by Foster, Lily
I hurt for Jeremy because this once close friendship has been fading away slowly but surely ever since I came back into the picture. Jeremy doesn’t see things that way, though. Life is short in his opinion. Too short to spend time with people who don’t have your best interests at heart. I can’t say that I miss dodging Sadie’s snarky comments or the way she’d regularly bring up Kenzie’s name in conversation. Not that she’s done that recently, though. Sadie and Kenzie had a major falling out a year ago over something ridiculous. I guess when you put two catty kittens in a cage together it won’t be long before they try to claw one another’s eyes out.
We have a full life now filled with friends who are true. Tori, Andie, Mateo, Taylor, Mike, Vince and Ava are all regulars at our house on Saturday nights. And whenever Vanessa and her partner Marie are able to get away from their business, they have their own personal guestroom in our home. Yes, Vanessa is someone I have come to understand and to love like a sister. Chuck Watters is also a regular guest, and others who have shared our past, like Anna Clarke and her Declan, are regulars around our dinner table.
Having Anna in our lives doesn’t bring me pain or grief. No, Anna brings me solace as few other people can. What we all went through, separately but connected, is a tie that will bind us forever.
More than eight years have passed since that fateful night. It took me two years to climb out from the darkest depths of despair, and another year to feel like I was truly healing and on the road back. The past few years haven’t been without setbacks or self-doubt, but I can say now that fear has no place in my daily life. I’m confident that I can handle whatever comes my way, just like the Carolyn Harris I was at fourteen—the karaoke loving captain of the Science Olympiad team, the steadfast friend, the girl who dreamed big…the Girl Most Likely to Succeed.
I fingered my collar, trying to create some space as it pressed tight against my neck. It’s only for a few hours. For her I can suffer.
I hate wearing a suit. This number is of the custom-fit, high-end variety and it still makes me feel stiff and trapped. Any day of the week you’ll find me in jeans, boots and a thermal shirt. My “topcoat” is a flannel button down. My most important business meetings warrant no more than khakis and a polo shirt. Carolyn bought me this suit for tonight, though, and I wasn’t about to complain. Especially after she told me I looked “delicious” and she was looking forward to “unwrapping her prize” later tonight.
And she looked incredible, so I needed to step up my game anyway. I smiled as I watched her work the room in her strapless, silver sequined dress. She wore heels that were sky high, raising her enough so that I could easily make her out in the crush of bodies that surrounded her. She was selling, and these rich old geezers were eager to buy whatever my beautiful girl was peddling. Her hair was up, revealing the soft curve of her neck and the promise of beautiful breasts hidden beneath the taut fabric of her dress. I was dying to pull her into a closet and claim her.
My desire for her would never let up. I wanted her right now just as much as I did years ago.
“Looks like tonight is going to be another smashing success! Thanks again, Jeremy.” I turned to look at my old friend and smiled. “Can you stop ogling your woman for a few minutes so that I can pimp you out in the gallery?”
“Sure, Andie, anything for the cause.”
Andie tapped an older woman on her shoulder and then gestured to me. “This is the artist.”
“Oh my word,” she said, clutching her chest. “You’re gorgeous, young man!”
The woman in front of me had to be pushing seventy-five. After the awkward greeting, we had a long conversation about color and perspective—she was a fellow artist and a collector of Chuck Watters’ work. She was interested in a piece I’d donated called My Life. Carolyn was the subject—no surprise. She posed for this one just last week.
Every piece I did was special to me but the ones of Carolyn were especially hard to part with. I felt like I was giving away a piece of me. Tonight was no exception; as I stood looking at Carolyn in this piece, discussing details of the work with this woman, I had the strong, familiar urge to lift it off the wall, pack it up and take it back home.
Carolyn would laugh at me, reminding me that our new home had limited storage space, persuading me with the argument that Briarwood needed the funds more than we needed yet another picture of her.
She didn’t understand. Every piece evoked a memory for me—a look, something she had said, her touch.
The woman had gone off to look at other works but I was still standing in front of my Carolyn, lost in thought. Andie broke the spell. “I’m telling you, Jeremy, every year it’s the same. Don’t these bidding wars tell you something? You should be doing this. All. The. Time.”
“Uh, no. I’m not the starving artist type.”
“Yeah, you’re the stinking rich general contractor type. Sellout,” she teased, poking me in my ribs.
I shrugged. Since my partner retired last year, Tri State Electrical was all mine and we were doing well—very well. It was a good feeling. No, it was a great feeling knowing that the twelve-hour work days, the six-day work weeks—that the hard work was paying off.
There were times when the realization that I now had serious money would hit. It wasn’t really the money, but the luxury of security. That I could afford the kindly home health aides who attended to my grandfather every day last year before he passed, that I could relieve my father of any and all financial concerns, that I was secure in the knowledge that I could provide well for my family—where I come from, that’s luxury.
Most recently, it was the day I surprised Carolyn with a plot of land, a beautiful two acre piece of property in Darien, and asked her if she’d like to help me design a house on it. As she paced the lot, yammering on about which side the kitchen should face and what angles would offer the best views, she stopped in her tracks and looked at me. “Who are we designing a house for?”
I just smiled wide as she ran towards me and tackled me to the ground. “For us? For you and me? Are you asking me to move in with you?”
“If you’d let me up, I’d kneel like I’m supposed to, Carolyn. I’m asking you to marry me.”
I never got up. She never let me and I figured that lying in the grass with this beautiful girl’s body covering mine was a better way to do it anyway.
“Excuse me, Mr. Rivers. My name is Madeline and this is my husband, Arnold.”
“Hello.”
“I have to tell you, I’m a great admirer of your work.”
“We both are,” her husband added. “My bride, though,” he said, gesturing to his elderly wife, “I think she enjoys getting into catfights with the other bidders over your work every year. It’s like an Olympic sport to her.”
She playfully hit his chest as she looked back to me. “It’s partly true. I find myself scheming to keep everyone away from your pieces so that I can snag them for myself. It never works. I’ve only managed to get my hands on one, Blue Gingham. And I want to tell you, it gives me such joy. I find myself looking at it almost every day.”
“Wow, thank you. I appreciate that. And I remember that piece. It was hard to part with it.”
“But this one,” she mused as she studied My Life, “this one speaks to me in a different way. I may be imagining it but I’d guess there’s a strong connection between you and the subject. I don’t know if it would be possible to evoke this level of feeling if there wasn’t.”
Her eyes lit up as realization set in. “But the subject is the same! She’s the same one, the girl from that oversized piece.” She hit my chest then, with some force, I might add. “Do you know how crestfallen I was that night?” Her husband was shaking his head, exasperated but amused, and I was just flat-out confused. “I plotted, calculated my bids…only to be outbid repeatedly. And then when I was giddy with the certainty that I was going to win? That I was going to beat out the insipid little tart who’d been outfoxing me at every turn?” She sighed dra
matically. “I looked to see them removing the piece from the wall. True Beauty…I still remember the name. Oh, I was heartbroken. I’d wanted it so badly.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “It hangs in my house. In my bedroom, in fact.”
“As it should,” she said, resigned. “Please tell me you won’t be pulling this one,” she pled as she gestured towards this image of Carolyn. In this piece she was looking at me with affection, her two hands resting lovingly across her flat belly—already devoted to the little person growing inside of her.
Just one week before, Carolyn stood in front of the sink, her lips rounded in a surprised O, the stick with the pink plus sign in her hand. I fell to my knees before her and rested my head against my child. I had never felt a rush of pure love so intense in my life. A week later now and I still struggled to put my feelings into words. The picture told the story best. That image of Carolyn and our baby was My Life in every sense.
“This one’s for you,” I said as I reached up to remove it from the display. “But just so you know…it’s not one of a kind.”
“Let me guess, you have one just like it at home?”
I gestured towards a volunteer and told him to pack it up as I made a note of the highest bid on the sheet so I could cover the cost.
“Yeah, this one is special to me.”
She took my hand. Her skin felt papery thin, just as my grandmother’s once had, and her eyes held me with their intensity. “I’m guessing they’re all very special to you, so I thank you. We’ll treasure this.”
As they walked off hand in hand, my woman came to take my hand. “I was going to interrupt but that looked intense. I remember them. That was the older couple I was telling you about. She was the one going toe to toe with Beth Peterman over your paintings, especially the one of me practically bare-assed. It was pretty intense. I was rooting so hard for her.”
“You were?”
“Of course. I couldn’t afford it myself and that just about killed me. I just remember feeling desperate that night. We weren’t together anymore but I…I wanted something of ours. Maybe it was more that I wanted some piece of you. But they were all so far out of my price range. I’d been watching the two of them walk around the gallery hand in hand that night. They’d obviously been together for a long time and still seemed to be so in love. Anyway, if I couldn’t have it, I wanted them to have it…to keep us safe, you know?”
“I get it. And I’d be a little creeped out by Beth having a naked picture of you on her wall. Or worse, that Mr. Peterman would be able to ogle your fine ass on a daily basis.”
“You noticed that she’s not here, right?” When I shook my head and shrugged, Carolyn teased, “Sure you didn’t. Anyway, the gossip gals in my mother’s group said she’s gone and Mr. Peterman has found himself a new young honey. I feel bad for her. I hope Beth picks more wisely next time.”
“Are you done selling? Maybe you shouldn’t be on your feet so much.”
Another eye roll. I got one every time I said or did something that Carolyn saw as overprotective. “I’m fine. This little fella is like the size of a kidney bean right now.”
“Little fella? Do you know something I don’t?”
“No, and we’re not finding out, ok? I want to be surprised. I’ll be shocked if it’s a girl, though. I just keep imagining a little boy that looks like you.”
Just like me.
Since we moved into our house, Carolyn has been going back and forth to her parents’ place to clear out odds and ends. A few days ago she came home with some photos and a small box of keepsakes. I came across her laughing on our couch, flipping through a notebook. She made a half-hearted effort to hide it when I came into the room so I had to wrestle it from her, copping a feel in the process.
“Do not read that!” she shrieked. But she was laughing so hard that I knew whatever this was, it wasn’t something seriously private.
My eyes went wide looking at the bubbly script that was clearly the work of a child. “Mrs. Carolyn Rivers?”
“No!” she cried as she tried to grab the notebook that I was now holding up and out of her reach.
“Who’s Rory Rivers and Jared Rivers?”
She was laughing so hard she had tears streaming down her cheeks. “Our children,” she blurted out, covering her face in embarrassment.
“You named our kids? In sixth grade?”
“Fifth grade.”
I couldn’t contain my smile or my pride. So she really was into me way back then. I read over the names again: Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy Rivers. That’s what we were. And we were going to be naming our baby soon. “I’m not a fan of Rory, sounds like what you’d name a big Irish Setter. Jared isn’t half bad, though. Jared Rivers.”
“It’s after Jared Leto.”
“The guy who wears eyeliner? Are you serious? Not happening. Now I don’t feel so great about you crushing on me back then.”
“Why not?”
“I was in the same category as a guy who likes to dress up like a chick?”
“Naw, back then he was a hottie…the brooding type.”
“Whatever. Jared’s off the table.”
Carolyn was holding a small battered looking piece of notepaper in her hands then and she wasn’t laughing anymore.
She turned the paper over to me. “Remember this?”
The paper had a cluster of tiny bluebirds in the upper left hand corner. It was the notepaper my grandmother kept in their kitchen. The handwriting was mine. I felt my features harden as I took in the barely legible scrawl. At the same time I felt Carolyn’s arm snake around my waist.
“You can’t imagine what that note meant to me at the time.”
It was simple. It just read: I’m sorry, with only my first name written underneath.
“I remember that I wanted to write more to you. I wanted to tell you that I’d never do that again and that I felt really badly about what I’d done. But I knew how babyish my writing looked and I knew that if I wrote more, I’d definitely misspell something and look even more stu—”
“Don’t say that word—ever.” Carolyn cut me off and then rested her head on my chest, wrapping her arms around me again, covering me in her warmth. “I remember feeling special that day. Even though everything crashed and burned for you that morning, I remember feeling something deep in my heart. I just wanted to believe that you saw me as someone special. That note was everything…I knew you cared about me, Jeremy.”
After a quiet minute, I mustered up the courage to ask a question that had been bothering me since long before Carolyn told me we were expecting. “Are you worried at all?”
“About what?”
“That our baby will be like me in that way.”
Carolyn turned and sat on my lap straddling me, running her fingers through my hair. “I’m kind of betting on it.”
I felt tears stinging my eyes as I fought to hold them in. “Really? How can you say that?”
“Baby,” she cooed. “We both carry a strong genetic predisposition. You, your dad, my brother…My mom thinks my grandfather’s brother may have struggled with it too.” She leaned down to kiss my forehead and then each cheek gently before she went on. “But I look at it another way. I mean, who on earth could raise a child with a learning disability better than you and me? I teach reading disabled children, for heaven’s sake. And you? You’re a role model. Your life is a testament to the idea that with hard work you can achieve anything if you set your mind to it.” She lifted my chin so that she had my full attention before she announced with conviction, “We got this.”
Carolyn always had faith in me, even when I had no faith in myself. I had to trust in us. I had to trust that we would be in this together, that we’d have each other to lean on…forever.
That next day, inspired by Carolyn, I popped into a jewelry store near my current jobsite in Greenwich. It was an upscale place but not too formal or stuffy. Turns out the place was perfect; the shopkeeper knew exactly what I wanted, even thoug
h I was struggling to describe my vision in words.
I held the silver chain in my hands, thinking of the day I would place the necklace around my wife’s neck. It would be the day we brought our first child into this world.
The chain held three, small, round hammered silver pendants. Each one was engraved with the words I’d used to describe this perfect woman, my Carolyn, over the years:
The End…for now
Thank you for choosing to spend a few precious hours with me. I hope you got lost in the Let Me series—connected with the characters, fell in love right along with them, wept when they fell, and rallied for them when they got it right and earned their happily ever after.
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