What Happens After Dark by Jasmine Haynes Page B

long after the bastard was dead.

6
    BREE LAID A FEW NAPKINS OVER THE MESS, SOPPING UP THE WORST, then followed her mother down the hall. She hadn’t heard a thing, but her mom was hypersensitive. She passed the den, then her old room, the bathroom she’d used, and the spare room her mom kept for sewing. Her parents’ bedroom was at the end of the hall.
    Pretty lace curtains covered the big window facing the large back garden, where the grass was green and overgrown with the recent rains. Her dollhouse stood in the corner by the back fence, though it wasn’t really a doll house. As a child, she’d been able to stand fully upright in it. Her father had built it for her eighth birthday. Its shingles were pink, lemon yellow scallops edging the roof and window like a gingerbread house. The bottom of the yellow siding was painted with a border of pink and red flowers, the colors still bright as if it had been touched up in the recent past. As if her father had been out there taking care of it.
    Bree clenched her hands into fists and turned away from the sight. The sky had turned cloudy, casting shadows across the bedroom’s worn beige carpet. The room’s air was stale with bad breath, medicines, and the scent of a body that hadn’t been washed well.
    A small wheeled canister of oxygen sat beside the bed, but her father hadn’t been using it while he was napping. He didn’t need the oxygen all the time, only when he’d exerted himself with too much activity, like now, as her mother struggled to pull him up from the queen-size mattress, straining with two hands on his arm.
    “I gotta pee,” he said in a longtime smoker’s gravel, phlegm bubbling in his throat as he breathed heavily.
    “I’ll help you, dear,” her mom was saying, but he batted her aside, muttering curses. “He’s not himself,” she told Bree.
    Not himself ? The lung cancer was starving his brain of oxygen, and his mind was definitely going. Last weekend when she was leaving, he’d asked her where she lived. But this, the belligerence, was exactly like him.
    Bree went to his other side, grabbing his arm, and together, she and her mom pulled him to his feet.
    “Goddamn, see what I have to put up with,” he groused, steadying himself with his hand on Bree’s forearm.
    See what her mother had to put up with. The oxygen deprivation was like Alzheimer’s, bringing out his mean streak. What was already there got exaggerated.
    “The mattress is too low,” she told her mom. “We need to have hospice bring in the hospital bed so it’s easier to get him in and out of it.”
    “I don’t need no fucking hospital bed.”
    Bree ignored him. “Come on, you have to walk. We can’t carry you.” She tugged gently on his arm, and with her mom steadying him on the other side, they shuffled over the carpet.
    He stumbled on the rug leading into the master bathroom, and Bree almost lost her grip on him.
    “Goddamn,” he said again. “I’m gonna piss myself if you don’t get me there.”
    Her mother tsked . “You’re doing beautifully, dear, just a few more steps.”
    Dear . Bree felt an irrational anger at her mother’s tone, as if she were talking to a petulant child, not a man who had so often treated her like dirt.
    The bathroom was small, but the tub was huge, taking up a good portion, and Bree ended up sidling him closer to the toilet, her mother having to step back.
    “You have to unzip him, dear.”
    Why do I have to do it?
    Bree wondered how her mother had managed to dress him this morning, every morning. She hadn’t realized how weak he’d grown. Just last weekend, he’d still been walking under his own steam. But there was no time for guilt or blame. Or anything else. Letting him lean slightly against her body to keep him steady, she unzipped his pants, feeling queasy with the chore.
    “You have to take it out, Father.”
    He fumbled, and there it was. Like a worm. Swallowing back the bile that had suddenly risen in her throat, she