Everything's Better With Kimberly

by Lucy Eden

  I nodded and sniffled.

  “So, are you asking me because we’re both White?” He walked into the living room carrying two bowls. The bowl he handed me had two scoops of vanilla ice cream with fresh strawberries and he dug his spoon in a bowl filled with vanilla ice cream sprinkled with Fruity Pebbles cereal. My parents adopted Cole when he was twelve but I couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t my brother.

  “No, dummy. I’m asking because you’re both guys.” I smacked him in the head with one of the square pillows from his couch and he laughed. “What would you do if you were Adam? Would you forgive me?”

  “Well, you’re a giant pain in the ass. You have the worst taste in movies. You use big words for no reason—that’s really infuriating— and you eat all the corn at Thanksgiving…”

  I cut my eyes at him and he laughed again.

  “You’re also really fucking smart. You’re hilarious and you’d give a stranger the shirt off your back. You’re also a total bad ass and a criminal mastermind.”

  I gave him a watery chuckle. When we were kids, I helped Cole run away his biological family and —unintentionally— broke a couple of laws doing it.

  “You would do — and have done— anything for the few people you let get to know you so, yes. Adam would be stupid not to forgive you.”

  “But you didn’t hear him. He was so angry.” My eyes were stinging again. A few tears fell into my ice cream.

  “You ignored his messages, falsely accused him of ruining your career with no evidentiary support, talked shit about his mom, threw him out of your house in the middle of winter, and then ghosted him.”

  “When you say it all together like that, it does sounds really bad.” One side of my mouth curled into a half smile. He laughed.

  “He’s obviously gonna get over it. You just gotta give him some time.”

  “How do you know?” I took my first bite of ice cream. Damn, it was good. Why did ice cream always taste better when you were sad?

  “Because, he delivered that contract when he could have just had it messengered it to your office.”

  “He lives eight blocks away.”

  He made the face Dad always makes when something is so obvious but you’re too stupid to see it. “He would have delivered those papers to West Bubblefuck. He really wanted to see you.”

  I thought about our kiss on the sidewalk. It was worth every other awful thing that happened today. It felt like home and heaven. I wondered if we’d still be kissing if I hadn’t dropped the contract, reminding him that the only reason we were kissing was because Vittoria had forced me to call him. Would we be making love in my bedroom or we would we just have attacked each other in my entryway?

  “Do you think I overreacted about house and the gold digger thing?”

  “You always overreact to everything, so yes.” He elbowed me.

  “But doesn’t that mean he doesn’t trust me?”

  “No. Adam sounds like a dude who thinks out loud that fell in love with someone who workshops every sentence before she says it. And let’s face it, Stringbean, you are very high maintenance.”

  “I am not high maintenance.” I smoothed the napkin on my lap. This was a Catherine Malandrino skirt. Cole tilted his head and raised his eyebrows.

  “But you are totally worth the effort and are the furthest thing from a gold digger. I’m sure Adam knows that. I’m also sure that you know Adam knows that.”

  “Do you think he’ll forgive me for all the stuff I said about his mom?”

  He nodded. “But never, ever saying anything bad about a man’s mother. Just don’t do it.”

  “Even if it’s true?”

  “Especially, if it’s true. Do you know how many fights I got into at school whenever anyone would say something fucked up, but totally accurate, about Crystal? She’s not perfect, but she still gave birth to me and she tries her best.” Cole doesn’t talk about his birth mother often, but he always calls her by her first name and calls our mother, Mom.

  “I feel like such an idiot. Why didn’t I just pick up the phone?” I started to tear up again, and he put his arm around me and pulled me into his chest where I sobbed.

  “You were scared and after what you went through, no one would blame you. But you have to move on eventually. Adam seems like a good guy. It’ll work out. Just give it a chance and don’t be too hard on yourself.”

  “You’re going to make a really good judge someday.”

  “I know, right?”

  It was 2:47 when I looked at my watch for the second time. I got up, grabbed my discarded clothes and put them in the hamper before climbing back into bed and pulling out my phone. After opening and rereading Adam’s messages, I quickly sent him a hammer emoji before I could change my mind. Waiting, considering and reconsidering hadn’t done me any favors this past three weeks. He needed to know he was needed. I needed him.

  twenty eight

  Adam

  Tonight should have been my first full night of sleep since I knew I didn’t have to worry about Kimberly calling or texting me if she woke up. Instead, I was up at 3:27 staring at the ceiling.

  The call I’ve been waiting for everyday for three weeks finally came earlier today. I could still hear the excitement in Eric’s voice. For the past two weeks I’d been taking myself apart, dusting off the pieces and putting myself back together in the hopes that when she did call I would be ready.

  But Kimberly had moved on. Even after she found out the truth, she didn’t even bother to call me. She used it as an excuse to end things. I was ready to give up the biggest opportunity of my career for someone who didn’t even want me.

  But what about that kiss?

  Her kiss said something entirely different. And those tears. I fucking hated seeing her upset, but I was upset, too. Was she crying because she meant all of that shit she said or did she just feel sorry for me?

  My phone was on my nightstand and because I clearly liked to punish myself I opened it to see that Kimberly had sent me a message. I couldn’t stop myself from opening the text app and saw that she sent me a hammer emoji.

  “I’ll call you if I need someone to come charging into my kitchen waving a hammer.”

  She needed me.

  I sat up. Then I laid back down. After everything she did was I just supposed to just go running over there because she wanted me to?

  Yup.

  I got out of bed and started to get dressed. What if she didn’t want me to come over? What if she just wanted to let me know she was thinking about me and I showed up at her door in the middle of the night all whipped and thirsty?

  Who was I kidding?

  I was whipped and thirsty.

  Still, I pulled out my phone and decided to reply to her text just to make sure. I pressed the princess emoji, I held it down until all the options popped up and sent the one that looked the most like my princess. I waited for a reply. Fifteen minutes passed and my heart sank. I checked the time stamp. She had sent her message over forty-five minutes ago. She was probably asleep, not answering or maybe she hadn’t seen it.

  I decided to go for a walk since I was already up and dressed. If Kimberly replied to my message and I happened to be close to her house that would be purely by coincidence.

  Twenty minutes later, I was sitting on Kimberly’s stoop. She still hadn’t responded and I wasn’t going to ring her bell. I was just about to leave when a yellow cab pulled up in front of her house and a guy got out. He immediately turned his attention to me and for a second he looked like he wanted to kick my ass before his expression softened to one of recognition. He was tall, with short dark hair.

  “Hey!” he called to me and wherever he’d come from he looked like he’d had a good time. “Adam, right?” I nodded.

  “Are you Cole?”

  He grinned. “No, I’m Kimberly’s other White brother.” He laughed at his joke, a little too hard, before pointing at the house behind me. “You and Kimmy get back together?”

  I l
ooked down and shook my head.

  “So you’re just sitting on her stoop at…” He stared at his watch for a full ten seconds and swayed on his feet a little before pulling out his phone to check the time, “four in the morning?”

  That was exactly what I was doing, but I didn’t have an explanation that didn’t sound crazy, so I said nothing. Cole just smiled.

  “Come on.” He jerked his head at the brownstone next to Kimberly’s. “You drink beer?”

  I hadn’t had a drink in almost a month, but I used to drink beer. I nodded.

  “You play Madden?”

  “Not in a while.”

  “Good, because I’m a little drunk so when I kick your ass, it’ll be fair.”

  Cole showed me into his living room before heading to the kitchen. He had picture frames everywhere. I walked around carefully examining every photo. There were photos of Cole with two people who had to be Kimberly’s parents. She looked exactly like her Mom, which gave me warm, selfish feeling knowing that she would always be beautiful. There was a younger kid that looked like Kimberly, who must have been their little brother RJ. There were also photos of a short woman with waist length dark hair and the same blue eyes as Cole taken with him at various ages who must have been his birth mother. Some of them, when Cole was older, looked like they’d been taken at a prison.

  It felt like I was being invasive, but I couldn’t help but focus on the photos of Cole and Kimberly at various ages. There was a Halloween picture of them dressed as Hermione Granger and Harry Potter with RJ dressed as an owl. They must have been seven or eight, which would have made RJ three or four. In another picture Kimberly and Cole were hugging with their cheeks pressed together and they looked about three years old. When Cole returned, I was staring at a family photo that was taken at a beach with Cole sitting on their dad’s shoulders. Kimberly and her mom were wearing matching bathing suits, but her mom was sporting a huge baby bump. It made me miss her so much.

  “Here you go.” He handed me a glass half filled with dark liquor. He was also holding a small bottle of ibuprofen and large glass of water.

  “What’s this?” I sniffed it. It smelled like brandy.

  “Hennessy.” He stared at me for a second. “Oh shit, you wanted a beer. Sorry, man. The kitchen’s back that way.” He jerked a thumb behind himself and sank deeper into the couch. I went to the kitchen grabbed a bottle of water and returned to the living room seating myself in large leather recliner next to the couch.

  “So what was Kimberly like as a kid?” I asked.

  Cole laughed and sipped the Hennessy he poured for me. “Besides being born an old lady?” he said. I smiled. “She was great, man. Bossy though. She would always plan our activities on family vacations, like weeks in advance. But she also always introduced me as her brother and always made sure I never felt left out of anything. She even saved my life once.”

  I leaned forward and raised my eyebrows.

  “I should back up. So, you’re probably wondered how I got adopted by the Simmons?”

  I did but I felt it would be rude to ask. I also got the feeling this wasn’t a story he would be telling me if he was sober.

  “I’m gonna make this as short as possible, because I’m getting tired, but my birth mom, Crystal, was from the Midwest, got pregnant at eighteen, took a bus to New York, and was greeted at Port Authority by one of those douchebags that wait for teenage runaways to get off buses from the Midwest. She ended up with him in Jackson Heights, Queens, had me and did whatever she had to do to feed us.” He leaned forward and stared into his glass. “Two years later she got arrested—not the first time— but this time, her public defender was Reginald Simmons. He and his wife had a kid my age, and they kind of looked after me and Crystal. Whenever Crystal would take a vacation—” He made air quotes the same way Kimberly did. “That’s what they called it when she got locked up, because they thought I was too young to understand—I would stay with them. Dad even kept representing her pro-bono after he left the public defender’s office. Her vacations kept getting longer so the Simmons had to become my foster parents. Then, when I was eight, it looked like Crystal was going on a vacation so long that she would pretty much miss the rest of my childhood.”

  He got quiet for a really long time. I was wondering if I should say something or leave.

  “So, I asked the Simmons to adopt me. They had pretty much raised me anyway. They threw me birthday parties every year, paid for my private school tuition, took me trick or treating every Halloween…The state was fine with them being my foster parents, but when they wanted to adopt me, a wealthy lawyer from a white-shoe law firm and his psychiatrist wife suddenly weren’t a ‘good fit.’ So, they kept placing me with other families and I would just run away and come home. After a year of that, they dug up some of my mom’s relatives in Missouri and sent me to live there, even after Crystal wrote a letter to the judge telling them why it was a bad idea.” He got quiet again.

  “So, what happened?” My curiosity overruled my politeness at this point.

  “Kimmy saved my life.” He smiled, took two of the ibuprofen and chased it with the rest of the Hennessy. “She mapped out the bus route from Branson to Port Authority, used Dad’s credit card to buy the tickets, then she mailed them to me with a pre-paid cell phone and two hundred bucks that she’d saved from her allowance.”

  I chuckled to myself. That was such a Kimberly thing to do. I thought about the blackout in Barbados. “How old were you guys?”

  “Ten.”

  Holy shit. That was impressive but not surprising. “Wait, how did a ten year old kid ride a bus from Missouri to New York without getting caught?”

  “Most people didn’t pay attention. If someone asked, I just said my mom was in the bathroom and they left me alone.”

  “So what happened when you got back to New York?”

  “I came home and lived in Kimmy’s closet for a week until we got caught.”

  “A week?”

  “Yeah, my piece of shit relatives in Missouri never reported me missing— they probably didn’t notice I was gone— and the cleaning staff were never allowed inside our bedrooms, so it was the perfect plan.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Fruity Pebbles. I was the only one that ever liked them. Mom always kept a box in the pantry and she noticed that someone had been eating them. Kimmy tried to say it was her, but Mom was too smart for that. Oh, my god, she was so mad at us.” He laughed. “We might still be on punishment. I still don’t know what the big deal was. I had a knife. So anyway, two years and bunch of lawsuits later, I became a Simmons.”

  That was a crazy fucking story. Cole starting sipping his water and leaned back on the couch.

  “Ten years old…” I shook my head.

  “Yep.” Cole agreed. “So what’s your story? Why are you so into my sister?”

  “What’s not to love?” I started and gave Cole a very sanitized version of our week together. He listened wearing a half smile and when I finished, he nodded.

  “You actually tried winning an argument with my sister?” he laughed.

  “Rookie mistake.” I grinned.

  “She’s just like our mom. They’re like the Hulk, except the angrier they get, the more articulate they get. Once, Mom called my social worker a self-aggrandizing troglodyte. She could have just told her that she was full of herself and her views about who can raise children were backwards, but then she wouldn’t be Beverly Simmons. Another time, I smashed a trophy case at my high school. When my principal misused the word decimate, my mom argued the she and Dad only had to pay for ten percent of the damage and that an educator should know better.”

  I laughed. It reminded me of every argument I’d ever had with Kimberly, except the last one.

  “Do you love her?” he asked, his face serious. I nodded. “I mean, do you really love her?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “More than I’ve ever loved anyone or anything else.”

  “And you know
about her anxiety disorder?”

  “It makes me love her even more.”

  “Good.” He nodded and stood. “You need to go. I’m starting to like you and that would make it awkward if I had to kick your ass for hurting my sister.”

  “Is that what happened to the last guy?”

  His face split into a sly grin. “She told you about that?” He started rubbing his chin. “That guy was an asshole. Have you ever talked to someone for five seconds and wanted to punch them in the face as hard as you can?”

  I nodded and instantly thought of my father.

  “That was him. He always had to be the smartest person in the room, but he wasn’t. He used to interrupt Kimmy all the time, answer questions for her and talk over her. He had no sense of humor. He called my dad, Judge Simmons but he called my mom, Mother Simmons, even though she’s a doctor and not eighty-seven years old. I once dated a girl who hid shrimp in the pockets of all my suits when we broke up, but watching my sister date that dick for four months was the worst relationship I’d ever experienced. For a while we were afraid she’d actually marry that dude.”

  I bristled at the idea of Kimberly married to someone else.

  “She said you all liked him.”

  He grimaced and shook his head. “We love her and she liked him, so we tolerated his ass. We thought he made her happy, so we trusted her judgment. Not everyone I brought home was a winner. He was her first boyfriend so we just kept waiting for her to come to her senses.” He shrugged. “But if I had any idea that he was capable of the shit he pulled…” His face darkened and he shook his head. “Who fucking does that? A stranger called 911. Anything could’ve happened to her and he didn’t even stick around to make sure she got into an ambulance. He’s fucking lucky I was at school…” His face was still dark and he was staring at something but possibly nothing.

  “So you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him?”