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I.
It’s odd that the only thing Fritz said that really stung Brenda deeply, back before the divorce started, had to do with Rusty Beck.
“You treat people like you treat your half empty lipsticks,” he’d told her, holding up an offending silver tube she’d evidently left in the same odd spot in the living room for heaven knows how long. She’d sometimes wondered where that particular lipstick had gone, Clinique’s Runway Coral being a go-to choice to pair with about six of her professional outfits. But she’d never cared enough to make herself search the house for it. Nor did losing it teach her to take greater care before plunking down yet more makeup onto whatever surface happened to be horizontal and close by.
She realizes now, with a decided absence of scorn or regret, that Fritz must have stared angrily at the silver tube everyday for the weeks (months?) it sat there. A constant, unobtrusive reminder of his wife’s failure to give one fig about the things he expressly cared about.
Brenda can admit to herself now that their entire relationship felt like a spool that was slowly unraveling as they went along. She thought that maybe it was just her track record that caused the little nagging fear she sometimes felt at odd moments. Like when they waited in stilted silence for a table at a crowded restaurant, or the rare occasions they went to the grocery store together, Fritz’s annoyance so suspiciously disproportionate when Brenda inevitably left their loaded shopping cart ajar in a random aisle. Off somewhere, staring dreamily at ice creams.
It’s a fear that fell away not long after she left Major Crimes, if only by definition of her slipping into a state of deep apathy; a long stretch of time mostly characterized by the general sensation of feeling hollowed out and then, every so often, by a shattering wave of sadness. But it’s behind her now, that period that (the rational part of brain knows) she should properly call depression - but doesn’t ever, if only because of her parents’ tutting voices in her head.
And Fritz got the worst of it. Brenda knows he did. And maybe someday she’ll even be properly sorry about that, but not right now, while she still carries around that little wound he took some care to carve in her right before he left.
“Have you ever once picked up the phone to check on Rusty Beck?” he’d asked accusingly, and already knowing the answer. It hadn’t been the first or last name in his long list of people Brenda had thoughtlessly cast aside. But strangely enough, it was the one that caused her the most guilt.
Which is why it’s both wonderful and so very terrifying to run into Rusty now, in this bookstore that she never goes to and that’s not anywhere near her neighborhood, both of them standing in the travel section and looking hopelessly lost.
“Rusty,” she says, careful not to scare him. She doesn’t have to know much about what’s going on with him these days to understand that someone with his history will always tend toward gunshy.
“Chief Johnson,” he says after a startled pause. His eyes go wide at first and then they narrow considerably. Produce a good facsimile of the dubious look the woman who’s now raising him used to give Brenda, back when before the lawsuit. Back when Brenda’s biggest problems involved murderers and figuring out ways to get around Captain Raydor’s red tape.
“Brenda,” she corrects him. She’s pretty sure the title was meant as a punishment and if so, it’s an effective one. Allows herself to wince a little so he can see that he drew blood. Assure him that he’s the one with all the power here.
She knows that she could immediately start to charm him. It might not be easy and it certainly wouldn’t be right, but she could tell a few well chosen jokes and make him smile despite the fact that she hasn’t made the effort to talk to him even once since she took her job in the DA’s office. She could get him to relax and stop staring at her like she’s the enemy, although absolutely nothing she’s done since they almost died together in her home should qualify her as a friend of his. It’s what Brenda’s good at, after all; the talent that makes her special. So good at getting people to hand her their trust when they absolutely shouldn’t that the LAPD handed her an entire division on a platter.
She doesn’t do it. It’s wrong and she knows she owes him more than conversational manipulations he’ll later see through when he goes back over this exchange in his head. But even so, the impulse burns all the way down when she makes herself swallow it.
“You goin’ on a trip?” she asks him, nodding at the guidebook he’s holding in his hand. She can’t see the title (his white knuckled hand is covering the print at the top of the slim book), though the cover picture is of a jungle that’s probably the Amazon. She’d say Peru if she had to guess.
“Just killing time here,” he shrugs with one shoulder. “Waiting on Sharon to buy something.”
Brenda should have anticipated that Sharon was probably around, given that Rusty is. But as intelligent as Brenda is, she understands that she sometimes deliberately ignores the obvious as a way of not dealing with reality.
The muscles in her neck feel tight and she tries to control her blooming panic. She volunteers to Rusty, “I came to buy a journal,” although he doesn’t ask and clearly doesn’t want to know. “I go through these periods when I think I should keep one. The problem is I never, ever stick with it.”
“You don’t say,” Rusty says sourly.
“Guess I have trouble stickin’ with most things,” she acknowledges, her voice uncharacteristically free of any false cheer and her smile a decidedly sad one. “Maybe keepin’ a diary consistently woulda meant keeping a record of all things I let slip by me.” She amends softly, “all the livin’ people I ignored because I was too preoccupied with the dead ones.”
“Maybe you should try it,” he replies, not unkindly this time. “See if that changes.”
Brenda can tell by the way Rusty is looking slightly past her shoulder that Sharon is standing not too far behind her. Has probably been hovering within earshot since she spotted the loose cannon that is Brenda Johnson chatting up her ward.
Brenda doesn’t know what people are saying about her failed marriage, and she doesn’t know how obvious it is to others that she’s been flailing to the degree she has been recently. She’s excelled in her present job because the last thing that will ever fail her is her professional work ethic, but sometimes she has lunch with David Gabriel and he stares at her across the red vinyl booth of the diner they favor. Looks at her like he’s uncomfortable and worried and maybe a little bit lost, because he doesn’t know who she is, exactly. Like she’s now some shoddy photocopy of the woman he use to work for and he finds this fact both painful and disorienting.
It's possible Brenda is just paranoid and isn’t common knowledge that she’s a bigger mess than she ever was before, having fallen to pieces because she had to hand back a job that she was way too good at for it to be anything remotely healthy. A haphazard heap of sharp edges and odd angles that might never fit back together again, because the only person who could ever make her feel right when she's like this was her mama, and her mama went and died while Brenda was too busy to pay attention.
But whatever the greater Los Angeles law enforcement community may or may not know about Brenda Johnson’s personal life, she cannot bring herself to turn around and meet the gaze of Captain Raydor. Simply does not have the strength left in her to make polite conversation with Sharon - a woman who is never a mess, never in shambles, and has probably never left a tube of her expensive red lipstick sitting on a random table for weeks and weeks on end.
“My cell phone number hasn’t changed,” Brenda makes herself smile at Rusty. “If you want to grab a pizza together or… Well, do anything really, I’d sure like to hear from you.”
Brenda doesn’t hang around a second after that. Just puts one foot not too hurriedly in front of the other and heads toward the glass doors in front of her, not stopping to touch her fingers to the neatly displayed row of leather journals and only a little sad to bypass the pink canvas one that has little purple flowers splashed across the cover. Its pages no doubt white and crisp, devoid of previous failures.
She’s just about home when her phone chimes with a text. Pulls it out from her purse a minute after she manages to wedge her car into a prime parking spot, right in front of her new building.
I hope you’re not one of those freaks who likes pineapple on their pizza.
And then, while she’s still gripping her phone and staring, Btw this is the guy you almost got murdered with that one time in your house.
She knows that Rusty’s text is a miracle and she’s grateful for the kindness he’s apparently decided to show her. But she also starts to panic now, because this where she always manages to screw things up. Brenda is sneaky, pretty, and charming when she wants to be, so most of the time she can get more than one foot in whatever door she picks. It’s what comes after the initial social opening that she bungles things up with people.
It’s tempting to not respond immediately but that’s a mistake that she won’t let herself make. She squints down her nose through her glasses and slowly pecks out her reply.
With you on the pineapple. But if you’re one of those damaged Californians who don’t like pepperoni this relationship is never gonna work.
. . .
II.
Brenda has dinner with Rusty on Mondays. It’s a routine they’ve managed to keep pretty consistently for about four solid months, if only because one of the few things Brenda does well is eat.
“Is it okay with Sharon that you’re out tonight?” Brenda had asked the first time they met. Monday was a safe bet for dinner with Rusty because Major Crimes was mostly certain going to occupied with murders that piled up over the weekend, and Sharon being busy meant Brenda didn’t have struggle with the southern guilt she’d feel, extending an invitation to Rusty but not the woman who’s graciously opened her home to him.
“I’m not a kid,” Rusty had rolled his eyes at her. Brenda had evidently looked concerned because he added after a short pause, “she said she’s happy I’m not just rotting in the condo, playing video games while she stands over dead bodies in those crazy pointy shoes of hers.”
It sounded like Sharon’s sentiment if clearly not her wording, so Brenda let it drop indefinitely after that.
“You must have been , like, your niece’s favorite babysitter,” Rusty tells Brenda now, a huge bite of cake chipmunked in his cheek. He’s in her apartment because she’d planned to cook for him. But of course she forgot to shop beforehand and then all the delivery options they could agree on were quoting wait times of at least forty-five minutes, so when Brenda took one look at Rusty’s crestfallen face, her own tummy rumbling, she made a snap decision.
“Hope you like German chocolate cake because that’s what we’re gonna have for supper,” she’d said. Smiled when his eyes lit up like they were about to do something wonderful and forbidden.
“I’m not one of those irresponsible people who lets a kid have cake for breakfast,” Brenda corrects him, holding up her fork. Rusty gives her a pointed look and she amends, “not until she was eighteen and old enough to make her own poor decisions about food.”
“Did you just call chocolate a poor decision?” he asks, his eyebrows shooting up.
She slides a bite of frosting into her mouth, her lips enveloping the fork as her eyes screw shut in bliss. “Musta been the low blood sugar,” she shakes her head, eyes still closed. “Don’t ever tell anyone I said that.”
“Deal,” he snickers, and she opens her eyes in time to see him pull his vibrating phone from his pocket.
“Everything okay?” Brenda asks after his expression falters.
“Just Sharon asking when I’ll be ready to go,” he tells her. Slides the phone back in his jeans without saying anything else or making eye contact.
“I’m surprised she’s home on a Monday night,” Brenda says casually. It’s clear from Rusty’s shift in demeanor that there’s a problem, but she doesn’t think it will go well if she asks outright whether Sharon disapproves of their dinners. Maybe Brenda just doesn’t have the guts to find out for sure what Sharon Raydor thinks of her.
“She took a personal day today. Something about the case they closed last week… I think it involved a little kid, but I don’t know for sure. Lieutenant Flynn started to tell me and Sharon stopped him. Gave him a glare that, like, would have melted the tires off a car.”
“I think I’ve been on the receiving end of that glare a time or two,” Brenda mutters, and Rusty looks a little fraught. Like he’s torn. “Ya know, kiddo,” she says, “I really enjoy my time with you but if you ever need to spend time with Sharon instead, I understand. She has a hard job… A really, really hard job, and sometimes she’s gonna want to spend time with the folks she loves.” She smiles softly, “spend time with you.”
“Honestly,” he shrugs, “I was going to text you and cancel but Sharon wouldn’t let me. I think that she was worried that it would hurt your feelings?” He shrugs again, “I didn’t want to fight with her when she was already kinda out of it.”
“Honey,” Brenda says, sitting up, “it’s okay to push when you’re trying to take care of people.” Musters the courage to ask, “where is Sharon now? At home by herself?”
“No. She must be running errands or something because she said she’s five minutes away if I wanted a ride.”
“Tell her to come join us.”
“Are you sure?” Rusty asks, though his eyes are now bright and hopeful. “I mean, I know that you guys didn’t have the easiest relationship and I know she’s the new Brenda, or whatever.” Brenda is sure her face doesn’t flinch at this because she made damn sure it didn’t, but Rusty must still realize his mistake because he starts to backpedal, his voice panicky and high. “I didn’t mean... Shit. I just meant I know that Sharon isn’t, like, your favorite person!”
As much as Rusty has it right, he also has it dead wrong. And to Brenda’s flooding horror, she realizes that if Rusty thinks this it’s probably because Sharon thinks it too. Feels her jaw go slack when it clicks that Sharon must have interpreted her distance as jealousy or even resentment, and despite that instructed the teenager she’s raising to honor his social commitment to Brenda at her own personal expense.
“You text that woman right now,” Brenda orders in the tone she used to take with would-be witnesses and Will Pope but now mostly uses with herself when she's in need of lecturing. What with her mama no longer here anymore to put her back on the straight and narrow; to remind her to be brave even when it's hard.
Rusty immediately freezes in his chair, phone in hand, when she points a stern finger at him.
“And I’m gonna to say this to you one time and one time only, because after this you are gonna accept this as the word of gospel: Sharon Raydor is loyal, sharp, and the most elegant, composed person I have ever met. So if there are times when I haven’t necessarily jumped at the chance to see her it’s because it’s real hard to stand next to your brother Esau when you’re Jacob. But that’s my failin’, never Sharon’s. You hear me?”
“Okay,” Rusty shouts, holding up his hands. “Jesus, Brenda.” Taps out a text faster than light on his phone as he mutters, “you and Sharon and your weird bible metaphors.”
Brenda sucks in a deep breath, amusement wrestling with embarrassment. "Guess I should just be grateful you understood the reference."
"Lucky for you I used to reread Genesis between tricks," he snarks, and Brenda winces at the joke but chuckles a little anyway.
There's a knock at the door only five minutes later, which means Sharon was somewhere really close, just biding her time before she could snatch Rusty back. She walks right in when she realizes the door's apparently not locked and Brenda braces herself for a safety lecture that never comes.
"Sorry to interrupt," Sharon says in what, for Sharon, is a small voice. She's in casual clothes that aren't meant for the office. Far more flattering than what Brenda would herself go grocery shopping in, maybe, but still a cotton top and shoes without any heel.
"No interruption," Brenda says, and gets up to go to the kitchen. "You want some wine, Sharon?"
Brenda must miss some kind of silent exchange because there's a pause and then Rusty says, "I can drive home."
"Then yes. Please," Sharon agrees, just as Brenda returns with a bottle, two wine glasses, and a fresh fork.
Sharon sits down with Rusty at Brenda's small dining table. Openly stares in dismay at the three-layer cake that sits dead center, two obvious mining operations having been conducted on outer edges.
"There was a slight change in dinner plans," Rusty gives Sharon an impish look. Brenda thinks this might not go over particularly well but Sharon's tired face softens when she meets Rusty's smile, and then her eyes shift entirely. Like the stain of something awful in her mind is being wiped away.
Brenda knows what that's like. Misses that feeling of home dearly and painfully, but can still find it within herself to feel content at someone else having it.
"You have some catchin' up to do, " Brenda says to Sharon and hands her the new fork she’s been holding in her hand. Sharon takes it with a small smile but then stares at the rich, sprawling cake like she's about to say "thank you but I'll pass."
Instead she drags her fork across the top of cake, carving out a large if neatly drawn triangle in the quadrant closest to her seat. "I'm claiming this territory as mine," Sharon says in that authoritative tone of hers. "Take note that trespassers will not be tolerated."
Well then.
"I don't know, Captain Raydor," Brenda says. Fills both her their wine glasses and shoots Rusty a sly smile. "I may have to test your resolve on that particular border."
"That'll be between you and my beanbag gun, Chief,” Sharon says, her fork cutting into the cake with some precision as she smirks.
It's the same smirk that used to make Brenda bristle because it was so effective and belittling, but now Brenda just sees the way it makes Rusty smile from ear to ear.
Digs her own fork dangerously close to Raydor territory. Waits to see if Sharon will take the bait.
. . .
III.
Brenda can’t get the smoke alarm in Sharon’s condo to stop emitting its piercing lecture.
She can get it to quiet down for about a minute or two but as soon as she goes back to the stove, it starts right up where it left off. She has every window in the condo open at this point and really the soup isn’t burning. It isn’t. It’s just producing a lot of steam and this apparently doesn’t suit Sharon’s fascist little smoke detector's compulsive sensibilities.
Maybe this is the universe punishing her for dirtying up another woman’s kitchen without even getting her permission. Maybe this is what she has coming to her for trying to do something nice in what is probably entirely the wrong way.
“What on earth,” Sharon says, coming through the door.
Oh hell.
“Sorry,” Brenda says, waving her arms wildly to move the steam away from the alarm. “Apparently your smoke detector doesn’t fancy southern cookin’. Must be a born and bred Californian.”
The alarm goes quiet, hopefully for good, and Brenda turns to face the woman who’s kitchen she’s kind of spent the last three hours completely destroying.
“Are those dumplings?” Sharon asks, peering into the large pot, and before Brenda can apologize or try to explain herself.
They don’t speak all that often, and when they do it’s almost always about Rusty. But Brenda’s noticed, not with displeasure, that Sharon just tends to skip right over all the painful, obvious questions. Like ‘how long have you and Agent Howard been separated?’ or ‘what in the hell are you doing in my kitchen?’.
“Ham and dumpling soup,” Brenda tells her. Wipes her forehead in case there’s any flour stuck there. “My mama’s mama’s recipe.”
“I hope Rusty appreciates all your work,” Sharon says, still staring thoughtfully into the steam.
“Actually. . . we ate takeout together earlier,” Brenda admits. “This is… Well, this is for you.”
“For me?” Sharon repeats, her tone eerily stoic.
“If you’re hungry. Rusty said you rolled out more than a day ago so I assumed you’ve been livin’ on coffee and bad takeout, ‘specially if the boys were the ones you sent to get you supper.” Adds, trying to sound cheerful rather than nervous, “Rusty wanted ice cream for dessert so he went to go fetch some.”
Sharon is so very silent after this that Brenda doesn’t know what to do. So she turns around and starts to wipe up all the flecks of powdered goods and pools of grease she’s gotten on Sharon’s previously shiny stove.
She keeps on cleaning as Sharon pulls a bowl out from the cupboard and silently dishes herself a generous helping of ham and dumplings, then leans over the counter where a pan of cornbread is cooling and considers the whole loaf before wrestling free a corner piece.
“Would the cook like some wine?” Sharon finally asks her, sounding calm rather than completely pissed. So there’s that at least.
“She would,” Brenda sighs, her back to Sharon, and the older woman chuckles, low and throaty.
“White wine alright?”
“Wine is wine,” Brenda says, but silently hopes it’s not one of those whites that's like sucking on a piece of oak.
“The cleaning will keep,” Sharon assures and pats her on the shoulder. “Why don’t you sit with me?”
It seems rude to make Sharon eat alone so Brenda grabs a piece of cornbread on her way to Sharon’s dining table. She expects Sharon to sit directly across from her, surprised when she gently lowers herself into the seat to Brenda’s left.
“This was really kind of you to do,” Sharon says after a long, not quite comfortable silence. “I can’t remember the last time someone cooked for me like this.”
Truth be told, Brenda isn’t exactly sure what made her do it. Sharon had sent her a nervous sounding text early in the morning asking if Brenda would be willing to take Rusty to his psychiatrist appointment later in the afternoon. Not the first favor of this kind that’s come up with regard to Rusty lately. He’s been moody and mercurial the last few weeks, and Sharon seems to be concerned about him making good on seeing Dr. Joe even if she’s working.
Brenda doesn’t quite know what’s going on with Rusty and it’s not her place to push. But the two of them had a perfectly lovely evening with each other, just hanging around after his appointment, and then Brenda had gotten to thinking about Sharon. How much harder it must be to keep your focus on a case when you’ve been up for thirty-six hours and there’s someone at home you’re filled with worry about.
Brenda never had the latter problem (she’s lucky Fritz was there to remember to feed the cat because lord knows it’s not a logistical detail that ever crossed her mind). She’s not sure how Sharon’s managing it without failing at everything.
“I started with a real basic soup,” Brenda tells her, “but then I thought it would be a shame to not have dumplin’s in it. Just wouldn't have been a proper meal. . . I’m by no means a great cook but there are a handful of recipes I made so often with my mama, even I can’t screw ‘em up.”
She doesn’t tell Sharon that once she started cooking, she missed her mama so badly that she just kept on cooking because she didn’t know how to stop. Made the dumplings from scratch and then the cornbread because if she stopped moving around the kitchen, she was pretty sure she was going to cry then and there.
If Sharon hadn’t come home when she did, she probably would have ended up with a wide assortment of fried vegetables and three different different kinds of pie. Most of fairly dubious quality.
“This is really good,” Sharon pronounces, and it sounds like she’s surprised. Brenda suspects Sharon probably took some to be polite but (understandably) braced herself for the worst.
“I promise I would never deliberately poison you, Captain Raydor,” Brenda winks. The panic subsiding enough for her to remember to be charming, given the mess that’s still in the other room.
Sharon smirks and looks like she’s about to say something but then her gaze locks on the shredded wrapping paper she can see sitting on the counter. The opened card and the present Rusty had given Brenda earlier that afternoon. And then Sharon’s eyes go wide with horror (maybe panic?) and her hand shoots to the skin below her neck.
“Today’s your birthday!” Sharon says, her hand still at the base of her throat. “Shit . . . Rusty told me and it slipped my mind. I - shit."
"It's alright."
"Brenda, I'm so sorry."
“Don’t be. There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“But I asked you to - Brenda! You must have cancelled plans to take Rusty to that appointment!”
“I did, but it was just with David Gabriel and it was nothing big or important, and instead I got to see Rusty today instead of in a few days. Which is kinda a present in itself.”
“I'm sorry," Sharon says again.
“Sharon,” Brenda breathes out, sounding more forceful now. Weighs her personal dignity against the woman’s obvious sense of social failure.
It’s a feeling of inadequacy that Brenda’s obviously well acquainted with, being that she’s spent a lifetime forgetting birthdays, failing to write ‘thank you’ cards, and most recently calling the night security guard who works in her apartment building by the wrong first name entirely. Repeatedly, for heaven’s sake. And though Brenda’s always been like this - always been a mess - that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still feel guilty for it, doesn’t feel silly and childish for all the little ways in which she constantly feels like she’s failing as she goes about her life. So she can only imagine how Sharon must feel at the moment; Sharon who probably has her holiday cards in the mail by the first of December and likely buys all her presents several months in advance.
The woman just can’t be well equipped to handle this kind of failure.
“I don’t have an exciting life,” Brenda says bluntly, deciding to take pity even at the risk of personal humiliation. “I’m a workaholic who’s now on her second divorce, and I’ve chosen - quite deliberately - to live in a state that don't contain any of my close kin. Please trust me when I tell you that you didn’t cause me to miss out on a crowded surprise party in some stuffy restaurant. . . There wasn’t and you didn’t, and I spent my afternoon with the person I honestly look forward to seein’ more than anyone else.” She adds, more to herself than to Sharon, “which is disturbin', now that I think about it, because it means my best friend is is a teenage boy.”
She expects Sharon to keep give her a look of sympathy and pity, the kind that’s meant well but always chafes when you’re on the receiving end. Plus Sharon is wearing her dark eyeliner and crimson lipstick, still dressed in a navy blazer and perfectly tailored pants, so this is going to feel like Captain Raydor getting a look inside the loneliest, darkest corners of Brenda Leigh’s sad, empty little life.
This is something that’s going to burn, of this Brenda is pretty sure.
“God, I’m so glad Rusty has you to spend time with,” Sharon says, the words sounding breathy and relieved, her green eyes fluttering shut for the briefest moment. “I’m trying so hard to do everything right for him but it’s not just raising another kid… It’s harder because I have to worry about all damage left by the adults in his life who couldn’t be bothered to get their shit together.” She makes a little sighing noise in the back of her throat and looks at Brenda like Brenda’s been doing her some kind of huge, impossible favor. “I still worry that what I do for him will never be enough but now. . . Well, now Rusty has you too and that makes it feel easier. Less insurmountable."
Sharon abruptly looks down and fills her mouth with cornbread after that. As if she thinks she’s said too much already and she’s trying to stem the flow of anything else that might fly out next.
Brenda smiles a little. Knows just how that feels.
“What was his present anyway?” Sharon asks after she’s chewed and swallowed more carbs than Brenda guesses she probably eats in a given week. Still sounds friendly and open, if now a little more controlled. “I asked him and he kind of dodged me. Changed the subject almost immediately.”
“A journal,” Brenda replies. Feels her mouth tug up on one side despite that she has to swallow the lump in her throat to get the words out. “It’s kind of, uh, an inside joke.”
Sharon swivels her body around in the chair, pushes her glass down her nose and stares over them, apparently trying to get a peek at Brenda’s gift amidst the pile of wrapping paper.
“Are those white flowers painted on the cover ?” Sharon asks, now leaning a little to the side in order to get a better look.
“Cherokee roses,” Brenda says brightly. “The state flower of Georgia. When I was little my mama had some in front corner of our yard and sometimes when she was fixin’ dinner she would let me -”
Brenda doesn’t finish getting the memory out because she can’t. One minute she’s smiling and telling a story, and the next she’s sobbing uncontrollably. Presses her hands to stop the burning behind her eyes and doubles over then and there. Breaks down at the dining table of a woman with whom she isn’t exactly friends and for whom she keenly remembers harboring a particularly intense dislike.
“Sharon!” Rusty shouts, the sound of something hitting the floor quickly following the closing door. Seems the universe's sense of humor is sick if remarkably consistent in theme. “What did you do to her?”
There's a short stretch of silence in the room, and Brenda's vaguely aware of the fact Rusty's footsteps have stopped somewhere behind her. That Sharon's hand is gripping her left arm, just below her bicep, and Brenda isn't sure how long it's been there.
"She didn't do anything," Brenda says. She makes herself get the words out since Sharon's made no move to defend herself to Rusty, but she keeps her hands pressed to her face, her hair blocking everything from view save the sliver of her own jeans she can see through her fingers. There are little spots of baking powder on them, bright and white against the dark washed denim, and Brenda just lets herself stare at her bespeckled thighs because what will coming out from her curled position do now? Not like anything can salvage her dignity.
"Is it the diary?" Rusty asks anxiously, and the sound of his panic makes Brenda sit up straight, brushing her frizzy curls out of her face and desperately wiping her eyes. “I honestly didn’t mean it in a shitty way, Brenda.”
“No, honey, I know,” Brenda shakes her head. She still feels like she’s going to cry again, like her body can’t stop itself now that’s started. Which is precisely what she was afraid of earlier when she was cooking. Maybe even why she had started cooking to begin with?
But Brenda won’t let herself scare Rusty more than she already has. Not even if it means she can’t quite tell him the whole truth about that little diary he gave her. After all, it's not his fault that he gave her such a sweet, thoughtful present and unwittingly handed her something that tore open the wound of her mama’s absence. Reminded her so poignantly of the gaping hole inside herself that she's afraid will continue ache hollow until the day she's put in her own grave.
“No,” she says again, this time her voice sounding strong and even. “Your present was lovely and so, so thoughtful. It’s just that Sharon and I were talkin' and it hit me how much I miss my mama on days like today.”
Brenda hears Sharon clear her throat and the sound makes her jump a little because it’s right next to her ear. She turns her head and sees that Sharon’s face is only inches from her own, her fingers still wrapped around Brenda's arm, more loosely now, and Brenda doesn't know why Sharon doesn't just let her go entirely.
Why won’t Sharon just let her go?
"So," Sharon says, standing up. "What, uh, kind of ice cream did you buy?"
Rusty nervously looks from Sharon to Brenda, then picks up the canvas shopping bag he dropped behind him and peers inside like he’s checking for any damage. "I wasn't sure what to get," he says. "So I got two kinds. Phish Food and Half Baked."
"I'll scoop," Brenda volunteers, snatching the bag away. Relieved to put a room between herself and Sharon's worried expression, and more than happy to miss whatever silent exchange that's undoubtedly taking place behind her.
A few minutes later she's still in Sharon’s kitchen, bowls pulled out but sitting empty. She's shoveling a spoonful of ice cream into her mouth when Rusty appears beside her.
"Are you going to save any of that for us?" he asks her. He's trying to be funny but Brenda knows he's still uncomfortable. He doesn't do well with conflict and big, emotional displays make him kind of twitchy.
"I haven't decided," Brenda sighs, but looks at his face and smiles a little. Nudges the container of ice cream a bit in his direction.
"Guys?" Sharon calls, and Rusty looks at Brenda like he's waiting for her to move first.
"I can't believe you thought she made me cry," Brenda tsks at Rusty instead, digs her dirty spoon right back into the pint.
"In my defense," he whispers, "I saw the way you left the kitchen. . . I’m pretty sure she’s, like, shot people for less."
"Probably," Brenda agrees.
Sharon comes into the kitchen and crosses her arms when she sees the two of them standing there, eating ice cream on her dirty counter. Bowls clean and untouched right beside them.
"Happy birthday, Brenda," Rusty says, and out of the corner of her eye Brenda can see Sharon crack a slow, uncertain smile.
"Thanks, honey," Brenda winks at him. "It's not everyday a handsome man brings me two different kinds of ice cream."
. . .
IV.
“I thought you were going to make reservations,” Sharon sighs at Brenda. Trows a quick dirty look to a man on his phone who very nearly stomps on the toe of her boot.
They’re sitting on a bench in the foyer of an upscale restaurant they’ve agreed to go to for dinner. It was Brenda’s turn to pick the place and therefore her job to make sure they had a reservation. And surprise, surprise, she didn’t, so now they’re both hungry and waiting in a crowded restaurant, both of them wedged together on a tiny piece of furniture that’s design regrettably emphasizes form rather than function
“You already know that I was and I didn’t,” Brenda crosses her arms. “No need to harp.”
“I’m just so hungry,” Sharon tells her, and Brenda affectionately pats her arm.
“I know,” Brenda says. And then, “I can hear your stomach from here.”
“No you can’t,” Sharon shoots back, but it’s no use trying to sound stern when Brenda can already see her smiling enough to show a flash of white, straight teeth.
Brenda started having dinner with Sharon after Brenda moved her hangout sessions with Rusty to weekends so that Sharon could join them if she wanted to, but then Rusty started bailing on Brenda because he’d begun to spend more and more of his weekends with friends his own age.
“Rusty. You can’t back out on Brenda last minute,” Sharon had lectured months earlier. After Brenda had come all the way to Sharon’s condo to meet the two of them and it turned out Rusty had made conflicting plans with some of his classmates. “It’s rude,” Sharon crossed her arms.
Sharon hadn't been wrong and Brenda didn’t want to undermine her, but Brenda also couldn’t quite blame a teenage boy for not wanting to spend his Saturday evening with two middle-aged women.
“Why don’t you and I just go alone,” Brenda had wearily suggested to Sharon. It had been a long week of work and she’d had the Mayor’s office breathing down her neck about the way one of David Gabriel's investigations was playing out. What Brenda had wanted more than anything was hot food and a comfortable chair to sit in, with or without Rusty.
“Really?” Rusty’d asked.
“Really,” Brenda’d nodded, her car keys jangling in her hand. “C’mon, Sharon. I’ll even let you pick the restaurant. If you're nice."
So Brenda’s dinners with Rusty had moved back to Mondays, and somehow, strangely, her dinners alone with Sharon stuck around too.
“So you and Sharon are friends now or whatever?” Rusty asked Brenda, not that long ago, and Brenda had shrugged at him like it wasn’t any big deal.
So she and Sharon are friends now. Whatever.
“One of us needs to go flirt with that short little host man,” Brenda says now to Sharon. “Why don’t you go see how fast that ol’ Raydor charm can get us a table?”
“That won’t help us,” Sharon shakes her head.
“How do you know until you try?”
“Because,” Sharon says, her voice thick with frustration now, “I’m almost positive that maître d’ is gay.”
“You sure?” Brenda swivels her head to look at the guy. Though what, exactly, she’s looking to find she couldn’t possibly say.
“How can I be?” Sharon gives a dry, exasperated laugh. “Besides, why should I be the one who has to flirt my way to a table you were supposed to book?”
“Because,” Brenda smiles, “I might be good at sweet talkin’ people but you, honey, are what two of my brothers would call ‘man bait’. Plus I’m pretty sure that host was checkin’ you out when you walked away.”
“Maybe he was just admiring the tailoring of my dress?”
It is a flattering dress, this much Brenda won't argue. Gray-green linen that nips in at the waist and ends just above the pale skin of Sharon's knees.
"Maybe," Brenda says. "Though my money still says he was lookin' at what's in the dress."
"Well. I'm not going to pretend that I'm above a little flirting for faster seating, but I draw the line when it's at a restaurant that's boasting salmon as their daily special. I do have dignity."
"You like salmon," Brenda squeaks. "You ordered it last week at that place off Sunset!"
"My point," Sharon sniffs, "is that an advertised chef special is supposed to be something impressive." She pushes up her glasses with an efficient move of a long, elegant index finger. "Even you couldn't screw up salmon, Brenda."
"You'd be surprised," Brenda mutters. Then looks at Sharon's tired expression and begins to worry in earnest.
She's picked this place because it's new and the last time they'd been out together Sharon pointed it out as they drove by it. "That place looks promising," Sharon had said idly, and Brenda heard Sharon’s nail click softly against the passenger-side window. "We should give it a spin sometime." And Brenda had been equally pleased and puzzled by the way that Sharon said it.
Is there no one else that Sharon goes out to dinner with? Or is it just that Brenda is now Sharon's preferred dining companion?
“Do you wonna leave?” Brenda asks nervously. “Because if so, we can just… go.”
Sharon’s goes wide and she pivots her legs closer to Brenda, erasing the tiny sliver of personal space they to had begin with - the two of them crammed on this small, supremely uncomfortable bench that barely rates as an ottoman. Puts her hand on Brenda’s arm when she says, “I don’t want to cancel our plans. I’m sorry if I sounded like I don’t want to be here… This is fine. I’m sure the food here will be great. Really. . . I’m fine. . . It’s fine.”
The one thing Brenda knows for sure is that Sharon isn’t fine. The woman’s had a miserable, sleep-deprived week and now she’s starving, forced to wait an hour for food that, truth be told, probably isn’t worth the misery of sitting here in limbo. Plus Brenda has already seen what the dining room looks like and the chairs there, while elegant in appearance, look only a little more comfortable than their present perch. Whoever decorated this place either has horrible taste in furniture or else didn’t want people to linger.
But this is one Sharon’s like when she’s had an awful week, Brenda’s learned. She doesn’t get moody and lash out at people the way Brenda herself does - no, Sharon goes entirely the other way. Works so hard at not taking out her bad day on the people she cares about that she becomes oddly soft spoken and diplomatic. As if it’s everyone around her is the wounded animal and it wasn’t her who recently had stand over the battered bodies of two young women, neither of whom were much older than the teenage boy she’s raising.
“I didn’t mean call it a night,” Brenda corrects kindly. “I meant we can leave here and go somewhere else.”
“Oh,” Sharon says, sounding relieved, but doesn’t move her legs to where they were before in order to reestablish some buffer of polite distance. Holding herself like that was probably less comfortable than this is, Brenda guesses, and even Sharon has her limits when it comes to keeping up appearances. “What would we do for dinner?” she asks Brenda. “Every other restaurant is going to have a wait on a Saturday night and we can’t just go back to my condo. Rusty has friends over and I really don’t want to crowd him out.”
Brenda hasn’t thought this far ahead. Would be perfectly happy to sort this out in Sharon’s car as they drive in what could turn out to be the entirely the wrong direction, except that Sharon’s not the kind of person to scratch her name off a lengthy waitlist without first having a plan.
Brenda’s whole adult life has basically been a long sequence of times she’s angrily, thoughtlessly crossed herself off one list or another, but she knows she has to do a little better this time, be a little bit more careful now. Because she’s with Sharon.
“We could just hang out at my place,” Brenda shrugs and Sharon gives her wry look. It's not like Brenda’s fridge is ever filled with fresh, edible groceries.
“I can’t sign up for take-out,” Sharon shakes her head, and then lowers her voice a little. “I can’t… Your juvenile eating habits have already put five pounds on me.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Brenda rolls her eyes. Looks at the svelte, porcelain arm that’s closest to her, angled in a way as to be centimeters from Brenda’s chest. “I’m sure the only thing holdin’ all your blubber in at this point is duct tape and a coupla rubber bands.” Sharon gives her a mean, tight lipped smile, the lines around her mouth more noticeable when she does so. And yet, Brenda marvels with little annoyance, her face is just as pretty as ever.
“Maybe my first impression of you was right,” Sharon pretends to glare.
“You mean that I’m a big ol’. . . Oh, shoot. Now what’s that word you Californians have for it?” Brenda feigns, sliding into thickest possible version of her accent.
“Bitch?” Sharon hands her, not one to ever miss her cue.
“That’s the one!” Brenda claps her legs, and both of them giggle at their own stupid little joke.
“Alright,” Sharon says, suddenly serious. “Let’s go. There’s two different grocery stores on the way to your place. We’ll just buy stuff.”
Brenda has to hustle to catch up to her because by the time she collects her purse, Sharon’s already halfway to the door. It's funny that the woman is so careful about decisions but once she makes them, everything is all go-go-go. It's like Sharon believes there’s some kind of huge, invisible game clock in play that judges life and she’s doing her very utmost to avoid a penalty. And Brenda sure hopes Sharon’s wrong about that because if not, then the actual universe they're living is the exact way Brenda’s always pictured her own personal hell. And now wouldn't that be funny?
They stop at a Sprouts even though Sharon prefers Trader Joe’s. “Not worth the extra distance,” Sharon tells her as she pulls into the crowded little parking lot.
“Let’s just each get what we want,” Brenda says.
“Of course,” Sharon laughs, “since I don’t plan on having pie for dinner.” Sharon grabs one of the small green shopping carts as they walk in and Brenda isn’t sure what the point of that is since it’s not like they’re going to buy a lot. Maybe Sharon just like the ritual of it?
“Well I wasn’t going to buy pie until you said that,” Brenda sighs, suddenly desperately hungry, and charges straight for the bakery section.
“Please tell me you don’t plan on eating a whole pie,” Sharon tsks, as Brenda stands contemplating the varieties. The store sells both whole pies and individual pieces but Brenda walked right past the latter, finding the neatly sliced, smartly packaged triangles completely unappealing.
“Not in one sitting,” Brenda replies, then wags a finger at Sharon. “And no judging my culinary decisions. You claim to be pro-choice.”
“That goes both ways,” Sharon reminds her, and rolls their little shopping cart over to aisle of grab and go foods. She comes back a minute later with a Greek salad sitting in the center of the empty basket, and Brenda smirks at her but doesn’t say anything because Sharon’s right. This goes both ways.
“You know what we’re gonna need?” Brenda realizes. Puts her hand on her hips and frowns a little at Sharon.
“Less stressful jobs? Bodies that don’t creak when we get up from chairs? Handsome men who’ll just accept our opinions as law but aren’t so pathologically nice as to completely bore us to tears?” When Brenda’s mouth falls open a little, no words coming out, Sharon stops looking smug and immediately starts to backpedal. “I thought I was being funny,” she apologizes, sounding decidedly uncertain.
“You were,” Brenda smiles slowly. “It’s just that sometimes I forget that you can be kinda wicked and… I guess it takes me by surprise, that’s all.”
“Then my life’s mission is complete,” Sharon deadpans. “Now what were you actually going to say before my comedy routine?”
“Oh,” Brenda says. “Wine… We need wine. I’m almost out at home I think, and anyway you’ll be wantin’ white.”
“I’ll grab it,” Sharon tells her. “You just… stay here and jealously guard the baked goods from other shoppers.”
“Check,” Brenda says, but still sticks her tongue out as Sharon primly deposits their cart in Brenda’s custody and saunters away.
Brenda manages to do what she’s told for a whole three minutes before she realizes that if she has pie, she absolutely has to have ice cream to go with it. She’s standing in the small freezer section debating whether or not to just get French Vanilla when Sharon finds her again.
Sharon’s got their cart with her, which is good, because now that Brenda’s thinking about it, she’s pretty sure she forgot it back in the other aisle. “Sorry,” Brenda cringes, and Sharon looks back at her with confusion.
“I knew exactly where to find you,” Sharon says like it's painfully obvious. “You already have pie, Brenda Leigh. It doesn’t take a detective to deduce you’d go in search of ice cream next.”
Brenda tilts her head in acknowledgement, strangely relieved at this. Reaches down to put the carton of ice cream inside the basket and tucks it right between her peach pie and Sharon’s salad, careful not to disturb the two bottles of wine Sharon’s safely nestled behind everything else.
“I think I’m hungry enough to eat everything in this basket,” Sharon sighs as they enter a long but steadily moving checkout line.
“So now you want me to share my pie with you?” Brenda huffs, hands on her hips.
“Would you?” Sharon asks her.
“Maybe,” Brenda hedges. “If you’re nice.”
But she would. No matter what. Brenda really, honestly would.
. . .
V.
“You’re not dressed yet,” Rusty accuses, appearing in Brenda’s living room.
“I already sent Sharon a text,” Brenda says. “I think I’d rather stay here for dinner tonight. Honestly. I’d prefer not to make a fuss.”
“She already made reservations,” Rusty presses, oddly insistent. And then, when Brenda doesn’t appear moved, “it's your birthday, let her fuss over you. She likes to fuss over people, Brenda.”
“I know she does, honey,” Brenda grunts, trying to move her couch back to where it belongs. “But I’ve been moving stuff around all day because of the painters, and now I’m just tired and sore.”
“But it’s your birthday,” Rusty says again, and Brenda lets out a deep sigh.
“If you’re gonna stand there and argue with me, at least have the decency to help,” Brenda scolds him. And because Rusty really is a kind, polite, well-meaning kid, he immediately complies. “As I assume you recall,” Brenda begins again, after they moved her coffee table, “I don’t do particularly well with birthdays, and as it was Sharon who pushed me to take on the massive project of redecoratin’ this condo, I’m sure she understands that I just… don’t feel like goin’ out tonight.”
“She didn’t see your text,” Rusty blurts, and Brenda squints at him in confusion. “She was in the other room when it came through and when I saw it I just, like, panicked and - and I deleted it before she could see it.”
“Rusty,” Brenda says and sits down heavily on the coffee table. “Why on earth would you do that?”
She understands Rusty enough to know that she isn’t going to like whatever he’s going to tell her next. It’s something that they have in common, this habit of blurting things and sometimes telling everything in exactly the wrong order. It’s because they both got used to lying their way through things and now they don’t. Not so much, anyway. But it takes up so much energy to focus on telling the truth that they just can’t always control the way things tumble out.
“She planned a surprise party for you,” Rusty tells her, and Brenda feels all the air rush out of her lungs. “And I know that you might rather have your hair set on fire than go to something like that, but it’s too late to cancel it and Sharon is crazy excited that she pulled this off for you… Plus she’s downstairs getting dressed and she looks super nice.” He adds, already sounding sad, “It’s going to break her heart if you bail now.”
“A surprise party,” Brenda repeats, and buries her face in her hands. “You’re right. I would rather have my hair set on fire.” She’d even let Russell Taylor strike the match, Brenda thinks, and then her whole body begins to pulse with anger.
Sharon knows she hates surprises. And people staring at her. And, really, every defining component of a birthday party with the big exception of the cake. Why would Sharon subject her to this on what, Sharon knows, is the day of the year that’s always toughest for Brenda? And for what, just because Sharon wants to make a fuss, throw a party?
“You’re not allowed to get angry at her,” Rusty tells her, strangely calm now, and Brenda decides that he’s right. She shouldn’t be mad at Sharon. She should be mad at herself for letting her life become so hopelessly intertwined with Sharon’s. For letting Sharon’s opinion influence so many of her decisions.
She’d complained to Sharon less than a year ago that she was sick of throwing money away on renting and underwhelmed with her apartment, so Sharon had talked her into make inquiries into her own condo building. Talked her into considering a bigger condo on a higher floor, talked her into buying it, talked her into knocking out two walls and completely redecorating every single room. And Brenda had gone along with all of it happily, because this is what she does.
She’s never, ever able to maintain a proper balance of anything. She’s either all empty and lonely, or busy completely twisting her life up in knots around someone or something else.
“Brenda,” Rusty says her name, and now she can hear the panic in his voice again. She makes herself look at him, his worried eyes and twitching hands, and realizes no that he’s going to be the hardest part of all of this. Because Brenda loves Rusty, she really does. But she also sees now that he was the reason she fell down the rabbit hole to begin with.
“I don’t think I can face a party,” she tells him honestly. “I don’t have it in me, honey.”
“Please?” he begs her, sounding young and scared. Like before Sharon came along and saw that he was turned inside-out and slowly, slowly tugged him right-side-in again. “For me?”
It was silly for Brenda to think she ever had a chance.
“You’re not dressed,” Sharon accuses, coming into the living room, and Rusty gives Brenda one last beseeching look as Sharon stands behind him.
“So Rusty already pointed out,” Brenda wipes her hands on her faded pink sweats, and not bothering to cover her bad mood. “I need to shower still but I’ll hurry. Gimme twenty minutes or so.”
“What are you going to wear?” Sharon asks her, when Brenda comes into the bedroom wrapped in a towel, dry hair beginning sticking to dripping skin.
Sharon’s sitting right on Brenda’s bed and that rankles now. It rankles because this what they do. They get ready together, they go shopping together, and they treat each others’ homes as extensions of their own. And while just this morning it made Brenda happy that sometimes on weeknights she pushes open her door to find Rusty watching Netflix on her couch, that sometimes she comes back from errands on Saturday mornings to find Sharon in her kitchen cooking them brunch, it does not make Brenda happy now.
It feels a little too tight and a tiny bit painful, like the expensive, strapless bras Brenda owns but never wears because they leave those deep indentations in her delicate skin.
“A dress,” she shrugs dismissively.
“Which one?” Sharon presses.
“I don’t know, Sharon,” Brenda shakes her head. “But this will go a lot faster if just let me get dressed. Please.”
She understands Sharon’s bewildered expression. She does. But that doesn’t mean she has the time or desire to deal with it right now, so she snatches a yellow dress out of her newly remodeled closet and marches back in the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
When Brenda comes back out - fully dressed, hair pinned up, makeup halfway finished - Sharon’s still standing in her bedroom but over by the door now, looking like she isn’t sure whether she should stay or go.
“Brenda,” Sharon says, very quietly now, “if you don’t want to go. . . we can just stay here. We don’t have to go out.”
It isn’t true. They really do need to go. Right now there’s a restaurant full of people waiting for them and Brenda’s already late, and if they don’t show up Sharon is going to have to make a dozen embarrassing phone calls apologizing to people and thanking them for wasting their time. But Sharon doesn’t know that Brenda knows this, is willing to make the sacrifice silently and without any fanfare, and both the idea of this and the sad, pained expression on Sharon’s face takes all of the vinegar right of Brenda.
This birthday is breaking her heart. Sharon is breaking her heart.
“No,” Brenda says, and sits heavily on the bed. “Let’s go to dinner. Let’s just. . . go out.”
“Do you want me to finish your makeup for you?” Sharon asks tentatively. It’s kind of a ritual they’ve developed. Something that initially made Brenda feel childish, like Sharon was politely offering because she didn’t think Brenda did the best job of it. It took Brenda a while to figure out that it’s something that Sharon just likes doing it. Sharon likes doing Brenda’s makeup, and doing her daughter Emily’s hair, and picking out paint colors in expansive, choice-crammed homegoods stores that induce crippling panic in Brenda.
“Would you?” Brenda asks her, because now she just feels tired and wrung out. And anyway what can it hurt, just one more day of her life being a funhouse filled with mirrors that all reflect back Sharon to her, even though it’s clearly Brenda standing there and staring into them?
Sharon makes an affirmative noise in the back her throat and then builds a little pile of makeup in her hand. Comes over to Brenda and tilts Brenda’s chin up gently, so she can better see the plains of Brenda’s face.
“Shit,” Sharon mutters when she’s finished everything but Brenda’s lipstick, an uncapped silver tube now in her hand. “Is this… Brenda, I think this one might be mine.”
“It is,” Brenda says without looking, because she knows exactly which lipstick Sharon must have grabbed. It’s similar to one of Brenda’s red ones, but deeper and with a purple undertone. Brenda put it on by accident in her rush to get out the door one morning the other week. Got quite the surprise when she looked at herself in the rear-view mirror of her car. “I think you left it here at some point. Not sure when, honey.”
“Well shit,” Sharon says again and then goes to grab another lipstick. “I’ve been looking for this for at least two months.”
“Sorry,” Brenda tells her, closing her eyes. Unsure how much ground her apology needs to cover.
“Not your fault I leave my makeup lying around,” Sharon murmurs, and swipes an orange-red stain across Brenda’s lips.
“Am I finished?”
“You’re finished, Brenda Leigh.”
The car ride to the restaurant is silent and awkward, and Sharon sits up front while Rusty drives. “Are you sure you don’t want the front?” Sharon kindly offers, and Brenda shakes her head. She wants to sit in back, alone, so she can worry freely about how she needs to act convincingly surprised.
Brenda is a practised liar, half the city seems to know this. But the thing people tend to forget is that her real talent is fooling complete strangers who don’t already have a read on her. Yes, she spent a good chunk of her adult life lying to her parents, lying to Fritz, lying to Will Pope, and for a while even lying to Captain Sharon Raydor, head of the Force Investigation Division. But the reason she usually got away with that is because those people (even her mama, Lord rest her soul) never learned to accurately read Brenda Leigh.
But Sharon has been her best friend for sometime now and she knows what it looks like when Brenda is lying, even about small things like what she had for dinner or the number of times she got lost on the way somewhere. So now Brenda is working up a genuine, foaming panic in the back seat of Sharon’s car, worrying that all the lying and scheming Rusty has done in the last hour will end up being for nothing. That it will all pop like a balloon the moment Sharon sees the feigned shock on Brenda’s face as everyone yells ‘surprise.’
It turns out all the worry was a waste of time though. When they get to the doors of the restaurant and Sharon is standing beside her, Brenda feels Rusty’s hand in the small of her back, not so gently propelling her forward, through the doors a solid second before Sharon.
“Surprise!” everyone yells, and Brenda does her very best rendition of being shocked.
“Y’all!” she says and smiles. Buries herself in the hug Rusty gives her, if only to poke him in the ribs. “You little fink,” she tsks in a low voice, right beside his ear.
“Learned from the best,” he wags his eyebrows at her, and she hugs him all over again.
“I didn’t get to see her face,” Brenda hears Sharon complain to Rusty. “Was she actually surprised?”
“So surprised,” Rusty says, and really sells it. The sneaky, underhanded rat.
Brenda is surprised by how many people have shown up. But then maybe she shouldn’t be because all of them are from the intersection of Brenda and Sharon’s work lives; most of them would be too afraid to look Captain Raydor in the eye and tell her no, even when it comes to how they spend their personal time.
“Chief,” Mike Tao says and then hugs her. Brenda’s so pleased to see him that the title doesn’t even chafe.
“Hiya, Chief,” Andy Flynn says, and nods politely. Keeps about two meters of distance between them.
“Brenda,” she corrects both of them. “Please, boys. Just call me Brenda.”
“Chief,” she hears Provenza call, and Brenda rolls her eyes. It’s probably no use fighting it. “Happy birthday!”
“Well thank you so much, Lieutenant,” she smiles. Provenza has a drink in his hand, bourbon from the looks of it, but it’s full and Brenda thinks it might even be his first because his eyes are sharp and his cheeks free of telltale color.
“I guess the gang’s all here,” Sharon says, appearing beside Brenda, and everyone looks happy to see Sharon but also a little uncomfortable when they glance from Sharon to Brenda. Maybe they find this painful, the new standing next to the old?
“Captain,” Andy nods again when Sharon makes eye contact with him, and Brenda sees Tao shift a little where he stands.
“Andy,” Sharon smiles back, but only after an awkward beat that Brenda catches. And now isn’t that just odd?
“I have a surprise for you,” Sharon says to Brenda, her hand on her arm, and Brenda clearly sees Provenza choke on his drink while Flynn's face just seems pinched.
“Another surprise?” Brenda asks her, tearing her stare away from their audience. And then promptly forgets they’re even there, because Sharon’s eyes look so big and bright and happy.
“It was a little late arriving,” Sharon smiles cryptically. “Let’s go see it now.”
“Alright,” Brenda says slowly. Begins to wonder, as Sharon tugs her steadily along to the back of the restaurant, whether she’ll have to wait horribly long to get her cake. Surely it’s some kind of chocolate? God help her if Sharon got her a cake that isn’t chocolate.
“It isn’t wrapped,” Sharon smirks, and Brenda starts to grow wary all over again.
“How very uncharacteristic of you, Captain Raydor,” Brenda says, and a few feet away David Gabriel starts laughing that contagious laugh of his.
“Hi, honey,” Brenda wiggles her fingers at him. Sees that David’s clustered in a small group that contains Julio Sanchez, all of them looking amiable enough. Brenda lets go of a breath she realizes she’s been holding for David for four long, anxious years.
“Ahem,” Sharon clears her throat. And Brenda takes a deep, patient breath, settling her gaze on Sharon with a smile that she doesn’t have to force once she’s staring into those green eyes. “Ta da!” Sharon says, and Brenda hears herself to mutter a horrible, unmannerly curse when she sees the smiling face that pops through the backdoor of the dim restaurant.
“Charlie,” Brenda says, her chin already quivering, and then Charlie hugs her fiercely and Brenda starts to cry in earnest. Within minutes, Charlie is crying and Sharon is crying, and they’re all a soggy, red-nosed mess of horribly smeared makeup. Well, except for Sharon, whose eye makeup and lipstick both remain unsmudged. No doubt because she’s made some unholy Catholic bargain with the devil, Brenda’s long since suspected. But she does so love Sharon anyway - even if the woman has so obviously mortgaged her immortal soul.
“Happy birthday, Aunt Brenda,” Charlie smiles, hugging her again.
And just when Brenda thinks she couldn’t get any happier, Sharon looks over and asks, “Brenda, dear, are you ready for your cake?”
Hours later, tired and dressed for bed, Brenda walks out of her bedroom to find Rusty and Charlie sprawled out on the floor of the living room, playing some noisy video game.
“Do you want us to turn it down?” Rusty asks, looking sheepish, and Brenda squints her eyes at the frozen image on her television.
“No,” Brenda tells him. “This is what I get for get for buying a TV this big. It’s like Mecca, but for gamers.”
She’d debated between this one and a smaller model, but she and Sharon are forever squinting at the scrolling tickertape when they sit down to watch the news on MSNBC. “Did they just say something Hillary Clinton?” Sharon would ask her, and Brenda would shrug because she couldn’t see it either.
“What game is this?” Brenda asks them, a little horrified by what she sees.
“Grand Theft Auto,” Charlie tells her, and Brenda rolls her eyes.
“Lovely,” she drawls, knowing this probably makes her sound old. She is old. She doesn’t care. “Is Sharon still up?” she asks Rusty, and goes into the kitchen to stare inside the fridge.
“Probably,” Rusty says.
“Probably,” Brenda murmurs. Grabs the small pink pastry box from the restaurant and closes the fridge, picks up her keys from the counter with the other hand. “Back in a bit,” she calls to the two of them. But they’ve already unpaused the video game and probably can’t even hear her.
Sharon’s living room and kitchen lights are all off, so Brenda thinks that maybe she’s too late, maybe Sharon’s actually asleep. But then she sees light coming from Sharon’s bedroom and she pads right in, her slippered footsteps muffled against Sharon’s floor.
“Hello, birthday girl,” Sharon smiles at her from behind her laptop. She’s under the covers already with only her bedside lamp on for light. Brenda suspects she caught her just in time.
“Twelve forty-three,” Brenda scans the digital clock by Sharon’s bed. “Not my birthday anymore.”
“You sound so crushed by that,” Sharon teases, and seem to watch with interest as Brenda sits down on her bed, pastry box squarely on her lap.
For all the overlapping of their lives, Brenda doesn’t do this. She doesn’t wander into Sharon’s bedroom late at night, sitting down right on her bed. And though sometimes Sharon does, once even coming in late enough to wake Brenda from a deep sleep, Sharon’s always dressed in work clothes when she does so. Sits right down at the foot of Brenda’s bed and starts to softly cry because she got to someone’s daughter/husband/sister too late. When it happens, Brenda's almost always sitting like Sharon’s currently propped up now - laptop on lap, glasses on head, legs tucked warmly under her blankets. Usually she stays there, motionless and silent, until she thinks that Sharon’s finally cried herself out. Because there’s just no consoling that particular sense of failure, Brenda keenly knows.
“It was a lovely party, a delicious cake, and amazin’ to have Charlie here,” Brenda allows, selecting a particularly promising truffle from the box. “That said, I’m not all upset that birthdays only come around once a year.”
“You didn’t mention your mother at all today,” Sharon points out gently. “Were you thinking about her and didn’t want to tell me?”
On some level, Brenda is always thinking about her mama. But now that she looks back at the day, she was so occupied with the stress of the condo, being angry about the party, and then not wanting to upset Sharon, she never had time to wallow in the absence the way she usually does on holidays. And then she saw Charlie and, well, everything painful kind of fell away.
“It always hurts a little,” Brenda tells her, feeling a surge of honesty. “But not quite so much today and for that I thank you, Sharon.”
“So,” Sharon says, and looks at her pointedly, “when did you figure out there was a surprise party?”
“Less than an hour before,” Brenda replies, after she’s bought herself a bit of time by thoroughly chewing her chocolate and then swallowing it down. She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t give Sharon more detail than that. There’s simply no reason to sell poor Rusty out for all his well meant efforts.
“Better than I expected,” Sharon sighs. “You aren’t exactly an easy woman to fool.”
“Can I ask you something?” Brenda says, staring hard at a truffle she already has in her hand. She highly suspects it’s one that contains that disappointing coconut filling, so she’s reluctant to pop it in her mouth.
“We don’t exactly have many secrets,” Sharon says and takes the chocolate from Brenda’s hand. Takes a bite and then makes a face. Grabs tissue from her nightstand and spits the coconut into it, throwing the little wad in the small wastebasket that’s just within reach of the bed.
“No,” Brenda murmurs. “Not many. That’s true.”
“So ask away,” Sharon shrugs, but it seems like maybe she’s just the tiniest bit scared.
“What happened between you and Andy Flynn?” Brenda asks her. Makes herself put the chocolates down so Sharon will have her full attention.
“Oh,” Sharon says, her lips holding the circle even after the word is formed. Tilts her head, cranes her neck. Looks back at Brenda hesitantly. “Well. I like Andy. He’s a good cop and I think a good man. He was. . . the first one in to cut me a break when I took over for you. . . And I’ve known him for years.”
“And?” Brenda asks softly, because she needs a little more than this. She knows that there was a time that Sharon and Andy spent time together outside of work, a time when Andy didn’t call Sharon ‘Captain’, and though Brenda didn’t realize exactly that that period was over, Flynn’s behavior at Brenda’s birthday party made it clear that it was. That it was and it has been for a while.
“And,” Sharon breathes out after a pause; a pained, pinched expression appearing and then going away. “There was a time that I think both of us thought that maybe we could be more than friends. But then I started spending time with you and less time with Andy, and. . . Oh, I don’t know, Brenda. Sometimes things just disappear when you’re not paying attention.”
Brenda makes a little noise of agreement because this is something she knows. A lesson she had to learn the hard way many times before it finally stuck for good.
“Why the curiosity?” Sharon crosses her arms, sounding a smidge defensive. “Did something happen at the party? Something with Andy?”
“Kinda,” Brenda replies, propping her head up with her hand. But then shr struggles with how to put this gently.
Brenda’s been thinking all evening about the way she panicked about the party, how irrationally angry she got at the lack of boundaries in their friendship. And she’s been thinking too about how the gang from Major Crimes had looked at her and Sharon standing next to one another in that restaurant - some of them clearly uncomfortable but Flynn uncomfortable in an entirely different way than the others.
Like maybe he was pissed the hell off.
“Sharon,” Brenda closes her eyes. Decides there’s no gentle of way saying this and so opens them back up again. Makes herself face this in a brave way. “Honey. Andy looks at me like I stole his date to the prom.”
She expects Sharon to be surprised at the implication - to react with horror or else give one of those derisive snorts of laughter that people who work with Sharon live in constant fear of. She’s surprised when Sharon’s eyes immediately well up with tears.
“Yeah,” Sharon nods slowly, her voice already watery and her face the picture of Catholic guilt. “I think that’s exactly the way he feels.”
Brenda lets out a little sad sigh because she feels for Andy, she honestly does. But she feels so much worse for Sharon, because heaven knows the woman is going to look at Flynn everyday and beat herself up with misplaced guilt. Right up until the day one of them retires.
Brenda cherrypicks another truffle from the box, this one pure dark chocolate she’s pretty sure, and hands it over to Sharon. Sharon takes it, looking kind of torn before she hands it back. She and Brenda don’t share many vices, not really. It’s more that Sharon indulges her.
“So,” Brenda says after Sharon dries her eyes. Inwardly reminds herself of all her mama’s lectures when she was little. That anything worth having is worth working to earn. “Is Flynn right?”
“What?” Sharon asks, sounding startled. Trying to buy herself more time, probably.
“Sharon,” Brenda begins again, and managing to keep her tone even despite that she’s just so scared. “Did I steal Andy Flynn’s prom date?”
“I think you did,” Sharon says finally, sounding scared herself. And only after a long pause in which Brenda has time to contemplate the kind of earth-shatteringly poor decision she might just have made.
“Hmm,” Brenda hums and reaches out her hand to Sharon. Floods with happiness and relief and something else when Sharon tentatively takes it. “That’s real unfortunate because I don’t think Hallmark makes an apology card for that.”
“They do not,” Sharon agrees with a sigh. Laces her fingers properly through Brenda’s, their palms pressed together when Sharon starts to smile back.
“If you ever find one to give to him, will you make sure to add my name to it?” Brenda asks, closing one eye and making a silly face. Because all the worries and the questions can wait for a spell. None of it’s going anywhere.
“Sure,” Sharon rolls her eyes, sounding prim and bitchy even as she snatches back the truffle with the hand that’s not tangled still up with Brenda’s “I’ll jot that right at the top of my to-do list.”
. . .
“It was much pleasanter at home," thought poor Alice, "when one wasn't
always growing larger and smaller,and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.
I almost wish I hadn't gone down the rabbit-hole ― and yet― and yet― ...”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland