Sweet

by Tammara Webber

  tammara webber

  Sweet

  a Contours of the Heart® novel

  SWEET

  Copyright © 2015 by Tammara Webber

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-9856618-7-8

  Contours of the Heart® is a registered trademark of Tammara Webber

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, distributed, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without express permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, or any events or occurrences, is purely coincidental. The characters and story lines are created from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover Design by Damonza

  To Hannah

  A smart, tough, logical girl

  with a mushy center

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Epilogue

  Books by Tammara Webber

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  chapter

  One

  Boyce

  Bud Wynn died this morning. According to the attending physician, time of death was 5:23 a.m. He died of liver disease, of cirrhosis, of complications from ascites that caused heart failure—any and all of these would be true enough, I reckon.

  I say he died of booze, because that’s truer than anything else.

  Under the fluorescent lights of the hallway, everybody in that hospital looked a step closer to death than they probably were. I’m sure I was no exception—but I didn’t intend to die anytime soon. It might have made me a cold-blooded bastard, but the reason I didn’t intend to die was because I was finally free. Free of that gutless, mean old man. Free of the asshole who’d chased off my mother and brother—one to disappear into the dark like a weightless shadow, the other into a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. Free of the charge I took of his final days because nobody else wanted charge of them.

  Two minutes after the doctor gave me time alone with the body to say my good-byes, I emerged dry-eyed and signed the papers authorizing the crematory to take him. They would slide him into a refrigerated box in the wall, and there he’d wait out the necessary forty-eight hours until he could be returned to dust. It’s what he’d wanted.

  “No fucking funeral,” he’d wheezed from his piece-of-shit recliner when I came in one night about six months ago, like we’d been in the middle of a conversation. I paused in the doorway but didn’t answer. “No goddamned casket. And for chrissake, no crap-ass service. Just toss my ashes in the gulf.” Something in my face must have told him I wouldn’t be toting his remains to the water at sunset in some sham memorial. “Or the john. Makes me no nevermind.”

  That was our only conversation about his looming death.

  As the sun rose over the gulf, I came home to a place that was somehow different from the shitty single-wide I’d left hours before, because this time he would never return. I’d been claiming it a bit at a time for years now—hard-won territory, every inch—the trailer and the small brick building it leaned into: Wynn’s Garage. But neither had belonged to me. Not until today.

  Leaving the front door open, I walked straight up to the stained recliner, deep-sea blue in a former life, now faded and held together with duct tape and loose bolts. Dragging it from its corner, I pulled it across the soiled carpet and rammed it through the front door, down the cracked concrete steps, and into the yard. I stared where it sat harmless and ugly on the dead grass.

  I picked it up and moved it to the middle of the asphalt driveway the trailer shared with the garage. Pulling my lighter and smokes from my front pocket, I stared at that chair, memories of my father rushing over me one after another until they all blended into one where I entered the room and he said, “Get me a beer before you go out that door, you worthless dumbass” from that chair. I’d fetch a can from the twenty-four-pack in the fridge and hand it to him, stretching out my arm so he’d be less able to grab my wrist and twist it, or yank me closer and punch a fist into my shoulder, my side, my stomach.

  Most of the time, he’d just take the beer, his eyes glued to the flickering screen. One time in five, he’d try to get hold of me. My heart rate sped, remembering. I never knew when he’d lunge and when he’d just snatch the can from my hand and ignore me.

  I lit the end of a Camel Crush and sucked in smoke and nicotine-aided calm.

  Once, when I was seventeen, he’d punched me so hard I couldn’t breathe for nearly a minute. I thought I was going to die. Stumbling and knocking over the coffee table as I fell just pissed him off more. He lunged and swung again, but I ducked and he missed. A first. That made him furious, and he came at me just as I hit the floor and my lungs decided to unlock and let me live. He kicked me once before I rolled to my feet and realized I’d grown as tall as him in the past few months. He still outweighed me then, but that thought didn’t enter my mind. I was desperate and enraged and scared as hell.

  I threw a fist straight into his face, and his nose crunched just like anybody else’s. Why that fact surprised me, I don’t know. But in that moment, he’d reached the end of his godlike reign over me. I saw the realization of it in his eyes as he staggered and swung, missing again. For the first time, I stepped forward instead of falling back. I lashed out instead of cowering. I hit instead of got hit.

  He was bloodied and gasping when I backed toward the door—laboring to breathe, inhaling and exhaling and alive and unhurt but for my bloodied fists. I pointed like the grim reaper. “Don’t. Ever. Fucking. Hit me. Again.”

  “Get the fuck out of my house!” he’d hollered, the weak squawk of an old man.

  “You won’t live forever,” I’d said, but he hadn’t heard me.

  I flicked the still-burning butt onto the seat of that chair, where it smoldered and sank like a crab burrowing down into the sand, leaving only a black-ringed hole. I’d gone to pull my lighter from my pocket again when there was a sudden, gratifying whoosh as the seat went up in flames.

  I took a step back and pulled out another cigarette, lit and started it, watching that chair turn into a squarish pillar of fire that would soon be reduced to ashes.

  “Good-bye, Dad,” I said.

  Pearl

  My hands gripped the wheel, and I took a slow breath as if I were psyching myself to lift a heavy weight or dive off a cliff. Southbound 181 remained a familiar blur of scrubby grass, gnarled mesquites, and mile after mile of weathered wire and post fencing. The monotonous view usually comforted me, every mile marker bringing me closer to home. Today, the closer I got the more aware I was of the confrontation I’d been avoiding for months and the fact that I couldn’t dodge it any longer.

  A
lifetime of camouflage fell away, and I was left with nothing but the truth of who I was and the fact that soon everyone else would know. I swallowed hard, reality tightening its fist around my windpipe.

  “Mama, I’m not going to medical school.” I forced the words out, testing their impact on my own ears.

  I knew my mother well, and while I’d certainly disappointed her before—my shy approach to social situations manifesting in an inevitable lack of leadership qualities, for example—this was disappointment at an unprecedented level. Medical school had been her goal for me my entire life. Our goal for me. Until I realized—with crushing clarity, in the middle of a Harvard interview last fall—that joining the medical profession wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

  I’d ended up waitlisted at Harvard. My near-4.0 undergrad GPA and above-average MCAT scores weren’t the reason I’d failed to receive unconditional admittance. The premed associations I’d joined, the internships I’d completed, my sorority membership and exemplary letters of reference—these things weren’t at fault.

  The determining factor had been my mouth, opening and closing in fishlike absurdity instead of giving a coherent answer to a perfectly standard question from the faculty member leading the interview.

  “Ms. Frank,” she’d begun, raising her eyes from the paperwork on the table in front of her and pinning me with a focused smile, “tell us, please—what reservations might you have about joining the medical profession?”

  There was nothing accusatory in her tone. She’d undoubtedly posed this question before and expected a competent, thoughtful answer in return. Here was the chance to affirm my desire to study medicine at a university that produces highly skilled physicians (such as Harvard). A nervous applicant might offer a chuckled comment about paying back formidable med-school loans. A self-confident candidate like my boyfriend, Mitchell, might declare: I have no reservations; I’ve always wanted to be a doctor.

  Instead, all I could think was, I don’t want to. My mouth worked in desperation, trying to find other, more appropriate words to say, but they wouldn’t come.

  I eventually blurted something inane, and after an awkward pause, the Q&A progressed to other interrogations. I made no further blunders as we discussed my premed preparations, methods of handling personal and educational challenges, and the ways I imagined the healthcare profession might change in the near future.

  But in the taxi back to my hotel, all I could recall was that one question and the host of suitable answers I hadn’t given. Once in my room, I’d called Mitchell and answered his post-interview debriefing with a vague, “It was fine. I’m just sort of beat.” I couldn’t put my newfound self-awareness into words over the phone. When he didn’t press for performance specifics, I wasn’t sure if he believed I was too tired to elaborate or if he was merely preoccupied with his own interview schedule. He’d just returned from Durham and would be in Cambridge in two weeks. He’d want to dissect every aspect of Harvard’s interview process before he arrived.

  I went to sleep hoping the whole thing was just passing insanity, but by the time Mitchell picked me up at the airport the next afternoon, I’d only grown more certain—I didn’t want to go to medical school. We’d planned our corresponding futures like we each planned everything else in our lives: every detail strategically premeditated, every probability accounted for. Except for the one where he went on to medical school and I… didn’t.

  That night, over short ribs at Péché, I confided the truth to him.

  Brows drawn, he finished chewing, wiped his fingers, and sipped his pisco sour before answering. “What do you mean, you don’t see yourself going to medical school? It sure sounds like you flubbed that interview—with Harvard too, Jesus—but you’ve got several others lined up. You’ll get in somewhere. Duke. Vanderbilt. UT Southwestern, if it comes to that. Stop being so defeatist.”

  I’d been dating Mitchell for over a year, but I’d never been able to get used to his fallback insistence that I maintain a “positive attitude” whenever I raised a concern or wanted to discuss some apprehension. Optimism is all fine and good, but it has squat to do with solving problems. You’d think as a future doctor, he would know that. But then, sometimes it also seemed that the need for compulsory enthusiasm only applied to me.

  “I’m not being defeatist, Mitchell. I’m trying to tell you that I don’t want to be a doctor—not a medical doctor, anyway. So it doesn’t matter whether I can get in or where.” I knew he was disappointed and probably shocked, so I gave him time to absorb the blow I’d just dealt our future together.

  He was quiet for a full two minutes, and then—“Are you fucking kidding me?”

  His set jaw and rigid gaze were all too familiar. Months before, we were alone in his dorm room, studying for an exam in organic chemistry, when I got a text from a guy in my technical-writing class. “Why are you getting a text from that guy?” he’d said.

  “We’re friends. And he was texting me about an assignment, Mitchell.”

  “Do I look stupid?” His face warmed to a livid red, spittle at the corner of his mouth and his fingers dug into my upper arms, immobilizing me. He glared at the phone in my hand. “Why won’t you fucking tell me what’s really going on?”

  I gasped, my mouth hanging open. “Nothing is going on.” I jerked loose from his grip and stood, backing away, only to trip over his roommate’s shoes, fall backward, and collide with a desk chair on the way down.

  Minutes later, while pressing an ice pack to the goose egg on the back of my skull, Mitchell apologized repeatedly. “I’m sorry—God, I’m so sorry—of course I trust you. These are my insecurities, leftovers from what Darla did to me, you know?” Darla—his freshman-year girlfriend who’d cheated on him with his best friend and broken his heart. “Please, Pearl. You know I didn’t mean for you to get hurt. I’ll never talk to you like that again, I swear.” His blue eyes were glassy with tears.

  I’d forgiven him in the end, accepting his sworn promises.

  “Are you. Fucking. Kidding me?” he repeated from across the table, snapping those months-old vows like they’d never been given.

  Despite the music pumping through the packed restaurant and the voices raised in conversation all around us, the two women at an adjoining table heard him. Both went silent, sliding looks between each other and the developing scene at our table. Mortified, I sensed them deliberating whether or not to intervene. I hated being a spectacle almost as much as I hated what he’d said, and he knew it.

  I leaned in, face on fire, voice low. “Mitchell, not here.”

  “Not here?” He angled his head as if he was offended. “You decided to drop this on me here. Maybe you should have considered where you wanted to have this absurd discussion instead of trying to tell me how to react to the fact that my girlfriend is tossing her future away—and mine, by the way—like it’s no big deal.”

  His words snuck under my arguments, igniting guilt that what I decided could alter the course of both our futures, not just mine.

  “I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I thought we could discuss this—”

  “Sure, sure. Let’s discuss it. So what are you planning to do instead with your degree in premed biology? Teach high school? Work in some mind-numbing lab for the rest of your life? Oh, wait—I know.” He sat back, mouth settling into a hostile smile. “Slink back to your sheltered small-town existence, away from the big bad world, and collect shells or diagnose fish allergies or whatever the hell you did last summer. Is that your brilliant plan?”

  Indignant, I sat back and crossed my arms, refusing to answer. I hated when he ridiculed my hometown—a habit that had worsened instead of improving after he’d visited for a week the previous summer. Though he’d seemed impressed with my parents’ bayfront property and had spent as much time discussing his surgical aspirations and opinions about the medical profession with my stepdad as he spent with me, he still insisted my homesickness was juvenile. Something to be outgrown.
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br />   He dipped his face into my field of vision and peered at me. “Oh Jesus—seriously? Have you lost your mind, Pearl? You must be certifiable, because no sensible person would sacrifice the chance to attend one of the top medical schools in the world to work with fish.”

  We’d almost broken up that night, but once back in my room, he convinced me that he was only concerned I was acting rashly.

  He begged me to reconsider. “You just have cold feet,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  So I agreed to continue the med-school interviews, consider the offers of admission, and even accept one of them: Vanderbilt, in Tennessee—one of two that had also accepted him.

  Meanwhile, I took the GRE and applied—on the final date to submit an application—to one graduate program in marine biology, located, as Mitchell predicted, in my hometown. I told myself that if I didn’t get in, I would go to medical school like everyone expected me to and no one would ever know I’d applied.

  In December, I got the acceptance e-mail. Fellowships had been allocated months before, but I was offered a small stipend—just enough to cover tuition, fees, and equipment—in exchange for working in the lab or collecting marine samples in the gulf. I was welcome to begin in summer, but the student apartments—weatherworn but beachfront—were full. Unlike other students, however, my parents owned a four-thousand-square-foot home minutes from campus. I wouldn’t need housing.

  There’d be no high-paid position awaiting me when I earned my degree, and most people would never quite understand what I did for a living or why. A lifetime spent studying the ocean and the life in it wasn’t something people did for money or social prestige. It was something they were drawn to, like people are drawn to the sea itself. I would discover my research niche in grad school—something environmental in scope—and spend my career building a body of work to support it.

  Instead of going to medical school and becoming the surgeon I’d always planned to be.