Hungover Emerson didn’t have the energy. “If you slept with someone else, I’ll kill you,” I said lazily. I knew he hadn’t slept with someone else. Mark had worked really hard to get me back. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t jeopardize our relationship now.
“I didn’t,” he said slowly, “but you’re going to wish I had. It would be easier to forgive. And far less permanent.”
OK. Now old Emerson was coming back. My heart started to pound, which was not a positive addition to the list of symptoms. I needed less pounding and more water in my life. Easier to forgive and far less permanent.
“Oh, God. Did you get a bad tattoo?” I gasped. “Or an STD?”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m terrified of needles, and I practically put a condom on before I’ll kiss you.”
Both things were true. I was out of guesses. Again, normal Emerson would have been bubbling over with them like a fresh bottle of champagne. Hungover Emerson felt like she had an anvil on her brain.
He cleared his throat. “My mother is coming to Peachtree.”
“Of course your mother is coming,” I said, attempting a laugh but falling short due to the pain in all my extremities. “We’re getting married, for heaven’s sake. She’ll want to be here to plan the rehearsal dinner.” I snickered at the thought. “She will absolutely hate that we’re getting married on the sandbar.”
Mark shook his head and smiled. “Yeah, I thought of that. I’m not thrilled that I’ll have to hear about it from here to eternity, but I am thrilled that she will be so irritated.” He cleared his throat. “We’re getting off track. I meant she’s coming back to Peachtree Bluff for good.”
Now I shot up in bed, pounding head be damned. “What do you mean, ‘for good’? What about Florida? What about the sun and the tax rate and the single men?” I leaned over and put my head in my hands. “Oh, God,” I groaned. “This is the worst morning of my life. That settles it. We’ll move to LA. We have to move to LA permanently. I know you have a business here, but you’re smart and capable, and people have to import and export there, too.” I could feel myself getting hysterical.
“Emerson,” Mark said, now getting kind of hysterical, too, “we’ve been through this. I’m not moving to LA. My business here supports my mom and me, and I can’t take that kind of gamble with her future.”
“Can’t you just sell the company?”
Now I’d made him mad. I knew I would, but I couldn’t help myself. He got out of the bed and crossed his arms. “For the thousandth time, I’m not selling my company. I’m not moving away from Peachtree Bluff. My mother coming here doesn’t change that.”
I shook my head, incredulous. “Do you see this?” I asked, holding up my left hand. “This means that you have to learn to compromise a little. This means that sometimes you do what I want to do.”
“Moving to LA is not ‘sometimes doing what you want to do,’ ” Mark said, making air quotes.
I could feel fury rising in me. It was a familiar fury, one that I had felt with Mark since I was fifteen years old. It was hard to explain how angry he could make me one minute and how the next minute I felt like I couldn’t live without him. “My giving up my entire career that I have worked my ass off for is not ‘sometimes doing what you want to do,’ either.”
“I don’t get it,” Mark said for probably the ten millionth time. “I make plenty of money. Why can’t you be happy here? Why can’t we just stay here?”
Wow. We were so far off track now that this wasn’t even remotely about his mother anymore. That scared me a little. Because this was the fight. This was the reason I hadn’t said yes right away. He’d said that we would work it out, that when you loved someone, you found a way to make it work. But he clearly wasn’t willing to give an inch, and let’s face it, neither was I. We had two months to figure it out, so we had to find a solution quickly.
“I just don’t get,” I said, for what was probably also the ten millionth time, “why you don’t get that I don’t want to be an actress because of the money. I want to act because it fulfills me, Mark. It gives me purpose and strength. It’s who I am. And I can’t do it here. I need to be in LA.”
“What about our kids?” he asked. “That’s why my mother’s coming back. She said that if you were always going to be flitting off to LA or making some movie, someone had to be here to take care of our children.”
That cut right to the heart of me, to my fear that maybe I was selfish. Maybe this dream of mine had clouded my vision to the point where I couldn’t see anything else. Maybe I was giving away too much of myself in exchange for reaching a level and attaining a life that, to be honest, I wasn’t even really sure how to know I had reached in the first place. But that dream was mine. And I was getting there. I wasn’t going to give it up now. I might not give it up ever.
“Hey, Mark,” I said, eerily calm. Then I yelled, “We don’t have kids! I might not be able to have kids at all!”
I turned my head to see a terrified-looking Kyle stop dead in his tracks in my doorway, his mouth open. “So sorry,” he said, getting ready to turn to go back downstairs. He held his hands up, each with a cup in it. “Ansley told me you were up here, and I, um . . .”
He gestured toward the stairs, but Mark brushed by him and said, “Don’t leave on account of me.” He looked back at me and said pointedly, “Her fiancé. You were the one she wanted anyway.”
Then he was gone, and I felt absolutely awful. Not hangover bad but existential-life-crisis bad.
I could feel myself blushing. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “That was awful.”
Kyle walked toward me and said, “What did he mean, I was the one you wanted anyway?”
I could have been reading into it, adding something that wasn’t really there, maybe even projecting a bit, but I could have sworn that he seemed almost hopeful when he said it.
I shook my head. “Oh, he meant because I was dying for a cup of coffee for this gosh-awful hangover.”
Kyle and I had never talked about that night in LA, never acknowledged it in any way. Of course, we recognized each other when I arrived in Peachtree Bluff and he was standing at my mom’s back door. But we never talked about the night we met, the kiss we shared, the secrets we swapped, the way we stayed up all night talking about our hopes and dreams. Nothing had ever passed between us that indicated to me that he considered that night remotely special.
He handed me the first cup. “Hangover cure,” he said. “Green juice with tons of lemon and cayenne.”
Then he handed me the second. “Black coffee. Hangover helper número dos.”
“Thank you,” I squeaked out. “Hey, I’m really embarrassed that you saw that.”
Kyle sat down on the bed beside me. “Em, are you all right? Because you don’t have to do this, you know.” He paused. “I mean, I don’t want to overstep, but you are . . .” He looked down at the duvet cover, running his finger down my forearm just like he had the night we met. He looked me straight in the eye. “You are everything, Emerson. Don’t give away any of that to make anyone else happy. Ever.”
I couldn’t say why, but I knew it was the best compliment I had ever received, that contained within it was a meaning that I couldn’t comprehend any more than Kyle could verbalize.
I wanted to compliment him back, but I knew I couldn’t. Well, I shouldn’t. And I didn’t know what I would say. You are the weirdest, most wonderful man I know? You have always made me feel like I’m more than just what everyone else sees? None of that made sense. And were those even real feelings?
I knew I should defend Mark. It wasn’t his fault that he was in love with a hotheaded blonde who wanted her own way or that I was in love with a temperamental brunet who wanted his own way. We seemed to egg each other on, which sometimes seemed like a negative, but when it was for something positive, it was the very best part about our relationship. It made me know that we wouldn’t be bored. But I couldn’t explain all that to Kyle.
Instead, I sipped the
hangover cure he had handed me and smiled at the way it burned when it went down. I noticed he had shaved this morning, which made him look younger. Before I could stop myself, I put my hand up and rubbed his smooth cheek. When I realized what I’d done, I blushed.
“A new Starlite Starlet?” I asked, looking down into my cup. I knew I was opening a door that had been locked tight between us, one that had been barricaded since I first saw Kyle back in Peachtree Bluff. I knew it, but I did it anyway. Impulse control has never been my strong suit.
The look that passed over Kyle’s face said, You remember, even though he hadn’t said a word. But he smiled at me and leaned a little closer. “You know the thing about the Starlite Starlet?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Please enlighten me.”
It nearly took my breath away when he said, “Its roots will always be in Peachtree. But the Starlite Starlet belongs in LA.”
* * *
THE THING ABOUT MARK, the thing that kept us together, was that we might have fought, but we were always quick to make up. We had an unofficial system. One time I would apologize first, the next time he would.
Today it was my turn, I realized with disdain as I swigged my second cup of coffee, unpacking boxes in the back of Mom’s store. At least I had Caroline to commiserate with. It made me a little bit happy that this was the first time in, well, twenty-six years that I had seen her looking something less than perfect. I mean, she was still gorgeous. But the lack of sleep was written all over her face.
I let out a low, frustrated groan as I slid the box cutter over a container of candles.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Caroline asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No.” I paused. “I don’t want to talk about it, but he’s such a nightmare. Why does he act like this? I mean, his mother has to move here because I’m going to be an unfit mother traveling around? No one calls Angelina Jolie an unfit mother. No one shames Sandra Bullock. Actresses have been mothering and working since the beginning of time.” I looked around to make sure no one could hear me and whispered, “And he knows how scared I am that I may not be able to have children. So that was the lowest blow I could think of.”
Caroline shot me that look I hated, the one that questioned whether I was doing the right thing. “Look,” she whispered, “I’m not kidding you. If you don’t call and get those test results, I will pretend I’m you, and I will do it myself. Do you hear me?”
I did hear her, but I wanted to pretend I didn’t. I wanted to pretend none of this was happening to me, that I was fine and dandy. If I called, they might say I was OK. But they also might say that I did have aplastic anemia as they feared—or potentially something even worse. And then I’d have to face it. I’d have to deal with it. I’d have to tell Mom.
“I mean, I don’t understand why he’s so unflinching on the move,” I said, changing the subject. “He is filthy, dirty rich. He could sell that business and be even filthier, dirtier richer. I just don’t understand why he won’t.”
“I think that’s the root of your problem,” Caroline finally said.
“That Mark is rich?”
“No,” she said, setting her box on the floor and leaning back on her hands. “The fact that once you marry him, you don’t have to work, because you don’t have to make money. I think when men have money, they assume their wives will jump at the opportunity to stay home. But you want your own identity, and I think that scares him. Or at least threatens the picture he sees of his future.”
That kind of made sense. But when had I not been Mark’s future? We’d been together all of high school, he had barely dated when he was in college, and now here we were again. Surely he recognized that I was never, ever going to be a stay-at-home mom or wife. But maybe that was the problem. I was the woman he wanted, and he was the man I wanted. But what we wanted out of life were two very different things.
“You don’t need to work, and you don’t need money, but James is thrilled that you’re working for Mom,” I said.
“Honey,” Caroline said, rolling her eyes, “James left me for Edie Fitzgerald, shamed the hell out of me, and then came crawling back. If I decided to shave my head and join the Peace Corps, he would act thrilled. He is on really, really thin ice.”
I nodded. My head was pounding again. This was supposed to be my therapy session, but the exhaustion and severe hangover had made Caroline somewhat vulnerable. She never wanted to talk about herself, but I felt like it was now or never.
“Car, are you happy?”
She shrugged. “What’s happy, really? I mean, I love my job, I adore my children, my family is together.” She paused. “I was happy. I was so, so happy. I can only hope that I can get back to that.”
“And if you don’t . . .”
She looked at me sadly. “If I don’t, then I will have to make some changes.”
“You’ll leave him?” I whispered.
Caroline cocked her head to the side. “I won’t spend my life miserable.” She smiled at me. “I have a lot to offer, and I won’t be taken for granted again.”
I smiled back at her. No one wanted her sister to deal with the hell of a divorce. But I also couldn’t stand the thought of my sister, my strong, brave, stand-on-her-own-two-feet sister, living a life where she felt trapped.
“Good. I can’t stand the thought of you being miserable.”
“Hey, Em, back at you.” She raised her eyebrows.
“I’m not miserable,” I protested. I mean, at least I thought I wasn’t miserable. I loved Mark. That was all that mattered. Wasn’t it?
“I know I’m extra-sensitive right now because of what I’m dealing with, but please don’t lose yourself, Emerson. If you want a different life, then by all means, have a different life. Plunge into it headfirst. Sit on the deck and eat bonbons. I don’t care what you do. I just don’t want you to be unhappy. It’s not worth it.” Then she groaned. “Just like all those martinis last night. I am never drinking again. Ever.”
I would remind her of that when she was popping champagne on Friday night.
I thought about what Caroline said as I left the store and walked to Mark’s house. He was standing on the porch when I got there. Neither of us spoke. Instead, Mark swept me up in his arms and kissed me with so much passion that I couldn’t imagine how I could live without him, how I could possibly be happy without him in my life. All of the worries I’d shared with my sister earlier melted away.
An hour later, lying in his bed, catching my breath, I finally said, “I’m sorry, Mark.” I wasn’t sure if I was actually sorry, but it was my turn. I mean, he had basically told me I was an unfit mother, and I had taken it like a chump. Should I have to be defending myself to my fiancé? I wasn’t sure. But there in Mark’s arms, I felt like I was where I was supposed to be, like he had loved all the fight right out of me. That moment with Kyle, when I wondered if we had let something special slip by us, suddenly seemed irrelevant. This, Mark, was my life, my future.
“So when does the princess arrive?” I asked.
“Oh, right,” Mark said. “She’s actually asking everyone to call her Duchess now.”
“You’re joking.”
“I wish I were.”
I didn’t know how he’d lived an entire childhood with that nut and turned out even remotely normal. Mark rolled over and pulled me closer to him, kissing my forehead.
“That woman cannot keep our children,” I said lightly, not wanting to start another argument over our nonexistent kids.
“Oh, God, no,” Mark said. “Not happening. I wouldn’t even let her babysit for like an hour.” He kissed my lips softly. “Your sisters already said they would have kids for us if we needed them to,” he whispered. “Or we could adopt. Or we don’t even have to have kids.” His eyes welled up. “I’m sorry, Em. I don’t know why I do that, try to hurt you when I love you so much.” He kissed me again. “I can’t live without you. I’ve tried before, and I couldn’t do it. Without you, life isn’t life at all
.”
I kissed him now. “I agree,” I said. “And I don’t want to fight with you. We have to figure out a way to get past this issue before we ruin this amazing thing between us.”
Mark nodded. “I know that. I do. And I’m going to try to be better. We’re not going to be that conventional couple. We’ll travel a lot. We’ll go back and forth to LA. I think I can come at least every other week or so while you’re there or wherever you’re on location.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said.
“And I’ll only take parts if they are really important. I don’t want to be away from you if it’s going to be for some sucky role that won’t get me anywhere.”
Mark kissed my nose. “Deal,” he whispered.
I felt so at peace and so right in that moment. I kissed him again. Then kissed him longer. “Hey,” I whispered. “When do you have to get back to work?”
He pulled me on top of him. “You mean I have a job?” he asked.
I giggled and was lost in him again, in that feeling of being so connected to another human being that you don’t ever want to be away from him, that the real world completely slips away. I briefly thought of poor Caroline unpacking boxes at Mom’s store, taking our punishment while I was over here having the time of my life.
But then again, I thought, as I kissed Mark deeper, Caroline had made me her servant on the regular when we were kids. It wouldn’t hurt her to have a little payback now. I closed my eyes and savored this moment with the man I loved. With my future husband. And I knew that I would sacrifice anything, be a different person, in exchange for getting to spend the rest of my life with him.
NINE
ansley: the first rule of parenting
I hadn’t been able to face Jack for two days after I became pretty sure Caroline and Sloane knew he was their father—and I was pretty sure he knew they knew. Once Caroline had called him “Daddy dearest” that night, it all started making sense—why Jack had been acting so jumpy around me, why Caroline and Sloane had been the tiniest bit distant.
The Southern Side of Paradise Page 6