere,” Dad rested his chin on top of her head. She was bigger than Fizzy and as tall as Pop, but never taller than Dad. She’d lost hope of that and maybe it was kind of nice to still be smaller than one of them. “Did we ever tell you about the day we got you?”

“Only a million times,” she huffed, annoyed by the change in subject. “Fizzy almost died trying to safety proof an electrical outlet and Pop-”

“Not the day we adopted you, the day Pop kidnapped you.”

J pulled back from the hug to stare up at him. Dad smiled faintly at her.

“The day he what?” her voice pitched up improbably high.

“Let’s take our coffee to the patio.”

Dad didn’t say a word until they were both seated with a mug of coffee and looking out over the tiny garden that was already half-dead. Fizzy tried, but he wasn’t much of a gardener and no one else gave a shit. So every spring started off with hope and seeds and by the end of the summer there was a small handful of survivor tomatoes, one huge zucchini and a lot of dead plants.

“We didn’t even live together yet,” Dad stretched his legs out in front of him. “Iz and I had apartments in Stede’s ridiculous building, and I was still seeing Pete pretty seriously. Jack wasn’t even supposed to be there, he’d been banned from the building, but he’d sneak in to see Iz from time to time. I’d run into him there when I started dating Izzy...and I figured out why Izzy couldn’t stand to say goodbye for good.”

“Cause he loved him?” J asked hopefully.

“Part of it,” Dad agreed and because he was merciful, he left that there. “So one night, Iz and I were sacked out on the couch, getting to know each other a little better, and the door practically flew off the hinges. Jack is standing there and he’s got this bundle of blankets in his arms and I thought for sure he’d finally accidently cut his hand off doing chainsaw juggling or something and we were going to be driving him to the E.R.”

“Chainsaw juggling?” She took a sip of her coffee.

“It’s never entirely off the table with him,” Dad snorted. “But it was you. Two days old. So fresh into the world that you were still in a hospital blanket. It came out of nowhere. Neither of us knew Anne was pregnant.”

“Pop didn’t know either.” That part of the story she knew well. Anne had kept it to herself until the bitter end, then called Pop up and told him so he could decide what he wanted to do about it.

“So he says, yeah. I wonder if he suspected sometimes. He was good at self-delusion back then and he spent a lot of time with her. In any case, he’d gone straight to the hospital when she called. He was the first person to hold you. Anne said she wasn’t ready.”

That was a new detail. J ran her thumb over the chip on the bottom of her mug. She’d slammed it hard against the counter over some argument that she couldn’t remember anymore. Pop told her she should keep using that mug so she’d remember what it felt like when you had to use something broken. Because not everything you broke could be fixed.

“You guys always said Anne didn’t want me.”

“I’m sure we didn’t say it like that,” Dad frowned. “I think she wanted you to exist. She wanted the idea of you in the world. She still does. In her own way, she loves you more than she loves anyone else.”

“Oh yeah sure,” she copied Dad’s snort.

“She does, J. Doesn’t mean that she knows how to express it or even that you’re obligated to love her back. People love in a thousand different ways,” Dad crossed one long leg over the other. “It’s a complicated world out there. When you can, you have to give people some grace.”

“Yeah,” she looked away. “So. What? Pop took me out of the hospital?”

“The second day. When Anne started talking about adoption.You’d have to ask him what he was thinking at the moment, but my guess was sheer panic. He jammed up your security bracelet and hid you in his jacket. He was afraid to drive, so he walked with you two miles to the apartment. Good thing it wasn’t raining.”

“How didn’t he get caught?” She asked, the image of Pop trudging down busy roads, holding a newborn in his denim jacket filled her with a sticky feeling and her eyes itched.

“Once we got over the shock, we drove him back there and got you smuggled back in. They had just started to panic, but Anne covered for him, said that he’d been there with the baby the whole time even though they knew he hadn’t been. It was a rough night,” Dad sounded pretty fond, despite the chaos. “But what I remember most was before that, just when he busted in and told us this jumbled story.

“Izzy asked him why the fuck he’d steal a baby. And Jack just looked at him like he had three heads and said: ‘this isn’t some baby, Iz. This is my girl.”

J curled up into herself, chin on one knee. “And that was it?”

“Sweetheart, if I hadn’t wound up falling in love with you myself, I still would’ve done everything we did to make sure Jack could have custody of you after that. He loved you from the first second he saw you and I knew he would give you the best life he knew how.

“Just turned out that that life included me and Izzy too. Been one of the joys of my life, helping raise you,” he sipped at his coffee. “But it’s been Jack’s reason for living. I think....well. I think he’s having a bit of a crisis of identity at this point.”

“Wait. Are you saying it is because of me?” She asked, holding her knee tighter. “Because I’m going away for college?”

“Not your fault,” Dad said firmly. “We’re all really proud of you and you’re going to do great. Just some growing pains back home while we get used to living differently. Jack especially. But he’ll come around. Let us worry about that part.”

Birds chirped obnoxiously in the trees. J drank her coffee. She worried. Her head hurt. Her heart hurt. So she did the thing that always fixed both and went to the gym.

Fizzy’s gym had, after some lengthy arguments, the official name ‘The Orange Punch’. He co-owned it with Jim, who had been the one doing the most arguing though there had been some dedicated heckling over ‘Izzy’s Revenge’ from pretty much everyone when he’d floated it. He still grumbled that people wandered in looking for smoothies or worse another orange themed gym, but considering the seriousness of the interior, most of that was soon dispersed. Izzy and Jim both preferred what Dad called a ‘minimalist aesthetic’ and Pop called ‘fucking boring’. J loved it. It was gray and black and steel, quiet as the cranky A/C would allow and staffed entirely by burly guys that made Fizzy look tiny. They all called him ‘boss’ without irony.

Even Fang and he’d been around for decades. He was there today at the reception desk, knitting something at death defying speed and talking on a headset, explaining lesson booking. He smiled when he saw J and held up a finger. She waited for him to finish, then came around the desk to get a hug.

“You’ll be leaving us so soon,” he sighed as he patted her back. “We’ll miss you, girlie.”

“‘I’ll miss you too, but I still have the rest of the summer.” If she held on a little longer than usual, he didn’t seem to mind. “I’ll stop by lots, I promise.”

“You better. Who else will eat the stale oreos?”

“They taste better stale.”

“Sure they do,” he held up the knitting, eyeballing it. It was black. Most of his knitting was. “I’ll have this ready to take with you.”

“You’re making me something?” She asked, delight cutting through her cloud that had followed her in.

“Of course. Can’t have our best girl go off to college without a cozy homemade something. You’ll get it when you get it though. Boss is in the back number crunching if you’re looking for him.”

“Nah, just gonna run through some drills or whatever.”

The punching bag with duct tape strategically placed into a frowny face had gotten J through a lot of rough days. She hammered into it now, her focus narrowing. The world dropped away. There was nothing, but her and the target. Long engrained combinations, flurries of punches and kicks, moved in her circles. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck.

When she finally slowed, coming to rest with a stuttering regaining of breath, she saw Fizzy watching her. How long had he been standing off to the side, arms folded and face drawn into serious focus?

“How’d I do?” She asked, sucking in breaths.

“Not bad considering you’ve been gone for two weeks,” he said, raising his brows.

“Seasons over. For good, maybe,” she reminded him. “Not like I have a place to keep up with it.”

“That’s your call,” he didn’t even sound annoyed like he had when she’d first told him she might not keep up with it.

“Dad totally made you say that.”

“No,” Fizzy said, a hair too quickly. “Well. We had an open and honest conversation like adults.”

“He made you watch Field of Dreams again?”

“Finding Nemo.”

“Yikes,” she wrinkled up her nose. “Did you cry?”

“We’re not discussing this.”

It felt good to laugh and apparently Fizzy thought so too because it earned her a clap on the shoulder, before she went to hit the showers. He took her out to dinner after too and they sat at their favorite diner and shared a piece of pie after. Fizzy mostly let her take the filling, picking at the crust.

“Do you think Fang is making me a sweater or just a scarf?” she asked, sipping coffee that had likely been sitting in the carafe since noon. It was the best.

“He’s knitting that for you? Figured he was making his five hundredth dog sweater. Swear to fuck, I don’t know what animals that already have fur need a damn sweater for.” Fizzy rolled his eyes. “Or booties.”

“Aw, but the puppies are his babies! It’s cute,” she stabbed into a glossy cherry, soaked in gelatinous red goo. Babies. Puppies. “I just got a great idea.”

“Fang doesn’t want to sell his dog sweaters. Trust me, Ivan has been bugging him about it once a month like clockwork for years and if I have to hear about hobbies becoming hustles becoming hernias one more time-”

“Not that,” she cut in, then thought it over for another second. “Nah. Never mind. Had a thought and it was gone.”

Fizzy gave her a suspicious look, but also let her change the subject to the roommate survey she’d gotten yesterday. This was not an idea for another parent.

“Sounds stupid,” Zinnia deemed as soon as J finished explaining. “I’m in.”

It was slightly harder than J had imagined to execute. Mainly because she did know it would be pretty brutal to just do without checking to make sure it had a chance in hell of working. And she had to get Pop where she wanted him at the right moment. Dad and Fizzy would probably reject it out of hand, so she needed a different ally.

J took a really long time composing the text.

J: hey would pop like a dog?

Okay, so it wasn’t a masterpiece, but she was under pressure here!

Anne: used to have one. Died a few years before you were born. Smelly mutt. Liked him though.

J: I think it would help with some stuff.

Anne: If it would make him stop mooning over your baby pictures like you were going across the ocean instead of an hour away, I’m in.

J: no promises

There were a few trips to the animal shelter before J found the right dog.

“This thing is ugly as hell,” Zinnia let the dog slobber all over her hand.

“Yeah, but she’s also kind of cute. Or like...so ugly she’s cute,” J suggested.

“Is she?” Squatting down, Zinnia had to lean back at an improbable angle to stop the dog from licking her face. “Cause this is some serious level of weird. I don’t think both her eyes look in the same direction.”

“Don’t be shallow. She’s got a big heart.”

“She’d have to. She’s not exactly small. You don’t think Lucius and Izzy will have a collective aneurysm?”

“Sometimes you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.”

“I love you, please leave me your car in the will.”

“You can’t drive,” J sat down next to her.

“Wrong, I don’t like driving, but I don’t lack the ability to drive and someday I might want to and therefore: car.”

“If you keep planning my death, I’m going to start to assume you’ll be the reason for it.”

“I mean, it’s never off the table entirely.”

The dog tried to lick Zinnia’s face again. It was kind of ugly, but it was clearly full of love.

The thing was....J didn’t think it would work, actually. She assumed that Anne would do her part because Anne had a weird guilt complex about J’s entire existence and she assumed Zinnia would signal her at the right moment so that J could walk the dog out past Pop and he could see it. But she didn’t really think Pop would adopt the dog. It all had the desperate third act feel of a schlocky movie.

So she was kind of shocked when Pop saw the dog, got down on his knees and started fussing over her immediately.

“Look at the face!” Pop exclaimed, letting the dog lick his face with all the enthusiasm she could summon. “Hey there, hi! Where did you come from?”

“The shelter is having an adoption event,” J gestured vaguely behind her at the pen of other eager dogs.

“I used to have a dog just like this one, you know,” Pop rubbed the dog’s ears and it seemed to make all of her melt.

“Oh yeah?” J asked as if Anne hadn’t sent her a picture for her to use to find the Right Dog.

“Uh huh, big ole beast. Called him Rat cause I found him fighting a rat in an alley. Loved him like crazy. Ran off on me though. Living out of a truck wasn’t much of a life for a dog, I guess.”

“Yeah,” J said slowly. “Guess they’d want a fenced in yard and a house or something.”

Pop didn’t stop rubbing the dog’s ears or even look up at her. “I know what you’re about, kiddo.”

“You do?”

“Uh huh, but...well, I have been thinking it’d be nice to have a beast around the house again and this one is already sweet on me. Be mean just to leave her here.”

An hour later, J was sitting in the back of Anne’s van with a dog sleeping across her lap, surrounded by bags of dog stuff. Pop was in the passenger seat, turned around completely, seatbelt contorting into new and interesting shapes, so he could look at both of them.

“Izzy is gonna kill me dead,” he said more merrily than he’d said anything in weeks.

“I mean, is this really the one thing that pushes him over?”

“Nah. Anyway, Lucy’ll get me first.”

J grimaced. What if she just made it worse?

“Are they gonna be mad?”

“Not with you,” Anne turned in her seat, leaving the road to take care of itself for a moment as she’d say when J screeched over such behavior, “You did good, J. If they don’t want the dog there, I’ll take her.”

The moment stretched, Anne’s clear cool eyes fixed on J and J staring right back with the eyes she knew looked just the same.

“Yeah, okay,” J whispered.

Anne turned back around. The road had, indeed, taken care of itself.

No one else was home when they arrived. Pop led the dog into the backyard where she ran around happily, smelling flowers and peeing on the half-dead cucumber plants. Well. Probably entirely dead now.

“She’s a real peach,” Pop said with a wide grin, resting his hand on J’s shoulder.

“What are you going to name her?” J glanced at him. “Not something-”

“Aw, is this another rant about the wrong doing I’ve done to you?” Pop sighed, his smile dimming a fraction.

“No! I mean. A little. Pop, come on. It’s a weird name.”

“It’s not weird!” He gave her shoulder a small shake then dropped his hand away.

“It’s a smush name! It doesn’t even really exist.”

“Every name was made up at some point. That’s how names work!” He shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest and setting his stance wide. “Never made you use all of it anyway.”

They watched the dog roll in the grass, every limb spread wide and joyous in the sun.

“You were a bitty thing,” Pop said, his usually bombastic voice only a hair louder than the choir of cicadas. “When I got you, you were so small. Iz and Lu...they believed in me somehow. Thought I could manage. Helped anyway they could. I’d loved Iz for years and I knew Lu was...well. I knew I could love him for a long time too as soon as he let me get close enough to know him. He wasn’t any kind of experienced with kids, but he picked you up and held you like you were precious right away.

“I wasn’t sure I could do it. Not nearly as sure as they were. Borrowed all that faith, didn’t I? Gave it back by making sure they knew exactly how much having us altogether meant to me. Couldn't give higher praise than your name.”

There was a rock loose under her feet, she nudged it with her toe, sure that her face was red as a tomato.

“Is everything coming apart because I’m leaving?” she asked the ground.

His arms went around her, pulling her in. She rested her cheek on worn cotton.

“Sometimes things change, kiddo. Nothing to do with you at all.”

Dad and Fizzy were not thrilled about the dog. For all of a week. By the time J had done four shifts at the diner, she was coming home to Fizzy asleep on the couch and Peaches flopped over his legs. Dad had come up with the name because ‘she’s fuzzy and sweet’ and he walked her in the mornings before work because it was good for him to stretch his legs.

But Peaches spent her nights in the basement with Pop.

J graduated. The robe was scratchy and the day was hot. She walked away from high school and didn’t look back.

Her graduation photos went up on the wall by the front door. One of her in her robe, taking the diploma without a smile. Another with all three of her fathers piled in around her, all beaming, her robe gone, but the hat still on.

Summer nights went to Zinnia, driving in idle circles, eating snacks Zinnia had taken from work and stopping at the park to sit on the swings. When J thought of that summer later, it would be the single image of Zinnia, arching up high on the swing, her hair a banner behind her, a Twizzler hanging from between her lips and a laugh catching in between the stars.

It went too fast and soon, she left the house with her backpack fat on her back, the last thing to get shoved into Pop’s truck. It was still thickly hot outside, definitely not an autumn beginning to the school year. But the school year had also never started with an hour long drive before.

The dorm room was tight, too many bodies in one place. Fizzy made her bed. Dad hung her posters (framed so they’d last longer and not at all so he had a project). Pop took her out of the room entirely and somehow got her into a group of kids in the lounge, and then disappeared outside, coming back with enough ice cream for the lot of them. They each hugged her in turn, the hours of allowed parental lingering running out.

The last thing she saw of them was Peaches hanging her head out the window and Pop’s hand waving good-bye frantically behind it.

J: settled in?

Zinnia: yeah! Heard there’s a mall that’s half-abandoned between here and there. Meet there on Sunday?

J: deal

Most of her classes were large lecture hall affairs with dozens of students, but on Thursday, she had a smaller section for paper writing and there was an actual role call. She waited, tensed.

“Jacob Miller.”

“Here. Jake though.”

“All right, Jake, thank you..... Alisha Nash?”

“Here.”

“Pearl Norrington?”

“Here,” a gruff looking boy said. J sat up a little straighter. He did not look like a Pearl, but no one said a damn thing. And he didn’t offer another name. He was Pearl. So what?

“Jazzy-Lu Rackham?”

“Here,” J said firmly and she didn’t give a correction either. The list went on. No one said a word.

Pearl glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, the faintest smile on his face. That was all the encouragement she needed. When they all got to their feet to leave an hour later, she meandered right to his side.

“I like your name,” she said and that was probably weird, but Dad always said to lead with a compliment and Pop always said ‘if they don’t like you, that’s on that fucker’.

“Thanks, my dad has a thing about pearls or something,” he gave her another one of those barely there smiles. It was cute.

“That’s way easier to explain than mine.”

“Jazzy-Lu, huh?”

“Yep.”

“Cool. Want to get lunch, Jazzy-Lu?”

“I’d love that.”

And maybe it was just meant to be because while they wandered towards hamburgers, they talked about home towns and interests, finding places where things aligned very neatly. When he mentioned ‘my dads’, she perked up.

“I have two,” he confirmed, casually, like he didn’t care.

“Cool. I have three.”

“..that is a really weird thing to try to one up, you know that, right?”

“No, really, look,” she showed him her graduation photo. “That’s my Dad, my Pop and my Fizzy.”

“Fizzy?”

“He wanted me to call him Father, and Pop kept calling him Father Izzy when I was little. I went with Fizzy.”

And he laughed and not meanly. Jazzy Lu decided she liked the cut of Pearl’s jib right then and there.

Zinnia: fine he can come with us if I can bring this girl I met spinning in circles on the quad

J: is the selling point the circles

Zinna: shes very hot, do not fuck this up for me

“Glad you found a nice boy, sweetheart,” Dad sing-songed over the phone, “remember all the lectures about safe-”

“Dad!” She groaned. “I know, okay? Please stop. What if Fizzy walks in and has an actual heart attack?”

“He’s at the gym. And knowing that you’ve met someone you like enough to be intimate with will not actually take him out,” Dad paused. “Probably.”

“How’s Peaches?” She asked, grasping at straws.

“She’s an angel. Who pissed in Jim’s rose bushes, so she’s an angel who isn’t allowed out of our yard now.”

She didn’t ask about Pop. They texted once a week. She’d send him pictures of things and he’d send back emojis and gifs. It wasn’t the same.

And if she didn’t ask, she didn’t have to know.

Midterms consumed her, spat her out on the other end and then at last, she was standing outside her dorm with a little suitcase and the truck came roaring up. It was Fizzy behind the wheel though, without explanation and Jazzy-Lu’s heart sank.

“He picked up an extra shift today,” Fizzy told her, offering a consolation hug. “C’mon, let’s get you home.”

The house smelled a little different. More doggish maybe. Everything was where she’d left it, but also all moved a little. The lamp in the living room had a different bulb that cast an orange-y light instead of familiar yellow. The kitchen looked a little more worn than she remembered. A little more gray. The basement door was closed.

Pop wasn’t home for dinner either, but Dad and Fizzy piled her plate high with food and distracted her with a dozen questions. They stayed up watching a movie with her, asking more questions. Fizzy kept touching her hand to get her attention as if she might drift away if he didn’t, even though he was the one that kept nearly nodding off. When the movie ended, they went to bed. Jazzy Lu stayed on the couch.

Pearl: rip my ears, my pa took up the drums

Jazzy Lu: but is he any good

Pearl: absolutely not

Jazzy Lu: Dad is doing watercolor, he’s pretty good, but it’s all Georgia O’Keefe if she was into men

Pearl: what’s that look like?

Jazzy Lu: imagine a stamen. Now imagine a thousand.

Pearl: okay

Jazzy Lu: now imagine tall buildings, bananas, ice cream cones

Pearl: theme received

The front door opened. She shoved her phone guilty in her pocket. Then took it out again. Guilty about what? She had a friend. That was fine. That was so normal and fine. Fuck.

“J!” Pop cried and then she was in his arms.

Best. Hugs.

She held on and on, and when they finally stumbled apart, he was beaming at her.

“You look good. I like the lip piercing.”

“Fizzy said it’s a liability.”

“Big words from a guy that used to have pierced nipples.”

“Oh, ew!” She scrunched up her whole face. “He did not.”

“Did too,” Pop laughed. “What are you still doing up?”

“Dunno. I stay up late at school a lot. Studying.”

“Studying,” Pop repeated with a slow shake of his head. “I almost believe it.”

“You should. It’s almost true.”

They sat down on the couch together, Jazzy-Lu tucking herself back against the arm and Pop taking up almost all the rest of it.

“Iz told me you’ve got a boyfriend.”

“He’s just a friend,” she mumbled. “I mean. I think he is. I don’t know. We hang out a lot.”

“Just lay one on him, that’ll tell you fast enough.”

“Pop!”

“It’s true!” He grinned wide at her. “Don’t listen to anyone who tries to sell you on complicated shit. Just give ‘em a smack and see where it gets you.”

“That’s what you said about kickboxing too.”

“Was I wrong?”

“No, not really,” J rested her head on the back of the couch. “Where were you?”

“Flea market!” He pulled out his phone. “Don’t know if it’ll stick, but Iz suggested I just get a table and start selling some of the bits and things that I’ve been doing and it turns out Lu’s old flame...you remember Pete? He has a stall, refurbished computers and things. The wood looks good next to it and he can turn a lathe too. Picked up a fair few commissions already.”

He showed her a picture of the stall which did look nice and official. Pete, who she’d met a few times, was in coveralls and looked very proud of the spot. Dad’s wood pieces did look okay next to rows of refurbished tablets.

“Looks good.”

“It is good. Make things during the week to restock, sell on the weekends. Might hit the street fair track in the spring. Pete has some contacts, might help set me up,” he tossed the phone onto the coffee table. “What about you?”

“Just school stuff,” she shrugged. “It’s a lot, but not more than I can handle. Interesting. I don’t know what I want to do yet though.”

“Eh, I’m still figuring it out, why should you know? Are you happy though?”

The college campus wasn’t home. It was big and daunting some days. She felt lost sometimes. She missed Zinnia like a limb, she wanted her own bed more than anything at night when she listened to her roommate’s nose wheeze. But she’d met a dozen interesting people. There was Pearl, who sat very close to her while they played first person shooters and listened when she talked. There was campus gym where she’d run into some girls who were trying to start a female wrestling team. It was out of her scope, but it sounded fun and they gathered to talk about it sometimes on the weekends.

“Yeah, happy enough.” She smiled at him. “What about you?”

“You know what? Just happy enough.”

She went up to bed not long after. She laid on the mattress she’d missed and listened to the familiar texture of home’s silence. Peaches was let out in the yard, barking at some invisible pest than back in, the sliding glass door closing.

Jazzy-Lu listened to her home.

She listened to Pop walk up the stairs, open a door down the hall and close it with quiet click. Muffled voices carried for precious seconds and then there was no more.

Pearl: fall asleep?

Jazzy-Lu: sorry pop came home, we were talking

Pearl: np. Hey. you want to go out to dinner when we get back? Forgot how much I like real food.

Jazzy-Lu: yes. Hey. if I kissed you, would that be weird?

Pearl: not even a little

She fell asleep smiling.