Starting Over (Treading Water Trilogy)

by Force, Marie

  As he ran a razor over his face, Brandon remembered he needed to check the mousetraps in Daphne’s apartment before he left for Vermont. Upon an earlier check, he’d discovered the little bastards had managed to swipe the bait without being caught. He felt like Wile E. Coyote trying to capture the Road Runner.

  The frantic Road Runner music was still playing in his head as he ran a comb through his unruly hair and got dressed. Time for a haircut, he thought, studying his reflection in the mirror. His face had lost the bloated, unhealthy look he’d worn for years, and he was starting to recognize himself again.

  At the AA meeting in Harwich that morning, he’d shared a small part of his story. Joe had encouraged him to take that step to get the first time behind him, and Brandon had to admit his sponsor was right—he felt better afterward. They also helped him locate a meeting he could attend while he was in Vermont.

  Brandon checked his watch. He had fifteen minutes until Declan and Colin were picking him up in Dec’s new Mustang. Taking the stairs two at a time, Brandon made his way to Daphne’s third-floor apartment and knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” Mike asked through the door.

  “Brandon.”

  Mike opened the door and greeted him with a big smile. She’d been down to visit him a couple of times over the last two days, and while he wanted to be annoyed by her, he couldn’t quite seem to get there. She was so damned cute.

  “Hello, madame,” he said with a low bow that made her giggle. “Is your mother home?”

  “MOM!” Mike yelled.

  “I could’ve done that.” Brandon made her giggle again when he opened his mouth in a mock scream. He was relieved to discover he could still be playful with a child. Maybe there was hope for him with his nieces and nephews.

  Daphne came out from the kitchen, and Brandon had to fight the urge to drool right there on her doorstep. She was wearing another of those tank tops—this time in a soft salmon color—and black yoga pants that left nothing to the imagination. Her blonde hair was piled on top of her head in a style that would’ve been messy on anyone else. On her it was perfection. She was a goddess—an unfriendly goddess—but a goddess nonetheless.

  “You’re staring,” Mike whispered.

  “What?” Brandon tore his eyes off the mother to gaze down at the equally fetching daughter.

  “You’re staring,” she whispered again.

  “Oh, um, I, ah, wanted to check the traps.” He cursed the goddess for making him into a stammering fool.

  “Come on in,” Daphne said. “See, that’s how it’s done: you knock, I say come in. You’re getting it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Brandon said in a deliberately dense-sounding tone. “I might be a dumb man, but I can be trained.”

  Mike giggled.

  Even Daphne cracked a reluctant grin.

  Brandon went to check the traps and found that he’d been outfoxed again. “Damn it,” he said under his breath.

  “Ummm, you sweared.”

  Brandon almost jumped out of his skin. “Christ, you scared me,” he muttered.

  “You did it again!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, amused by the scandalized expression on her cherubic face.

  She plunked herself down next to him for a nice long chat. “Why’s your hair all wet?”

  “Ever heard of a shower?”

  “Why would anyone take a shower when it’s still daytime?” she asked, her nose crinkling with disgust.

  He tossed his head back and laughed. “Because I needed it after working all day, and I’m going on a trip.”

  Her face fell with disappointment. “Where’re you going?” she asked in a small voice that tugged at his heart. Yesterday he’d noticed her playing by herself in the fenced-in backyard. She was the only kid in the building, and there was an aura of loneliness about her that saddened him.

  “I’m going to Vermont for the weekend to see my brother.”

  “You have a brother?”

  “Three of them.”

  Her eyes widened with envy. “Three brothers? You must’ve had lots of fun when you were kids.”

  “We did.” He smiled as he remembered the chaos of growing up with four siblings. “There was always something to do, that’s for sure. I have a sister, too, and she has five kids, including three little girls just like you.”

  “You’re so lucky. I just have my mom.”

  “Maybe you can play with my sister’s kids sometime.” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.

  “Can I? Do you mean it?”

  “Sure,” he said, taking great pleasure in her delight.

  “Mike, are you talking his ear off?” Daphne asked from the hallway.

  “Of course not,” Brandon answered with a wink at his friend. “She’s keeping me company.” He pulled out the baggie of cheese he’d brought with him to bait the traps. “Don’t go near these things, Mike. Do you hear me?”

  She nodded. “Uh-huh. Guess what, Mom? Brandon said I can play with his sister’s kids sometime.”

  “Brandon said that, did he? Since when are you calling a grown-up by his first name?”

  “Since he told me I could,” she said with a conspiratorial glance at him.

  “Mr. O’Malley is my father. I’m just Brandon.” He tugged on one of the girl’s pigtails. “My friends call me Brand.”

  “That’s a nickname like Mike, right?”

  He chuckled. “Exactly. Well, ladies, I have to run. My brothers will be here in a minute to pick me up. You guys have a nice weekend.”

  “When will you be back?” Mike’s tiny lips twisted into a woman-sized pout.

  “Sunday night. I’ll come see you then, okay?” Again it seemed his mouth was working without backup from his brain as he made a promise to the child.

  “Okay,” she said and scampered off to her room.

  “Sorry if she’s being a pest,” Daphne said.

  “She’s adorable. I like talking to her.”

  “I appreciate you being nice to her and everything, but…”

  “But what?”

  She bit her bottom lip, and Brandon found himself staring again, wondering if that lip tasted as sweet as it looked. “I don’t want her getting attached.”

  “Why not? I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t know how long we’ll be here, and the fewer attachments she forms, the easier it’ll be when we move.”

  Disappointment spiraled through him. He’d have to wait until later to think about why. For now he wanted to enjoy being close enough to the goddess to smell her alluring fragrance. He was also close enough to touch her, even though he’d probably be risking a finger or two if he did. “Where’re you going?”

  “I don’t know yet. It all depends.”

  “On?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, shutting down so tightly he could almost hear the door slam in his face. “Thanks for checking the traps.”

  “No problem. Do you mind if I stop by to see Mike on Sunday? I sort of promised her I would.”

  “Fine,” she said with a deep sigh, as if the weight of the whole world rested on her petite shoulders.

  “I won’t hurt her,” he said with a fierce determination to mean it. For reasons he didn’t quite understand, it mattered to him that he be someone the girl could count on, despite his horrendous track record in the reliability department.

  “I won’t let you,” Daphne said with determination just as fierce.

  Brandon held her gaze until the loud blare of a horn from the street jolted him out of his trance. “That’s my ride. I’ll see you.”

  She said nothing as he walked away.

  The bickering began just south of Boston. Declan didn’t like the smell of the salt-and-vinegar potato chips Colin bought at the gas station, so he forbade his brother to eat them in his new car. Colin opened them anyway, and when Declan made a grab for them, Brandon had to lunge from the backseat to resc
ue the chips before they went flying all over the car.

  “For Christ’s sake, you two. Knock it off.” Brandon thrust the chips at Colin. “Open a window. They stink.”

  “That’s why I don’t want them in my car,” Declan said.

  “You’re being such a girl about this car,” Colin said.

  “Screw you.”

  “Just because your girlfriend’s pissed at you doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk to us all weekend,” Colin said.

  “Quit busting his balls, Col.” A headache had started behind Brandon’s left eye that promised to only get worse in the next three hours if the two of them were going to keep up the uncharacteristic bitching. Brandon was nervous enough about how he would be received by Aidan without listening to the Bickersons go at it in the front seat.

  He yearned for some peace and quiet so he could think about why Daphne made him want to drool and why the thought of them moving filled him with such sadness. He’d known them only a couple of days, but Mike was already working her way under his skin. He remembered something he’d heard at one of his meetings about the many blessings that came from living a sober life and wondered if Mike might turn out to be a blessing in his life.

  Her prickly mother, on the other hand, had the potential to be more of a curse. He chuckled as he imagined her reaction to him drooling at the sight of her. It probably wouldn’t be the first time a man made a fool of himself over her.

  Colin and Declan had fallen into merciful silence.

  “How pissed is Jessica, Dec?” Brandon asked.

  “Royally.”

  “We could’ve gone without you,” Brandon said. “Mum wouldn’t have known.”

  Declan snorted. “As if. She’d find out, and I’d be even more screwed than I am with Jess.”

  Colin laughed. “Why do we still care so much about our mother being pissed with us? We probably need counseling or something.”

  They shared a laugh, and the fight over the chips was forgotten.

  “Do you think if we ever have kids they’ll fear us the way we fear her?” Colin asked.

  “Hardly,” Brandon said. “We’ll be lucky if they don’t end up in jail.”

  “How pissed do you think Aidan’s gonna be that we’re showing up there unannounced?” Dec asked.

  “Depends on what’s going on with him,” Colin said.

  “How was he when you saw him last weekend?” Brandon asked.

  “On top of the world,” Colin replied. “He said he was going to marry Clare.”

  “He did?” Dec turned to look at Colin. “When?”

  “Friday night when the rest of you were dancing.”

  “Wow,” Dec said. “That was fast. Didn’t he just meet her?”

  “A couple of months ago, but he said he loved her from the very beginning. She seems really good for him, and he loves her kids, too.”

  “She has kids?” Brandon asked.

  “Three girls,” Colin said. “Nineteen, eighteen, and thirteen. The oldest and youngest were there last weekend. They’re nice kids.”

  “How do you guys think he’ll feel about seeing me?” Brandon asked, expressing the worry that’d been on his mind since their mother issued her edict two nights earlier.

  Colin turned in his seat to look at Brandon. “The two of you have to sort things out eventually.”

  “I have things I need to say to him,” Brandon said. “To all of you, really.”

  “Like what?” Colin asked.

  “Some of it I need to talk to Aidan about. Maybe not this weekend, if he’s got other stuff going on, but sometime. It’s crap that goes way back, but they helped me see in rehab what a big effect it’s had on my life.”

  “You gotta give us something, Brand,” Declan pleaded, glancing at his brother in the rear-view mirror.

  Brandon stared out the window, watching the Boston city lights zip past as they crossed the Zakim Bridge on Interstate 93 North. He was going to have to do this at some point. Why not now? “Do you guys remember when Aidan got into medical school?”

  “Sure,” Colin said. “Before he and Sarah graduated from Yale, just before their wedding, right?”

  “That’s right. Well, I jumped to a huge conclusion at that time that I’ve only recently found out was wrong. Way wrong.” When he took a deep breath to steady his nerves, he realized Dec had turned off the radio, and he had his brothers’ full attention. “I assumed Da would expect the rest of us to come into the business.”

  “I think we all assumed that,” Colin said.

  “But I didn’t want to,” Brandon said so softly it was almost a whisper.

  “What did you want to do?” Dec asked, making eye contact with Brandon in the mirror.

  “I wanted to be a Navy SEAL. I wanted to go places. See things. I wanted out of the Cape.”

  “Why didn’t you ever say anything?” Colin asked, incredulous.

  “I figured Aidan had gotten the get-out-of-jail-free card, and there wouldn’t be one for the rest of us.”

  “Why would you just assume that?” Colin asked.

  Brandon shrugged. “When I talked to Da about it the other day, he made it clear I’d read the whole thing totally wrong. He was devastated, in fact. Made me feel like shit to upset him that way.”

  “So all these years, you’ve just been, like, hating life?” Declan asked.

  “Not every minute, but a lot of it. Yeah.”

  Brandon gave his brothers a minute to process what he’d told them. “What about you guys? Wasn’t there other stuff you wanted to do?”

  “Not me,” Colin said. “That’s why Da couldn’t get me to go to college. I was exactly where I wanted to be.”

  “Me either,” Declan said. “I couldn’t wait to get through school so I could come home and go to work.”

  “I guess it was just me.” Brandon sighed. “And I blamed Aidan for the whole thing because he got to leave, and then when he gave up medicine—even then—he didn’t come back home to work with us. I was really furious about that.”

  “Why?” Colin asked. “It wasn’t his fault you hadn’t gotten to do what you wanted to.”

  “I know that now. I know a lot of things now, but at the time, that’s how I saw it. For many reasons, I blamed him.”

  “Is this tied into the, uh, other thing?” Declan asked.

  “You can say the word alcoholism, Dec. It’s not forbidden. And yes, it’s all part of it. I’ve kept huge secrets and nursed even bigger resentments, both of which are very destructive to someone who has a natural inclination to drink too much. Together they’re like gas and fire. I got so I couldn’t deal with anything or anyone without alcohol to numb me first.”

  “So there’s more?” Colin asked. “You said there were secrets, plural.”

  “Yeah, but the rest is stuff I need to work out with Aidan. Eventually.” Brandon’s stomach twisted. He couldn’t imagine any scenario that would be conducive to saying to his older brother, Your wife, the love of your life who died? Oh, by the way, I loved her, too. A shudder rippled through him. And I hated you because you had her and I didn’t. Yeah, this was going to be one hell of a weekend.

  When they arrived just after ten at the A-frame house Aidan had built outside of Stowe, Vermont, they found him passed out on the sofa with a dozen empty beer bottles scattered around him.

  “Shit,” Colin said. “He’s smashed.”

  “Aid.” Declan poked at his brother. “Aidan.”

  “What?” Aidan grumbled. “What do you want?”

  “Wake up,” Dec said with a glance at Colin. They hadn’t seen Aidan like this since Sarah died.

  Brandon hung back at the door to Aidan’s den, staying as far out of the way as he could.

  “Aidan!” Declan said.

  “What? I’m awake.” His speech was slurred, and days had passed since his last shave. “What the hell are you guys doing here?”

  “Your mother sent us,” Colin said. “She wants to know what’s wrong with you, and since
you wouldn’t tell her, here we are.”

  “There’s nothing wrong, so go home.” Aidan buried his face in his arm and appeared to be on his way back to sleep.