“When?”
“Before I texted you.”
“And?”
“He’s funny. I always liked him.”
I sigh. “He always liked you. Mom too. I never really understood it. You had a reputation as a bad boy and then … ” I trail off. I’m trying to make a point, not accuse him.
“What? They still like me? Even after I … even now?”
“Maybe they do it to infuriate me.”
“It’s because I get your dad. He’s stodgy and accidentally racist, but he thinks he’s cool. He likes anyone willing to acknowledge his inner Fonz.”
“I always knew you were trouble, Grady Dade. I saw it in my parents’ affection. Parents aren’t supposed to like their girls’ boyfriends. Maybe that’s why we broke up.”
He looks at me with playful eyes, but the expression doesn’t last. We both know why we broke up, if that’s even what we did. We’re both trying hard not to touch those old wounds — not yet, anyway — but they surround us like land mines. We can tread lightly, but we’ll eventually trip some no matter what.
There’s an odd few seconds of uncertain movements, eyes flicking various places as smiles flatline on our faces. I can practically hear all the things he’s not saying, and I’m sure he can hear everything I’m keeping inside. The air is thick with unspoken conversation, arguments that could potentially erupt. But we’re both trying to hold back the floodwaters a little longer, and so the moment passes with effort.
Grady reaches out. He takes my hand. I’m at least 50 percent sure I should extricate myself — not with anger or malice, but just because it’s not right, even if only for Mackenzie’s sake — but I don’t. I let the hand stay where it is as all the strange emotions and impulses of the past few days churn inside me like a witch’s brew.
There is sadness.
There is bittersweet.
There is joy, or imagined joy.
There is disappointment, anger, and hurt.
There is indignation and fury.
There is the memory of love.
And there is lust. Pure, unattached, meaningless lust. If not for Grady, then for someone, something, somewhere, to release the pressure.
When Mackenzie starts to turn, I finally reclaim my hand. I do it with a kind glance so Grady doesn’t feel rejected, even though everyone in my life would agree he deserves it. But my daughter comes first, and I won’t confuse her because of something my heart — or any other part of me — seems to want. I’ve put myself ahead of her too often. I won’t make this harder than it needs to be, or give either of us false hope … of a thing I’m not even sure I’d wish for if I knew it would come true.
Oh, God, this is hard. It’s so, so hard.
We don’t go for the stupid paddleboats right away. We walk first. Dalton Park is stunning — a much better park than a little dip in the highway like Inferno Falls deserves — so we circle the lake with its beautiful railings in all the right places, its aromatic and immaculate landscaping, its many nooks and crannies as the path dives toward the water and away. There are hundreds of people here, but because the park sprawls with many walkways, we never feel crowded. We’re three people going about our casual business.
This park wasn’t here when Grady left. Or rather it was, but it wasn’t nearly as nice. It was a smallish lake surrounded by a rough path. We went to Reed Creek when we wanted to be alone with nature. It’s where I still go today when I have mornings to myself. Where I go to think.
About us, more often than I’d care to admit.
Grady falls into a natural rhythm with Mackenzie as we walk. Maybe he’s doing it to make nice and impress me, but it’s damn convincing for a sham. He stays at a suitably platonic distance from me, not knowing how much I want him by my side. Mac is surprisingly silent — she’s never been especially quiet. She’s always had a thousand questions, and I’ve done my best to answer whatever I could.
She finds her voice and asks me if I know the names of all the flowers. I don’t know, so she asks Grady, as if he’s an old friend she’s known all her life. The unabashed way she faces him with her questions reminds me of the need to renew Stranger Danger lessons — but really, she’s not this friendly and open with every adult. It must be something about Grady she’s drawn to, as if she senses a connection.
Grady surprises me by knowing a few of the flower names: anemones, lavender, and yarrow. He looks back at me after rattling off scabiosa as if it were as common as rose or daisy, and I feel myself react to his cocksure, handsome look. The look that first made me melt for him. The look that got me in so much trouble.
I don’t have to ask how he knows what he knows because Mackenzie does. Grady tells her that when you travel as much as he has, you run across interesting people and learn interesting things.
That lights something inside me, stoking my old urges to get out into the world — urges doused with cold water the day I learned I was pregnant. With a few unremarkable exceptions, I haven’t left this town my entire life, but it’s all I wanted to do when we were kids, for all the reasons Grady is giving Mackenzie now.
She’s as curious as I am, instantly familiar, instantly his best friend.
Who did you meet, Grady?
Where did you go, Grady?
Did you really go to all fifty states? And then, when he corrects her that it was only the lower forty-eight, she peppers him for details. Which was your favorite? How long did that take you? Did you see the Grand Canyon? How about Mexico and Canada? Do you have a passport? Can I see it?
Grady answers her with patience that makes me feel like a bad mother. Mac’s questions often exhaust me. I sometimes snap when I’m tired, telling her that not everything is something she needs to know, particularly if it’s about my life, or that we’ll talk about it later. But not Grady, not now. It’s like he’s been dying for someone to show interest in his travels. Like she’s his biographer and he’s finally able to unload his long list of experiences — a list that makes my own blighted list feel millimeters by comparison.
1. I was born.
2. I had a kid.
3. I went to work.
4. Some day, I will die.
It’s not fair that he’s done all that he has. It’s incredibly unfair that I’m hearing some of the things we talked about on cloudless nights, on our backs in the clearing just down from the creek, staring up at the stars. Grady says he rode the badlands on horseback. He hiked part of the Appalachian Trail. He’s wintered in Maine, something that reading endless Stephen King novels made sound like a necessary pilgrimage. But those are all things we were going to do. He and I, together.
Resentment resurges, and with it a thousand other emotions. I can’t control the miasma in my head, and as I’m left a few steps back, odd woman out in our threesome, images return of all that’s been bothering me. All that’s wrong, because I had to stay and he got to leave.
My job.
My parents, who I love … but who I never wanted to live near enough to resent.
My stupid boss.
Roxanne, who makes every day difficult.
The way I’m broken inside, and the things I’ve done because of it — all of which I resent while walking in sunshine and fragrant air.
This place. This town, which I love like my parents … but which has also felt like a prison. Worse: a prison with an open door, where I’m too scared to flee, given all I’m dragging behind.
As I walk with Grady and my daughter, life feels perfect.
But because I know it’s fleeting, it hurts my heart and makes me want to run. Like he did.
We do the paddleboat. By the time we step into it, a heavy funk has settled on my chest, and I can no longer precisely say why. Everything we do is ideal. It’s what the three of us should have been doing all along, every weekend from a fairytale start. There’s a backseat that Mackenzie can sit in while we paddle, and for long minutes at a time it feels like just me and Grady, side by side like the teenage lovers we were. I d
on’t like it. I want it to end. I want it to go on forever, if the bubble would never burst.
By the time it’s all over, we stand like three people at the end of a furlough. We all know the perfect, fake-reality day has concluded, so no one wants to leave. I don’t want to return to my life of Ed and customers and responsibility. Mackenzie, though she can’t know what’s in my head, doesn’t want to return to what will obviously now be a fatherless existence, though it’s always been “our normal.” And Grady, if I had to guess, doesn’t want to return to himself. Because he’s been wearing a mask today, and I’d be foolish to believe it’s simply how he is now. Grady knows it. He can pretend to be this man for a few hours, but in the end he’s still Grady. He still ran. And he’ll still run today, no matter whether part of him likes what he’s seen, and wants to stay.
There’s still much to be said, but I can’t make myself say it now. I can’t ruin this. We all know what today was, on some level, but I won’t be the one to shatter our illusion.
Mackenzie breaks our parking lot standoff.
“Grady?”
He looks down.
“Can you come over for dinner on Sunday?”
It’s a hideous, childlike, naive request. Prolonging this farce is a horrible idea regardless, but given that we eat Sunday dinner with my parents, Mac asking Grady to join us is on par with two kids promising each other they’ll get married at age twelve.
Grady looks at me. He told me today that he’s mostly finished with Ernie’s house and could conduct the rest from anywhere, so I’m sure he’ll be gone soon. He’s smart enough to decline. He’s not cruel enough to accept.
“Only if your mother says I can.”
Mackenzie smiles up at me, her grin all uneven teeth that haven’t fully come in. But when I look at Grady, I realize that his grin is — minus the uneven teeth — almost exactly the same.
“Of course,” I say.
CHAPTER 21
Grady
I meet with the auctioneer on Friday. I have plenty of questions, but he talks as fast in his dealings with me as I imagine he’ll talk from the middle of Ernie’s living room.
Yes, I can give the company a key and let them handle it all.
Yes, they can sell off the remaining furnishings.
Whatever doesn’t sell, they’ll donate or throw away. The haul-off fee is included in their auction percentage.
They’ll get the place cleaned up.
They’ll take care of everything. If I’ll just leave direct deposit information, the money can plop into my bank account, with the paperwork sent by FedEx wherever I want when it’s done.
In short, I can brush my hands off right here, right now, today. I can hand Paul from HomeSellers my key then get in my pickup and go.
But instead of handing it over, I keep the key. I tell Paul to let me know when they want to do the auction, and we can go from there.
With Ernie’s stuff mostly gone, the house feels both more welcoming (because Ernie has finally left the building) and overly sparse. It’s like a hotel room that nobody bothered to fully outfit. There are cupboards with nothing inside. There’s an empty fridge. The closets are all for show. I didn’t want to move in more than I needed to, and it didn’t occur to me to keep a single fork and plate. If not for the money and responsibility, I’d burn this place to the ground. I’m torn somewhere in the middle, wanting to obey my id while handling things properly, like Dad would have wanted.
But I won’t sleep in Ernie’s bed, or my old one. I won’t eat from his stores, or off of his dishes. I sleep on the couch like a tramp, and let the walls offer nothing more than shelter. I use Ernie’s electricity to watch TV and read, and his shower to get clean. But for the most part, this place could be a cave sheltering me from the weather.
As uncomfortable as being here is, I honestly don’t know why I’m staying. Paul promised me that the auction could happen fast; they’d started putting up signs and advertising on that first day, when I called after hearing from my uncle’s lawyer. He could call me tomorrow; he could call me the next day or the one after that. When that happens, I’ll either need to leave or get a room at the inn. And I’m not really a bed and breakfast sort of guy.
I should go.
But I don’t.
Instead, I lie on the couch as Friday night closes, staring at the pocked ceiling. Brandon and Joe both asked me to go out, but the memory of my near encounter with Tommy Finch is still too fresh in my mind. Some of what I said came from drink, but the beer had only rattled loose the things I’ve wanted to say and do for a very long time.
Oh, the number of times I’ve imagined punching Tommy’s perfect face. The times I’ve imagined all I want to say, and find a way to make him pay. I’m aware of how senselessly macho it is, me wanting to hurt Tommy as if that would make anything better. It wouldn’t change either present or past, but I don’t trust myself enough, by accepting Brandon and Joe’s invite, to find out. Old Town Inferno Falls isn’t big, and if we run into Tommy again, I’m afraid of what might happen.
I use my new, unpopulated LiveLyfe account to snoop on one Thomas Finch. He’s not much better of a user than I am, but even thorough his skeletal information I can tell that he’s landed a much better job than anything I’ve ever had (it’s listed in his profile) and that he’s single because there’s no wife indicated and no two photos of Tommy with the same woman.
According to what I see, nothing has changed since high school. He still looks like a football player in his prime. I thought about Tommy a lot on my drive back here, and was hoping he’d have ruined himself. Bright flames are supposed to burn down to wax, but the lucky star that Tommy Fucking Perfect Boy Finch was born under apparently hasn’t gone supernova just yet. He’s successful. He seems, based on his interactions, to be well liked, as if the poor souls around him can’t see through the skin of a slippery snake. He’s still crass and rude and a pathetic womanizer; that much is clear in a ten-second glance. But everyone’s still falling for it, just like they did back then when Tommy merely flashed his smile to turn the girls to putty. It even worked on the school faculty. The things they came down on me for, Tommy grinned his way through.
Back then, even Maya thought Tommy was hot.
I hated that so much. Even after we were together, she used to joke with me about it because she thought it was funny. And worse, she thought he was funny. Tommy was always big, always strong, and always popular, and it gave him an obnoxious confidence — along with a general obliviousness about what it was to be less than a golden boy. He was an ass to misfits (some were my friends), but Maya always defended him. He’s just screwing around when he makes fun of them, Grady. She’d say it patronizingly, like I was too stupid to understand. But because Tommy never mocked her, she never got how wrong it was. How it could only come from an arrogance so thick as to be irretrievable.
I used to bait her about him. Doing so made me feel pathetic, like a girl begging for a compliment. I should have had more dignity than to force her to compare me to Tommy, given that she’d made her choice and was with me, not him. Maya seemed to see right through the thinnest part of my self-esteem — my Tommy-related weakness, say — and rubbed my face in it because she, like Tommy, thought it was hilarious.
Look at those arms, Grady. How can I not be turned on by those arms?
And I’d say, What about my arms?
Oh, he just makes me so hot, Grady.
And I’d say, Don’t I make you hot?
But she never gave in. Because she thought I was being an asshole, digging for validation. If she wanted Tommy, she’d be with him. But she was with me, so my arms and hotness were, apparently, victorious.
But even while with me, Maya liked Tommy. How could she not? He was well over six feet tall, broad as a truck, without an ounce of fat on his body. He had a chin like a god and a way of moving and speaking that made girls practically beg to wash his anointed feet. And hell, he’s still like that today.
The only
thing stopping Maya from being with Tommy, I always felt sure, was that he didn’t feel like bothering with her. She was with me as a runner-up. Perfect Tommy would have been her first choice, the moment his predatory radar found her.
We broke up for a while, and she proved it. That broke my heart. It came out as anger because I’ve never been good with emotion, but it was only hurt.
I put my laptop away. I lie back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. I’m restless and, after my day with Maya, unable to sleep. Things never used to be like this. I spent the last third of my life moving from place to place, and there was only the thrill of exploration, occasionally the panic that comes with a life on the edge. There was never this kind of gutting conflict. Never this rehashing of old wounds I’d thought were long healed.
I should go. Maya won’t try to hold me here. I could read her the same as I’ve always been able to. She was thinking the same things as me, but we both knew to keep our mouths shut. We both know that the old bodies are buried, and that digging up one will unearth them all.
What’s done is done. She won’t ask me to stay. We can return to our old lives and pretend this stupid homecoming errand with its ill-advised reunions never happened. She survived fine without me, even if I should have been there. And I survived without them, on my own, worrying only about myself.
With the auction underway, there’s no reason for me to stay in Inferno Falls.
Unless I want to stay for them, and never mind the pain.
CHAPTER 22
Maya
This morning, before sending Mackenzie off to reluctant weekend daycare because Mom and Dad are busy, she asked me if I like Mr. Grady.
I wasn’t sure what to say. The ups and downs of adult emotion are confusing to kids, who see life through a simpler filter. They don’t understand the forces behind the motivations, the caveats, the need to second-guess and qualify every little thing. Rather than trying to explain, I said that I like him fine.
The Second Chance (Inferno Falls Book Three) Page 13