The Infinite Sadness: Chapter One

The Infinite Sadness contains the following themes:

Chapter-specific warnings will be provided where relevant. If any of the above are a trigger for you, please wait for the next chapter.

Thank you for reading!

Chapter one warnings: Discussion of death

When I Come Around

The doorbell of the de Lepaute manor rang out like church bells over a graveyard that cool October afternoon, and Mick Martin prayed to whatever god that was listening that the person answering wouldn’t be the Angel of Death. He had a decent chance here. Sure, Mr. de Lepaute, technically count of Southwind and more formally attorney at law and wealthiest man for miles, would be at work in his office downtown at this hour, but the genial Mrs. de Lepaute, artist, had her studio in the attic, didn’t she? And then there were the maid Claudette or the butler Jean-Pierre, who only mildly pitied and disdained him, respectively. Any of these choices would be wonderful; any of them would be preferable.

But of course, what he got when the door swung open was the Ice Queen herself, already murdering him with her eyes.

Of course. Of course this was going to be one of those days.

And Astrid de Lepaute, eldest of the de Lepaute children and apparently a lawyer like her father according to her insistence, flicked her eyes to the delivery bag Mick clutched, then to his face.

Mick stood at attention, steeling himself for what was coming.

“No,” she said flatly.

“Delivery,” he responded, as evenly and professionally as he could. With one hand, he opened the bag and pulled out a stack: one large box, a small box, and a Styrofoam clamshell, stacked precariously on top of one another. “Large garlic and anchovy—”

“No.”

“—garlic knots—”

“No.”

“—and a caesar salad.” Mick shrugged the empty bag over his shoulder. “That’ll be 120 krone altogether.”

“First, we didn’t order anything.”

“Somebody apparently did.”

“And second, did you raise your prices again?”

“We’re competing with Pizza Hut.”

“By overcharging?”

“By paying for something better than frozen dough with low-grade cheese.” Mick thrust the stack towards Astrid. “A hundred twenty krone, plus tip, and I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Which brings us back to the first point. Nobody ordered that.”

Astrid began to close the door, but Mick stuck one foot in. He thanked the gods that he had the foresight to wear the heavy Doc Martens this time as the de Lepautes’ heavy oak slab tried to crush his toes.

“Look, Astrid. Somebody ordered these. We got your address—”

“From whom?” She swung the door open and planted one hand on her cocked hip. “Who was on the phone, Monsieur Martin? Who placed the order specifically?”

“You know I don’t answer the phone.” Mick pressed his shoulder into the door to keep her from closing it again. “Astrid, please. It’s just 120 krone. To you, that’s nothing, but if they take it out of my paycheck again—”

“I don’t see how that’s any concern of mine.”

“It will be if I tell Eleanor you left me out to dry.”

Astrid opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. Her eyes fell onto the stack, and Mick pushed it towards her again.

“How much for just the salad?” she asked.

“That’s not how this works.”

“Martin.”

“One hundred and twenty krone,” Mick warned, pushed the stack forward again. “Plus tip.”

Astrid squinted at him, then yanked her wallet out of her pocket. She tore out a handful of bills and slapped them into Mick’s outstretched hand while taking the stack.

“Con artist!” she hissed, shortly before slamming the door in his face.

“Pleasure doing business with you!” Mick shot back with a mock salute.

As he descended the front steps and started back for the red VW Rabbit in the driveway, he counted the cash Astrid had handed him. Then he stopped, counted it again, and sighed heavily.

“You didn’t tip!” he shouted over his shoulder. When he got no response, he shook his head and dug into his pockets for his keys, muttering colorful names for Astrid with every step to the Rabbit.

By the time he reached his poor rust bucket of a car, his anger subsided into a dull throb of frustration. Barely half past noon, fourth delivery of the day, and already things were going great.

And if that wasn’t enough . . .

Mick unlocked the driver’s side, collapsed into the worn-down seat, and shut the door behind him. Slowly, heavily, he sank, head back, amber eyes locked onto the ceiling, mind already regrouping to prepare for his next course of action. He was so tired, and yet . . .

“Hi, Eleanor,” he said at last.

And Eleanor, youngest of the de Lepaute family and apparent car break-in artist now, shifted the discarded jacket she hid under to peek at her best friend from where she lay, curled up in the Rabbit’s back seat.

“Hi, Mick. Thanks for Astrid’s lunch.” She held up a hundred-krone tip. “And the rescue.”

---

One rearrangement of a passenger into the passenger seat later, Mick steered the Rabbit along winding ribbons of asphalt beneath trees thick with fire-orange leaves. He tried to keep his eyes and mind on the road, but he had to admit he was a little distracted. Not exactly because the person he’d had a crush on for most of his life was sitting practically shoulder-to-shoulder with him—though once again, he had to appreciate how that baggy flannel hung off her slender shoulders and how her messy, raven-black hair framed her oval face. Instead, it was more because Eleanor, immediately after climbing to the front seat in a feat of acrobatics that Mick was also not thinking about right then, started rummaging through the Rabbit’s glove box with all the intensity of Jean-Claude Van Damme elbow-deep in a time bomb.

“Anything I can help you with?” he asked.

“At some point, I need to get you to curate your own collection,” she said. To prove her point, she pulled out one of the cassettes stashed away in the glove box, flashing Mariah Carey’s seductive smile at him. “I know this isn’t yours. Not that I’m judging Marcie’s taste in music much.”

“That’s Bill’s, actually.”

Eleanor wrinkled her nose in horror and disapproval and tossed the cassette back in. “The point is, I just think it’s odd that this is your car but their music. It’s bad enough you only use this thing for deliveries.” She pulled out The Little Mermaid: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. “Do I want to know?”

Mick shrugged. “Keeps Mylene entertained when she’s with me instead of school or the restaurant.”

“Isn’t she twelve?”

“Affects one’s appreciation for ‘Part of Your World’ less than you’d think.”

Eleanor stuffed that cassette back into the glove box as well. Her face had fallen, relaxed into a nearly unreadable mask of distance.

Mick swallowed. This wasn’t about the tapes.

“So . . . what’s new?” he asked. “How’s the job hunt going?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her glare at him, then lean her head against the window and stare into the autumn leaves. It had been five months since Eleanor had graduated from a prestigious college in Eldaven. While all of her college friends went off to work for tech companies, schools in foreign countries, fashion magazines, banks, even the crown itself in one case, Eleanor quietly moved back home to live with her parents and no plan.

Not that Mick minded having her there with him right then; he just wondered why. Eleanor was brilliant—graduated in the top fifteen of her class, even. She spoke seven languages, had a head for math, not to mention ambition. People must have lined up out the door to hire her. Yet here she was.

“Sorry,” he said. “Sore subject. I get it.”

“And you?”

The question struck Mick so suddenly he had to turn his head to look at her. Then he swung his gaze back when he realized she was leveling an intense stare right at him.

“What do you mean?” he asked, voice cracking along the edges.

Eleanor looked out the windshield, clearly considering her next words. “Rumor has it Bill is taking over the Red Rooster.”

“Rumor? He has, just last month.”

Though he’d practically run it for longer. Sure, their mother had technically been the owner and head boss up until the month prior, but she hadn’t been able to set foot in the Red Rooster since . . .

“And Marcie’s taken her place as head cook, I take it.”

Mick didn’t like where this was going. At all. Still, he cracked a sly grin. “Are you asking me if I want to be a delivery boy all my life?”

“No,” Eleanor replied casually. “Just catching myself up.”

Mick let his smile soften, from sly to soft and awkward. “I’m as happy here as you are. And I’m fine. And there’s nothing new to report since we last hung out.”

Eleanor turned her head, her gaze suddenly distant as she pressed her mouth into her palm. Around them, the trees gave way to blocky businesses and strip malls, the red and white of a Pizza Hut and the sprawling parking lot of the Aldi’s.

“I was afraid you would say that,” Eleanor mumbled, so softly Mick almost thought he’d imagined it.

He pressed his lips together and backed away from the subject. The air inside the Rabbit grew heavy and hot, as if all the molecules between them stilled into a thick soup of vibrating nothingness. Mick wanted to replace it with something, with words—maybe a conversation about last Friday’s Family Matters or maybe music after all—but he couldn’t help but dwell on the silence between them.

See, Eleanor was wrong about one thing. Oh, she was right in her point about the tapes: that he was holding back what he wanted in order to make room for other people. The Red Rooster—or, really, Bill and Marcie—needed its delivery boy to compete with the uniform, bored teenagers of Pizza Hut, and Mick was familiar and friendly, a walking advertisement and also far better at being one than his dour and more importantly license-less younger brother Matthew. And Mick understood this. He couldn’t argue. They were his family; how could he turn his back on them?

But Eleanor was wrong about what Mick really wanted at the end of the day, his family’s survival aside. It wasn’t just to study music miles away from home.

His left hand, the one closest to Eleanor’s gripped the steering wheel in denial at first, then drifted hesitantly down, wandering towards her fingers as they rested on her knee. Then, at the last second, Mick’s hand fell short and dropped onto the Rabbit’s gear stick. He coughed lightly and pulled the gear from 1 to 2, and the old Rabbit sputtered in protest and picked up speed.

Oh, sure, he could say something. He wanted to say something. He’d yearned to say something since he’d realized not every guy saw their best friends in the same holy light he saw Eleanor in.

But she came back to Southwind for a reason, and he wasn’t about to ruining their friendship on top of that reason.

Suddenly, the thick silence in the cabin of the Rabbit was broken by the click of the tape deck. Eleanor popped out whatever he’d left in there, hesitated, and held up the tape.

“Dexys Midnight Runners?” she asked after a pause. Mick could feel her quirk an eyebrow at him. “Whose is this?”

“Bill’s,” Mick lied, quickly and with full knowledge that the blush searing his face right then was a damn traitor.

And now, he could feel Eleanor’s grin as she slipped the tape into the glove box. This was followed by the rattle and pop of another tape drawn out of its case by Eleanor’s delicate hands, and as Green Day’s “When I Come Around” filled the Rabbit’s tiny cabin, Mick knew this wasn’t a tape in his siblings’ collection.

---

In a way, there were really two Southwinds: the outer edges, where the wealthy lived in massive, beautiful houses surrounded by trees and the peace of the wilderness; and the town itself, which was a little more buzzing with cars and people, a little rough around the edges, and full of businesses that were proud of being at least three generations old.

The Red Rooster was one of those generations-old businesses. Founded as a tavern about seven generations ago, the Red Rooster rode the few centuries between the Martins’ arrival to Southwind and the modern day, adapting to whatever the town wanted for trendy cuisine. A few hundred years ago, it was a tavern; one hundred, it was a Eldavenian bistro; and for the past fifty years, it was a pizza place. Or, really, a Venecian restaurant, but ever since pizza became en vogue, the Red Rooster served fewer plates of homemade pasta and more trays of brick-oven pizzas.

Whatever kept them in business, as Mick’s father would have said.

Or, rather, whatever kept them clinging to life, as Marcie would say under her breath. And as much Mick didn’t want to admit it, he couldn’t deny knowing full well how much money they pulled in every week or how long Bill mulled over, well. The bills.

Walking in with half the delivery bags on his arm and Eleanor with the rest following close behind, Mick wasn’t entirely surprised to see only two tables in the Red Rooster’s sizable dining room occupied. Height of what should have been the lunch rush—what probably was the lunch rush once—and not even a quarter full. It wasn’t even the Pizza Hut at this point. Southwind might have been a town of tradition, but this was the 90s. Any business seven generations old was, by default, on its deathbed.

Which of course was a concern for Mick. His family always had the Red Rooster, from the day they’d set foot in Southwind. What would they do if they didn’t have this?

“Mick, our dear wandering brother! Have you brought an assistant today?”

Mick let out a slow, heavy sigh towards the ceiling at the sound of the eldest Martin’s booming voice. On second thought, maybe the death of Bill’s business wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

“Don’t read too much into it,” Mick said with a sharp warning glare towards Bill, who leaned against the cash register.

“Hello, Bill,” Eleanor said with her signature dazzling smile. “Mick was just saving me from the headache of my sister.”

“Ah, Astrid de Lepaute,” Bill purred with a smile of his own. “How is she? Did she finally dethrone Satan and take her rightful place as frigid queen of the damned?”

Eleanor snorted into the back of her hand but regained composure a second later. “Not yet, but I can tell you she is very close.”

“Evidently.” Mick held out the stack of krone and orders with a hard scowl on his face.

Bill raised his eyebrows at his brother. “Stiffed you for a tip again, didn’t she?” He took the stack and turned to the register. “Don’t you worry, little brother. The balance of the universe always finds a way to restore itself in the end.” And then, the corners of his mouth twitched into a smooth grin. “Unless, of course, you’d like to inform Miss Eleanor that there are better ways of calling on her favorite red-headed taxi service.”

For perhaps the umpteenth time that day, Mick felt his face ignite with a blush. His eyes slid towards Eleanor, who stood blissful and calm beside him. “He . . . he didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Yes I did.” Bill lifted his chin and gave Eleanor a serious glance. “Our dear, sweet middle brother would do anything for y—”

The Martins’ dear, sweet middle brother immediately hooked an arm around Bill and dragged him into the kitchen, stammering something barely coherent about the next round of orders all the while.

Bill, meanwhile, flicked that grin back at his younger brother and let himself be swept through the door and into a kitchen heavily scented with garlic. As soon as the door swung closed behind them, he twirled out of Mick’s reach and rose elegantly to his full height, back straight and against a counter. Marcie glared at them both from the pizza oven against the far wall, eyes over her shoulder as her beefy arms continued to turn a pizza.

“What are you two idiots doing?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Mick replied with one frustrated twist of a hand in Bill’s direction. “Just getting subjected to the usual humiliation.”

“Miss Eleanor is accompanying our dear brother today, apparently,” Bill replied. “Likely the same de Lepaute who called in our poor, dear brother to Southwind Manor.”

“Ah.” Marcie turned back to the oven. “And in the twenty minutes it took to drive from there to here, you didn’t come clean, did you?”

“There’s nothing to come clean about!” Mick hissed.

“Please. You’re the least subtle person in Southwind.”

Marcie pulled the pizza out of the oven and shoveled it into a box on the counter. There were three boxes stacked right next to it, leaving Mick with a sneaking suspicion that he was about to walk into an eight-year-old’s birthday again.

“She’s right, you know,” Bill said. “And please understand, Mick. We only want the best for you, and you only have so much time before Eleanor’s off to who knows where.”

“I repeat: there is nothing to come clean about. We’re just friends.” Mick stalked to the row of tickets hanging above the counter. “Where’s the next batch going?”

Marcie gave Bill a weary look. Bill cocked his head, shrugged, and sauntered to his brother’s side.

“To be clear, we’re aware of your relationship with Miss Eleanor,” Bill began. “Our concern is more . . . she may be planning on leaving Southwind. Forever.”

“I’m aware, Bill.”

“And, well. As your older siblings, we love and care about you very much.”

Mick sighed, his shoulders sinking. Ah. So it was this conversation again.

“What the idiot is trying to say,” Marcie interrupted, “is that we love you, but we want you to think about what’s best for you. Not us or the restaurant.”

This conversation again indeed. Mick picked his head back up and squinted at Marcie. “Do you want Matthew to do this job?”

“Between the two of you, yes, Mick, I would rather have you do it,” Marcie replied. “However, even if you left, Matthew isn’t gonna do this job forever, either. A Martin just needs to be in the kitchen and the office. We can hire more delivery drivers from practically any family in Southwind. And believe me, there are plenty of kids out there who’d be just as eager to do what you do.”

She couldn’t hire more delivery drivers. Their father hadn’t thought about getting life insurance before he’d had that widowmaker coronary four years ago, so the only thing he’d left after his funeral was a mass of debt, the restaurant, and a family scrambling to put things back together. Mick had cut a deal with his siblings that summer, and suffice to say, Marcie would be hard-pressed to find a delivery boy to work for the peanuts he did.

He wasn’t going to remind her of this, though. Frankly, Mick wanted an out of this conversation more than he wanted to get into any of this. His siblings had mourned and moved on. He’d mourned and moved on. Life went on, and he didn’t regret the deal he’d made four years prior.

But there were times when he didn’t want to have a conversation about that, and this?

“What our dear sister means to say,” Bill continued, “is that you don’t want to spend all your life here.”

This was one of those times. This was definitely one of those times.

Mick glared at Bill. “What makes you think I don’t?” He held up a hand before either of them could answer. “Listen. I know what this is about. We’ve been going around in circles about this every month, just like clockwork. I made my decision to stay, and I’m standing by it now. Nothing’s changed.”

Marcie shrugged and closed the last box. “Well. Except for the fact that Eleanor’s future here is uncertain.”

“You think that matters? I hope she gets out of here. That’s what she wants.”

“You don’t think that.”

Mick dropped one of the bags onto a counter. “I’m her best friend. Of course I think that. I want what’s best for her, and she’s better than this town.” He unzipped the bag and stared hard into its empty interior. “Anyway, if we’re going to talk about what Eleanor wants, it’s not like she’s leaving tomorrow. The job hunt hasn’t been going well.”

“You sure about that?” Marcie said. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but the last time she sent us an order to get you to rescue her, today aside, Astrid called specifically to drop us a nugget of information to pass to you.”

“Which we didn’t, because we agreed it wasn’t relevant and that Astrid is a compulsive liar when it comes to her sister’s business,” Bill hissed, glaring hard at his sister.

“What did she say?” Mick said icily.

Marcie glanced from Bill to Mick to the pizza boxes, landing on the latter as if they were far more interesting than anything else in the room. Drumming her fingers on the counter, Marcie tilted her head and shook it slowly—in sympathy or while contemplating whether or not she should respond at all, Mick couldn’t tell.

But then, at last:

“She said Eleanor’s turned down five job offers so far,” Marcie said, “including one from Etienne. She could have been working for the Royal Archives by now. And then she asked us why.”

The Royal Archives. Eleanor dreamed of working there as long as Mick had known her. Any budding archaeologist who’d memorized every line in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom dreamed of studying First Age artifacts alongside the kingdom’s finest scholars, right there in the Royal Archives’ hallowed halls. The Royal Archives were the absolute pinnacle of archaeological academia—and, more importantly, they were about as difficult to get into as any absolute pinnacle of academia would be. Invitations didn’t just come to a budding archaeologist gift-wrapped with a bow. Of course, not everyone had one of its board members as a brother.

So why in the name of the Queen Goddess Herself did Eleanor pass up exactly such an invitation, not only gift-wrapped with a bow but also served to her on a silver platter with her name engraved on it?

And why didn’t she tell him about this? Not that this part bothered Mick. It was her business. Maybe she just didn’t want to talk about it.

Maybe—

Maybe it wasn’t any of his gods-damned business. Maybe he’d be a hypocrite if he asked.

Maybe he should just shut up and do his job, and this would go away.

Mick exhaled sharply through his mouth, then nodded to the boxes. “Is that another delivery?”

Marcie glanced to Bill for help. Bill raised his hands, palms to Marcie, head bowed in defeat. Shaking her own head again, Marcie stacked pizza boxes and passed them to Mick.

“All four, plus the two-liter of Pepsi tagged in the fridge out front,” Marcie said. “Bard Records, Huntress Woods Mall. Ask for Adelaide when you get there.”