by Heather Gean
“Oh, come on. What didn’t you like about it? I want to hear your take on it.”
“Telling you my take on it would be like walking in front of a firing squad. You’re going to shoot down all of my criticisms.”
“No, I won’t,” I said gingerly. “I can support criticism as much as the next person. Try me.”
“I would rather keep my opinion of it unchallenged,” Ashley said with a wink. It was such a well-constructed response that any politician would have taken notes, and I sighed at his ability to suck the romance out of a moment. We quickly became nothing more than two people smushed together only to avoid the rain.
I spotted the nearest coffee shop just up the street and dragged Ashley towards it. The outside the windows were coated with condensation, and I paused for a moment to draw a small heart with my finger. Ashley smiled at my handiwork before ushering me inside where the fragrant aroma of coffee beans met me in a wave. A person could get a caffeine buzz just from sitting inside the place.
The line was only a few people deep, and I stood listening to the low moans of a jazz musician playing over the speakers and contemplating how the slow jazz was an odd companion to a double shot espresso beverage, which seemed better suited with a high-paced techno beat or simply more upbeat jazz. A shrill noise from a few customers ahead in line drew me out of my series of random observations; a poor, frazzled looking young woman had a baby in one of those fashionable yet curious looking baby slings, and it was wailing. The baby emitted three long-winded screams before being coaxed into silence with a pacifier. Her shoulders drooped in a sigh of relief. Hearing one cry from the infant made it clear why she was in line for massive doses of caffeine. Despite the trouble the little thing was causing her, I smiled at its adorable face and tiny fingers. Even with all their crying and pooping and spitting up, very few could deny the incomparable cuteness of babies. The lady ordered and took a seat in an armchair near the back with a parenting magazine open in front of her.
I placed my order for a simple cappuccino, never having been one to get fancy with my coffee orders like those people who had obviously been taking the stuff intravenously to be able to rattle off their mile-long set of instructions for a single cup of coffee in less than ten seconds flat. Ashley finished up our order with a regular, decaf cup of coffee… to go. That struck me as odd. “To go?” I asked quietly. He was passing the clerk a crisp, green bill as he glanced over at me.
“Yeah, I just figured since I have an early day.” His tone was as flat as the gaze he gave me. His eyes had lost their spark of interest. Ashley’s inner workings were baffling me, per usual, but I couldn’t take ‘yeah’ for an answer without being curious. He flashed me a smile before turning back to get his change.
Within moments we had our environmentally friendly cardboard cups in our hands and were back outside under the umbrella. The heart I’d drawn on the window minutes earlier had already begun to drip lines down the glass so that it no longer resembled a heart at all. Ashley sipped at his beverage too soon and cursed under his breath at his scorched tongue. I jested at him, “You’re such a coffee amateur.” The small amount of amusement he mustered was unsatisfactory. “You okay?” He was being high maintenance, and he should’ve known I wasn’t into that.
He broke into an irritated smile and seemed to be walking it off. “Kids just annoy me,” he said. “It’s not you! I would love to sit down and have coffee with you. Babies crying just - it’s like nails on a chalkboard.” He laughed whole-heartedly. We dodged a guy on a bicycle then fell back into step. The rain had almost stopped completely, making the umbrella a simple precautionary object hovering over our heads.
“You don’t want kids?” I asked. I was weirded out by Ashley’s confession. Mind you, I wasn’t ready to pop a kid out within the next year or two, but I planned to have some before I was thirty. I held my warm cup between both hands as I awaited his perfectly formulated response.
“I want a couple of them, maybe. Separately – it isn’t my turn for twins, so you should be happy about that. But, you know, I think it’ll be great eventually. I’ll make it to all the soccer games and help with the science projects and, you know, that stuff.” His smile widened as he slid his arm around my waist.
“What about the stuff that comes before the cleats and the volcanoes?” I asked. “Babies can’t play soccer. Babies are cute and cuddly, but they’re more likely to need a diaper change than a person to kick a ball around with.” I finally took a sip of my cappuccino to give my words a moment to catch up to my thought process. “All I’m saying is that with babies, or kids in general, there is the good stuff and bad stuff.”
“Yeah, but don’t worry about that stuff. We can hire the best nanny in the country – in the world even! That’s taken care of.” It was another Ashley-statement that I had to blink off. I put the plastic cup lid to my mouth and took another gulp to avoid saying anything rash.
“You want to hire someone else full-time to take care of your kids?”
“No, no, no. It’s not like giving them away or anything. The nanny would stay in our house to be there if the baby needed anything so you could sleep or shower or… do anything, really. You could take up tennis.”
“I don’t want to play tennis. Ashley, if you can’t handle the good stuff with the bad stuff when it comes to a baby then you shouldn’t have a baby at all. It’s ridiculous to pay someone else to do everything for your own child.”
“It’s not like that, Rainy,” Ashley defended. “It’s just a second person to help out.” He was digging himself a deeper hole, and I was ready to go ahead and kick him down into it.
“Ashley, that second person is supposed to be you! Where the hell do you expect to be all the time?”
“Rainy, I have a job. I’ll be working. Important people in the company have to put in a bit more than a simple nine to five. I have tons of meetings, tons of trips--” A taxi loudly beeped his horn at us, and I realized that we were crossing streets with no attention to the crossing signals. Ashley flipped off the driver before hurrying us across the street. He was obviously out of his element. I wasn’t sure I’d ever encountered a first name argument so early in a relationship before, you know, when the constant use of the other person’s name may as well be a four-letter word, but it was rolling right along by that point.
“Ashley, how do you plan to be married? Marriage is for better or worse. Are you going to hire someone to do all that stuff, too?” We weren’t yelling, but the conversation was more heated than the coffee I kept slurping down like ammunition.
“No!” he yelled. He sighed angrily and turned his face away from me. “Why do you keep pushing me? You don’t want this to work!”
“I do want it to work, Ashley, but for it to work you have to actually be around! How can I marry you? You’re already married to your job!” I yelled.
That’s when it hit both of us. We were stopped in the middle of a glistening New York City sidewalk having a yelling match. I instantly wanted to crawl inside of the nearest dumpster, which would seemingly have been less embarrassing for passersby to witness than the argument they just had. Ashley ran his hand through his blonde hair as he studied the sidewalk. I fumbled with the cardboard wrapper on my cup and stared at the buttons on the toes of my shoes. If only a major accident would happen on the street so that the spectators on the sidewalk would forget the childish couple yelling. Selfish, I know, but I felt horrible.
“I’ll call for the car?” he said. He sounded defeated, but I didn’t feel happily victorious. Is it possible for both people to lose in a fight?
“Yeah,” I said with a nod.
I had never known that New York City could feel so small.
Chapter 10
Thursday was more than my last day in New York. It was also the day James Wellington would be taking a final sneak peek at my exhibit. It had been a few days since I had received a full update from Wes, but reaching him that morning had been impossible. I hoped the phones were g
oing unanswered because everyone was too busy carrying out my instructions with perfection and being hospitable to the guest, not because things had gone horribly wrong and everyone was standing around arguing over who would give me the bad news. All of those alternative reasons frightened me, especially since I had never verified that those last, crucial pieces had arrived. James Wellington’s sneak peek opinion of my exhibit would definitely affect opening weekend and the overall success of my first project. Needless to say, I was a nervous wreck, not at all eased by the three cups of coffee I had downed that morning.
I sat at the last meeting I would have with Monica Radella before my departure, going over wedding details, which were still of the utmost importance to her: time of day, media coverage, photographers, A-list guests, disgusting color schemes. My mind, however, was somewhere else, and she was pissed, to put it nicely. “Rainy, this is your wedding. I need you to put this at the top of your list of priorities!” Maybe it was the tone in her voice. Maybe it was the three cups of coffee. But something inside me snapped.
“No, Monica, this is your wedding. This is Sarah Schroeder’s wedding. It definitely isn’t my wedding because there is no way I would make my friends wear chartreuse dresses and glue their hair into geometric shapes. I would also never agree to an all-meat menu when vegetarianism is not only a growing trend but something very serious to my best friend. And over my dead body would I let Dee make my wedding dress. And I’m not exactly a Plaza kind of girl. So, Monica, as far as I can see I’m not sure why my presence here matters at all because my opinion obviously doesn’t.” The delivery had been as smooth as if I had rehearsed it, and it had the desired effect. Monica straightened up in her chair and focused her wide-eyed stare on me.
“Do you have any idea what kind of family you’re marrying into?” Monica asked. The tone in her voice indicated that my ideas weren’t fit for the Schroeder standards. It was obvious that she meant I should feel privileged and be compliant.
I smiled at her without changing my relaxed position. My outstretched leg and titled shoulder seemed to be making a statement. “They have to keep you around to cover up all of their mistakes. I think that pretty well lets me know what kind of family I’m marrying into.” I took one last drink of coffee, finally coming into reality enough to realize how horrible it was, and stood up with a fake, wide smile. “Whenever you’re ready to let me plan the wedding, let me know. You know how to reach me.”
I met the doorman hanging around in the foyer. “Any chance I could get a car to take me into the city?” I lingered beside the nude statue as I awaited his hesitant response.
“Miss Clarke, you haven’t been authorized to take any of the vehicles,” he regretfully informed me. His doughy face looked apologetic, but I was still annoyed. Was I under house arrest or something?
“Ashley asked me to meet him for lunch. I figured I would leave early and do a little shopping.” Playing the Ashley card didn’t seem to give me the desired effect either.
“I’m sorry, but our driver is out with Mrs. Schroeder.”
I sighed pathetically. “I don’t need a driver. I know how to drive. I just need a car. There are probably five sitting in the garage. I’m trustworthy enough to marry Ashley. Can’t you trust me with a car?”
“My hands are tied, Miss Clarke.” I groaned sharply and wove my way through the house until I burst through the back doors. I walked until I found the concrete dog and plopped down in the grass.
On the phone, Ashley’s secretary reported that he would be in a meeting right up until noon, but that was hours away. My only hope for approval was busy talking business with fat men in suits, which is what I should have been doing that day instead of lying in the grass. I groaned again, collapsed onto my back, and draped an arm over my face to shield my eyes from the sun to encourage my brain not to explode from the overabundance of thoughts rapidly expanding in it. After all, I wouldn’t want to get brains all over the dog. I actually liked the dog.
Walker and Penelope, as far as I knew, had both abandoned the house. Penelope was probably on the road with Sebastian, and Walker was more than likely sleeping off a hangover in some posh apartment. Monica and Mrs. Schroeder weren’t options either, and Mr. Schroeder was most unattainable of all. That only left me two lifelines in the area. Piper McMahon from the concert was thrilled to hear from me but was also in the middle of her workday, so she made me promise to call her about the exhibit once I was back in Memphis then cut our call short in order to get a few more things taken care of before lunch. I had been avoiding my last choice, but it seemed inevitable.
~*~
The “thank you” I uttered once out the front doors of the house with a hope of leaving were perhaps the most heartfelt two words I had ever spoken in my life. I didn’t even mind that I was crawling into the passenger seat of a vintage police car. A cage barrier separated us from the backseat, where the Styrofoam beginnings of a sculpted person lay, and an old CB radio-style contraption was mounted where a radio should have been. I reached over and fiddled with the knotted, spiral cord running to the transmitter. The dashboard was cracked with age so I didn’t hesitate to rest my knees against it as I slouched into the seat. I was so desperate to get out of there that I would’ve even ridden in the hearse without question.
“What is it that you do that you have such a flexible schedule?” I asked. “Not that I’m complaining. I’m just curious.”
“This and that. I sculpt, you know, but that’s only when I’m in the mood for it. I fix things for people.”
“Like cars?” He nodded, the muscles in his arm flexing as he put the car into gear. “So you’re a mechanic?”
“I don’t have any formal training, but I am handy with cars.” He seemed to be distracted with driving. I was trying not to notice anything about him much. That’s how I nearly got myself into trouble the last time.
“Did you learn it from your dad?” He cut his eyes over at me before turning them right back to the road. He looked slightly suspicious.
“My dad wasn’t really around a lot.”
I hated my tendency to stumble into uncomfortable conversations. I turned things back around.
“What else do you fix?” I picked up the clunky microphone of the CB radio and turned it around in my hands.
“Some appliances. Radios.”
“Does this work?” I asked as I held up the mic.
“It does.” He reached over and flipped a few switches then turned a few knobs, and within seconds I could hear men talking over a crackly connection. I was shocked.
“Who is that?”
“Truckers, probably.” He smiled at my amusement. “You’re especially chipper today. Have you been into Monica’s meds?”
I smiled and rolled my eyes with a sigh. “I drank the coffee,” I admitted. “Three cups.” He seemed impressed and bewildered as he burst into a laugh.
“Oh my god! You’re going to die!” He reached over and put the backs of his fingers against the side of my neck as if he was checking for a pulse. The touch quickly turned awkward, and I think we were both having guilty recollections of the night he’d driven me home. Van returned his hand to the steering wheel, and my eyes dropped to the purple evidence still swollen into a few fingers on my left hand. The diamonds in the ring that I still couldn’t remove sparkled as they caught the sunlight coming through the windshield.
I shook the microphone, which was still in my right hand. “Can I talk to them?”
“You can,” he said, “but you need a handle.”
“What?” I was trying to recall any trucker lingo I may have stored up in my head but quickly gave up. I looked to Van expectantly.
“A call sign. A code name.”
“Hmm. Okay. What’s yours?”
The smile that had disappeared moments earlier returned. “That’s privileged information, Miss Clarke.” He glanced over at me as if he had been expecting me to pry it out of him, but I simply smiled. I could only drag information out of s
omeone for a short time before either a two-way communication was forged or I gave up. It was his move. “Van Gogh.”
“So I’m privileged?” I asked with a chuckle. “Van Gogh, huh? That’s a bold comparison to make.”
“It’s just a call sign, not a comparison. I still have both of my ears.” He winked at me in a sideways glance.
“What should mine be?” I turned the microphone over in my hands.
Van titled his head to the side as if he was racking his brain. He finally switched his left hand to the steering wheel and motioned to me in confident resolve. “Mississippi Queen.” I laughed at his attempt.
“I’m from Tennessee.”
“You’re from Memphis, and last I checked Memphis is the one of the main cities on the Mississippi River. I feel that it’s appropriate.” He saw I wasn’t convinced. “It’s a great song.”
“There’s a song?”
“An awesome song, from the seventies. If you heard the song, you would be sold.” With a smile I finally agreed to adopt the moniker.
I held the microphone up to my mouth and pressed the button. “Hello… over,” I said into it. Van burst into laughter the second the words hesitantly left my mouth. My cheeks grew hot as I smiled innocently. “Well what the hell am I supposed to say?”
Another voice came over the radio. “Hello, newbie,” a good humored man said. “Over.” He laughed over the radio directly after saying over. Apparently it wasn’t as common as I had thought.
“Who are you?” an older-sounding man asked.
I looked over to Van for guidance, but he merely nodded me along without a word. “Mississippi Queen.” I closed my eyes and laughed at myself. Saying that made me blush even more than the incorrect lingo did.
“Traveling alone, Mississippi Queen?” a gruff voice asked in such a slimy tone that I actually winced.
“No, I’m traveling with Van Gogh.” I shot a glance to an amused Van before settling back into my seat.