by Andrea Rose
“Okie dokie then…” Jacquie slapped her thighs.
The minute Gavin went down for this, he’d be dragging her with him. “Y’sure about this? Your kids?” I asked. “You don’t have to do this. Gavin doesn’t need to be arrested, I’ll still get my girl.”
“I don’t want dirty money to protect my kids. I want my own vindication, Tyler. Give me a few hours to get the contract work done and we’ll talk.”
40
Mom’s silly face in her mask shooed me into the warm air of the house and eyeballed Dad inside too, a relieved smile on his face.
“Don’t think you can come back here without answering a few questions. Your room’s under jurisdiction of Maldova House Rules. You want your bedroom back, you gotta prove why you deserve to be let back in this household. Nothing’s changed.”
“I’m an adult.”
“Baby.” My dad reached for Mom’s arm.
“Not the time, Al. Ariana…” Her hand twitched for me to stand up.
“Not until you quit freaking out,” Dad said.
I headed for the stairs. “Mind I take a bath first? I need to think through some things.”
“House Rules. Tell me where you’ve been and why you thought it was OK to live this lie to your parents or get back on that road.”
“Lie?”
“Drugs, Ariana. I thought we raised you to not need to rely on substances for escape. And to blame us? Ugh.”
I sniffed and mirrored Mom with my own hands on hips. “Drugs, mother? You think that my life has fallen that far?”
“Ari,” Dad said as he massaged my mom’s shoulders. “Braydon told us about the prescription abuse. Your Mom and I have agreed we will stay calm and listen.”
“Braydon told you that? You think that’s why I stopped talking to you guys?”
“She is on them,” Mom said.
“I stopped speaking to you because Braydon made me realize you are toxic people. I lived to make you guys happy and proud. But after a life of trying, I asked why? Why give you guys my effort when you never gave me credit for it?”
“Oh, stop it.” Mom waved me away.
“My graduation ceremony, you both missed my walk. I won the internship in New York, I get a half-assed text saying ‘Congratulations’. Maybe now that I’m Tyler King’s publicist, you might be proud of me…Yeah. Tyler King, the quarterback. Surprise! I’m a big time publicist. I made it! But neither of you will care, will you?”
“When did you get so sensitive? Raising you by never praising you for silly rites of passage encouraged self-validation, or so our parenting books told us.”
“Screw self-validation. It’s exhausting and confusing. I don’t know what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong.”
“I’ll tell you drugs are wrong.”
“Mom, I’m not on drugs. I want you to show you care right now because I’m so alone right now. I’ve raised two healthy dogs, graduated early, survived New York City, got engaged, represented a super athlete, fallen in love with an amazing man, and I haven’t touched a drug beyond caffeine and Adderall. Can you at least fake that you’re proud of me for something? I work so hard and I’m so tired.”
“Wait up there.” Dad shot up. Dad-Mode fired up. “Engaged?”
“Yes.”
Mom put her hand to her lips, both of them riddled with disappointment. “You got engaged and you didn’t call us? When? We spoke to Braydon the other day.”
“I called you g—! Learn to use a technology!”
“We never got word, sweetie,” Dad confirmed. “Engaged. We’d be there to celebrate in a heartbeat. You know we love a good excuse to boogie.”
“Have you ever called my current phone number?”
“We used to. We’d get either voicemail or Braydon.”
I motioned at Dad to help out here. “Did you guys forget who I am or something? Jesus. When have I ever not answered a phone call? Maldova Rules.”
“Chicken,” Dad pressed.
“How often have you spoken to Braydon this year?”
Mom threw her hands in the air. “I dunno. More than you, that’s for bloody sure.”
“How often?”
“What does it matter?! You forgot us. Except when you needed cash, then you weren’t shy to get in touch, were you?”
I stood up, hoping to anything I wasn’t so stubborn as to get back in that truck outside. I was so tired.
I swung open the door into the ice-cold night. Wind whistled around the low-lit street, the chill keeping me at the breach of the door.
“I don’t take handouts.”
“Then what the fuck was that money we gave you?!”
Dad backed Mom back to the sofa.
“Thousands of dollars isn’t easy to come by these days. We used some of your father’s retirement fund to help you keep afloat, Ariana, and support your drug habit. How could you be so reckless with money? We didn’t raise a brat. We raised a daughter, a woman.”
In a single moment, my father and I uncovered a common thread. “Mom,” I realized into the night.
“Who spent it? Braydon? Braydon doesn’t need that money,” she said.
Dad rubbed at Mom’s back. Eyes burning brighter, he turned to me and nodded.
“You and Braydon break up, I guess?” Dad asked, nostrils flared.
“Months ago.”
“How many?”
“Last year, Summertime-ish. There was no…definite end to it.”
Alex Maldova pinched his eye sockets. He was shocked again.
He paced out the room.
Mom gasped and looked like a worried mom should.
“Ariana, promise me you never saw that money we sent you around Christmas,” she said and grabbed my hand.
I shook my head. “Trust me, if I had twenty thousand dollars at Christmas, I wouldn’t be here begging for you to care about me because I have nothing left.”
“I’m gonna sue ‘em.” Dad strode back into living room to the kitchen. “I’m gonna sue the shit outta that bastard, Ariana.”
“Can everybody stop suing each other?!”
“I sent you twenty thousand dollars. Did you see a penny of it?”
“No.”
“OK. So…I’m suing the bastard for stealing my cash meant for my daughter’s future and security.”
“Are you gonna tell me off for picking another dud again?” I looked sheepishly at Mom.
She held my shoulder. “He fooled us too, baby girl.”
“When did you last speak to him?” Dad asked.
I swallowed hard. “This morning in court,” I said to more Maldova shock. I clicked in remembering. “Oh yeah, Braydon sued me for custody of the dogs. I lost fifty-percent of the dogs. And, um, he’s taking my apartment too. And when I go home after court, there was a letter under my door saying he’d be visiting later this evening to stay the night.”
Dad held up the cordless phone to show who he was calling. Braydon’s name showed on the Caller ID.
“Why are you calling him, Dad? Stop.”
“Alex, my man. How was Boston?” Braydon answered my estranged father’s call.
41
I paced around the functions room. I’d got word Gavin had finished up with his buffet dinner— The pig’s final supper. But, again, I had to fight through patience to get my moment.
This fucker who calls me son, who got me beat up, shot, and left me for dead on a doorstep, was about to get what he was owed.
“You should probably sit down, Ty. You’re hyperventilating,” Chrissy said.
“Don’t tell me what I should be doing.” I swiped at air.
She readjusted her Hello Kitty glasses, hunched on the bed.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I’m taking it out on you,” I said.
“Don’t sweat it, but you’re dehydrated to hell and I’m worried about you, moron, so sit, listen and drink.”
She bounced when I fell on the mattress beside her spilling a glass of water all over me. I fumed.
“I’ll get a towel,” she said but I stopped her standing up.
“No, you sit. I can’t.” Impatience stirred my head into a distracting whir of non-thought. I couldn’t keep it from Ariana anymore, or anyone else for that matter. I walked to the faucet to fill the glass.
“I’m in love with Ariana, Chrissy,” I said as my head fell to my hand. “I’m fucking in love with a woman I haven’t even taken on a real date.”
Chrissy gently caressed my back and fell down to hold me. I can’t deny it felt good to know someone still had my back.
“I know,” Chrissy giggled. “I told you she was a keeper.”
I sat up to study her eyes. “You knew I loved her,” I decided.
“Obviously. You wouldn’t stop getting weird hospital boners for her whenever they dosed you on morphine.”
I squeezed her shoulder with a grimmace then paced the room again beside the window.
Baltimore was shroud in dense cloud. Behind me, the muted buzzes and alerts of our phones blowing up with news alerts about Phoebe’s stunt.
Phoebe groaned again.
She hadn’t lifted her head from the table in a half hour. After scrolling mindlessly down the infinite comment box of hate, growling any time I tried taking the phone from her she lamented more.
“I’m the reason Ariana got fired,” she said, tracing the desk beside her cheek. “I got you in god knows how much trouble. You’ll get shit for this, y’know? Someone always has a witty line or meme. How do I live with this? I’m the reason for this mess.”
“Stop.”
“I didn’t think about what I was doing. I pressured you guys to make this work between you two. I didn’t even ask. That’s so… I’m so shit…”
I heard footsteps and stood.
“You dike slut…” Phoebe grumbled. “Tyler deserves better slut…Nice tits bitch…Rot in Hell…” She wiped away more tears.
“What’d I say?”
The door swung open.
Gavin’s fat ass limped in to meet me, lowering his brows at the others in the room.
His silky shirt unbuttoned over a wife-beater. That gut begged to receive my fist in it within the next five minutes.
I balled them up at my sides. “What’s with the red face, Gav?” I said. “Too many servings at the buffet?”
Gavin collapsed into the sofa in the corner and sparked a cigarillo.
I closed the door and slid a chair under the handle to keep the hog from running.
“The fuck is this shady shit?” He wriggled and tried to stand up but I sent him back into the seat, leaning over him.
“Hey, Tyler, buddy. Calm down. I’s just playing around. Thought hangovers tamed your temper.”
I grunted and tipped his chair backwards, enough to make his arms flail and the back to hit the wall behind him.
“I ain’t hungover,” I lied, wanting to keep this wet dip-shit in the dark about everything. I didn’t want them name of my love falling off his snake-tongue ever again.
“What’d Kissinger want?”
“Ariana’s fired. Yuri’s running my game interviews tomorrow.”
“Oh.” He creased his nose and nodded knowingly. “I’d say I was surprised but…”
Fuck patience. Fuck a build-up.
“You tried to fucking kill me,” I said.
The cod-mouthed fuck bobbed his chin in alarm.
“You’ve lost it, kid.” He stifled a laugh best he could, unable to make eye contact with me.
“You tried to kill me…or injure me. Whatever Leroy and his boys could get done fastest. Now I know all that, got proof of most of it too, looks like you lost, big fella.”
A scratch of his collar then his hands caught mine and slipped me from my grip on the chair around him.
He dodged under and made for the door.
Chrissy stood before him, feet wide, hands planted sideways.
His nervous laugh warmed me from the inside; Chrissy had the man shaking in his square-toed loafers.
“…Injure me enough to make me a little easier to manage. No team books me next season and Josh becomes your new golden boy. I’m stuck in contract limbo until it times out. Do I have that right?”
Saliva formed in the corners of his mouth. He looked at Chrissy holding guard at the door again.
“You wanna keep Josh’s contract?” I asked.
Gavin wriggled the gold watch on his wrist and hiked up his sleeves.
“You want your name to remain un-smeared, even if you don’t fucking deserve it.”
“Wh—What d’you think you know?”
“We know plenty.”
“Plenty?”
“Spiritual advisor, Gav?”
He shoved me back. “Do you know how fuckin’ hard it is to manage you all these years? I made you and you think you made yourself. Your star value’s been on the downward slope since your Dad stopped giving you guidance. Then I see a regular outgoing of nine-hundred bucks every few weeks, one guess what that was for. You didn’t think the IRA would—?”
“You tried to murder me. At nineteen, you take me under your wing, call me your son, you ate at my dinner table, I stood by you in your divorce and you paid a hood-rat to break my legs or put a bullet through my skull!”
The chandelier above us rattle.
“It’s business.” That’s how he justified his savageness to me.
“You left me for dead. Bleeding on a doorstep, reaching out for who I thought was a friend—”
“I had be sure when you f—fell…it’d be for the last time.”
I slapped him hard across the side of his face. He crumbled to his side, cupping hand over ear.
“Yet here I stand,” I said.
Gavin whimpered on the floor and opened a palm to me. “Tyler, kid, relax…”
“If nothing else, I appreciate your honesty.”
“We can figure it out. Wait. Just wait a few days, win the Bowl. We’ll talk, we’ll figure something out.”
“You’re helping me plan something. I ain’t taking no as a fucking answer. When it’s done, consider our contract null and void as of today. I promise to drop the case.”
He snickered and stood. “Y—You’ll drop this?”
“The whole thing if you do one thing for me.”
“Just like that? Ha.”
“Yes.”
A nasally laugh escaped his nose. “OK. What do I gotta do in return?”
“Attend a press conference tomorrow.”
He waited.
“What’r’ya doin’, kid? The Bowl’s in two frickin’ days. Be patient for once in your damn life. This’ll open doors. You made it this far.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Not this time. Not for you.”
Gavin showed his teeth and turned around the room for support.
“A press conference?”
“Dress sharp. No wife-beaters. It’s unprofessional and the middle of fucking Winter.”
Chrissy literally kicked his ass out the door.
“You little bitch,” he said.
“Shove it, Gav.”
“Wait, one sec Chrissy! Ya seen—” She slammed the door on him. “—my phone today?”
I exhaled and put my hands on my hips to ease my racing adrenaline.
“He’s running,” Chrissy said with her ear pressed to the door. “Fast, in his case.”
“He should be.”
“You…gonna drop the case? Just like that.” Chrissy bit her lip.
“Me, personally? Hell yeah. Whatever you and Ariana have been working on behind my back, on the other band…”
She gave a Joker smile. Reports from Chrissy suggested she and Ari were about to crack open a scandal so huge it will bring the League to a standstill. I wasn’t about to get in the way of my girls’ dreams.
42
My skin crawled.
Braydon spun a web of manipulation down the phone line. Mom sidled up to me, tucking me under her a warm arm.
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She tapped her hand twice then dragged me in tighter, setting her chin atop my head. I don’t recall ever being this close to her in my life. It was nice to feel her breathing.
We kept listening…
“What’d you do today?” Dad asked Braydon.
“I’m in the Hamptons again. Ari’s been back and forth between meetings.”
“Sponsor meetings?”
“And a few business meetings. She still loves her little writing job in the city.”
We stood in a shocked huddle. Even Dad lacked the words.
“What happened outside the court house today?” Dad asked.
“Ay-ah, You must be…” He sniffed a few times, his voice an octave higher. “Courthouse…?”
“Ariana got in touch.”
“Ah, she did. Do you know where…she…is right now? I thought she’d be home, what with KK gone and…”
“In the city, I hope. How would we know? You’re the boyfriend.”
“Of course. I…apologize.”
“That reminds me. About that cheque we sent Ari a few months back? You know, for her mortgage payments she couldn’t make?”
“Right.”
“How about y—?” Mom stole the phone from dad, fuming.
“Braydon, darling. It’s Grace.” Her eyes apologized to me.
“Grace? Oh, what a lovely surprise. Didn’t…know you were listening…also.”
Braydon’s kinder tone for my parents made me want to gag. Not nearly as much that I used to let that creep touch me once upon a time and speak to me in the same voice.
“I need to ask a favor of you, Braydon. I know this sounds mad but me and Al have this feeling Ari is in serious trouble. We got a strange call from a private number…her dogs were in trouble? For the animals’ sake, we’re going to take them back to our place for a while. We have a backyard and plenty of food.”
He gave himself away by pausing a fraction too long.
Dad paced down the hallway where I heard him rummaging in the office.
“Y—You’re both on your way here to New York?”
“We’re her parents and it’s our job to make sure our daughter and those dogs are safe. We haven’t been stubborn enough. If she won’t let us into your lives we’re barging on in.”