His Brother's Wife

by Mia Ford

  “Yeah, well, nothing much changes around here,” I answered quietly, feeling whatever dignity I had left slipping away at his second mention of the fact that in almost a decade, I hadn’t gotten anything aside from my diner job. “But I guess you knew that.”

  “Sure,” he answered amicably enough, maybe even a little bit embarrassed, which was something I wouldn’t have minded a bit. “I guess I did.”

  “I saw a light in in your house earlier. I’m still living in the same house. I didn’t think it would be you, though. I mean, the thought crossed my mind, but I didn’t think it would be you.”

  “I didn’t think it would be, either. I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I inherited the house, and there’s a whole lot more to getting things all figured out than I expected there to be. It seemed like coming back for a while made the most sense in the end.”

  “I heard about your dad,” I said in a low voice, furious for myself with the sudden feeling that I might actually start to cry. I dug into my palms with my fingernails, to make sure that didn’t happen. “I’m very sorry. I thought about sending my condolences, but then I realized I wouldn’t have had the first idea of where to send them. So, you know. I didn’t.”

  “That’s all right. It’s sweet of you, though, to think about it. Thanks, Fay. I appreciate it. Unfortunately, I should also be going.”

  “Going? Didn’t you come in here for a meal? Or, why did you come in here?”

  “Just a coffee to go will be fine, actually. I’ve got a lot of shit on my plate, and I’m not trying to stay in Ashville for the rest of my life.”

  “Of course. Hold on.”

  I poured him his cup of coffee with hands that were undeniably trembling. How many times had I done this exact same thing over the course of my life? Enough that when I’d first begun giving him drinks to go, they had been cups of coke or hot cocoa instead of coffee, back before he was grown up enough for a drink as mature as that.

  Back in the day I had all but lived for the times when Neil would come in to see me. I had loved the way he had always made me feel like the most important, special person on the face of the earth. And now? Now he was like a stranger, only worse. A stranger wouldn’t have had this uncanny ability to hurt me the way that Neil was, to hurt me without even trying. And he wasn’t even doing anything! He was only acting like we were strangers or distant acquaintances, which was exactly what we were now. All I knew was that I wanted him to go. Out of all of the times I had imagined the two of us seeing each other again, it had never once played out like this.

  “How much do I owe you?” he asked.

  “Nothing, please. Let’s just consider it a gift from an old friend.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure, I’m sure,” I answered in an overly bright voice, knowing that I would never be able to work the register in my present state of agitation. “Least I can do, right?”

  “Shit. Well, thanks. I don’t have anything to do for you in return. But we should get together before I leave, you know? We should do some catching up. Maybe I can buy you dinner or something, or what passes for dinner in this place.”

  “Yea, if you have time. That might be nice.”

  “All right, good. I’ll see you around, Fay.”

  I nodded at him, feeling both relieved and sad when he was finally out of the diner and getting back into his truck. It was a nice enough offer, his idea of us going to dinner, but I wasn’t an idiot, or at least not a total idiot. Not as far as I could tell.

  The dinner suggestion had been his way of getting the hell out of dodge as fast as he could. Nothing less and nothing more. For all the things that appeared to have changed about the guy, there was something other than his eyes that seemed to be the exact same as it had been when he’d gone and never looked back.

  His desire to be as far away from little old Ashville as he could get was exactly the same as it had been when we were still teenagers. Although I wouldn’t have thought it was possible back when I was still an eighteen-year-old girl, Neil’s dislike of Ashville seemed to have grown instead of decreasing.

  I’d heard the saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” plenty of times. Everyone had. For Neil, the opposite seemed to be true. Absence seemed to have made his heart grow colder, towards Ashville as a whole, and undoubtedly towards me. I was nothing more than some silly little townie, and there was no way seeing me again was on his agenda.

  My hand flew back up to my locket, and for just a minute, I could see the Neil that had been mine. The Neil that I had loved so completely. Then my hand dropped back to my side, and that image was gone, leaving in its wake the version of Neil I had just seen. This man was all work and no play for sure. If I saw him again before he left, I would be so stunned, someone could knock me over with a feather.

  My guess was that seeing me again would only drive him to get his work done faster so that he could leave his past behind for good and get on with whatever fancy life he’d created for himself out there in the wide world.

  “Well that was a trip and a half, am I right?” Courtney asked.

  I turned to look at Courtney, who was beginning to look a little blue from all of her time in the massive refrigerator. I shrugged my shoulders in a gesture I hoped looked at least a little bit nonchalant. Not only was I not sure what to say, but I also wasn’t sure that I could trust my voice. Whether I wanted to be or not, I was kind of bowled over by what had just happened, and I needed some time to regroup.

  “Come on, Fay. Don’t be mad, all right? I know you just wanted to hide from him, but really, why the hell should you? This is our diner. Not his.”

  “I know. I’m not really sure why I was hiding, to tell you the truth.”

  “Because you were surprised? Or who knows? Maybe he’s just like one of those guys in your books. What do they always get called? ‘The one,’ or some shit like that? Maybe he’s that, and your body just reacted.”

  “Um, doubtful, Courtney.”

  “No shit, it’s doubtful. Now come on, pour a girl a cup of coffee before she freezes to death. I swear, I can’t even feel my nipples anymore!”

  And just like that, the strange and unexpected appearance of Neil was behind me. My real life came rushing back with full force. If there was one thing Courtney was good for, it was reminding a girl where she was. I poured her coffee, handed it to her, and the reached out and gave her an impulsive hug. It was something she would normally have shrugged off with a string of curse words, but this time, she let the hug slide. It wasn’t until we got an actual customer that I let her go. By that time, I was starting to feel a lot better. It had been a fluke, seeing Neil, and one I was sure I wouldn’t have to repeat.

  Chapter 6: Neil

  For a few terrifying seconds, I didn’t have a fucking clue where I was. All I knew was that the sun was way brighter than I felt like it should have been, and my head was pounding with the kind of hangover only whiskey was capable of giving me. When the culprit responsible for your hangover was the only thing you recognized for sure upon waking, you knew you were in trouble. This was something I had never known before, but I sure as shit did now. It wasn’t a lesson I was pleased to learn.

  “Christ,” I groaned to myself, hearing how pitiful and weak my voice sounded and feeling powerless to fix it. “What the fuck happened last night?”

  I lay there tangled up in my sheets and feeling like I might freeze to death if I didn’t get myself up to turn the heat to an acceptable level. I did my best to piece things together. It wasn’t just last night that needed piecing, either. There were whole days, at least a week, that was so disjointed that it took me a minute to remember what they had been and why.

  Once I got everything settled in my own mind, I had the distinct displeasure of finding that things actually felt worse, instead of better. This wasn’t all that unusual when a person woke up from a night of heavy drinking, but knowing that didn’t make me feel any better. With things the way they were now, it was going to
take a hell of a lot to make me feel anything close to kosher. It was going to take more than I thought the shithole town of Ashville, Alaska had to offer me.

  That was it. The thing I couldn’t escape no matter how much of my dad’s extensive bar I spent my solitary nights trying to drink up. I was back in Ashville, and although I spent a lot of time and energy reminding myself that it wasn’t permanent, there was a part of me that felt like time had slid backward and taken me back to the place I’d spent all of my adult life trying to get away from.

  Not only that but my dad was dead. He was dead, and the state of affairs he’d left behind wasn’t going to take only a couple of hours to sort through. Forget a couple of hours; it wasn’t going to take a couple of days. If I managed to get the fuck out of Ashville within a month, I would be doing well. No amount of lying to myself could change that fact. I was here, and I wasn’t going anywhere. In less than a week of being home, I had already managed to get myself into exactly the kind of shitty situation I had come home hoping to avoid.

  “But how the fuck was I supposed to know?”

  I grumbled the words to myself as I forced myself up to a sitting position. I chugged down the large glass of water I had apparently left myself the previous night before passing out cold. I was dimly aware that talking to myself wasn’t the best development ever, but after days of being almost exclusively on my own in a house with twelve bedrooms and eight full bathrooms, it was a habit I had just seemed to pick up.

  Things felt too empty otherwise, and since I had no intention of throwing any parties or making any friends, talking to myself so as to hear an actual voice seemed like the best of a whole bunch of shitty options. And although I was the one making it, it was a legitimate point, legitimate enough that I said it once more for good measure as I stumbled from the bedroom that had been mine when I was a teenager to the shower that was calling out my name.

  As I let the water pour over me, I also allowed my thoughts to limp along back to the previous afternoon, to the encounter that had led to my impressive solitary bender on my dad’s favorite, pricey liquor. I didn’t want to go there, or at least most of me didn’t, but I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself, either. In some sick act of masochism, the encounter with Fay was the only place my thoughts wanted to travel. With me being as tired, drained, and worn down as I was, I was fucking helpless to stop them.

  Maybe it made me an idiot, but it had never occurred to me that Fay Turner might still work at the local Ashville diner. Quite honestly, it hadn’t occurred to me to think about whether she still lived in the tiny town where fun and ambition came to die. I had thought about her plenty after I had first moved away, but over the years and after getting into bed with more women than I was prepared to count, she’d sort of lost her place in my mind.

  She’d been relegated to a new spot, a spot so far in the back of my other thoughts and memories that when I had seen her yanked up from beneath the diner counter, I had felt like I was looking at a ghost. If I hadn’t still had my wits enough about me to realize that it would have made me look like a complete moron, I would have just turned and hauled ass out of there.

  Shit, I would have driven right back to the tiny airport and gotten onto my little plane and headed back for Connecticut if I’d been able to justify it to myself. I would have done it if it hadn’t been for the fact that it wasn’t Brent’s job to clean up the shit my dad had left behind. And if I hadn’t wanted to be one hundred percent sure that none of dad’s asshole family managed to weasel their way into something they didn’t deserve.

  Even so, seeing Fay again had almost been enough for me to give up all semblance of responsibility and head out, back to the life that actually belonged to me instead of the shit show it had so recently been replaced with.

  The first thing I had thought when I’d looked at Fay was that she hadn’t changed at all. Even after nine years, I would have recognized her anywhere, which I was sure was something I wouldn’t be able to say about most of the people in town.

  I was the kind of person who made forgetting into a job when I wanted something out of my head. That was exactly how I had treated tiny Ashville just as soon as I had managed to make my escape. Fay, though, she was somebody I wasn’t ever able to forget, even if I hadn’t realized I remembered her until I saw her again. Even her mannerisms were the same. The way she compulsively tucked her hair behind her ear, or the way she played with whatever piece of jewelry she had on that day.

  The second thing that had occurred to me upon seeing the ghost of my girlfriend past was that she was fucking beautiful.

  She always had been. She’d been beautiful in a way an eighteen-year-old boy just couldn’t appreciate. Getting a little older had only managed to accentuate that in her. Her hair was long and full. The kind of blonde that only came from spending hours and hours out in the sun. Her eyes were a deep green that almost looked fake. They were so thoughtful that they actually made me nervous when they landed on me. She was every bit as beautiful as any girl I’d seen since abandoning my hometown.

  Realizing that had made me squirm while I was standing in front of her and trying to figure out how to get away. It still made me squirm while I stood underneath the shower. Because when I had left Ashville, I had left all of it, my girlfriend Fay Turner included. I had left with promises to write, to call, left telling her that I would visit her just as soon as I got myself situated in college. What I had actually done was call twice and send one stupid letter before leaving her behind and letting her go. I hadn’t ever told her it was over.

  I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t had the balls for that conversation back then, or if I’d just decided she wasn’t important enough to deserve a proper goodbye. Either way, I hadn’t given her one. I had just gone and thought about her very little, until standing face to face with her again. I was lucky she hadn’t punched me in the face right then and there. I should probably have been grateful about that. Instead, I was even more ready to get out of town. If I had to go through another impromptu meeting like that one, I would kill myself.

  “I need to get the fuck out of here,” I growled to myself as I toweled off and slipped into what I had quickly come to think of as my Alaska clothes. “That’s what I need to do.”

  I needed to get out of town, but that wasn’t an option. I decided that the grocery store would have to do. I piled into my truck once again, a heavy feeling of reservation on my heart this time.

  For starters, after seeing Fay, it was now impossible not to remember that I could see her house down in the valley below my own. When I looked at that house, I remembered all of the meals her mom had made us before she died. I remembered how close to going all the way we had come that summer before I left. It made my stomach do a weird little flip flop when I thought about those times. I slammed my truck door and revved my engine as if the sound of it would be able to drown out my own stupid thoughts.

  I headed down to the town’s only grocery store. That flip-floppy feeling only got worse the further into town I got. By the time I got inside the small store, I figured there was a fifty-fifty shot that I was going to throw up. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the whiskey or my nerves.

  Getting out of the house was necessary, as was getting some actual food to put in the house instead of just having booze. But being in the grocery store felt a whole lot like playing with fire. Who the hell knew who I was going to run into while I walked through those aisles?

  It wasn’t like Fay was the only person I had just up and left, although she was probably the worst of it. I’d done the same thing to every person I had ever known. There was a very good chance that they wouldn’t all be as gracious about it as Fay had been. I wasn’t really itching to get into a fight right there in the grocery store. I also wasn’t sure that it was something I would be able to avoid. Almost everything I had done since arriving in Ashville felt like a giant misstep, and it looked like this was going to be more of the same.

  “Driscoll!” a voice boome
d out from behind me, the timing of it so perfectly matched with my thoughts, it might as well have been in a movie or something. “Holy shit, Driscoll! Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” I answered dismally, talking before I even started to turn around.

  I didn’t know who this guy was, but I was sincerely hoping it would be somebody I could talk down. I really did feel like shit, and although I was in what I liked to consider fairly decent shape, I didn’t think it would take much to knock me out flat at that moment. I was so ready to get my ass kicked, actually, that when I got myself turned around and saw somebody walking toward me with a smile on his face, I had trouble believing that was the person calling my name.

  I squinted at him and realized that this was somebody I knew. He was coming right for me, his arms opened wide like he wanted to give me a hug instead of punching me in the face.

  “I fucking knew it was you! I know I already said it, but holy shit, man! It’s fucking good to see you, brother!”

  “Jesus, Eli? Is that who I’m looking at right now?”

  “As I live and fucking breathe, man. How the hell are you?!”

  Eli was a couple of inches taller than me, despite the fact that I stood at a respectable six foot three. I let him swallow me up in a bear hug that drove the air from my lungs. He even bounced me up and down a couple of times.

  What with the hug and the amount of profanity flying around, we were still making a scene, but it wasn’t a scene that involved somebody telling me what an asshole I was. So, I was more than willing to take it. Besides, Eli was a dude I was actually happy to see. I hadn’t thought about him any more than I’d thought about anyone else I’d left behind over the years. But seeing him brought back a flood of memories of all of the trouble we’d gotten into together. Also, as girly as it felt to admit, even to myself, it was good to find that I still had a friend in town. Not a friend I had kept up with, but a friend. That was worth something for sure. He clapped me on the back one more time and then let me go, grinning at me widely and shaking my hand.