by Julia Kent
“I feel like a shamed little girl right now, Mama.”
She reached out and tipped my chin up, forcing me to look at her. “Why?” Her eyes were narrowed, her mouth set with purpose.
“Why?” I asked, incredulous. “Do I really need to spell it out?”
“You think you should be ashamed for loving two men at the same time?” Her tone was even. No judgment. Just curious and guarded, like she was handling me with kid gloves.
I was either going to throw up or hug her.
Maybe both.
“No.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that I do love two men at the same time,” I blurted out, my mouth filled with the tang of tears, my vision blurring. “Or did. I did love them both.”
“And you never told me. I had to figure it out for myself.”
I just sniffed and shut my eyes, tight, like she was gonna smack me upside the head.
“I’m sorry.”
“If you’re apologizing for loving them both, then shut your trap. If you’re apologizing for not trusting me enough to love you no matter who you love, then apology accepted, you foolish little girl.” And with that, her arms were around me and I sniffed again, smelling cigarette smoke and baby powder and Mama.
I sobbed into her shoulder and she soothed me. Then I heard the telltale inhale of her taking a puff of her e-cig. Pragmatic and stressed, my mama sure was.
“Why ain’t they here? Too good to come back to Peters and be at a hick wedding? That why they broke up with you?”
And blunt as fuck, my mama was.
“No!” I pulled away and wiped my eyes, my insides jangling like a set of car keys in a baby’s hands. “I broke up with them.”
“You did? Both of ‘em?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Huh. Most women would’ve hung on to one of them, Darla. For security.”
“It don’t work like that, Mama. We’re a threesome.”
She bristled at that word. Ah, fuck. I started to cry again.
“So you break up with one, you have to dump ’em both?”
“Something like that.”
She studied my face. “I don’t think so,” she said, her face crunched in a skeptic’s scowl.
“What do you mean?”
“I think you broke up with ’em because you didn’t have the guts to tell me about them.”
“What? No.” But a chill ran through me. “It’s the other way around! They wouldn’t tell their parents about me, and they humiliated me at a dinner party Trevor’s mom had.”
She tensed. “Humiliated you? On purpose?”
“Well...” Now that I thought about it, no. Not really.
Mama narrowed her eyes and took a drag off her e-cig. It glowed pink, then purple. Great. The woman was smoking the e-cig version of a Glowworm doll.
“Then what? ’Cause what I’m hearin’ is that you wouldn’t tell me about them just like they wouldn’t tell their parents about you and what all three of you been doin’, Darla.” She got so close to me I could feel the heat of the end of that glowing e-cig thing, even though I knew there was no heat.
“I didn’t raise no fool, Darla, but it looks like I raised a hypocrite.”
I gasped.
“And that’s the only thing I might have to be ashamed about when it comes to your behavior.”
And with that, she slowly lumbered out of the living room and made a harumph sound that echoed through my conflicted soul.
CHAPTER 10
Trevor
“What’s your GPS say? You punched in 26 Old Farm Road, Peters, Ohio, 44444, right?” I read Darla’s address off the piece of paper I’d scribbled it on.
“Yes. You watched me. Like a fucking hawk, you pansy-ass hovermother.”
“So where are we?”
“Lost signal,” the GPS said in a robotic voice.
“FUCK!” Joe screamed. “We’re stuck in Hoopieville, Ohio with a lost satellite signal. This is how every horror movie starts.”
“Not every horror movie,” I said, correcting him.
“Shut the fuck up, Trevor.”
“Just making a point of fact.”
“I’ll shove that point of fact up your ass, Mr. Attorney, if you don’t—”
“STOP!” I shouted. “Look. There’s a sign. Jerry’s Bar. remember?” How could either of us forget Jerry’s? It was there that I caught Joe kissing Darla for the first time. Right in front of the cigarette machine by the bathrooms. That moment was frozen in time in my mind. It was the second my life turned, like I shifted from one dimension to another, as if there were multiple Trevors living in parallel in different universes.
And I became the Trevor who didn’t mind sharing Darla. Who enjoyed watching my best friend kiss her. I became that person right here, right there, in that piece of shit, honky-tonk bar off I-76 in truck stop, flyover territory.
I smiled.
“I remember,” Joe groused, pulling a 360-degree turn to head back toward the neon sign. “I remember we nearly got the shit kicked out of us when we performed there.”
“That’s not how it happened.”
“That’s what it felt like.”
“They warmed up to us afterwards, though.”
Joe blew a long puff of air out of his nose and ran a hand through his hair. “That was then, and they were hostile. How fast do you think word about us spread around town after we pulled that stunt when we were leaving?”
“You mean when you pulled that stunt. I remained clothed by the side of the road.” Joe had stripped naked and stood on the side of I-76 for about an hour, waiting for Darla to show up, to make a point. Or to try to get her to come to Boston. Or—for some reason.
“Shut up, Trevor.”
I did. He parked in a spot in the parking lot. It wasn’t hard to find one right near the door, because there were only seven cars in the parking lot.
“No angry mob with pitchforks and torches tonight,” I said.
“Seven cars means at least seven guys in there. More than enough to kick us into little piles of shit they can flush down a toilet,” Joe said tersely, hands clamped to the steering wheel, knuckles like white stones under stretched skin.
“But they won’t.”
He raised his eyebrows and stared straight ahead. The neon sign was broken. It said:
JERRY’S AR
Like a pirate.
He let out a shaky breath and finally turned to me with haunted eyes. “What are we doing here?”
“We’re—”
“I mean really doing here, Trevor. She left us. Broke up with us. We’ve been totally dumped, and we’re acting like stupid puppy dogs chasing after her. That’s nice and all in the movies, where the guy goes and gets his woman and they kiss and it’s happily ever after, but Darla left us for a reason. A big reason. An insurmountable reason. What the three of us have is too countercultural. It’s too extreme. There’s no place in society for it, and she walked away because we’re too chickenshit to say to our parents that this is what we do. This is how we live.”
“This is who we are,” I said with a long sigh that matched his.
Joe’s hands began to shake on the steering wheel. His gut tightened visibly. “Right.”
I turned to him. “What’s the alternative?”
He looked at me with mourning, soulful eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
He snorted. “I do? Then you tell me.”
“The alternative is what we’re doing now. Hiding. Except Darla just shattered that. We can’t hide it any more.”
“Sure we can.”
“No. We can’t. Because she’s gone. The price of hiding it is losing her.”
“I don’t think that’s the price of hiding it.”
“Then what is?”
“Feeling like a phony all the time.”
“You’re turning into J.D. Salinger.”
“I always did like his books.”
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“That’s because you’re an asshole like Holden Caulfield.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Only an asshole would.”
“We can bicker at each other like two guys in a David Mamet play, or we can decide what the fuck we’re doing out here. This is one big mistake.”
“No, it’s not. We’re here to talk to her. Convince her to come home.”
“Trevor! You fucking idiot! She’s not coming back to us. You don’t get that? You really don’t fucking get that, do you?” With savage grace, Joe ripped the car door open and climbed out. He started kicking his own car.
I jumped out and ran around to him. “I get that we lost her! I get that she left us because we were ashamed of her. But we’re not ashamed of Darla. Not one bit.”
“Not one bit?” he growled. Kick. “Not one fucking bit?” Kick.
I grabbed him by the shoulders. He tensed, fists tight. I’d take a punch if I had to, in order to make him hear this.
“No, you fucking tool. We’re ashamed of ourselves.”
“Damn right!” His eyes glittered in the night, filled with total hatred for me. I was the messenger and he knew what I was saying was true. “We should never have tried this kinky-ass experiment.”
“Experiment!” I choked out. “That’s all this has been to you? A fucking experiment? Don’t you realize that isn’t it at all?”
“Then what is it, Trev?”
“It’s love.”
The door to Jerry’s Bar opened and a very drunk old dude poured out of it like a bartender pouring a drink. He just slithered out the door and fell onto the ground with a ribbon-like grace that was almost artistic.
Joe’s jaw was on the ground already from my words. I could feel the heat radiating off him, even from three feet away. He was corded muscles and tight anger and nothing but.
We looked at the dude on the ground, his face inches from a small puddle, and looked back at each other.
He gave me a cocky stare. Not a concession, because Joe would never crack like that. But as close as I could expect.
“We are definitely in Darla’s hometown.” A small puddle of piss formed at the prone dude’s crotch.
“Yes.”
He sighed, a heavy sound of resignation. “Let’s go ask for directions to her mom’s trailer.”
As we reached the main door, Joe bent down and checked for a pulse in the guy’s neck, careful to avoid the urine. “He’s alive.” Joe wiped his hand on his jeans. “Disgusting, but fine.”
“No worse than anything we see in Boston.”
The man moaned, opened his mouth, and a set of upper teeth fell out onto the asphalt.
“I take that back,” I said.
The door opened wider and a vaguely familiar form filled the space, hogging most of the light. Wider than one of the split doors, the body was that of a man, dressed in an enormous flannel shirt and sagging jeans.
“Did Jack pass out again and piss himself? You can set your clock to it.” He looked at me and shifted his weight just enough that a parking lot light lit up his face.
Darla’s Uncle Mike.
“It’s the chicken fucker!” Mike said in a booming voice.
Oh, yes. We were definitely in Darla’s hometown.
Uncle Mike opened the door wider. “Good to see you wearing clothes, Trevor.” He reached out to shake my hand, his bear paw covering my hand completely. He shook me like a rag doll. “You here for the bachelor party?”
Darla clearly hadn’t said a word about dumping us. Had she said a word about...us? I assumed Mike would be cold and angry, but this warm reception was confusing. Welcome, but confusing. I’d rather there be a misunderstanding out of ignorance than be dumped in the bar’s trash can by a group of angry rural citizens outraged on the behalf of one of their own.
I imagined it worked something like that. It wasn’t vigilantism out here to just take care of things.
It was justice. But then what did I know?
“Bachelor party?” Joe squeaked.
“Who’s this?” Mike’s voice went cold and suspicious, the tone exactly what I’d expected of him earlier.
“This is my friend Joe,” I explained quickly. “He’s part of the band I’m in. Remember? He was here before. With me.”
“The one Darla manages? Oh, yeah...I remember you. We made fun of Chicken Fucker here.” Present tense. Darla manages. He spoke in present tense. My eyes narrowed in thought. Darla hadn’t said a word to anyone, had she?
Joe’s eyes flickered in my direction. He was thinking the same thing.
“Right.”
Mikes entire countenance changed. Softened. He stuck a paw out for Joe and gave him the same handshake treatment. I could hear Joe’s teeth rattle, but he maintained his grip.
“Nice to see you again,” Joe said politely, but I could hear the What the Fuck?
“Come in. Have a beer. You need to meet Darla’s new stepdaddy. Plus, a friend of yours is here already.”
I stopped cold. Joe slammed into me from behind. A friend? We didn’t have any friends out here. What the hell was Mike talking about?
“Cut it out,” Joe hissed in my ear.
“Are you as freaked out as I am?” I hissed back.
“More.”
“Impossible.”
“This is not a contest,” he muttered back as we walked into the bar.
Six guys dotted the stools at the bar counter. No one was at the tables. Nine televisions were blaring. That was an upgrade. Last time we were here there were more like six. The bar was exactly the same otherwise. Neon beer logo lights dotted the back wall behind the bar, among pennants from Cleveland and Ohio sports teams, their three points of felt curling noticeably and the once-white strips at the flat, left hand sides yellowed with age. This was a place where old friends came to drink, hang out and play pool.
My eyes sought out the cigarette machine. I walked closer to the hallways where the bathrooms were, waiting until I could crane my neck a bit and see it. A wistful smile stretched my face. In the periphery, I could see Joe watching me. He had a matching smile.
All the men were turned away from us, sucking on various glasses and watching a hockey game.
“CALVIN!” Mike boomed. A man turned and climbed off the stool as he saw us. He was tall and willowy, taller than me and probably fifty pounds lighter. His face was sunken in and bony, half his hair gone, and he wore glasses. He looked like a younger version of the old man in the American Gothic painting. If he wore the same outfit and held a pitch fork, he’d be a twin.
“Calvin McMasterson, meet Trevor and Joe. Darla’s friends from back in Boston. Boys, this is Calvin. Darla’s new stepdaddy.”
“Nice to meet you,” he said with a slur. I couldn’t tell if it was from being drunk or something else, but his smile was gentle and friendly, his head sloping down just slightly as he pumped my hand. I liked him instantly.
Joe exchanged handshakes and turned to Mike. “Any decent foreign beers in this place?”
“Rolling Rock.”
“Jesus.”
Mike just rolled his eyes and said,“You drink enough Rolling Rock, you see Jesus.”
“You drink enough of that shit and you pray to him the next morning while you’re tithing to the porcelain god,” Joe shot back.
Mike howled with laughter, and the other men at the bar turned to watch. Until that moment, they’d ignored us, but Mike’s laugh seemed to signal acceptance. That we were worthy of attention.
That we were part of the pack.
The televisions went silent for a second, between game and commercial, and a toilet flushed loudly. The rush of running water was a backdrop to all the handshakes and names flying past as Mike introduced us to the other five men. The names escaped me, but I was dutiful, shaking and talking and trying to make sense of what we’d stumbled across.
This was a bachelor party? Seemed more like a wake.
Heavy footsteps came at a fast clip from
the bathroom hallway, and then:
“Trevor? Joe?” A very familiar voice. We turned and saw the last person we’d imagine seeing here in bumfuck Ohio.
“Alex?”
“Hey!” His face lit up and he walked faster to us, swapping a handshake for a hug. He was Darla’s aunt’s fiancé, and we’d rescued him (sort of) when he’d run face-first into a parking sign way back when, but other than seeing him socially here and there, we weren’t best buddies or anything.
His hug was a little too long. His smile was a little too eager.
Oh, man.
“You okay?” I asked, concerned for him.
“I’m just relieved to see someone I know,” he said in a low voice, clapping my shoulder. But his eyes held a kind of alarm in them that I would imagine most physicians—especially obstetricians—don’t generally possess. The man worked in emergency room rotations, from what Darla had told us. He was unflappable.
“All right,” Joe said, giving me a look. He caught it, too.
“You all know each other?” Mike said, letting out a giant belch and motioning to the bartender for another beer. He laughed. “Of course you do! Josie’s fiancé and Darla’s boyfriend...” His voice tapered off as his eyes flickered from me to Joe over and over.
The skin on the back of my neck prickled.
And that look of alarm sharpened in Alex’s eyes.
“We’re all with the band, remember?” I said to Mike, as if nothing was weird. Play nice. Pretend. It was just like being at home at my mom’s house, and that dinner party.
Everybody wanted the lie, as long as it came with a smile.
Darla
Mama didn’t want no bachelorette party, but Aunt Marlene insisted. Said it was time for Mama to let loose for once in her life and have some fun, and besides, with Josie and me there, we could all have ourselves some adult action and get down.
I wasn’t sure what all that old-fashioned slang meant, but my takeaway was that Aunt Marlene figured me and Josie were paying for the big ass tab she was planning on building.
“Mom, I don’t really think—I mean, if Aunt Cathy doesn’t want...” Josie’s voice trailed off. This was fucking weird, because she became so...mousy around Aunt Marlene. Tentative and worried, like a scared little kid. Then again, what did I know? I’m the one who thought I couldn’t tell my mama the truth about my threesome and it turned out she was more offended that I didn’t trust her than by the fact that—her words!—I found room in my hoohaw for two men at once.