Ties

by Campbell, Steph

  Well, famous because it was Dad’s favorite. She’s now taken to making it every time I come by.

  Since there haven’t been many girls that my mom has actually met, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when she asks about her, but after running into Whit a few days ago for the first time since she broke off whatever it was she and I had going, it’s unnerving to talk about her.

  “It’s Whit,” I say. I have no idea if that’s her full name or not; I never bothered to ask. “And no, I’m not seeing her.”

  Whit wasn’t like the other girls that I brought home from bars. She wasn’t in it hoping to be the one to change me, to save me, to bring me back to life.

  She was in it because she was running from something, same as me. She was running from feelings she didn’t want too close to the surface, she was doing what she had to do to forget, even if that was becoming someone she wasn’t.

  I knew that the first time I saw her. Gorgeous face, killer rack, and the saddest fucking eyes I’d ever seen.

  I guess the fact that I took her home makes me the asshole dirtbag that Deo says I am, but at the time, I couldn’t see past the fact that she understood what I needed without me ever having to say it.

  She’s also the only girl apart from Megan who ever met my mom.

  It was the single night that Whit spent at my place. Not by choice: she always made sure to leave before I’d even pulled the condom off most nights. Or I’d slip into the bathroom and come out and she’d be long gone.

  Because back then, it was what we both wanted, even needed.

  That one night Whit and I shared a few too many beers, and she passed out on my chest. Scared the shit out of me to find her there when I heard knocking on the front door of my apartment the next morning. Not because it meant we’d been caught: I didn’t care who saw me with any girl. But waking up to her clutching onto me like she needed me there freaked me out--and it did the same to her when she woke up.

  Ma had come by with bagels, which Whit politely declined since she “only ate real bagels, from the northeast, like God intended.” Ma was grinning like crazy watching Whit and I--half-dressed--scrambling for clothes and exchanging awkward goodbyes. It was one of the last nights I spent with Whit, and I missed hanging out with her when she stopped returning my calls.

  But, damn, I’m so glad a rad chick like that found someone to make her happy the way she deserves.

  “Shame, she was a pretty little thing,” Mom says, pointing at me with the knife. “Is there anyone else?”

  I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mean for it to sound like a threat, but I know it’s coming just before a long sermon about how ‘all the good girls will get snatched up’ and ‘starting a family is the best investment in a future a man can make.’

  As if that’s not bad enough, she’ll drag Dad into it. She might even pull the old photo albums down and want to look at pictures of the good old times.

  Not that they weren’t good times.

  The best times.

  I just can’t think about my father and his life right now. I loved my father, but his life isn’t my life, and I can’t make decisions that were identical to his just to keep some Byrne legacy alive.

  My mother thinks I’m being a narcissist by choosing a life that’s different from my father’s. What she doesn’t realize is that I think about him every time I make any decision: I think about how much he gave up. I think about the man he never got to be, the life he never gave himself the chance to live.

  “Mom, you know I’ve been busy. I’m out on the water every morning before work, and most nights I get out there again. I barely have time to eat and sleep.”

  I think about the last few weeks, the way the days have started to bleed together. What used to be the one thing that could ricochet energy through my body has started to feel like work. Maybe it’s the press of always having to do better, knowing that a few seconds can cost me sponsorship and my future.

  Mom’s sigh is long and tortured. “Again? With the boats? Ry, I love you. I do. But sailing isn’t a poor guy’s game. If you had a trust fund and time to spare? Wonderful. But you’re a blue collar guy from a blue collar family. I know you don’t want to do plumbing--”

  “Please, Ma,” I beg. “Not with plumbing again. Uncle Pat can recruit Tommy if he’s that desperate. I’m not old enough to give up on life like that yet. Poor Dad got sucked in and never got back out.”

  She whips her head up and I wish I could cram my insensitive words back down my goddamn throat. “What makes you think your father got sucked into anything?” she asks, her voice so calm it’s fucking scary.

  “Seriously? Who grows up wanting to be a plumber?” I scoff.

  Mom slams a hand into her hip, the look on her face the same pitying one I saw so many times growing up: when I asked for a dirt bike for Christmas, when I told her Megan and I were getting our own place senior year of high school, when I announced that my job making sandwiches at Subway made me an adult and negated the need for me to have a curfew.

  “You know who wants to be plumbers, Ryan?” She stares me down. “You know who? Men. Grown-up men who take pride in putting bread on the table. I know everyone thinks they can be a rockstar or a cage fighter and make the big money, but those are boys’ dreams, and they only become reality for very few men. And I use the term ‘men’ lightly in that scenario.”

  “Sailing is nothing like that,” I argue, but I know it’s going to fall on deaf ears. “I train my ass off. It’s Olympic level training. And it’s not just physical. I study. I learn. I have to go out there and observe every damn day.”

  “Yeah,” Mom says, going back to her chopping. “Do you observe any girls while you’re out there? Megan wasn’t the only one. You’re a good-looking guy, and you got your dad’s work ethic, thank God. I’d like to see you with someone who can make you happy.”

  I pop a bite of cubed cheese into my mouth to draw out my response. I want to tell her about Hattie so I don’t have to listen to the whole song and dance, but I wouldn’t even know what to say. Hattie is amazing, but she may very well be off limits to me. If her strict-ass, self-imposed rules about who she dates and when and for how long don’t get me, her big bro and his chest-thumping, territorial bullshit just might.

  Even without all that, there’s the point that she and I want to take this whole thing in seriously different directions. I left the synagogue feeling pretty pissed, even though she acted exactly the way she told me she would: she acted like I was a fling, good for fun and nothing else. She was clear that she didn’t want family meetings and “complications.”

  The thing is, I never agreed to doing this half-assed, and I’m not about to give up on nudging her outside of her rules. Which is why I haven’t called yet, even though I know she’s waiting on me. I’m not about to let this sink into something meaningless. I can’t toss her aside like I did with so many girls before.

  I’m not about to explain this all to my mom. Hell, I don’t know that I’ve even got a handle on it myself.

  But Tommy saves me before I have to say anything. He whips in through the kitchen door, plopping a six pack of Harp on the counter as he catches our mother around the waist, smacks a kiss on her cheek, and steals a whole, ripe tomato. He bites it like an apple and red juice drips down his chin, making him look like a pale, ginger vampire.

  “Tommy!” Mom catches my brother under his chin, turning his face back and forth like she’s inspecting him for some disease. “You’re too skinny. Are you and Pat eating anything other than take out?”

  My brother pats his flat stomach and talks around a mouthful of tomato. “Sometimes we do TV dinners. I need to get rich and famous so I can get me a chef.” He grins at me, and I shake my head, because he dropped that one right into Ma’s lap.

  “A chef? A chef?” She shakes her shaggy hair, dyed the same shade of red as Tommy’s, which is the color it was before she started going gray the year dad got sick. “How ‘bout a wife? Huh? You two ever heard o
f getting married?”

  Tommy pretends to choke, going as far as falling off the counter under Mom’s feet, holding his throat and gasping, arms outstretched. “Ma...” he wheezes. “Ma...I’m gonna...die alone...a bachelor.”

  She kicks him hard in his bony ass. “It’s a big joke, isn’t it? Hardy har har, your old mom is so stupid, isn’t she? I’ll tell you both what’s going to happen.” She waves the knife around and Tommy yelps. “All the good girls, all the nice ones, are gonna get themselves married. To smart boys. And you idiots will be left with the village bicycles still riding around the bars. How do you like that?”

  “I love a good bike ride,” Tommy says, and Mom pokes the knife dangerously close to his chest. “Ah! Woman, you’re scaring me. I promise you, I swear--” He lays a hand over his heart. “I swear I will be married by twenty seven.” Mom narrows her eyes and fury radiates off of her. “Twenty five!” Tommy amends.

  She sighs and chops away at the remaining vegetables with all the gusto of a butcher working on a tough old carcass. “Maybe I’m old fashioned? I don’t know. I just think this whole waiting to start a family thing is nuts. No one can afford to live on their own anymore. Trust me, if you think you’re gonna wait til you have it all figured out, you really will die alone.” She swats Tommy’s hand with a wooden spoon when he makes a grab for her other tomato.

  “We’re still young, Ma,” I reason.

  Correction: I attempt to reason.

  And should have kept my damn mouth shut.

  “You are today. Close your eyes and blink, son. You’ll have gray hairs, a pot belly, and a load of debt. It goes like that.” She holds a hand up and snaps her fingers, her blood-red nails shiny in the light. “You wanna end up like Uncle Pat?”

  “He was married,” Tommy points out, jumping up on the counter, just close enough to the cutting board that Mom has to shove him over. He grins like a fool.

  “To the village bicycle! He picked her up after a few kegs too many. See my point?” She puts a hand on her hip.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Tommy salutes and nabs a handful of olives. “I will pick up a mail order bride catalog today! I’ll pay extra to get my wife shipped overnight.”

  “You’re an asshole, Tommy. You know that?” Mom says, chuckling despite herself. “Here’s an idea. Why didn’t you scoop Jenny up before she got herself engaged? She showed me her rock after mass, and that McCarthy boy must be doing well for himself. Could have been a ring you bought on her finger, Tommy.”

  Tommy tosses the olives back in the bowl and slides off the counter, his scowl fierce. “I gotta check some shit out back.” He stalks out and slams the door hard enough to shake the frame.

  “What the hell crawled up his ass?” Mom asks.

  I don’t care if telling my mother makes me a traitor: she’d weasel the story out of someone else, then give me hell when she found out I already knew.

  “Tommy and Jen had something going on, I guess? They were just...casual.” I watch Mom frown because she knows full well I mean they were just fuck buddies, even if I’m not about to utter those words in front of her. “Anyway, she stopped calling, and he didn’t think too much about it. When he found out she was engaged, he went to her house and went apeshit in her front yard. Punched Troy in the face.”

  Mom stops her manic chopping and grips the counter, her head hanging down. “Holy Mother of God, what did I ever do to deserve such stupid boys?” she implores her Virgin Mother statue, the tiny ceramic one who’s guarded the sink ever since I was a kid.

  There’s a Holy Mother in every room of my house, one in the front and backyard, and one in the glove compartment of every vehicle we’ve ever owned. Mom doesn’t like to take chances that the Virgin Mary might miss out on one of her prayers to help heal us of our rampant stupidity.

  “He was so drunk, the punch hardly landed.”

  It sounded more comforting in my head.

  “Did he drive drunk?” She shrieks like a harpy, that damn knife still clutched in her fist.

  “How the hell would I know, Ma? I wasn’t there.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “He’s supposed to be an adult, you know. I’m not his keeper.”

  “He needs a keeper,” Mom bites out. “He needs a wife. Why didn’t he scoop Jenny up?” She takes the kind of long, shuddery breath that usually means she’s about to weep.

  Shit.

  “I think Tommy always assumed Jen would be there waiting. Forever.” I try to keep my voice gentle for her benefit, but this whole family drives me fucking batshit crazy.

  “That’s my point.” Ma bangs the knife handle on the counter and focuses her crazy eyes my way. “That’s exactly my point! A pretty, smart, sweet girl like Jen with a degree and a good job? A girl who goes to mass every Sunday and has good birthing hips? Mark my words, she’ll get knocked up on her honeymoon. That kind of girl doesn’t wait for a guy, because she has choices. She has choices.” She pushes her bangs out of her eyes. “You boys will be left in the dust.”

  She looks so damn sad. Heartbroken over how dumb my brother and I are, and--the fact is--we are. Dumb as shit, stubborn and stupid and I know we worry her to death. So I say what I say mostly to calm her down. Also to give her hope. And maybe, possibly, because I’m in as much denial about Hattie as Tommy ever was about Jen.

  Instead of thinking she’ll always be around, making sheep eyes at me, I think she might bend her rules if she meets the right guy. And I feed the delusion that I might be that right guy.

  “I actually was going to ask you--” I’m going to punk out, be reasonable, stop while I’m ahead. Then my mother looks at me, her eyes red-rimmed with tears that are drippy on her lashes. And I just let it out. “I was going to ask if I could invite my girl, Hattie, over sometime.”

  My mom’s penciled in eyebrows shoot high up on her forehead. “You have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes.” Not exactly.

  “And you wanted to ask if you could bring her here?” My mom forms the words slowly, like she’s repeating a sentence in a foreign language.

  “Yes.” Worst idea ever.

  She comes at me fast, and I’m sure I’m about to get beat around my head with a wooden spoon.

  She hugs me instead. Hard.

  “You invite her over right now,” she demands into my shirt. She turns to the windowsill and rubs a loving finger over Mary’s mantle. “I’ll be saying a Novena this month, that’s for sure.”

  I immediately regret my white lie. Mom’s humming some hymn, and I realize that she’s not just going to pray a thousand times, rosary beads in hand, at St. Monica’s. She’s going to tell the priest, the sisters from the attached convent, the biddies who spread gossip like crazy wildfire, and soon they’ll all be asking where my “fiancée” is. Because Mom is also a notorious exaggerator. I guess that’s where I get it.

  I hear Tommy’s skateboard wheels hitting the pavement off the rickety ramp we built when we were still in high school. Asshole. It’s like he wants to break his neck. What kind of adult man takes all his problems out on a homemade half-pipe?

  Then again, what kind of guy lies to his mother in front of the Virgin Mary?

  “Call her,” my mother says when she sees me standing like a shell-shocked lemming. “Call her and have her over. I had a feeling today was going to be good.”

  It’s like she forgot she’d been on the cusp of a full-on breakdown a minute before.

  I leave the kitchen, my mom’s hums now yodels of happiness and stare at my phone. Hattie clearly wanted me to call for a hookup tonight.

  The chances of her being down for a wholesome family dinner are slim to none.

  I decide to try anyway.

  The phone rings three times before she picks up, her ‘hello’ calm and unrushed.

  I’m all over the fucking place. “Hey. Hattie? Listen...you can say no. Shit, I know you’ll say no if you want to anyway, so I have no idea why I just said that. Anyway, I’m not making sense. My mom is having my brother and sister and m
e over for dinner--”

  Her sigh interrupts my ramble.

  “Ryan.” She takes a deep breath. “Dinner with you mother? C’mon. We have rules! We established them for a reason. This is supposed to be fun. I’m very charming. To mothers. I don’t mind breaking your heart, but what about hers?”

  I can hear that she’s smiling when she says the words, and that gives me some hope.

  “C’mon. You’re going about the whole fling thing too literally. My mom is cool,” I lie. “She’s not going to think just because you came over to eat, we’re on our way down the aisle,” I lie harder. “It’s just dinner. I want to see you tonight, but I’ll get stuck here. Come jack me out of familial prison.”

  I listen as she draws a long breath in.

  “Okaaay,” she finally says. “Ugh. You laugh, but my rules work! They’ve kept my heart very safe, I’ll have you know. I don’t have any tragic break-up story in my past, and I didn’t have to spiral into months of debauchery like some people I know. See how nice rules make things? For the record, I think this is a really bad idea, Ryan.”

  She has no clue just how bad an idea it is, but I happen to hate rules. And really like her. I’m not about to play it safe where she’s concerned.

  “Stop being such a wuss, Beckett,” I taunt. “Or are you afraid that you might fall in love with me over this one dinner, and then your heart will be broken when this fling is over?”

  She snorts. “Text me your mother’s address. I’ll be there as soon as I can. And be prepared for some no-strings-attached action after. Remember, I’m doing you a favor.”

  The phone clicks off before I can snap an answer back, so I just text her the address.

  Then I go into the kitchen, instruct my mother not to mention marriage or I’ll never bring Hattie around again, and crack open a Harp. I take a long sip and make the trek to my old room.

  I moved out years ago, but Ma left it exactly the way it was, all dark plaid wallpaper and a twin bed with navy sheets. I take a little safe off the shelf that holds my baseball trophies and old, buckling pictures of me and friends I used to be tight with but hardly see anymore.