All Yours: A Second Chance Romance

by Ellie Bradshaw

  He draws in a breath, then lets it out. For a moment I am worried that he’s going to confirm my fears and tell me that, yes, these feelings of hurt and loss and unworthiness are, indeed, my fault.

  “No,” he says. The relief I’d hoped to feel doesn’t quite flood me, but somehow just the single word makes me feel somewhat better. “No, this definitely falls in Cam’s lap.”

  I feel as if I need to argue with him. Not to protect Cameron, but out of some need to punish myself. “But Cam didn’t write that text to Marie.”

  He draws in another breath, and his face falls for a moment. And now I realize that, in focusing on my own pain I have ignored the pain he must be experiencing, and now I’ve just ripped off a scab. I open my mouth to apologize, but he says, “Sure. He didn’t do that. But he created this entire situation. He set things up so that you put your heart on the line. He left you both exposed to this—this whole, fucked-up outcome—to impress his dad. To secure his place in Jason’s little world. Cam did that. And he—”

  “He didn’t stand up for me.” Saying the words makes me feel as if my heart is going to tear in two.

  Eric glances over at me. “The thing is, Cam loves you. He would do anything for you.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  He shrugs, his shoulder nearly brushing mine. “I don’t know what was running through his mind. Only that it must have been—you know what, I’m not going to have his back on this one. He should be here driving you home, not me.”

  I touch his hand. “But you are, and I thank you.”

  He nods.

  “Do you want to talk about Marie?” Anything to get my mind off the events of this morning.

  The muscles on the side of his jaw bunch into a hard knot. “Nope.”

  “I’m giving the money back.”

  Eric purses his lips. “A principle-of-the-thing sort of thing.”

  A sigh feels heavy as it comes out of my mouth, as if it’s been sitting heavy on my lungs without my noticing it. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “What about your mom?” His eyes are locked onto the road.

  Yeah, Aimee. What about your mom?

  “I’ll think of something. Drop out. Get a job and take care of her. Something.”

  “Back to Bartlesville, huh? Seems like we’re making a lot of effort to get you out of there right now.”

  Why does everything have to be so hard?

  “I have stuff to take care of in Norman. Things to pack.”

  He nods. “I’d keep the money.”

  “Fuck their money.”

  He half-smiles. “I’d keep it and call it Asshole Tax. It’ll do you more good than it does them. Jason was right about one thing. They’ll never even notice that it’s gone.”

  I shake my head, not in denial but in amazement. That something that means so much to me and my mom—something that could provide us with a temporary security that we both so desperately need—could mean so little to someone else.

  I fall back in my seat. “I’ll think about it.”

  ***

  I get several texts as we drive. I glance at them, see they are from Cameron, and ignore them. So I almost ignore the phone when it rings. I let it go for a moment, listening to the ring-tone I custom clipped for it—Katy Perry singing about roaring—until Eric becomes obviously impatient.

  “You going to get that, or just keep poisoning my ears?”

  “You have poor taste, you know that?” I glance at the phone.

  The screen says one word.

  Mom.

  I answer just before it goes to voice mail.

  “Hello?” I say, my heart sinking into my stomach. I know, deep down, that it’s my aunt. Or a neighbor. Or a police officer with bad news, calling me because I was the number one ICE number in my mother’s cell phone. Damnit. I should have been with her. All this time I wasted cavorting around with Cam, living some pretend life for his family’s benefit, I should have been with her. And now, what? Is it too late?

  All these things flit through my mind in a split second. A split second that is shattered—or perhaps the right word is melted—when my mom’s voice says, “Aimee?”

  My heart stops. I’m certain that it does, and that I’ve just died. Eric is going to have to change course to drive me to a conveniently located morgue.

  “Mom?”

  “Hi, sweetie. How are you?” As if we had just had a reasonable mother-daughter conversation last week, and she was just checking in for an update on class or boys or….whatever.

  “Pretty good. Just driving around with Eric. You remember Eric, right?” Does she? He was over at our house when we were growing up as if it was a second home. But does she remember that?

  Her voice has none of the uncertainty about it that I’ve become used to in the past year. “Of course I do. How is Eric?”

  I glance at him, my mouth open. He looks over at me, his eyebrows raised to his hairline. He mouths the words, “What’s up?”

  “You know Eric, Mom. Mooning over some girl, as usual.”

  His eyes go back to the road, but he flips me the bird with his free hand.

  “Well, tell that boy that there are plenty of girls. He’s a good kid. The right one will come along and then he won’t know what to do with himself.”

  Jesus, Mom hasn’t been this lucid in…I can’t remember how long.

  I’m scared to ask, but I have to. “How are you doing?”

  There is a pause on the other end of the line. Then: “I’m feeling…better. I’m feeling a lot better, Aimee.”

  I could cry. In fact, my eyes are stinging and there is a dull ache in my throat, so I think that, probably, I will cry.

  “That’s…that’s really good, Mama.”

  “I was so tired after…after your dad died.” There is a hitch in her throat, but her voice is steady. Strong. “But I rested a while. I think that’s what I did. I just had to get some rest.” A deep breath, and a sigh. “But now I’m awake, and I feel pretty good. Susie told me that I haven’t been exactly…present…for some time now. I’m sorry.”

  And now, by God, I am crying. But a good kind of crying. The kind that comes when a huge amount of stress and grief that you’ve been carrying around with you seems to wash away. Part of me hesitates to believe that my mom really could be back. Could be recovered and back to her old self. But the greater part of me, that part that’s known her all my life, knows that this is the real deal. That Mom returned from whatever Nowhere Land she has been living in these past months.

  “No,” I say, my shoulders shaking. “No, don’t you be sorry.”

  We talk for a while longer, and then we hang up the phone.

  I sit there for a moment, phone in my lap, looking at nothing in particular. It wouldn’t do any good to look at anything, anyway. The whole world is blurry. After a while I wipe my eyes.

  “Eric?”

  “I am so all ears.”

  “I know we’re halfway back to Norman.”

  “Yep.”

  “But could you take me back to Bartlesville? To my mom’s house?”

  “Yep.”

  Cam

  I sit on the edge of my bed and recap the last twenty-four hours to myself. As snapshots in life go, this one seems pretty goddamn momentous. I brought Aimee to my parents’ house. I came back to my parents’ house myself, the prodigal son returned to the bosom of paternal approval, which was something I had previously thought unlikely. I told Aimee that I loved her. I got her back, and we spent hours making love in a tree house. And then.

  And then I lost her again.

  All in less than a day.

  I text her again (This is all my fault. I love you.), but I don’t expect her to answer.

  The bedspread twists in my fingers and my teeth grind together.

  What did I do wrong?

  What did you do right, good buddy?

  The whole thing hits me like a wave. I fucked up. Every step of this entire idiotic plan was a mistake, was phony, an
d it was my fault.

  Not every step. The part where I told Aimee that I loved her, in front of all those people: not a mistake. Making love to her: not a mistake.

  But not storming out of my father’s presence, cutting ties with my family immediately. That was a mistake. Not bitch-slapping Eli for his goddamn games. I should have done that. He hacked her phone. He violated her personal information.

  I’ll kill him, the prick.

  Anger floods me, and on its heels, exhaustion. It’s been a long day. I lie back on my bed, frowning up at the ceiling like an angsty teen. Oh, Kurt Cobain, where are you when I need you?

  My eyes flicker closed, and I let them. I think about Eli, and about driving my fist repeatedly into the center of his smug, laughing face. I’m still think about that when I drift off to sleep.

  The Black Sheep

  Cam

  When I awaken, it is with a foul taste in my mouth and the afterimage of Aimee, her eyes red-rimmed and her face stricken with hurt, pushing past me. And her back as she flees down the hall.

  On the heels of that image comes a certainty: I am finished with this. Done with my dad’s games. Done with his money. I will walk away from his business and my easy guaranteed future. I will…I will…find some way to make all this up to Aimee. To show her that she really is the only thing in the world that I want. And that I want her, not just for right now as she said last night, but for always.

  I swing my legs off the bed and sit upright. Look in the mirror over the low side dresser to take stock of myself. My shirt is rumpled, my hair is tousled from sleeping on it. My eyes are still sleepy. Perfect. I’m on a mission to cut ties, not ask for a job. Perfectly acceptable to look like hell when I do it.

  I pack much as Aimee did hours ago. Quickly, haphazardly. My toiletries and clothes all jumbled into my leather suitcase without much care for them. Part of me reminds myself that pretty soon I’ll be paying for all this stuff myself, and that perhaps I should take a bit greater care with them. But the part of me that is in motion isn’t worried about all that right now. The zipper seems loud when I close the suitcase.

  Light through the window is dim. I must have slept for a really long time. Makes sense, given the great amount of non-sleeping I did last night. I feel energetic now, though. Ready to get out of here, face my father. Face the world.

  Mom must be feeling nostalgic today. Smells as if she’s fired up the old wood stove in the kitchen to make biscuits. It’s how her grandmother taught her, and she still believes it is a way to bake biscuits that is superior to any conventional oven. Given how good those biscuits are, I would have to agree. Despite my upcoming task, my mouth begins to water.

  The weather must have taken an even colder turn. The wind howls outside my window. I pick up my suitcase and leave the room. As I stride down the hall toward the kitchen, the smell of smoke is stronger. There have to be at least two fireplaces going. Of the things I’m going to miss, this might be the biggest. There are so many memories that seem to center around fireplaces in this house. Board games on the rug with Aimee and Eric in the rec room, the fire crackling. Watching movies in the living room with Mom, the fire in the hearth warming us while we ate popcorn.

  I make a mental note that, once I get myself rich again—hey, if my grandfather could do it, so can I—I will buy a house with a fireplace. Shoot for the stars, Simons. Make that four fireplaces.

  I do find Mom in the kitchen, but she isn’t cooking biscuits. Instead she’s sitting at the small kitchen table, much as she was earlier, staring into space. When I come into the room she looks up, sees the bag in my hand. She smiles sadly, and it breaks my heart.

  “You slept a long time.” Her voice is quiet, subdued.

  “I was tired.”

  She runs a hand across her face and I can see, now, that she is tired too. But the kind of tired that is on her face isn’t the kind that comes from a sleepless night. It’s the kind of long, down-in-the-bone tiredness that comes from a lot of them.

  “So this is it, then,” she says, nodding at the suitcase.

  My throat closes up and for a moment it seems I can’t talk, so I just nod instead.

  “I’ve wondered for a long time if it would come to something like this,” she says, sighing. “Your father, he—”

  I hold up my hand. “I love you, Mom. I always will. I love Dad, too, I think, but I can’t be what he wants me to be. I don’t want to be what he wants me to be. Let Eli do that. It’s all Eli lives for, to be what Dad wants. They can leave me out of it.”

  She nods, a tear trickling down her face.

  “Where is he?” I ask. I don’t even have to specify which “he” I mean. She knows I don’t have anything to say to Eli.

  She tilts her head toward the door that leads out onto the patio. “He’s in the barn,” she says, “puttering around with those old tractors of his.”

  I lean over and put my arms around her shoulders. The muscles aren’t quite as firm as I remember, and there is more padding on them, and it suddenly occurs to me that my mother is getting older. She is getting older and her son is leaving her.

  Not you, Mom. I’m not leaving you.

  But deep down I know that’s not entirely true.

  I leave the suitcase on the floor beside the table and walk out the back door.

  Dad’s hobby, if you can call it that, is rebuilding old tractors. Specifically John Deeres. He loves them. I think it’s the green color. They remind him of money. When last I saw, he had five of them in various states of disrepair. He could easily hire a mechanic to come and refurbish the machines, and they’d be done in a matter of weeks. But this is one thing that he doesn’t want to outsource. Maybe it really is a labor of love, if such can be said about anything my father does.

  He keeps the tractors in a barn he had built a couple hundred yards from the house. It is down the hill, just past and to the east of the elm tree—make that “burning stump” I remind myself. And it is still burning. I shake my head. That thing really might just smolder in the ground forever. I haven’t yet crested the edge of the hill, so I can’t see it, but I can see the plume of smoke even against the twilight, whipped into torrents by the wind that scours my face. And the wind seems to have whipped up the flames, as well; there is a decided orange glow emanating from the other side of the hill.

  It seems like too much smoke to be coming from a burning stump, though. And from the wrong place. I quicken my steps, trotting. When I cross the edge of the patio, I see two things that make my heart drop into my stomach.

  The first is that the tree isn’t belching smoke. In this high wind, the flameless combustion at the core of the stump has suddenly caught more oxygen than it knows what to do with, and now a vortex of embers cyclones up from the ground, a swirling devil that dances to the tune of the capricious wind, reaching out at random and dropping small pockets of flame onto the yard. Luckily there isn’t much grass here to burn, or it could start a fire that might spread all the way to the house. That is the only way, really, the disaster could be worse.

  The disaster is the second thing I see. At some point the dictates of the swirling Oklahoma air drove cherry-red plumes of burning tree the fifty yards across the lawn and into the barn. As the barn is essentially a mechanic shop, there is no bed of straw covering the floor, or stacks of hay bales. If that had been the case the barn would, I’m sure, have been reduced to cinders long before I got there. As it was, it definitely only had a few minutes before the roof came down. Because Dad does keep a mattress of straw in front of the big roll-up door to make sure people—and tractors—are less likely to track mud into his barn. There, I can only surmise, the burning tree-bits found a home in that straw. It caught and burned rapidly and is now only a bed of black ash.

  Flames have climbed up both walls and spread across the roof from front to back, raging through the tar shingles. Through the door, I see only a furnace. Ghosts of tractors flicker in the flames, seeming in this moment alive and tormented. The one n
earest the door sits canted to one side, one of the big tires having exploded in the heat while the other sits, waiting for its own demise.

  Eli stands outside the door, looking in with a hopeless expression on his face.

  “Eli!” I yell. “Where’s Dad?”

  He doesn’t say anything, his face frozen, his whole body apparently frozen. I grab his shoulder and shake him. His head snaps toward me and his eyes focus. “Where’s Dad?”

  His mouth works and I want to slap him like in some old Bogart movie. I want to do a lot more that slap him right now, actually, but I have other priorities. So I shake him again.

  Eli lifts a hand and points into the barn.

  Of course. This was never going to be an easy day. I run to the door, leaving Eli to continue staring, or whatever he would decide to do.

  “Dad!” I call, hoping beyond hope that he’s near the door and I can get to him. Much past the entrance just looks like a good place to burn to death. “Dad!”

  From inside the barn, somewhere in that inferno, I hear three words. Hoarse, smoke-choked, my father calls to me. “Cam! Stay out!” He doesn’t sound close, and I see the chances of getting him out safely dwindle to ribbons.

  I should do as he says. Timbers creak in the ceiling, and a shower of coals falls to splatter across the concrete floor just inside the door. I should, for once, obey my father to the letter.

  But what the hell, I think. You came down here to tell him to get fucked. What better way to do it?

  Besides, I’ll probably die in there, and that will be a lot of pressure off.

  I take a deep breath and run into the fire.

  It is so hot inside the barn that it make the skin on my face tighten like old leather. Smoke immediately strikes me nearly blind and I squint. Remembering what old Fireman Jim told us in a fourth grade safety presentation, I squat down, getting as close to the floor as I can. My eyes are watering.

  “Dad! Where are you? Tell me quick so we don’t both die in here!”