“Well, I plan to keep working for you,” I assured him. “For a while. I’m excited for your granddaughter to finish her clerkship and join us.”
He nodded happily but didn’t get sidetracked. “Yes, that will be wonderful. But what about you?”
“Well…I was thinking that maybe I’d open my own salon with my cousin Kayleigh. Someday.”
“Have you gone to beauty school? Do you have a business plan? Money saved for a down payment on a storefront or for a security deposit? Have you looked into licensing?”
“No, none of those things,” I admitted.
“So, it’s not a very serious plan.”
“No, not really,” I admitted further.
“Eimear is taking classes. You could do that with her.”
“I could,” I said, but I couldn’t put enthusiasm into my voice. I’d hated school. Well, the parts about hanging with my cousins and going to football games and sometimes even dances—those parts I had liked a lot. The other parts, the actual academic ones, I hadn’t enjoyed at all. Yes, “hated” was definitely the right word to use for me and my relationship with learning.
“Hm,” Gary said. He sounded thoughtful, but also disappointed.
“I don’t really want the same things that Eimear does,” I tried to explain. “Like, I really want to get married.”
“Eimear’s marrying that large man,” Gary countered, and that was true.
“I really want a family,” I tried again, and he had another answer.
“Eimear and her fiancé adopted a baby. And she’s also going to school, and she’ll be a lawyer, eventually.” Now he sounded very satisfied.
Ok, yes, all that was accurate. “I’m not as ambitious as Eimear. I want a house and a garden—”
“Don’t Eimear and the man she’s marrying have those things?”
I gave up. “Yes, they do.”
“Then you could, also!” He started talking to me about community college and night classes, all the way to his old men club. He was a terrible driver, too, and talking to me distracted him enough that we had two near-misses with a bike and a pedestrian, but Gary was so focused on improving my future that he didn’t notice. We made it to the club with nobody dying and with no plans for me hammered down, either, and I was glad about both of those things.
I wasn’t as worried about my future—at least, I wasn’t worried in the same way that Gary was. We were focused on different things, I thought. Gary wanted me to get ahead, to make a step up, but I liked where I was. I just wanted to add someone there with me, a few people: a husband and at least two kids. And also, I really wanted a dog and maybe a miniature horse, and some goats. And a cat and garden, like I’d said, and a house to take care of so I could host my family after church and for holidays.
No, I really wasn’t very ambitious, and maybe that was a mistake. I thought of my mother’s life and how it had turned out for her in a way very different from what she’d expected. I felt a little shiver of anxiety, the kind I usually tried to ignore. I did now, too, because we were going to celebrate!
Gary’s club was quiet, the kind of place that made me think I should whisper, like a library or the bus station late at night. It had that kind of sad vibe, too.
“Morose,” Eimear murmured to me as we walked through the big, marble cavern of the entrance, which I was fairly certain meant that she agreed about the sad vibe. “Not really the place for celebrating.”
“No. We could easily hold a funeral, though.”
She laughed, even though I had meant it seriously. Gary was all smiles, too, as he strutted in with us toward the bar. “Aria, what can I get you? Fruit juice?”
“Um, ok, juice is good,” I said, and Eimear ordered a sparkling water. She wasn’t much of a drinker, either. Gary got a beer, then we stood a little awkwardly with our glasses in hand.
“Cheers! To the Kritikos family and to our success for them!” Gary told us, and raised his glass.
“Cheers!” we agreed, and then we found three fancy, leather armchairs to sit in and settled down there. Gary started to tell us about some cases he’d had at the beginning of his career, just starting off as a lawyer, and I saw Eimear sneaking glances at the time on her phone and sending out some texts, too.
But it was Gary who got the call to go. “What’s that?” he suddenly asked us, sitting bolt upright in his big chair. “Do you feel that?”
“I think maybe you have your phone in your pocket. On vibrate,” Eimear said carefully. She leaned forward so that her platinum hair hid her face, and I was sure that she was smiling behind it.
“Oh! Well, darned if it isn’t.” He stood to fetch it. “Beverly?” he yelled, and went toward the front door, so he could stand on the sidewalk and bellow in peace.
“I’m going to go,” Eimear said, drained her watermelon-flavored water, and stood. “Will you let Gary know?”
“Are you sure? We could hang out more.” I’d always liked her a lot, but she’d always been so busy with everything in her life.
“As fun as it is,” she said, and grimaced. It actually hadn’t been as fun here as I’d imagined that we could make it. As a trio, maybe we worked better together rather than played together. “Do you mind, Aria?”
“No, it’s fine. See you Monday. Have a great weekend!” I said. She waved as she went out, already on her phone and smiling. She was talking to her fiancé, I was sure. They spoke a lot and sent each other messages during our hours at the law office. I could always tell when she heard from him because she always got that same smile.
I watched her go, wishing I had someone to make me smile like that, and also wondering what was keeping Gary. I probably wasn’t supposed to be sitting in this chair without a club member with me. I definitely didn’t belong here, because almost all of the other people who had come in were men and almost all of them were older. Except one, who was young and tall and strong and beautiful.
“Oh! Is that Cain?”
My voice had been loud in the quiet of the club. The blonde man I’d seen near the bar turned quickly and looked through the dusty air at me. He said something to the men he was standing with (old guys, all of them) and walked over to where I was sitting.
“Aria.” He looked down at me, his face kind of cold. Frozen, like he wasn’t showing any excitement or happiness at seeing an old friend, which we were, weren’t we?
Maybe he thought that I shouldn’t be here, just like I’d been afraid of. “I’m with a member,” I said quickly. “I came to have a drink with my boss, but he had to go outside to talk to his wife.”
“You went for a drink with your married boss who’s outside so you can’t overhear a conversation with his wife,” he said slowly.
“Exactly!” I answered, smiling. No one wanted to listen to Gary’s deafening phone calls with Bevie, as he called her.
Cain frowned, like he was angry about something. “Come sit with me, Aria,” he told me, and even though he still wasn’t looking so friendly, I was happy to join him. His other friends left as I took my glass and followed him over to the bar.
“Who were you here with?” I asked him.
“It was a meeting,” he said briefly.
“Don’t you have to be a member of this club to hang out?” I looked around, wondering if we were going to get booted before my boss finished his phone call and came back in.
“I am one. I got sponsored for a membership since it looks like I’ll be in Tennessee for a little while. This is where business really happens in this town.”
“Wow!” I sat down on a bar stool. “I thought you had to be old to belong here. Old, and really rich.”
“No,” he said, even more briefly, and picked up my glass, rolling around the juice at the bottom of it. “What are you drinking, a screwdriver? Why do women always want fruit with their alcohol?” He ordered one for me before I could say it was just an orange juice, and he got himself a Tennessee whiskey. “Neat,” he told the bartender. Now, that was a drink that made sen
se in a place like this.
“Can I try it?” I asked him when we got our round.
“My whiskey?” His eyebrows raised.
“I just want to taste it.” I picked up his glass and took a tiny sip, but it was as awful as I’d expected. “Ooh! Thank you,” I told him, my lips puckering. “You know, I’m not supposed to drink yet,” I said, very low. “I’m only twenty.”
“Are you serious?”
I nodded. “Don’t you remember? You were fifteen when my father died, weren’t you? And I was five. It was fifteen years ago.”
“I do remember that,” he said, nodding slowly. “You were practically a baby.”
“I thought you were the big boy from next door,” I said, and laughed. “You weren’t as big as you are now.”
A tiny, tiny smile appeared on his lips. “I was about a hundred pounds, dripping wet. I had to work for years to put on weight.”
I sighed. What a problem to have! “You were a nice boy to me,” I told him, and he immediately lost that ghost of a smile.
“I heard you coming to visit my aunt again last week. Thank you.”
I’d heard him also, a deep and sometimes angry voice behind the door that had been my bedroom in our old house, the words too muffled to understand but the tone of bossing very clear. I’d asked his aunt what he was doing in there and she’d said, “Oh, business,” but I had no idea what she meant, even after I’d searched his name and read about his company in San Francisco. At least I knew it wasn’t a criminal enterprise, as my mama had said it was.
I’d noticed a lot of improvements around the house when I’d been visiting. The refrigerator held more than the casserole dishes that neighbors had been bringing, the lawn looked like someone had given it attention. My Uncle Jed had fixed the dangling shutter, which was a welcome change, but it was more than that. Cain had obviously been working on things.
“I’m happy to see Miss Liddy,” I said. “I have time on my hands since I don’t have a family of my own like everybody else.”
“You’re only twenty,” he said, reminding me of what I’d just told him.
“Yes? That’s right, it’s why I shouldn’t have this.” I pushed the glass on its fancy napkin back his way. “I don’t know if you’re allowed to mix whiskey and a screwdriver. Will it make you sick if you drink mine, too?”
“I’ve never tried that and I don’t plan to now.”
“Oh, but it’s a shame to waste it!” I said. “I’m sorry. I wish I’d told you earlier that I’m underage.” I lowered my voice on the last word so the bartender wouldn’t hear me. I didn’t want Cain to get in trouble. I told him that, too.
He stared at me. “Are you joking?”
“No, I really am. My birthday is next October fifth and then I’ll be legal, twenty-one.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, are you honestly worried about wasting my money and getting me in trouble?”
“Oh, of course, I can pay you back!”
“No.” He put his hand over mine for just a second as I pulled my wallet from my purse. “No, that’s ok. You ready to go?”
I looked at the drinks again, feeling sorry, but I nodded. “I’m not sure where Gary went. My boss,” I explained. “He drove me here.”
“You shouldn’t wait around for a guy like that,” Cain told me, and I shook my head, not understanding what he meant about Gary. “I’ll drive you home. Come on.” I trotted across the dark wood floor and outside, where I felt like I could breathe easier. Places like this club, grand and elegant, always made me so uncomfortable that my clothes felt too tight. I tested my waistband with my fingers to see if they were.
I looked for Gary outside, but he appeared to have left me, which wasn’t like him at all. But the club’s valet pulled up a car and Cain got into it, so I did as well. “Where’d you get this?” I asked him as the valet shut my door.
“It’s a rental. I may have to buy one, though.” He pulled out. “Where to?”
I gave him my address, and even though it had been years since he’d lived in the area, he seemed to know the way. “You would buy a car to keep in Tennessee?” I asked.
“It doesn’t make any sense to keep renting one. I have no idea how long I’ll be here.”
That had been my next question. I nodded, because Miss Liddy had told me that her treatment would take a few weeks and they might do a second round. “You’ll stay the whole time?”
“I’ll stay until she doesn’t need me anymore. Sometimes she’s too frail to get up to take herself to the bathroom. I need to hire a nurse, also, because she’s too embarrassed to accept my help with other things.” He sighed, and I saw that he looked tired.
“One of my older cousins does home healthcare. She’s really wonderful. I can give you her information, if you want,” I suggested.
He nodded at me, and I started scrolling through my phone. He’d sent me his aunt’s treatment schedule so I could plan my visits so his name was in there: Cain Miller, with a 415-area code that meant he lived somewhere else now.
I asked him about it. “What’s California like?”
“Fine,” he said briefly. “I like the ocean.”
And that was it. “What do you do out there?” I had read about his business but I hadn’t understood it.
“I started my own company a few years ago.” He explained briefly about logistics and shipping and trucks and computers, a bunch of things put together that I still didn’t totally get. But I did understand one thing, and it was that he had done it himself, through a lot of hard work and scrimping.
“That’s wonderful!” I marveled. “Wow, Cain! Your own company!”
He looked over at me and got a funny smile. “You sound surprised.”
“I’m just so impressed! How did you ever think of those ideas?”
“I was doing security at a place and I’d get to talking with the guys who worked there about all the problems they were having. It amazed me that I was the first one to come up with a solution, but I did.”
I shook my head, still marveling. “Is that what you’re always busy with in the bedroom at Miss Liddy’s house?”
He nodded. “I’m trying to run things from here. It hasn’t been easy.”
I thought about that and was even more impressed that he was staying in Tennessee to look after his aunt. I’d known that he was doing something that had made him some money, otherwise, he couldn’t have dressed so nicely in the smooth cotton shirts and the tailored pants I’d seen him wearing. He couldn’t have joined the club or rented this nice car, either, I considered, and touched the polished wood on the dashboard.
“Are you hungry?” he asked me suddenly. “I haven’t eaten today. Aunt Liddy has a friend coming to have dinner with her tonight so I don’t need to be there.”
“Make a right at this street,” I said immediately. “There’s a good place on the next corner. Or, if you want, I could make something at my apartment. I love to cook, as I guess you can see. But you’ll have to hang out with my two roommates. I live with my cousins, Kayleigh and Cassidy.”
“I remember y’all had a lot of family.” He glanced over. “Why are you smiling?”
“You haven’t sounded like you came from here, not until you just said that,” I explained.
“I worked on it,” he told me. “I worked on losing it.”
“Why?” Why would he want to lose where he came from? But he didn’t answer that question.
“You used to have big parties at your house when you lived next door to my aunt,” he said instead. “I could hear you and your sisters playing with everyone in your yard. That swing set used to creak like it was dying every time a kid sat on it.” He pointed ahead to a brightly lit building. “Is that the restaurant?”
“Yes, turn into the driveway,” I told him. “Do you remember coming over the night my father was killed? You pushed me on the swings.”
He nodded as he stopped the car. “I remember. I could see you sitting out there, trying to make
it go. It got darker and darker and you didn’t move off the pink one.”
“You stayed with me a long time.”
“Until your mama came out and found me and made me leave. She thought I was trying to hurt you,” he said, and pulled on the door handle.
I didn’t remember that part. I remembered his hand on my back, pushing gently but in a steady rhythm, every time I swung towards him. I remembered the stars above us, so close in the dark sky. She had made him leave? I wanted to ask more, but Cain was out of the car already.
“You didn’t hurt me,” I called after him. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard.
He ate his dinner like he didn’t notice what was on his plate and it was clean in about a minute. We didn’t talk much as he devoured his meal and I pushed mine around the bowl. “This was good. I miss this food,” he said, shoving back from the table a little. “The ‘Southern’ restaurants in San Francisco just feel contrived.”
“I’m going to cook dinner for you and Miss Liddy next week. I’ll check her schedule and make something tasty,” I decided.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to!” I told him, and Cain looked at what I had in front of me.
“How’d you enjoy that salad with the dressing on the side?” he asked, and made a face like he probably wouldn’t have, himself.
“It was fine. I try to be careful about my eating habits. Don’t you remember me as a kid?”
“Yeah?”
He wasn’t understanding. “I’m surprised you were able to push me on the swing! My nickname in the family was ‘biscuit’ because I was round like one, even though Mama didn’t like it when they said it.”
“I don’t remember you that way,” he said. He tilted his head as he looked at me, and his hard stare made me a little uncomfortable. But he said only, “I remember you in the mornings. You would wander over onto Aunt Liddy’s driveway to say hello while your mother was trying to get everyone into the car to go to school.”
“Did I do that?” I laughed. “Well, I always have liked to talk to people, and we always had to wait for my sister Bree in the morning. Aubree, I mean, my oldest sister. She takes forever to get ready. If one hair is out of place, she won’t leave the house.”
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