Stepbrothers

Part 7

Sometimes Fran just wanted to scream at Larry to leave it alone.
She loved him, of this she was sure. He was such a laugh, bigger than life, a heart of gold. A REAL one. Not just a beautiful facade with nothing but dirt and crazy, ugly things behind... Things that hurt and destroy you and leave you in ruins...

Yet, there was something sad with Larry. Something she was only too familiar with.

That something was a shadow. Not a violent and cruel one like hers. No, it was a quiet, formless shadow. The whiff of a perfume in the bedroom, a weird light in the salon, a brief tinkling of a clock in the kitchen. And mostly a silence...
A deafening silence.
When the boys, Manuelita and José were here, when they were all together, it was noisy and alive. Like a proper family should (except when the boys were laughing this curious nervous laugh at everything and everyone for absolutely nothing...). But once Manuelita and José went to their business, once the boys were away to school (by the way, why were those two constantly flustered, their faces red and avoiding each other's eyes ?), that silence took place and it was worse than a bomb.
Of course Larry and her had their own business to take care of (there was a ridiculously extravagant wedding to be paid among other little things...) But they remained more than enough together to endure it. Or was it only Fran that felt it ? That dark silence between her and Larry ?
Things had been so easy first. Well, if you put Loki aside. Loki, the lost, pitiful child, so dignified, so elegant yet so distant, walled up in his fortress of pain... Impeccable in his manners and attitude but just like a butler. Compliant but distant, polite but cold. On the job, she would have described him. He intended to play the perfect stepson, above reproach.
Honestly Fran would have exchanged it any time for a rebellious, smart-ass, aggressive brat, for this attitude was far much worse.
She always wanted to tell him to chill, to relax... That she had no intention to rob anyone's place, that being here didn't mean SHE was forgotten. God forbid the worshiped shadow would be desecrated.

God forbid she mentioned the Saintly Francesca of the Holy Remembered.

She felt mean thinking like that but she was damn tired. How could she make them understand ? The weight of it all, the heaviness of NOT TALKING ABOUT IT. It made her more alive than everything else. That was the paradox. Not talking about her, about who she was, what she liked, what she did with Larry and Loki, not having her photograph around, acting like she was the biggest taboo ever, was just making things only worse.
Francesca was on their mind constantly because mentioning her felt like launching a ticking bomb in the room. Fran knew that by preventing themselves to acknowledge that fact, father and son were unable to surpass their grief. Loki couldn't talk about her because it hurt too much, obviously, but also because there was no one to talk about her with. Fran and Thor never knew her. Manuelita and José had their own lives to live. Being the Laufeysons' live-in employees made them family but not to the point to contradict and anger their boss. Said boss refused to talk to his son (or anyone for that matter) about his dead mother for... whatever reasons he had...

And Fran had the chilling impression that he was making a fuss about her, her son and their wedding (at the expense of Loki's feelings) just to run away from the ghost he had greatly contributed to create.

God, how Fran hated that damn piano...

As she was sadly walking around the salon, carefully avoiding the elegant black form, she thought again about Thor and Loki. The whole sum of her life, lately. If she was not thinking about Larry and his haunted home, she was pondering about the boys' new and strange behavior, wondering for the millioneth time what was wrong with those two in particular...

***

It had only been two days and two nights and to Loki it had seemed a decade, a century, millenniums...
Since the day he... No way.
DEFINITELY. NO. WAY.
He has NOT kissed... Oh god...
He did.
He effin' did.
He kissed Thor.
Now what ?