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It was Letty’s fault, anyway—asking for trouble, that kind of thing, leaving the door wide open for it to walk in. But it was finally warm again, and she’d been watching Mia and the kid through the window. Mia was sitting in the grass with her legs stretched out in front of her; the kid was trucking dirt from a dug-out hole under the honeysuckle. He was shoveling it into the bucket of a yellow plastic backhoe, taking a long meandering path, and dumping it at Mia’s feet. This had been going on for a while and he’d built up a decent pile. The frayed hems of Mia’s jeans were getting dusty, but maybe she didn’t care.
So Letty slotted the last dish into the rack and went out the front door and down the steps, and said, “Nice landscaping, kid,” and dropped a kiss to the top of Mia’s head. Mia was wearing plaid, sleeveless and tied at the waist, blue and chocolate brown. At some point in the last six months she’d started dressing like a farmer’s wife except for her hoop earrings; Letty thought it was funny and had been calling her Redneck Woman. After dark, she’d been teaching Mia to shoot, glass bottles lined up on the far fence and a suppressor on her Glock. There wasn’t that much to do out here.
“It’s a volcano,” Mia told her. With her thumb, she pressed a flat divot into the top. The kid was back under the bush, working his shovel into the dry dirt. She squinted, then raised her voice a little. “Baby, don’t put your hands in your mouth; they're filthy.”
The sun was getting low. Letty leaned back against the porch railing. She said, “Remember how wild you used to be?”
“Me?” Mia said, eyebrows raised. She liked to play innocent. She reached up, tugged the dish towel out of Letty’s belt loop, and snapped it across her ass. That made the kid giggle; he was making his way back towards them, and for a moment she brandished it at him too, then laughed and handed it back to her.
Letty threaded it in between her fingers, twisted it, let it come untwisted. She was remembering a time when she’d driven through a retaining wall, only because Mia had leaned over and yanked the wheel to the left; the cops had been on their asses. Back then they’d called it the blue light special, or sometimes, on the comms, Babylon. In all that time Mia hadn’t learned to fire a gun.
She said, “Yeah, you.”
“I don’t know,” Mia said. She yawned. Letty wanted to kiss her again and did, on the corner of her mouth where her lips curved up and met her cheek. “I guess so.”
At that moment, in the corner of her vision, Letty saw light on the dirt road. Light past the rusted gate—she'd oiled the hinges, and it struck her then that they had missed its creak, and that it had been a stupid idea. Sliding white light that meant one thing, and Mia was on her feet and had the kid by the hand already.
“Laundry room, now,” she said to him, and sent him off that way with a push. He was fast for three. Letty tracked the hard patter of his feet on grass, steps, creaking floorboards, all the way there. The guns were in the garage and she was following Mia. Mia’s fingers were quicker on the locks. She let Mia keep the Glock; she curled Mia's fingers around the grip. She leveled the shotgun.
All that for Rome with his hands up. Rome calling, “Don’t shoot! There’s enough trouble in the world!” Tej was behind him; Ramsey was climbing out of the back seat, hauling some kind of duffel with her.
“Jesus, man, call ahead.” Letty let the barrel fall. She’d barely even had the time to feel it, and now it was all flooding out of her.
Mia sighed and stepped forward to hug Rome, saying over her shoulder, “Letty, go and get him,” so Letty stowed the gun and went to pull the kid out of the linen closet. It was a little higher-tech than that; it locked from the inside, and the door was eight hundred pounds of steel.
“Password,” the kid said, muffled and then, sounding kind of hopeful. “Is it zombies?”
“1327.” Letty heard the lock click open. “Yeah, it was, but Mia got ‘em all.” She had to stifle a grin at his disappointed sigh, bracing her full weight against the door. Finally it swung inwards on its hinges, and he squeezed through the gap. “Cheer up. Next time we’ll leave you one.”
“Promise?” When he narrowed his eyes like that, she always thought he looked just like Mia.
“Sure. Guess what?” He was going to like this. “We got company.” That sent him racing off again, this time towards the door. Letty left the dish towel by the sink before Rome could give her shit for it and then followed him, listening to it in reverse, creaking floorboards, steps, grass.
Out in the yard it was weirdly silent. “Hey, little man,” Rome said, but the rest of them were all huddled around what looked like a tablet. From the set of Mia’s shoulders, Letty could have guessed what was going on with fifty percent accuracy.
She would have been wrong, though. Ramsey angled the screen toward her.
“Ah, fuck,” Letty said heavily. That side of the family.
-
Obviously there was nothing to be done about it, not once they’d packed up again, not since she and Mia and the kid had waved them off and their taillights had disappeared around the bend. They would just wait for the news to roll in from Montequinto. She and Mia were out of commission and probably not needed anyway, not when they’d dropped in on Dom already and he was en route to meet them there.
None of that rang very true in Letty’s head. For Mia’s sake, though, she kept on thinking it. They hadn’t talked yet in earnest because it was the kid’s bedtime. Mia put him down and Letty lingered in the hallway, listening to them.
“Do you remember Uncle Brian?” she heard Mia ask him, and really, that told Letty everything she needed to know. She’d known anyway; the world might not have been enough, but this would have been. In that way Mia was a lot like her other brother.
“Uncle Buster,” the kid said, and laughed. “He has a silver car.”
“Yeah?” Letty said. She leaned against the doorframe. “What make?” She tried to make eye contact with Mia, but Mia dodged her gaze. It didn’t surprise her.
Instead, Mia stood up; they’d made some silent agreement to change places. Letty crossed the room and sank down to sit on the edge of the mattress.
“Nissan,” he told her, blinking drowsily up at her. “GT-R.”
-
She stayed with him for a while after he fell asleep, watching the soft rise and fall of his chest, the flutter of his eyelashes. Sometimes she thought about what a trip it was that that had been her once, that that had been Mia, that all of them had been this age with the whole long road of the future stretched out for them. Now they all were what they were. She believed vaguely in predestination and at the same time it bothered her; she liked to think that people could change, not that those ideas couldn’t be reconciled, but she wanted to have chosen it. But she liked the notion that she’d always been going to find her way back to her.
The front door creaked open softly. She rose to her feet, then leaned down to kiss the kid’s forehead. He didn’t know much, she thought, and maybe that was a good thing. But he knew what they were to him and beyond that he knew why.
She went out into the living room. The screen door was closed; she squinted and couldn’t see her, so she eased it open gently and let it close behind her. They got real swarms of mosquitoes out here like crazy. In the air she could smell the lingering sting of one of Mia’s spiraling citronella coils.
Letty picked her way across the grass, around the garage, down the packed-earth driveway. There Mia was, standing by the rusted gate in the long overlapping shadows of the pines. She didn’t turn; she just waited for Letty to come to her, and when Letty was close enough, she said, “It’s not like I thought it would last forever.”
“Yeah,” Letty said. She exhaled. “This is why we only had one.”
“Mm,” Mia said, meaning not to push it, so Letty slung an arm around her waist, and after a moment, she rested her head against Mia’s shoulder. They stood there, just looking out at the long stretch past the gate, dirt road and dry fields and over it the unbelievable sky.
Way out here you could hear cicadas at night, sometimes owls; Letty went out on foot or on the bike after dark and swept the perimeter, the chain-link fencing between the pine trees. In the far west distance, the red lights of the highway. Revving the bike she could get a taste of the old night feeling, the open throttle, the lit burner, the snaking red-hot sensation of coming alive. But the air was stiller here and the skies were darker.
When Dom had come out to stay with them they had raced on the dirt road. Even then Letty had pulled around and, panting, braced her hand against the gate. She had looked back towards the house—its slanted roof, the light spilling out through the open door. Mia had been watching from the porch, leaning out over the railing.
Now Mia put her hand over Letty’s, the hand curled around her hip, and stroked her knuckles three times. She had been doing that for six years, which meant there had a been a time when she’d been doing it for as long as Letty could remember.
Letty asked, “When are you heading out?”
“In the morning,” Mia said. She turned to her, finally, and rested her forehead for a moment against Letty’s. “I don’t want to leave without saying goodbye.”
If it was a little pointed, Letty probably deserved it. She’d been selfish in 2009, easing herself out of bed silently. That was a topic they’d covered before and reached a consensus on; she’d atoned for it over the last three years by sleeping with her face buried in Mia’s hair.
The house was beckoning them back, the lights on downstairs and the faint glow from the kid's window. They made their way slowly back up the driveway.
“What are we going to tell him?”
“I don’t know,” Mia said, and sighed. She laced their fingers together; their shadows joined hands and merged and became one formless shape. Maybe two years would be enough. Maybe getting to see Brian would be enough. He had a kid attention span; they could pack up all his plastic trucks. “It kills me a little.”
But what could you do? “We gotta get hitched,” Letty said, which she had been saying for a while now, “for real. Something happens to you, I don’t know who they call.”
Probably her, but ever since she’d been wanted for extradition and dead she’d seen more value in having everything in place on paper. Even in her life before that, the pink slip had mattered a lot to her.
“One of these days,” Mia said, reaching for the door. In the bedroom she guided Letty down onto her knees and they fucked like it was the last time, not for any particular reason but because they always fucked that way, just on principle.
-
Mia left early, just after dawn, in the Chevy Nova. “You really want something that old?” Letty asked. “Are you sure?” She was standing on the porch, bouncing the kid a little on her hip, watching Mia load her overnight bag into the passenger seat. He was still sleepy, rubbing at his eyes and leaning against her shoulder.
“I’m not flying to Montequinto in this,” Mia said—okay, logically. She closed the door and came up the stairs again. Her hair was still damp from the shower.
“I love you,” she told the kid, and put her arms around him, and pressed her nose into his hair and closed her eyes and breathed in until he started to squirm. “Take care of Letty for me.” She said this like Letty couldn’t hear, leaning in close and confiding. “All right? Don’t let her get into any trouble.”
“Okay,” he said, and giggled when Letty dug her fingers into his side. Mia raised her head.
She was dressed more like her old self, black jeans and grey t-shirt; her jacket was kind of Western, embroidered with wings. A bird's, not an angel's. She was wearing her big hoop earrings.
“Don’t kick it,” Letty said, mostly because she didn’t think the kid knew what kick it meant. “That’s my thing.”
Mia looked at her incredulously, then softened. “I’ll see you soon,” she said, and reached out to tuck Letty’s hair behind her ear.
“Yeah?” Letty said. “How long you think I’ll hold out?”
“Forty-eight hours,” Mia said, and kissed her. “But I think it’s sweet that you’re being noble.”
She had called Brian in the night, Letty was almost certain; she had a hazy half-memory of Mia’s voice on the phone. She let the kid down onto his feet so that they could walk to the end of the driveway. Mia was going maybe five, ten, until the dirt road curved.
Letty’s eyes were stinging a little. It was the churned-up dust from Mia’s tires. She had to blink furiously. Serves me right, she thought, and she reached down and tugged on one of the kid’s curls and asked, “You hungry yet?”
Yeah, he was.
They went back inside. “I think you and I can hang on for three days,” she told him, opening the fridge. At any rate, Mia had said forty-eight, so she had to make it to forty-nine now. They were out of milk; she could fry him an egg and drive with him into town later. Maybe Mia would call when her plane landed. “Then I gotta go keep an eye on her.”
“Eye on Mia,” he said, sing-song, He was hanging off the fridge door, leaning back and swinging on the handle.
Smart kid. “Yeah, on Mia,” Letty said, and tousled his hair again. This time he yelped. She squinted into the fridge. “You want juice? We have apple and a weird one.” It was Mia’s. It was orange: carrot, something, and mango.
He did, but he wanted to see and he wanted to reach for it. “Letty, up.” Sure—arms up. She could give him a boost, hold on tight, kid, oof, gotcha.