Honey, When It Ends: The Fairfields | Book Two

by Lennox, Piper

  “Semantics.” We reach the office. I lift my hand to knock, but he stops me.

  “I’m not saying you should still be with her. I’m saying...if you still care about the other person, even a little, and they care about you, then trying to fix things is usually a good idea. But both people have to want to try, or else it doesn’t work. And...I guess that’s where things fell apart, with you and her. She didn’t really want to try.”

  I nod bitterly. She’d given up on me long before I gave up on her.

  “Jeannie and Tim aren’t going to work things out, though,” I counter, “whether they want to or not. Trust me. You can’t move past something like this.” Even though the door to Tim’s office is virtually soundproof, I keep my voice low. “If they stay together, it’ll be because it’s easier than leaving. Maybe it wasn’t fake before—but it will be, now.”

  “So it ends,” he says, “or it’s fake. Those are the only options?”

  “Basically. That’s how they all end.”

  “Relationships with cheating?” he asks. He tilts his head into my vision when I shift my eyes past him, instead of looking him in the eye. He knows me too well. “Or all relationships?”

  The hall suddenly feels like a sauna. I wish I’d left my jacket in the truck.

  “All,” I answer. Then I shrug, the way Mara would, as if to say: you might not like it, but that’s how it is. Deal with it.

  “Wow.” His jaw sets. “So me and Juliet, or Mom and Patch—you think everyone’s just faking it, waiting till they die or can’t stand pretending anymore, whichever comes first. Is that it?”

  I think back to the night Mara told me her beliefs on relationships. Then I think of our night at Maison. When, out of nowhere, I believed it too.

  At the time, it felt like a relief: I didn’t have to feel sad or shocked about Tim, about losing everything I’d modeled my life after. I didn’t have to feel anything.

  Now, with Cohen staring at me, the flash of his wedding band under the sconces catching my eye, I do feel something: emptiness. It’s like the vacant space in the middle of a room, the whole thing feeling not quite right. And you can’t figure out what, until someone else points it out.

  “Do you remember,” he says, quieter now, as he turns and leans against the wall, “when Al got sick?”

  Slowly, like a kid getting chastised, I nod. Alvin and Trixie were like grandparents to us; they helped our mom out countless times during our days at the nudist farm. While I chose Tim as my role model for manhood, Cohen chose Al. We both learned from each of them, though—so I lean on the wall on the other side of the door and stare straight ahead, readying myself for Cohen’s story.

  “He could barely talk,” he says softly, but stoically. In addition to picking his battles, Cohen’s a master at emotional control. Another trait of his I envy, even if I plan on taking that fact to my grave. “He didn’t remember who Trixie was, by the end of it.

  “But she didn’t even cry about it. She just...accepted it for what it was. I heard her tell Mom, ‘If he—’”

  “‘—if he doesn’t remember me,’” I finish, “‘then I’ll just go reintroduce myself. Make him fall for me all over again.’” Through the sting in my sinuses, I smile. Trixie showed up at the hospital that afternoon with a stack of photo albums as big as she was, piled on her scrapbooking supply cart, the wheels squealing their way down the corridors of the ICU. She spent hours showing Al pictures of the two of them in their younger days. She read him the poetry he’d written her during his Navy hitches. One by one, she put the pressed flower petals from the bouquets he’d sent into his palm.

  Slowly, Al forgot everyone else. But he remembered Trixie, as the days passed. And he never forgot her again.

  “I think about that every time Juliet and I get in some stupid fight,” Cohen says. “That if Trixie and Al could still make it work when he had so little time left, and didn’t even remember her...then Juliet and me?” He smiles, a little sad and sideways. “We can make it through anything.”

  “See, but that’s—”

  “I know.” He holds up his hand. “Cheating isn’t in the vows the way ‘in sickness and health’ is. It violates the entire idea of marriage, so I get it when people can’t or don’t want to make things work after something like that.”

  “Then I’m sorry,” I say, pushing off from the wall, “but I don’t see your point.”

  “My point,” he says, “is there’s no way Al and Trix were pretending.” Cohen stares at me so hard, I have to look away again. “If that was fake, then nothing in this world is real.”

  My protests catch on my tongue. I’m silent.

  “And as for the other option,” he continues, “all relationships either being fake, or ending? They lasted right through ‘till death do us part.’ Hell, they lasted even longer than that—Trixie didn’t suddenly stop loving him, when he was gone.”

  He gets quiet again, but only for a moment. “That’s the kind of love that makes you believe...you know, there’s got to be an afterlife. Because there’s just no way something like that wouldn’t last forever.”

  Cohen ends his story with a firm knock on the office door, an excellent strategy: I’ve got no time to argue with him before the buzzer sounds and we’re clicked inside. He’s also great at getting the last word. It never fails to annoy the shit out of me.

  Only this time, I’m not sure I’d have anything to say, even if I had the chance.

  27

  I’ve driven past 3403 Greenbrae Lane twice today.

  It’s exactly how I imagined: painted brick, columned porch, little diamond patterns in the shingles on the roof. The door is a bright, cobalt blue that reminds me of my mother’s favorite perfume. I feel like if I go up and touch it, it’ll feel the same: smooth, frosted glass, cool to the touch, with a swishing sound like the ocean slinking from the shore.

  He took me to the beach once. He had a job at the docks in an industry town, unloading huge shipping containers with a crane. The sound they made when they were lifted into the sky terrified me, like a plane about to break apart at its seams.

  “Let me show you where I go every night, when my shift’s over,” he told me, when Mom and I came to visit. I was thrilled to be out of the motel room for once, and young enough—four, maybe five—to not yet hate him, so I happily put my hand in his and followed him to the tiny stretch of beach nearby.

  He rolled up my pant legs until it felt like two giant rubber bands clamping into my thighs. Then he rolled up his jeans, and we walked through the shallow, skimming tide along the shore. I stared at the sand trapped in his leg hair and grew jealous: I had no way to carry sand back with me, when our trip was over.

  “Here,” he said, and took his last two cigarettes out of the pack, tucked them behind his ears, and scooped a handful of dry sand into the box. “We’ll get you a jar for it before you and your mom have to leave.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I whined. “I want to stay with you. Let’s just live here.” It’s this part of my memory that feels like some bad editing job in a tape: it can’t possibly be right. I want to stay with you.

  “It is nice,” he mused, and my heart felt like a balloon inside my body, lifting everything higher.

  “We could get a house.”

  “Yeah?” He tickled me until I ran away, squealing while my heels kicked up foam. “A nice little beach house with...let me guess: a sky-blue door. Is that still your favorite color?”

  “Blue blue,” I corrected. “Like Mama’s perfume.”

  He echoed this part softly, smiling at the horizon, before he looked down at me. “I’ll make it happen, baby girl.”

  Back then, I loved that he called me baby girl, just like my mother did. I loved the different smells in his coat, like a hundred stories trapped there, waiting for him to tell me every single one.

  Back then, I believed him.

  This morning I stared into the blue of that door and felt anger swell in my chest like that balloon
, that hope, twice as big and burning even brighter. I gripped the steering wheel like it could stop the anger from slipping away.

  I didn’t want to feel happy from the memory. It wasn’t happy, when you picked it apart and saw it for what it really was: the first of so many broken promises.

  He painted it blue.

  No. A coat or two of paint—if he’d even been the one to choose it; if it wasn’t just a giant coincidence screwing with my head for no reason—wasn’t going to turn that day at the beach into some profound father-daughter bonding experience.

  I kept the sand for nearly two years. No matter how much we traveled and moved, how much we pawned or abandoned altogether…I kept the sand he’d collected for me. That night in his motel, before he and my mother disappeared together into the bathroom, he helped me pour it out of the cigarette pack into an empty glass Coke bottle. We covered the top with one of his paystubs and a rubber band—the one my mother used to tie back her hair. For the rest of our visit, her hair whipped everywhere in the wind. “I look like a wild woman,” she complained, while Dad and I told her she looked beautiful.

  The curtains in his living room shifted. I snapped out of my memory, stomped on the gas, and left.

  Readily, I took a page from Levi and threw myself into work. Hours later, I still haven’t stopped, and the bar has never looked cleaner. Mara the Human Cyclone does amazing work. Stick a mop in her hand, give her a memory to run from, and let her loose.

  “You need to slow down.” Penelope halts my broom with her foot when I start sweeping underneath the booths for the fourth time today. “It’s making me exhausted, just watching you.”

  “This place is a shithole. Somebody’s got to clean it.”

  “You and I both know this place needs more than a good cleaning,” she says, which is true: no matter how much I scrub and mop and dust, it can’t hide the fact the bar needs new tables, paint, taps, and a general overhaul.

  “Yeah,” I sigh, but keep sweeping when she moves her foot. “And we also know there’s no way Jack will spring for that. That cheap bastard wouldn’t even get you a new apron.”

  “I heard a rumor,” she whispers, a tad dramatic for her, “that Jack is selling the bar.”

  I freeze, the broom handle feeling more like a telephone pole in my hands than some splinter-riddled stick. All I can think is, Great—I already lost my home. Let’s round out the fall season by losing my job.

  My next thought takes the broom from telephone pole to sequoia, the thing nearly tumbling from my grasp: when I thought of my home just now, the one I lost...I didn’t picture the loft. I didn’t feel an ache split my bones in half, envisioning everything I loved merging into one big pile of ashes.

  I pictured Levi’s house.

  Actually, I only pictured him.

  “Selling it to who?” I manage, steeling myself with a breath when Penelope stares at me, waiting for my answer. I sweep around her feet and pretend I don’t really care.

  “No one yet, as far as I know. I just heard he’s thinking about it.”

  “Would it still be a bar? Like...would we lose our jobs?” It’s a stupid thing to worry about: there are plenty of bars in this city. It’s a big reason I like what I do. There might not be day-to-day stability, but it’s totally recession-proof. People always buy booze.

  “I’d hope so. Chris says it will, because investors like salvaging what they can when they buy a business. But I don’t see that happening with the place in such bad shape, do you?”

  “Not even a little,” I admit, and get back to sweeping. It’s like some weird survivalist instinct has kicked in today. When in doubt, keep busy. When in hell, at least make it look nice.

  After a minute, though, I look back at her. “It’s just a rumor, though. I mean...sometimes they’re true. But sometimes they’re not.”

  “Yeah,” she shrugs. She believes it already, I can tell. To be honest, part of me does, too. Profits have been razor-thin for Jack for two years now, and he’s been investing much more money in his newest project, a fleet of food trucks that specialize in “cuisine fusion,” whatever that means. Jack explained it to me once, but I stopped listening after hearing jasmine and taco in the same sentence.

  The broom feels impossibly heavy again. Great: another memory, twelve o’ clock.

  It was the first time Levi cooked dinner for me, the week I moved in.

  “This is.... It’s okay, right?” he asked, glancing at me as he licked some sauce off his thumb.

  “Yeah. Roommates cook for each other sometimes,” I reminded him, then bumped his hip. “We covered that at breakfast, remember?”

  His blush might’ve been from the heat of the stove; I couldn’t tell. “Yeah. I remember.”

  Dinner was ground turkey meatballs—made from scratch, I assumed, if the mess of breadcrumbs on the island was any indication—in a smoky barbecue sauce, mixed with an equal amount of apple butter.

  I picked up the jar before tasting it, my skepticism glaringly obvious when I asked, “You drove all the way to Sutter Orchard to get this?”

  “Yeah,” he said easily, as though he was surprised everyone in town didn’t make some annual pilgrimage to that godforsaken hilltop. “Juliet’s family invited me to go apple-picking with them last year.”

  “Last year,” I repeated.

  He picked up his fork, but paused and glanced at me. “If I remember correctly, they invited you, too.”

  “I was actually wondering how long apple butter lasts. You stock up early around here, huh?” I set the jar down quickly, not wanting to tell him that yes: I had been invited.

  We lifted our milk glasses in a wordless toast, drank, and started eating. The entire time, I wondered at what point in my life the mantra “Don’t get attached to anyone you sleep with, for your own good” tipped over into “Don’t get attached to anyone, period. For everyone’s good.” I remembered that text from Juliet, the year before: My family’s going apple-picking this weekend! You in?

  I’d left her on Read. Thank God she had no way of knowing I didn’t read the message just once, but ten more times.

  My family. I wouldn’t belong there. Pity invitations weren’t my thing. Neither was apple-picking, for that matter. I told myself I hadn’t missed anything, and no one really cared whether or not I went. They were just being nice.

  “Is it good?” he asked suddenly, when we’d eaten in silence through half our plates.

  “Very,” I said, mouth full. It was true. The meatballs weren’t overcooked at all, simmering in the savory flavors I liked best, and the comforting spices of fall that Levi, I already knew, treated like ambrosia. Two things that shouldn’t have blended together so incredibly, but did.

  “Oh, heads up,” Penelope says, taking the broom from my clamped hands. “You’ve got a customer.”

  I wish I could say my heart doesn’t climb, just like a balloon, when I turn and fully expect to see Levi sitting at the bar. I think I even mirror that Fairfield smirk, ready to let it sweep the rest of this day clear off the planet.

  Instead, I find my father.

  28

  Uncle Tim is back to his natural state: business attire, fresh shave, and an aura of Calvin Klein, not alcohol. Even the put-together look can’t hide the sunken lines of his face, though, or the face he sighs hello to us instead of booming it like some big merger announcement.

  Cohen hugs him first. I’m grateful. It’s easier to follow through on the motions myself, having just watched the process.

  It’s not like I hate Tim or anything. It is hard, though, to shake his hand the way I used to, look him in the eyes the way he’s always encouraged me to do because it’s “just good business,” and not feel like something’s changed.

  I’m angry. It’s the same low, buzzing burn in my gut I also feel for my aunt, if I’m being honest. Spoiled as their daughter is, she doesn’t deserve the shock and heartache of learning her parents have been two-timing each other since the 1990s.

  Of c
ourse, knowing Caitlin-Anne, she’s probably focusing most of her attention on the fact her inheritance will now be split down the middle.

  “You added the guy to your will?” Cohen asks, after Tim explains why he called us here today: he wanted us to get all the facts from him, before the rumor mill takes over. “I thought there was going to be some giant court case and DNA testing.”

  “That’s...” Tim sighs again and rubs his temple. “...for the others.”

  I think all three of us cringe at the same time.

  “Jesus,” Cohen breathes, pushing back his hair. “How many others are there?”

  “Four. But,” he adds emphatically, “I know for a fact three of them aren’t mine. They can’t be.”

  “Let me guess,” I mutter, snorting, “you never met the women in your life.”

  The fact I even spoke doesn’t register with me, much less what I said, until I feel both of them look at me.

  Tim tilts his head back, brow furrowed. “You think I’m lying?”

  I almost backpedal. My entire life, I basked in my uncle’s approval. Sought it out like the secret entrance to the Good Life: if I stayed on his good side and learned everything he was willing to teach me, I could have anything I wanted.

  Too bad I never figured out what, exactly, that was.

  While he stares me down and Cohen fidgets in his seat, I draw a breath through my teeth before deciding on honesty. “Not really. Why should I?”

  “Because I made mistakes. I didn’t turn into a completely different person, Levi.”

  He says it like a scold. It just pisses me off more.

  “Anyway,” he goes on, “I have met the women filing the suit, but nothing happened with any of them. Not to mention the fact I haven’t seen any of them since years before the children were born. They’re just hoping I’ll write some checks to snuff this out quietly.”

  “But you’re not,” Cohen clarifies.

  “Damn right, I’m not. If they think they can scare me into giving them their fifteen minutes and a pile of money, they’ve got another thing coming.”