fic: please don't let me be misunderstood (rpf)

[falseeeyelashes]

please don’t let me be misunderstood

rpf. he’s made his bed and now he’s got to fuck in it: the story of the suburban widower turned drug dealer and the sister-in-law that ruined everything. bill hader/kristen wiig. weeds!AU. 11,335 words.

notes: hahahaha OH GOD. like everything in my life, this started as a joke. and then got super serious. the other night fractives mentioned the idea of a Weeds!AU involving these two, and then I got it in my head to genderswap it? so basically Bill is playing the role of Nancy Botwin and Kristen is Andy, lol; or for the uninitiated, Bill is a widower who starts dealing weed for reasons of the $$$ variety and Kristen is the crazy sister-in-law who comes and stays with him and his kids. I totally used gigglemonster's genderswap casting as inspiration for, er, Silas and Shane, so the roles of the kids are played by Jane Levy and Chloe Moretz haha. oh and Amy Adams is the dead wife. because i just saw The Master? idk. aaaaand i definitely used the show as inspiration plot-wise, and tried, more or less, to stay true to the whole Nancy/Andy dynamic, and I guess that's it! i regret nothing?!



and i promise you, i’m doing the best i can.

1.

The day Kristen shows up at his house he decides is the actual worst day in the never-ending string of bad days that started with the day his wife died.

He wakes that morning to the smoke alarm going off. He spends what would have been, had there actually been a fire, a crucial fifteen seconds laying still in his bed, trying to will himself to reach that much farther to the alarm clock on his bedside table. It’s when he’s mid-reach that he gets it: totally not the alarm clock beeping like the world might be coming to an end.

He finds both Chloe and Jane in the hall, Jane looking irritated and Chloe looking serious.

“We’ve gotta move,” she says, “It’s the smoke inhalation that’ll get you.” Jane glares at Chloe and then yawns, wide and theatrical, as though the prospect their house might actually be burning down yet they took the time to discuss this premise on the landing of the stairs is already the most boring part of her barely started day.

“There isn’t a fire,” he grumbles. He’s not entirely sure of that fact so he takes the stairs down two at a time just to be safe.

What he finds in his kitchen isn’t the disaster he expected, but rather a disaster of a different sort: a half-quelled grease fire and his dead wife’s sister with a spatula at the stove.

“Good morning!” Kristen calls -- while she beats out the last of the flames with what was once a white dishtowel.

“You gotta be kidding me,” he mutters under his breath, but it gets lost as both Jane and Chloe vault forward -- grease fire be damned -- chirping, in unison, “Aunt Kristen!” like this is the greatest thing to happen to them in, well, weeks.

“I’m sorry, dude, about . . . this. I was trying to surprise you guys! Breakfast! The most important meal of the day!” Kristen drops the burnt-out skillet into the basin of the sink and it sizzles when an errant drop of water falls from the faucet.

“Where have you been?” Jane asks, suddenly awake and excited and alert and all those things she wasn’t when she thought their house was about to be smoldering rubble.

Kristen pushes a strand of hair -- now sort of red; it had been darker at the funeral -- off her forehead. She’s dressed pretty low-key for herself; she normally looks like a mish-mash of what you’d find in the back of one of those high-end fashion magazines and what you’d peel off the floor of the worst bar you could find at closing time. She’s wearing jeans and boots and a t-shirt that’s sheer enough he can see she’s wearing a black bra under it. He can also see a tattoo along the right-side of her ribcage, and he’s not entirely sure if that’s a new addition to her or just a new fact for him.

“Ohhh,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. “Here. And there. Alaska briefly. Not nearly as many eskimos there as pop culture led me to believe. Or igloos. A lot of fishing though. I really don’t care for fishing.”

“Are you staying for good?” Chloe asks from her perch at the counter, like she’s the twelve year-old judge presiding over these proceedings.

Kristen smiles, big and goofy, but her eyes flit over towards him. He can only imagine what he looks like: the sleep-mussed hair, the old Oklahoma State t-shirt he’s had since he was probably in high school, and a pair of boxers. He drags his hand through his hair and waits to hear what Kristen’s going to say.

“We’ll just have to see,” is what she settles on, and Chloe looks mollified for the the time being. “Let’s get you guys some eggs going though, huh?”

“Girls, set the table. And get some juice, okay?” Strangely enough, they listen to him. Since Amy passed, it’s been like every order issued by him has been met with some sort of mild rebellion.

He watches Jane pull the carton of OJ out of the fridge and watches Chloe meticulous fold four napkins in half before gathering up some forks and knives. He turns his attention to Kristen as she cracks an egg.

He crowds next to her, that tight corner of the counter where it meets the stove. She glances up at him and smiles slyly before dropping the broken eggshell into the sink, her thigh brushing against his.

“So, Kristen,” he says, low enough so the girls can’t hear him. “How long are you planning on staying.”

She whisks the eggs before pouring them onto the fresh frying pan. Her hair has fallen in her face again and he’s close enough that when she moves her arm presses against his chest.

“It’s good to see you too, Bill.”

2.

Here’s the ugly truth first:

Bill’s a drug dealer.

He didn’t start that way. He started on the straight and narrow, just like every other resident on their street. But then Amy died. And then he was laid off. And then. Well.

He guesses it’s not entirely defensible. But it is paying the bills. It has been paying the bills. And the thing is, he’s liked to think he’s kept his head above water throughout all of this.

And then Kristen shows up.

The day Kristen shows up it all starts raining down on him.

Namely, he has to pick Chloe up from school with the word “expulsion” resting as a heady threat in the air. Principal Poehler had called to let him know that Chloe had disrupted a class assembly to go on an impassioned rant about a woman’s right to choose -- “that’s . . . not really the worst thing to rant about, right? I’m a man, I purposefully avoid conversations like these” -- and when he gets down to the principal’s office, Chloe is talking about Kristen like she's fucking Gandhi or something and how she said you have to stand up for what’s right, and Bill can feel the throbbing starting at his temples as he tries to remain cool and calm and the adult in this scenario.

And namely, he discovers that Jane is not actually dating that Logan kid who lives down the street, all straight-laced and clean-cut and running to be Class Vice President (“You couldn’t aim a little higher and try to date the President Elect?” Chloe had asked that morning over the burnt breakfast Kristen served them; “No, no, no,” Kristen had said, siding with Jane, “I totally get it. It’s a Cheney thing, right? The puppet master rather than the puppet? I feel you”), but rather fucking PJ. PJ Ransone, the dude helping to run whatever syndicate Bill is trying to game in Agrestic, the dude who is definitely way too old and way too everything to be involved with his teenage daughter. He finds out in the worst possible way: catching the guy shoving his tongue down Jane’s throat, and watching her zealously reciprocate in the high school parking lot.

When he grabs her by the arm and hauls her to car, impotently yelling, “We are going to have words!” at PJ, Jane looks completely unfazed.

“Aunt Kristen said it was fine. She said girls mature faster than boys anyway so what does it matter in numbers.”

“You need to stop talking. Stop talking right now and stop talking to your aunt.”

And there’s another thing: where had the time gone that got him to a point where he has a teenage daughter? He started early, he gets that, and sure, he and Amy had started by accident and wound up with a kid by the age of 20 and married that same year, but they had been happy, right? He got that great job about thirty minutes away from Agrestic, and he drove a fucking Prius to work every day and he was good at his job (or however good a guy can be that gets him to rise from a cubicle to a corner office without ever expending that much effort beyond time spent and tedium incurred), and then, sixteen years after Amy told him she was pregnant and sixteen years after he married her, it all fell apart.

Amy died and he was fired and there were still bills to pay and a funeral to pay for and two daughters that together were the greatest money pit he could ever imagine (cell phones and school fees and fucking uniforms for that fucking school Amy thought Chloe needed because she thought even before she died that Chloe might be fucking crazy, and well, based on the sheer number of times Bill has been called in to talk with Principal Poehler since Amy’s death he thinks Chloe really might be fucking crazy).

Kristen had come to the funeral. He’s not sure why he expected that she wouldn’t, but if he’s being honest with himself (and that grief counselor Ari talked him into seeing the week after Amy’s death told him that he really needed to start being honest with himself), he didn’t expect her to come. He supposes he really might think that poorly of Kristen.

The night of the funeral they had sat together in the kitchen. They talked and she made him coffee and together they poked at the remains of the banana pudding with vanilla wafers Tina had brought over before finally reaching for the wine.

He had mumbled, “I don’t know how to do any of this.”

And Kristen had offered that little smile of hers. “Of course you do. The rest of us fuck-ups rely on the likes of you.”

Kristen left that night, but before she did she pressed a small piece of paper in his hand.

“For a good time, give Jones a call,” she said.

And he did. He did that. He went to see her on what Ari calls the poor side of town, and he saw Andy too, the both of them living together in some sort of upscale frat boy squalor.

A week later he went to his first and last appointment with the grief counselor Ari recomended. That same day, he sold his first dime bag.

He fumes the entire drive home from the high school, and Jane fumes beside him. He’s kept it together for a good long time now --

but then his whole world has been coming down for just as long.

3.

“Hey, Buddy,” Kristen calls from the kitchen when he walks in. She’s at the stove with a pot of boiling water and a box of pasta with some fancy label on it he doesn’t remember buying.

“‘Buddy?’” he repeats. He throws his keys down onto the counter and they jangle against an empty cereal bowl no one bothered to rinse out. “You have been here less than twenty-four hours yet you have still somehow managed to send one of my daughters into the arms of the latest contestant on To Catch A Predator while almost getting my other daughter expelled from school.”

“They aren’t contestants on To Catch A Predator. They’re just, like, predators. That they’re trying to catch.”

Bill stares at her, his face all tight and he can feel the tic at the hinge of his jaw.

“I want you out of this house. I want you out of my fucking house.”

Kristen looks at him over her shoulder with an almost gleeful look on her face before turning back to put a lid on the pot. That can’t bode well.

“I went to see Rashida today.”

And he’s right. Just like that, the day manages to get that much worse. She takes a step toward him and eyes him up and down.

“I really thought you’d be the type to try and rock the pager at the hip. Even if pagers are that passe, you know?”

He’s not sure why it’s this of all things that makes him feel like he’s losing it. His wife died. He lost his job. His eldest daughter is dating a dude who looks like an extra off the Sons of Anarchy set and his youngest daughter might actually be a vigilante sociopath in the making (he’s gotta stop talking to Jimmy about parenting advice, especially when Jimmy’s stoned). And he’s now a drug dealer. A pretty successful drug dealer, but, well, a drug dealer nonetheless. All of that he could handle. He is handling it. Yet somehow Kristen showing up in his kitchen that morning is the final straw.

He grabs her hard by the elbow and jerks her toward the door.

“Outside,” he grits out and she stumbles alongside him as he throws the backdoor open. He slams it shut behind him and watches as Kristen starts to laugh as she backs away from him.

“Man,” she says as she catches her breath, “when I told you to hook up with Rasheeds I meant, like, buy a fucking dime bag. Or, actually, well, do her. Not take over the goddamn territory in Agrestic.” She starts laughing again, hard, her whole body shaking with it like this is the greatest joke she’s ever heard.

It’s almost like he’s too tired to keep up his anger toward her. He slides down the side of the house and sits down on the ground, his knees bent and hands dangling loose from his wrists in between.

“Fucking hilarious, right.” Kristen doesn’t say anything but she’s no longer laughing at him, just watching him. He turns his head away from her, hiding his face against his shoulder. He hasn’t cried since the funeral, and even then that had been behind closed doors and after the girls had gone to bed; the way he saw it, they had enough shit to deal with, they didn’t need their father’s on top of that. But out there on his back patio he finds the sudden temptation to cry is almost overwhelming.

“Kristen, please,” he hears himself say, all pathetic and sort of tragic sounding. “I really want you to leave.”

There’s just silence for a beat too long, like they’ve entered some sort of stalemate.

“Look, Bill,” she finally says. “I get it. You are a sad man with a lot of sad problems. And we both loved Amy. We loved her very, very, very much. But she’s gone now. And I get it. You’re doing the best you can. But with me around? Your best can be even better.”

Bill sighs heavily, looking out at the pool (which only makes him think about mortgage payments, about Chloe’s swim lessons, about how he needs to get someone out here to clean that fucking pool he never wanted in the first place, but when they moved Amy had said, It’s California not Oklahoma, Bill, not New York, of course we need a pool). He glances up at Kristen.

“You take a marketing course while you were out on the lam?”

“I wasn’t on the lam. I was . . . wandering.” She smiles at him. “And no. I didn’t. I’m just naturally persuasive. And right, I might add.”

Bill doesn’t say anything. He rubs at the back his neck and thinks about what that one therapist recommended he do in times of stress: keep your mind blank, think of the ocean and keep your mind blank. But Kristen can’t even let him do that, achieve that tiny bit of piece, because she’s still talking.

She sits down next to him, her back against the side of the house. “Hey,” she says quietly. “Hey,” and she nudges his knee with her knee. He leans his head back against the wall and looks down at her. “I know you think . . . the worst of me. That I am the worst. And I probably am. You know there’s a warrant out for my arrest in this totally Twin Peaks-equivalent county in Washington State?” She scrunches her nose up. “Anyway. You, William, have a lot on your plate. You lost your job. You’ve got the girls. You’re dealing,” she can’t repress a smile when she says it. “And whatever . . . whatever terrible things you think of me, Amy was my sister. And that makes you my brother. And I loved her, and I love you. And what I’m saying is: whether you want it or not, I got your back.”

Bill swallows. Kristen is easiest to deal with when she’s glib and joking and doing all those crazy voices and singing those crazy made-up songs while she flits unreliably from one thing to the next. When she’s like this, all soft and sincere, he doesn’t know what to do with that.

There has never been anything about Kristen that reminds him of his wife. That was never the case. The fact the two sprang from the same family always served as a riddle, always baffled him. Even at Amy’s softest, her most earnest and most loving, there always remained that hard edge to her Bill admired so much. That edge is missing from Kristen. Kristen at her softest, her most earnest, her most loving hurts him.

It’s like she needs protecting.

From what or whom he’s not entirely sure, but in that moment out by the pool he thinks it might be himself.

4.

He first met Kristen at his engagement party.

Her hair was long and blonde then and while he didn’t know her, he knew of her. Amy had briefed him beforehand. She told him about their mother and she told him about her older sister Kristen.

“You’ll like her,” she said, but she had said it with disappointment.

Despite that, he hadn’t been entirely sure what to expect. What he found was a woman shorter and smaller than he expected, quieter too. He had heard the stories. He had thought she’d be just as loud and wild and crazy to match.

The way she looked at him, a little guarded but mainly curious, made him think she felt the same about him.

“So you’re the guy who knocked up my little sister, huh,” she finally said. The way she said it, it wasn’t like she was judging him for it. If anything, she said it like it was the punchline to some great joke only she was privy to.

She cast her gaze over towards Amy at the buffet table. “Pretty fancy for a shotgun wedding,” she teased.

5.

So Kristen stays.

And Bill keeps dealing.

For the first month or so Kristen is around he tries to keep her out of it. It’s not that he doesn’t trust her necessarily -- it’s that he doesn’t trust her.

Rashida remains his supplier, her face always that blend of quiet amusement when he swings by for a pick-up. “If it isn’t our Father of the Year,” she teases when he walks in, Andy sprawled out at the kitchen table, bagging and weighing.

“I heard Kristen moved in, huh,” Andy says, not even bothering to hide his smirk.

“God help us all,” Rashida says and laughs.

The only one who really questions Kristen’s arrival and continued presence is Ari. Ar Graynor has lived across the street from Bill and the girls the entire time they’ve lived in the neighborhood. For an uptight busybody, Ari’s okay. Since Amy’s death, and since Kristen showed up announced, Ari has been doing everything within her power to play matchmaker. “Dude, just roll with it. Or I’m never gonna hear the end of this shit,” her husband Seth had said at last week’s poker game. If anything, he’s better friends with Seth. Or, well, Seth is one of his better clients.

Seth or Jimmy.

Jimmy, the world’s or at least California’s worst attorney, is easily one of his top clients (and a good friend, though he’s not sure what happens exactly when you mix the drug business with your friends, but he’s sure he’ll find out). Jimmy lives a couple houses down with his wife Tina, the head of the neighborhood watch.

But Kristen comes and Kristen stays. He doesn’t pay attention to the fact that they’re no longer eating takeout every night for dinner (though if she tries to spring tofu on them one more time he will actually kill her) or that he doesn’t need to race off to pick the girls up from school or do the grocery shopping (his credit card, her time) or how the laundry more or less gets done on a regular basis.

He also doesn’t pay attention to how Kristen has made the guest room her room. She sleeps with the door open (“I was in this, like, boarding house in Hell’s Kitchen, and I know, who knew boarding houses were still a thing and didn’t, like, die out with Dickens or whatever, but, like, this dude I befriended was boarding a couple rooms down, and he was totally a heroin addict and he’d, like, OD sometimes, or, like, choke on his vomit, so I started sleeping with my door open so I could hear him, right? I guess the habit stuck, hmmm”) and the first couple days she stayed with him, he found that he’d peek in on her before heading downstairs. At first it was because he felt like he had imagined the entire scenario. He invented the breakfast fire and Kristen laughing at him on the back patio and her insisting that she stay. But she was there that next morning, curled up in a tight ball with a huge expanse of bed empty beside her. After those first couple days and after she became a part of their routine, checking in on her in the morning became part of the routine too. He doesn’t pay attention to why he does that either. Nothing good could come of thinking about things like that.

And nothing good could come from thinking about other things too. Things like how the girls needed a mother, and how they sort of have one now. But he doesn’t like to think of Kristen as that. Even if it means he might have dodged the bullet of having to explain shit like menstruation and sex to Chloe.

(“Please, you think Chloe doesn’t know all that anyway? This is the internet age, Bill. Those girls know all sorts of vagina business already.”)

Kristen has been there a month, and throughout that time Bill still fakes it like he might go straight. He interviews for other jobs. He makes a show of it, that he’s trying.

He comes home one day exhausted -- four different interviews and none of them went well. On top of that, he went to that fucking PTA meeting Ari made such a big deal about. They spent the entire time discussing whether it was fascist of them to outlaw the consumption of sugar soda in the cafeteria. Bill was the only man present.

He gets home and he plops down on the couch. Kristen’s in the kitchen wearing what looks like a kimono as a robe, but she has it open, and underneath she’s wearing tiny gym shorts and an old threadbare Rolling Stones t-shirt he can kinda see through if he stares long and hard enough.

“Did you eat?” she asks him, and he just grunts.

“I made these awesome kebabs for the girls. There’s still a couple left. With steak, you blood-hungry monsters.”

He closes his eyes and rubs at them.

“You are not going to convert or shame us into becoming vegetarians. I don’t know why you even try.”

“Because I am now the one who prepares your meals and cow blood is sick, man. I am a conscientious objector to this slaughter.”

His laugh comes out more like another grunt. He can hear the beeping of the microwave, and apparently she took his sound effects as a yes for those kebabs.

She drops the plate down on the coffee table in front of him but Bill doesn’t move. She stands over him for a beat before she sits down next to him, her knees tucked to her chest as she faces him.

“Hey,” she says and Bill doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even bother to look at her.

She leans forward and without prelude she starts unknotting his tie. He lets her. His eyes shoot open and his body tenses, but he lets her. As her fingers work, her face is incredibly close to his and he glances up at her.

“Look,” she says as she pulls at his tie. “I know you said your business is not my business and I am totally respecting that. I have been most excellent on that front. Even though we both know of the two of us I’m the one with greater expertise in that arena, but, hey, you’re doing things your way, and that’s awesome.” She finally has his tie undone and she pulls it out through his collar.

“But?” he prompts as he watches her.

“But,” she says, leaning in that much closer, her bare knee almost on top of his thigh, and her hands are at his throat. Despite himself he can feel his pulse accelerate. She undoes the top button and her hands go to his chest and then still, just close enough to his heart that she has to be able to feel it. She looks him in the eye. “You need to commit.”

He swallows and for a beat the only sound in the room is the wet sound of his tongue in his mouth as he stares right back at her in the eye. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She undoes the second button. His chest rises under her hand.

“You’re already split. And you’ll remain split because you have the girls to consider.” She pauses but she doesn’t move away from him. “Bill, I’m not trying to be an asshole, but you’re barely handling shit as it is. And that’s without an actual nine-to-five job. If you want to keep down this path you’ve started on, you’re gonna have to commit.”

He scowls. “Thanks for the advice, Don Corleone.”

“You’re not going to be good at anything if you keep going half-assed at everything.” He rolls his eyes at her. “And believe me,” she says, her face impish yet somehow still serious, still too close to his, “this is not a business you wanna be half-assed about.”

“Eat your dinner,” she says quietly against his ear and then pushes off of him.

6.

A couple weeks later Bill comes home one night to find Kristen sprawled out on the leather couch eating hummus with carrot sticks.

“Yo,” she calls.

“Where are the kids?” he asks, not even bothering to disguise how tired he is.

“Jane’s at a sleepover. At a dickless friend’s house, I might add, so her virtue is totally not in jeopardy. And Chloe went to bed, like, thirty minutes ago. Or she said she went to bed. So she’s probably secretly reading amateur-written erotica or whatever.”

“Great,” he sighs, and shuffles into the family room, dropping down on the couch next to her, making her entire body bounce. She’s sprawled out over the majority of it and she doesn’t bother to move her feet so they remain sort of under his thighs. He reaches for the bottle of wine she has open on the coffee table and doesn’t bother with a glass, just takes a long pull from the bottle.

“You know, for a recreational drug dealer you’re really super stressed.”

“The drug use is recreational -- the dealing not so much.”

“Yeah, hey, speaking of,” she says and moves her feet a little which feels bizarrely . . . he doesn’t know what word he could use without implicating a lot of shit he has no desire to implicate . . . under his thighs. “I talked to Hamm about you buying out that storefront.”

“What?”

“You need,” she yawns, and he has no idea why she’s so tired; she was still in bed when he left that morning and half-awake on the couch when he got home, “a legitimate business front, buddy. You’re paying for all your shit with drug money, dude.” She sits up a little, her weight balanced on her bent elbows, her eyes bright and suddenly alert. “You know how most criminal enterprises are busted? Tax fraud.”

He rubs at his eyes and her feet twitch under his thigh again. He already knows where this is going. He knows she’s been chatting a lot (a lot a lot, not that he notices, or cares) with Jon Hamm -- Agrestic councilman and extremely profitable entrepreneur. “You wanna launder the money through a Hamm business?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be a Hamm business, it’d be a You and Me business. He’s just selling us the property. And cooking the books.” She must recognize the look threatening his face -- more fucking money -- because she lifts a hand and points a finger at him, the move tipping her weight to the side and almost off the couch. He places a steadying hand on her hip. “You gotta spend money to make money. That’s what they say.”

“That is what they say,” he agrees. He yawns again and drinks more of her (well, his, he’s pretty sure the bottle came from the pantry) bottle of wine. His hand is still on her hip but neither of them seem to be thinking about it (though he is aware of her, how bony her hip feels under his hand and under the loose sweatpants he thinks were once his; his wine, his pants, she’s basically bit-by-bit Hitler-encroaching-into-Europe-style taking over his house and his life).

“What kind of business you thinking?” he asks.

Her face brightens that much more and her smile is completely open. “A bakery.”

He sighs again and slouches that much lower on the couch, her foot now basically under his ass. He stares at the TV, the Real Housewives of whatever county, the volume too low to actually hear them shrieking at each other. He casts her a sidelong glance and finds her looking at him expectantly. “And let me guess: you’d be the Martha Stewart of this particular venture?”

“Well, yeah, like you can bake, dude.”

7.

Baked Goods opens by the end of that summer. They’ve got Hamm doing the books, though Kristen has a surprisingly deep knowledge of how money laundering is supposed to work (Bill’s not even going to question that; he doesn’t want to know). Bill works there some days -- Kristen in the back actually baking while he mans the register.

Eventually, Kristen convinces Bill to let Jane work there after school. And as a sidenote, he’s never entirely sure what to make of how Kristen gets on with the girls. They treat her with an odd mixture of barely concealed tolerance and worship, vacillating between incredulity and almost respect. She’s nothing like their mother. And she’s nothing like Bill. With her, it’s like there are no boundaries, no sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.

“She’s just a kid,” he says when she brings up Jane at the bakery.

“And kids need jobs.”

“And she can absolutely have a job babysitting the youth of America or whatever it is young girls do for money.”

“Webcam shows?”

“You’re really not funny, you know that right.”

Kristen follows Bill around to the other side of the counter standing too close to him while he pours himself some of the coffee she brewed.

“Working at the bakery would be good for her. She can -- she can develop a sense of financial responsibility! While learning how to make really great yummy things at the hand of a sort-of-educated-at-a-sort-of-renowned-culinary-school baker like me!”

Bill puts the pot and his mug down and gives Kristen a funny look.

“How is one sort-of-educated exactly.”

Kristen reaches and takes his mug, swallowing a sip before putting the mug back down in front of him.

“They sort-of-get-kicked-out-of-school.”

“Ah, there’s the strong female role model for my children.”

He takes his cup of coffee and walks away from her.

“Let your daughter help the unemployment rate in America, Bill!” she shouts after him.

He yields, but not because Kristen asked.

8.

The laundry list of jobs Kristen has apparently worked in the time she has not been in Agrestic include:

Drawing the potential “after” pictures for patients at a plastic surgery clinic;

Selling peaches at a farmer’s market;

Selling hot dogs at a mall;

Catering Hollywood events (“Phillip Seymour Hoffman has a very particular appetite, though a big appetite it is”);

Singing in a Spice Girls cover band (“I was Ginger,” she tells the girls solemnly and then holds up a peace sign, “Spice up your life!”);

Singing in a traveling bluegrass band that wound up abandoning her at a Days Inn in Kentucky;

Singing as a showgirl at a casino in Reno ( “ -- the girls don’t need to hear about that”; “I kept my top on. Sort of”);

And starring in an amateur porn video.

“It was one video, and I was generously compensated for my time.”

“And vagina, I should imagine.”

“You would imagine,” Kristen scoffs.

Bill never watches the video. Not in its entirety. Embarrassingly, Andy is the one to track it down -- “I feel weird even looking at you after watching that, dude” -- but he sends him the link anyway.

Bill clicks it, and it’s . . . porn. And it’s Kristen. The acting’s what you’d expect from amateur porn (he doesn’t think there’s a plot here at all, just a lonely girl fucking the movers who moved her into her LA apartment, which yeah that’s a totally viable plot, right), but he watches the first minute before closing out the window in some gut-churning mix of shame and humiliation and something else he refuses to put a name to.

Something bad.

9.

That fall, Chloe starts the seventh grade. And she joins the soccer team. Bill trudges out there for the first game of the season only to find Ari waiting for him.

“Fuck,” he mutters and then smiles big for Ari.

“Oh, Bill,” Ari says, grabbing him by the arm and steering him toward the giant tent and picnic she’s set up to watch the game. “It’s so good of you to come,” she says, like Bill just showed up at her sad ladies’ book club.

Bill more grimaces than smiles at Ari. Since Amy’s death -- an event Ari likes to wear as though her own badge of martyrdom; “the PTA really will never be the same,” she had said at the wake -- Ari has been doing her damnedest to help procure the next Mrs. Bill Hader, and she only seems to be getting more aggressive with each time he rebuffs her.

It’s sweet, save for how annoying it is.

“Have a juice box,” she says to him as she settles into one of those fancy fold-up camp chairs. He takes the juice box, which, not too surprisingly, is a wine cooler instead of juice.

“Uh, thanks.”

“Sit, sit, sit,” she says. Her face goes suddenly serious behind the giant designed shades she’s wearing. “Aunt Kristen couldn’t make it for the game?”

“Aunt Kristen marches to the beat of her own drum,” he says, aiming for levity. He knows exactly where “Aunt Kristen” is, and it involves Rashida, the bakery, and the distribution network they’re trying to figure out in Agrestic. He’s not sure when Kristen became a cog in the machine that is his nascent drug empire, but she’s there now. His business has become her business.

“I’ll say,” Ari says, and he thought he’d enjoy all the judgment in Ari’s voice, but finds he doesn’t. He’s been wanting a partner-in-crime to commiserate with about Kristen since she got here. It used to be him that played that role for Amy, listening to her rattle off the long list of misdeeds Kristen had committed, listening to how irresponsible and unreliable Kristen was. He tried with Andy and with Jimmy and even Seth, but all that got them was the sort of conversation usually reserved for when they talked about their wives, and the fact he connected the two weirded him out way too much.

But now that he has the opportunity to whine about Kristen, badmouth her to kingdom come, all he really wants to do is defend her. And that’s totally fucked up.

“Bill,” Ari says and reaches out to grab his forearm. “I say this as a friend. Kristen is not a nice person. She is not a nice woman.”

Bill turns his attention from watching Chloe meander her way down to the field to squint at Ari. “Huh?”

“She’s trouble, Bill.”

He smirks. “Believe me. I am well-aware.”

Ari leans in a little closer, conspiracy and pinot grigio hot on her breath. “You’re not -- you know,” she gestures vaguely with her hands. Bill’s frown deepens in confusion.

Ari sighs impatiently. “She’s your dead wife’s sister, Bill,” she snaps. “Maybe think about that. This isn’t . . . this isn’t Westeros. You’re not a Targaryen and you are certainly not a Lannister. Incest,” she hisses, “is frowned down upon.”

“What the fuck, Ari.”

“Seth got the season pass on the Tivo for Game of Thrones. It really is a thrilling show.”

“No. No -- I, I know what Game of Thrones is, dude.”

Ari moves that much closer. Any closer and she might as well just sit in his lap. She grabs his hands, which are wrapped around the wine cooler she gave him. “Let me set you up on a date. Please, let me set you up. You deserve better. Your kids deserve better. And she deserves to be shipped off to greener pastures. Like a rehab facility near Albuquerque. I have the name, all you have to do is ask.”

“You are not going to do that. I don’t need -- I’m not, I’m not ready for all that.” Bill rears back from Ari. “And I’m not sending Kristen to fucking rehab. She’s not -- I don’t know what you’ve heard, but she’s not a drug addict. Jesus.”

“She looks like one. All I’m saying. I know that they say ‘don’t judge a book by it’s cover,’ and that’s true. I never would have picked up Fifty Shades of Grey based on that terrible cover and I never would have had a renewed sense of eroticism. But Kristen’s not a book so it’s entirely okay to judge her by her cover. And her cover stinks of marijuana.” She whisper-hisses that last word and Bill can feel his patience rapidly waning away. He shoots Ari a glare. “Okay, I never smelled her. But she looks just like a girl I knew who went to Berkley and she wore these god-awful sandals and talked a lot about feminism and lesbians and she smoked a whole lot of weed. I’m just saying.”

Out on the field the coach blows the whistle and shouts something toward Chloe.

“Kristen’s none of those things,” he says to Ari. Well, she’s probably a feminist. And he’s not sure about the sandals. But whatever. “And I’m not fucking her, okay. So get that gossip out of your head.” He watches Chloe jog as though in slow motion towards the coach. “Besides. She’s good for the girls.”

“Well, she wouldn’t pass me the motherfucking ball!” they can hear Chloe yell.

Ari arches an eyebrow.

“I can see that,” she says.

10.

After The PJ Incident, Jane was grounded. Or he meant to ground her. He sincerely doubts Kristen is as hard-line as he is when it comes to parental enforcement, but either way, that teenage nightmare of a relationship fizzles out just as fast as it started. It turns out that this time Jane isn’t faking it: she’s actually dating Agrestic High School Vice President Logan Lerman.

He considers that to be a relief, that is, until he walks in on Kristen talking to Jane about blowjobs.

“When you’re blowing a guy? You wanna stick a couple fingers up there. Most dudes will maintain that wanting anything up their ass automatically makes you gay as a Streisand movie marathon, but lemme tell you: they will thank you later.”

Jane blinks at her. “That’s really gross.”

Kristen covers Jane’s hand with her own. “Most sex things are. It’s noisy, and I don’t even mean vocally. All those body fluids and stuff. It’s disgusting.”

“Please tell me I didn’t just overhear all of what I think I overheard,” Bill says from the doorway. He went for a run, a run which took him not only out of the neighborhood but down into the valley. He ran until he thought his heart might burst and then he ran a little further on. He walked the entire way back (almost eight miles according to the pedometer Jane and Chloe bought him four Christmases ago) and by the time he reached the kitchen he was sweaty and his t-shirt was sticking and wet to his chest.

Jane rolls her eyes at Bill.

“I’m going out,” she announces.

“Be safe, have fun,” Kristen says, like she’s mocking the responsible parental role. Jane rolls her eyes at Kristen too and more or less stomps her way out of the house.

Kristen returns her attention to the cup of tea before her and Bill pulls a water bottle from the fridge. He chugs half of it and then groans a little, the muscles in his thighs burning still from that run. He leans back against the fridge and looks at Kristen.

“Were you really giving my teenage daughter blowjob advice.”

“It’s a good skill,” she shrugs and then stands, dumping the rest of her tea out into the sink.

“You know, I’d really like for Jane to make it through high school without having to shoot a stint for Teen Mom, if that’s okay with you.”

Kristen slouches at the sink and turns around to face him, crossing her arms over her chest.

“You’re a smart guy, Bill. You gotta know you can’t make a baby just because you swallowed some come.”

He’s pretty sure it wasn’t the run that’s going to kill him but rather this conversation. Based on the expression on Kristen’s face he’s pretty sure his face makes him look like he’s suffering the onset of an aneurysm.

“Do not talk about my daughter that way,” he says. He was aiming for, like, Clint Eastwood steely or something, but instead it just comes out whiny and kind of petulant. Kristen rolls her eyes, but unlike Jane, it’s good-humored.

She steps forward and pokes him in the center of his chest, seemingly unbothered by the sheer amount of sweat that’s soaked into the cotton.

“I think,” she says quietly, a malicious glint in her eye, “that what you need is for someone to pull that stick you’ve got up your ass -- ”

“And what? Fuck me with it?” he interrupts, his voice just as low as hers. “Follow the advice you gave my teenage daughter?”

She smiles, and it’s crazy -- despite the entire conversation they’re having the dirtiest thing about it is the way she’s smiling at him.

“It certainly couldn’t hurt,” she says. The smile grows into a smirk and she walks away laughing.

11.

There is no correlation, in his opinion, between the fact that since Kristen has moved in he’s started jacking off a lot more.

He totally googled that shit and apparently an increased sex drive after the death of a spouse isn’t a sign that you’re a sociopath or that there’s something awful, terribly wrong with you. If anything, he takes consolation in the fact that if or when he jacks off and if or when he thinks of Kristen, there’s nothing tender about it. He thinks the worst things imaginable (at least for him; he knows there’s a whole realm of terrifying porn out there he has never even probed and never really plans on it). He thinks about shutting her up with his dick in her mouth. He thinks about holding her down and fucking her until the only thing coming out of her mouth is profanity-laced gibberish and his name. He thinks about throwing her off-center the same way she has done to him. He likes to tell himself that he was fine before she got here. That he would have managed, probably even excelled, without her here. With her here it’s just another mess for him to clean up. It’s just another person to be accountable for and to.

He was fine before. He was fine.

But he jacks off in the shower after his run and after . . . whatever that was in the kitchen. He thinks about exactly what she said: her on her knees and sucking him off, a finger or two playing with his ass, and dude, he’s never even been into that shit. It almost makes him angry -- yet another thing Kristen has managed to fuck with in his day-to-day life: his libido -- and the anger only seems to make the lust prick that much sharper, making his skin feel hot and tight.

He gasps a little as he pulls hard at himself, twists, and just like that, the fantasy changes in his head. She’s still on her knees, but he’s got his cock in her ass; she’s dripping around the fingers he has in her cunt, and Jesus Christ, he pants, he’s fucked, he’s fucked, he’s completely fucked.

He comes hard and sudden, like a punch to the gut, all over his hand and the shower door. He’s breathing as hard as he was at the end of that eight-mile run, winded and out of sorts. He slumps against the wall under the shower spray and breathes deeply.

He calls Ari the next morning and tells her to set up a goddamn date.

12.

He’s starting to get ambitious, and ambition in the drug game is both a blessing and a curse.

Andy convinces his to expand and start a grow-house. They’ll grow the weed indoors with artificial light and hydroponics. Andy, Bill, Kristen, Jimmy and Seth are all in on it. He creates his own strain of weed, DILFweed (more as a joke than anything else thanks to Andy; “We all know, my friend, around these parts you are the tragic dad all these momma wanna fuck”), and it totally takes off.

“Better check yourself, Tony Montana, before you wreck yourself.” It’s the only word of caution Kristen offers on the expansion. Granted she says it after she’s smoked down the better part of a blunt, which really only makes her advice sound all the easier to dismiss.

It’s six months after Kristen moves in that the girls find out.

If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s his own, but he blames Kristen all the same. “It was your job to protect them. It was your job to keep them from this.”

Her eyebrows raise and she looks like she wants to laugh. “My job? Are you kidding me? I’m their aunt not their mother. I’m not the one who decided to dive headfirst into the, the, the criminal underbelly that is . . . Agrestic,” she trails off.

She shrugs. “Besides. They’re young. I’m sure their moral compass is still malleable enough for you to warp and remain Daddy Dearest.”

“That is far from comforting.”

13.

When he gave Ari the go-ahead, she went wild.

For the better part of a month, Bill finds himself out with a different woman. They’re all of the same breed: divorcees, a couple widows, a single mother or two. The only one who is any different from that template is Aubrey, who Bill considers to be Ari’s last ditch effort.

Aubrey is . . . something else. It weirds him out how she looks so young to him. She’s droll and sarcastic and more or less unresponsive the entirety of their first date and he finds it impossible to read her. He considers that date to be a bomb, his final strike out, and he spends the following Friday night with Kristen on the couch.

For the first time, he actually tries his own product. He smokes up with Kristen while she cues up an X-Files marathon -- “This show stoned is a revelation, man” -- and while they’re watching he gets a text from Aubrey.

“hi u home i wanna fuck”.

Kristen reads it over his shoulder and laughs hard. “You should really take her up on that. The monkish widower look has a limited shelf-life. And I’m sure your dick could use the exercise.”

He considers it (. . . sort of) but ultimately chickens out. He makes Kristen turn the TV and lights off ("god, you're paranoid when you're high, dude") and Kristen complies like it’s all some marvelously hilarious game -- “she scares me I don’t want to fuck her!” -- and they hide together on the floor beside the couch in case Aubrey, who rings the front doorbell a gazillion times in a row, can see them, the both of them giggling until Aubrey leaves.

“Let’s just stay down here,” Kristen says, and he looks at her like she’s crazy. She hits play on the DVD remote and the show starts up again, but the lights stay off and Kristen stays on the floor, sprawled out against him and the couch. He stays with her, the warmth of her body comforting, and he doesn’t know if it’s the weed or himself talking.

Around the same time as the whole Ari-induced-speed-dating, Kristen starts seeing Jon.

Much like his daughter and that PJ guy, he only finds out because he catches them in the act.

He walks in on her fucking Hamm in the backroom of his bakery (the ownership matters, in a gross, possessive, super masculine way, the ownership matters). And he should leave, he totally needs to walk away, but he doesn’t. He watches her. He watches her just long enough before pulling his cell phone out and digging through his recent text messages.

He capitalizes on Aubrey’s last text: he fucks her. He fucks her and he thinks this is what people mean when they talk about completely mindless sex.

It’s the first time he’s fucked anyone besides Amy in sixteen years. That’s a statistic that leaves him feeling hollowed out in the middle and sad. The sex itself is anticlimactic. He can’t remember the last time he did something like this, fuck a woman without any intention of loving her; college maybe? College before Amy?

But it’s not that mindless. He’s not thinking of Aubrey, but that doesn’t make it mindless.

He thinks about Kristen. He thinks about how she went all slack-jawed, bent over that table, how her fingers clawed for purchase along the edge. He thinks about the way her tits looked in Jon’s hands, the sounds she was making, and fuck. It’s a transgression of the worst sort -- fucking this glorified stranger while thinking about his sister-in-law in the bed he shared with his now dead wife.

Maybe that’s why it feels so entirely satisfying when he comes.

14.

The tide starts to turn against them when they get too big for their britches (a Kristen saying).

He starts to expand his business and he brings this kid Jonah, a student at the state college, in as a his on-campus dealer. Without knowing it, he’s stepped in on Bateman’s territory. Bateman’s a clean-cut member of society with a chain of home supply stores, and needless to say, he is less than thrilled to learn some dude from Agrestic is trying to get in on his market share.

Needless to say, this all culminates in a huge altercation when Bateman and his second-in-command Arnett hold Bill at gunpoint to take his stash of weed to sell themselves, an aggressive move to demonstrate who’s on top here.

Kristen steps into the kitchen at the grow-house only to find a Mexican stand-off.

“What the fuckkkkk, everybody’s got guns?!”

They all turn their guns on Kristen while Bill stands at the sink with his hands in the air.

“What is going on?!”

He doesn’t know how she does it. Maybe she has a gift for diplomacy he should have been exploiting from the start, or maybe her ability to ramble can sometimes have its benefits. But she sends Bill out to fetch the weed from Rashida and despite all the odds brokers a peace Bill never would have obtained.

They all leave, bullet-free.

Well, save the bullets embedded in the side of Bill’s Prius.

She doesn’t say anything, she just raises an eyebrow.

“My first drive-by,” he says drily, offering nothing more.

“We’ll get you an ice cream cake to celebrate,” she says just as sarcastically, and they drive the rest of the way home in silence.

When they do get home, Bill bangs through the house and goes out to the pool and for exactly three seconds shouts at the top of his lungs.

This, he thinks, is when it all starts coming down. Kristen’s arrival was just the start of it. He’s up to his eyeballs and for every moment things appear to be going his way, there’s a shit-ton of disaster just waiting in the wings.

“What are you doing,” Kristen says fro the sliding door, but it’s more accusation than question.

He takes a deep breath and drops down into a deck chair. Kristen doesn’t sit but she hovers above him.

“I don’t think I need to remind you of how bad shit almost just got, right? Right. You’re a smart guy, you’re a -- ”

“For the love of god, Kristen, please just shut the fuck up.”

She sighs and crosses her arms in front of her chest.

He shakes his head and leans forward, looking down at his hands.

“It’s all fucked up, man,” he says. Kristen doesn’t say anything.

“She died right in front of Chloe,” he hears himself saying. “She was making pancakes and then she just -- dropped dead.” He pauses. “Chloe had the foresight to turn the stove off. That was what she told me later. ‘Mom’s dead but I turned the stove off.’”

“Bill.” He doesn’t like the edge in Kristen’s voice.

“None of it makes any sense.”

Kristen doesn’t say anything.

“Amy dies and here I am with -- ” He doesn’t say the rest. He doesn’t look at Kristen and he doesn’t say the rest.

“Maybe,” Kristen says quietly, “She was just too good for all of us.”

He can’t bring himself to look at her.

15.

It’s Andy’s idea, but Kristen encourages him: they’ll burn down Bateman’s crop.

And that’s what they do. They do it without consulting Bill -- “We knew what you’d say,” Kristen tries to argue, “You’d make that mean face, the Bond villain face and tell us arson is bad”; “It is bad,” Bill says, trying to keep his voice down, “You just helped burn down the entire city.”

And that’s exactly what does happen.

The fire spreads fast, and if they had told Bill about this plan, what he would have told them is that he listens to the Weather Channel near exclusively in his car (“It’s a Prius, man,” Andy would say, “That’s more of a toy than a car”) and it’s the dry season and all it takes is an errant match, an open flame, someone ignoring Smokey the Bear at their campsite, and boom: wildfire.

Boom: consequences.

They burn the city down, and Bateman burns them too.

Jimmy’s the one who gets the tip: Bateman went to the DEA. He went with information about their grow-house. Bill listens to the news, and he always thought that should the law come sniffing around him he’d basically lose his shit. Save for the drugs and the dealing and the growing and the almost shoot-out, he’s always been a law-abiding citizen. He’s been a good person. At least that’s what he’s always thought. Had Amy never died none of this would have happened. He would have remained a good person and had the good sister and his daughters would grow up to be good and bright and wonderful.

Instead what he has is this.

Amy dies and here I am with --

He should have looked at Kristen’s face when he said it. Now he watches the fire spread into the tree line as Jimmy tells him the feds are coming. The feds. The fucking feds.

“They’re evacuating the area,” Bill says quietly. When Jimmy looks at him, it’s like he’s looking at a stranger. The apprehension is writ right there across his face.

The fire is spreading and he can smell the burning wood and the smoke in the house, even with all the windows closed. They’ll leave in the morning. It’s decided; he decided. He told the girls to pack, and he told Kristen, too.

For once he feels like he might actually have a plan.

16.

That night is their last night in the house he bought with Amy. It’s been a year since Amy died and over a year since Kristen moved in and stayed.

“Are we in trouble? Like, get a lawyer trouble?” Jane asks at dinner.

Bill ignores her. “Pack tonight. Anything and everything you want to keep, but that can fit in the car. We’re not coming back here.”

“Oh my god, we’re going off the grid,” Chloe says, but she says it like it’s some great adventure.

Kristen doesn’t say much of anything.

The girls go upstairs to pack while Kristen washes the dishes.

“No real point in that,” he says while he watches her. “We’re not coming back,” he says for the second time that night. It’s like he has to keep reminding himself. They are leaving. They are going and they are leaving all of this behind. Kristen doesn’t say anything, but she keeps rinsing the plate.

“I figure,” he says, if only to fill the room. Their roles are reversed: normally she’s the one who won’t shut up. “We’ll leave early. They’re evacuating the neighborhood tomorrow anyway. Figure it’s good if we’re gone before then.”

Kristen puts the last plate on the drying rack and finally looks at him across the counter.
She leans her body heavy into the counter separating them, cradles her face in her hand when she cocks her head up to look at him.

“Where you gonna go?”

He shrugs. “Down to the border. I guess. Ren Mar sounds nice. Down near the border. Isn’t your mom somewhere down there?” He pauses and tries to study her face, her question fully registering. “What do you mean ‘you’?”

“I think,” she says quietly, looking down for a beat, “I’ve overstayed my welcome.” She smiles, her lips pressed tight together. “You don’t need me, Bill. You probably never did. You’ll be fine and the girls will be fine. It’s high time I did what you suggested when I got here: get out.”

He stares at her. The smell of burnt wood reaching for them, climbing up the hillside, is almost suffocating.

“What are you talking about.”

She pushes away from the counter and walks around it, either towards him or to leave, but she pauses. “You wanted me gone. And now I’m going.”

He steps towards her, his body too near hers. “You can’t leave,” he says, his voice quiet, and she closes her eyes.

“Well, I can’t stay here.”

He reaches to cup her jaw but he grips the back of her neck instead. “You have to. You have to stay.” His hands are aggressive, but his tone is pleading.

She presses her hands flat to his chest. “Why? You . . . you were all I ever wanted. And you never wanted me. Why would I . . . ” she trails off like she’s said too much and pushes him away from her. He grabs her wrists in one hand, squeezes too tight and can feel the small bones grind together. Her eyes flash up to him.

He bumps his forehead against hers, her mouth right there, right next to his. “No, no, no,” he mutters. “I want you. I need you -- ”

“You want me to stay,” she hisses, accusation thick in her tone, and he lets go of her wrists and wraps his arm around her, pulling her body flesh against him.

“Yes,” he says, mean and insistent, wanting to look her in the eye but wanting to touch her mouth. “I want that. I want you.” He bumps his nose against hers and their lips finally touch, hers parting near immediately.

He kisses her harshly, his front tooth finding her bottom lip, and just as he’s pulling at her hips she grabs at his chest under his t-shirt.

He sucks at her mouth and likes the soft moaning sounds she makes under his mouth. She tastes like smoke when he kisses her, but everything around them, everything they’ve touched, would taste of that.

He gets his hand down her jeans and pushes at her through her panties. Her breath catches in her throat and he can hear the wet click of it, her mouth parting, her teeth just visible. He rubs at her until her hips start to roll into him. She won’t look at him though, not when he’s looking at her. She hides her face against his shoulder, pushes it into the crook of his neck, breathing hard when he finally pulls her panties to the side and pushes two fingers in her.

He fingers her roughly and she rubs her face in his neck. “It’s always about you,” she mutters into his neck, her mouth sticky and hot against the stubble that has grown in. She says it even though he has his fingers inside of her, spreading her open, pushing her to come. And she does come, wet and sopping by the time he finally gets her there -- her thighs trembling but pushing together to trap his hand between her legs.

“Tell me you’ll stay,” he says into her hair, and when she doesn’t say a thing he pushes her back against the kitchen table. He pushes her back, onto her back on the table, and peels her jeans down her legs.

When he asked her to leave a year ago, she told him she loved him. He’s asking her to stay now and no matter what he does to her he can’t seem to shake those same words back out of her.

He fucks her on the kitchen table they’ll leave behind come tomorrow. Both of them are mean with each other -- her blunt nails digging into every bit of skin she can find on him, scratching and clawing like she’s trying to make him understand something, something his mind can’t light on, not now, not like this, not with the both of them, their mouths biting at each other, trying to stay quiet, the only sound filling the kitchen the wet slap of skin on skin, the way the force of his hips, his cock stretching her, makes her gasp, barely audible but it’s there, the sound reedy and strained, the same strain he feels in his back, the muscles of his thighs, as he works his way into her.

He wants her to come around him. He wants her to remain around him. He wants her to stay, he needs her to stay, “don’t go,” he bites into her collarbone and her hips buck under him; “don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, tell me you still love me,” he begs of her, “tell me you still love me,” and he thinks that’s when she starts to come again.

The only thing she says is his name.

17.

Kristen came to the funeral with dark hair and dry eyes. She came to the house rather than meeting them over at the church for the service.

When he opened the door she folded her body around his, her fingers digging into his upper back, so he held her to him. He locked his arm around her waist and cradled the back of her head.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Bill, I’m sorry,” she whispered under his jaw and he pulled at her hair.

She stayed after everyone left, after they all left their casseroles and their tupperware and their condolences disguised as leftovers. She sat with him at the table in the kitchen and they split a bottle of dark red wine.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he finally said.

She looked at him, taken aback. “Of course I came.”

“Right,” he said, his eyes locked with her. “She was your sister.”

She didn’t blink. “She was my sister.” Her mouth was stained from the wine, and he was sure his was as well. He let his gaze fix on her mouth and he told himself there was nothing wrong with that. He watched her lick at her stained bottom lip with an equally stained tongue.

“I thought you might need me,” he watched her dirty mouth say.

18.

He finds Kristen in the kitchen the next morning, her bags packed.

“I’ll wait in the car,” she says, and he has never seen her look so determined before.

“You’ll come?”

“I’ll be in the car,” she says.

She’ll come.

He says good-bye to the house, in his own way, spilling the gasoline he fetched from the garage all over the family room and into the kitchen, all over that giant wood table.

He lights a match and drops it, watching for just a beat, long enough for it to light, before running out to the car and the girls waiting in the street.

Kristen arrived smelling like smoke, and they leave together stinking of the same.

He thinks they’ll drive through the rest of the day, the night. Drive until no one knows them. Until anyone who looks upon them would think, simply,

There’s a nice-looking family.

fin.