by Octavia Zane
That didn’t seem right to Riley, a wedding being a solo project, but he’d never been married nor anywhere close to marrying. “Did one of you get cold feet?”
“Mine were getting colder as the date approached, but I tried to ignore it.”
“Why?”
“I’d spent so much time and effort and money on putting it together.” Theo contemplated the grumpy face of his cookie before biting off the tail feathers. “I thought I just had to muscle through it, and everything would be fine. It was just stress. Normal wedding stress that everybody feels. But the closer we got on the calendar, the more I dreaded it. The thought of mailing the invitations had me in a panic.”
Leaves pattered down from another light breeze. Sweeping a red leaf off his leg, Riley said, “What was he like? Besides rich and smart and successful?”
“Quick-witted.” Theo hesitated, his haunted look increasing so much that Riley was sorry he asked. “Vaughn had a sense of humor so sharp it sliced. He could put the best debate team to shame with how well he argued. He was charming, gracious, gallant. The day a stack of my loan repayment bills arrived in the mail, he ripped them away from me and took care of them. He hated my old, junked-up car, so he bought me a new one; he hated my cheap clothes and in days I had a complete wardrobe of the finest.”
“That sounds like a fairy tale to me.”
“It was. But I didn’t see it for what it really was underneath.”
“Which was . . .”
Theo washed down his cookie with the last of his coffee and set the cup aside. “It wasn’t so funny when I was the one he was slicing to ribbons with his humor, or when he couldn’t let an argument go, and he was charming and gallant only when it suited him. He hated my car and clothes because of how they made him look. So I benefited greatly from his generosity, and I’m thankful, but it was more about him than me. It took me a long time to see who he was, and then a longer time to accept it.”
“Deep down he was a jackass,” Riley commented.
“Sometimes he was. Sometimes he wasn’t. But he was more often a jackass than he wasn’t in those last few years. I remember one Thanksgiving . . .” Theo let the unfinished sentence travel away with the breeze.
“I’ve got some bad Thanksgiving stories, too,” Riley said.
“I saw him that last Thanksgiving we were together. The real Vaughn.” Theo’s lips set in a thin, miserable line. “We always celebrated with his family. His father had passed away, but his mother was alive and so was her own mother. He had two sisters, married and with kids, and there were a few cousins in the mix, too. His oldest niece was about sixteen that year, and she said something silly at the table about politics. It was the kind of thing that you expect to hear from a teenager and not worth a response. But Vaughn went after her. Verbally. He could not let it go until she admitted she was wrong, and what teenager caves in without a fight?”
“None I’ve ever met.”
“He berated her until she broke down in tears. And then he kept going. He had to win, even though his opponent was a high school kid. Everybody just stared at their plates. She finally ran off to her room and he sat back with a smile. He was proud of himself. And I truly saw him.”
Brilliant, rich, and mean as a snake, Riley thought. “Didn’t her parents do something to stop him?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Riley would have lost his shit to have a grown man go after Gigi like that.
The memory made Theo wince. “They knew what I knew: he couldn’t be stopped once he got going. You just had to wait it out. The whole family was cowed by him, like they were once cowed by his father. I don’t know what it was about that particular instance, but it made me think about how many times I’d seen him do things like that. At parties with total strangers, while I stood there embarrassed, and at other holidays with different members of his family. And with me. I chalked it up to Vaughn having a competitive personality. But seeing him turn on a teenager, and that smug smile afterwards, made me wonder what I ever saw in him.”
“Is that what broke you up?”
“No. But it put a chill in my feet. I didn’t want to think about it but I couldn’t stop. What if we had kids? We weren’t planning on it, but what if we changed our minds? Was he going to do that with a ten-year-old? A four-year-old? He couldn’t even handle our cat.”
While this gave Riley a better idea of where Theo was coming from, it didn’t explain the morning after Halloween. “So that’s why you left? Because you had him on your mind?”
Theo looked down to his lap. “I left that morning because Vaughn is still in my head. I don’t want to go back to him. I’ve just got eight years of him shadowing me wherever I go.”
His cheeks flushed as brilliant a scarlet as the leaves falling down around them. “That sounds very melodramatic.”
“Well, it’s better than anything on the Dreyer Sheets that my ex left everywhere. ‘I am the sea and the sea is in me.’” Riley took Theo’s hand and squeezed it. “You must have been so happy to get away from him.” Riley had been happy once he was rid of Dreyer; it was like a storm cloud hovering over his head finally blew away.
But Theo didn’t answer.
“Weren’t you?” Riley pressed.
“That’s a complicated question.”
“Are you not sure then about never going back?”
A burst of emotion livened Theo’s eyes, but it was gone as quickly as it arrived. “He’s getting married to someone else.”
Riley backed off fast from his next question, sensing that one misstep might lead to an argument or a retreat. No matter what he was feeling, his dislike of the uncertainty, this was where he had to stop. He wanted them to go back to getting along far more than he wanted to dig around for a clearer answer.
“I should get back to work,” Theo said, stretching out his legs and his expression amiable again.
A cell phone buzzed. Riley pulled it out and groaned at the text. His sister had sent a picture of the bakery, where a line stretched all the way to the door. Showing it to Theo, he said, “I have to get back, too. Goddamn, where did they all come from? It was crickets when we left.”
“I’ll never hear the word cricket again without my brain automatically inserting allegiance after that,” Theo sighed. “I don’t think I need to hear what the rest of the kids were named.”
“Oh, I think you do. We’ll find out from Koala before you go.”
They got up to head back companionably, speaking of inconsequential things, the bigger questions remaining behind them on the bench.
Chapter Ten
Theo
“Give me that phone.”
“Get your own phone! He said yes!”
“He’s saying yes to be nice. Give me your phone for one lousy minute!”
Theo pulled into the garage, listening to a scuffle on the other end of the line. Parking the car, he leaned back in the seat rather than start dragging grocery bags inside. As he waited for Riley or Rivers to win the battle, he glanced up to the ceiling. The garage was set up for the weekend sportsman: straps above for multiple kayaks and wall-mounted storage racks for bicycles.
He didn’t own either of those things. His bike was left behind when he left his parents’ home and he hadn’t acquired another one; Vaughn preferred paddle-boarding to kayaking and so Theo never explored his interest in trying it out. But why not? Maybe this would be something that Riley would like to do with him.
Rivers got the phone. “Theo!” she cried, her voice coming through his ear bud.
“Hi, Rivers. How badly did you injure your brother to get his cell away from him?” Theo asked.
“He’s horrifically ticklish. I’ve been using that against him since we were three. Now, I don’t want you to say yes because my brother or my son are pressuring you to speak to the class.”
“They aren’t pressuring me. Like I told Riley, I’ve done this before. I have a little speech I give and then I have the kids draw their pets, or pets t
hey’d like to have if they don’t have any. Wrap it up with an animal sticker for each of them, answer a few questions, and that’s it.”
“I told you so,” Riley exclaimed in the background.
Theo wondered, had the adoption gone through, if he and his sister would have been like that. A friendly squabbling relationship. He envied Riley for it.
“Well, I wanted to hear it from him,” Rivers snapped at Riley before returning to Theo. “We’ll pay you in Thanksgiving pie. Do you like pumpkin pie? Or are you more of an apple man? We also do chocolate every year.”
All of them sounded amazing. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“That means you like everything. One of each then.”
“Rivers, I can’t eat three entire pies . . .” Theo said, but she was already giving the phone back to her brother.
“You’re so annoying!” Riley yelled at his sister. “Sorry, Theo.”
“So, you’re ticklish, huh?”
Riley groaned. “No,” he lied.
“I’ll remember that when I want something.”
“Hmph. Thanks for doing this, though, Jesse will be over the moon.”
“It’s my pleasure, but you’ll have to help me eat my way through three pies. She really doesn’t need to give me any.”
“It’s better just to let her do it. With Rivers it’s all about picking your battles.”
“That is not true!” Rivers yelled.
“Oh my God, leave me alone,” Riley hollered back.
“It’s my office and I need to finish these forms. Leave me alone.”
“Leave me alone, too!” Koala shouted from farther away. “Both of you!”
A door closed. Rivers’s voice was promptly replaced by the children’s voices, the two of them asking if everything was done yet in the bakery so they could go home. Theo just laughed as Riley moved from one noisy orbit to another. “Why don’t you call me back later?”
“Why don’t you come over later?” Riley suggested. “We’re just going to pick up some pizzas on the way home.”
“PIZZA! PIZZA! PIZZA!” the children cheered.
“Let me get back to you on that. I’ve got a trunk full of groceries to put away.” Theo had to pop out of bed early in the morning, too. The schedule was full of spays and he preferred to do his surgeries as soon as he got in.
“Talk to you later,” Riley said, the call cutting out on the kids still chanting about pizza.
They were such a sweet family. Loud, but sweet. Being in their company on Halloween night had been a lot more fun than Theo initially expected. They simply welcomed him in, just like they did with Sherlock.
He wrestled the bags out of the trunk and through the door. Paper handles tore, dropping one overpacked bag to the carpet as he passed down the hallway. He ferried the rest to the island in the kitchen and doubled back for the broken bag, calling, “Target?”
She didn’t come running.
Lifting the broken bag from the bottom, he returned to the kitchen. The cat usually jumped onto the island when he came home from shopping to investigate the contents of the bags, and then it was normal to have a prolonged battle with Theo putting her on the floor and Target jumping back up until the groceries were put away or she sat in a chair to watch, which was fine with him.
Today she wasn’t around. Maybe she was taking a nap somewhere in the house. He stacked up the freezer meals and stowed them in the ice box, thinking before he closed the door that he was tired of microwave dinners. While he was out looking at kayaks and bikes, he should pick up a cookbook or two as well.
The last year had been so gray. Color was rushing back to him, the world itself was rushing back, and now the prospect of a microwave meal in front of the TV for hours was what seemed gray. Rather than being a mindless comfort. This was the last week of cardboard-flavored dinners. Next week, he would make something from scratch.
“Target?” he called again once the island was cleaned off.
No response. Going to the living room, he checked her cat bed. She wasn’t snoozing there, nor was she curled up on the couch. Puzzled, he opened the hall closet to make sure she hadn’t sneaked in there in the morning while he was taking out his jacket.
He peeked behind the suitcases on the floor. No cat.
It was more likely that she sneaked into his bedroom closet while he was getting dressed. He checked in there. No cat again, so he got down to his knees to peek under the bed. Nope. He searched the other rooms of the house, calling for her worriedly. This wasn’t like her. Had she gotten out when he left in the morning? But he would have seen her!
Just then, a mighty crash came from the garage. He moaned and hurried back through the house to open the door. She flew past his feet in a streak of brown-and-black stripes.
The previous owners left a lot of tools in the garage when they moved out, taking their newer stuff and ditching the older. All of it was still in good condition, the hammer and pliers and screwdrivers and jars of nails and other things, so Theo had dusted it off and kept it for himself.
Target had wriggled out while he was bringing the groceries in. He surveyed the damage. She’d gotten on the worktable and knocked off a tray of mixed-up socket sets, screwdriver blades, hex ends, and stuff that Theo couldn’t even identify. It was spilled all over the floor.
“Target!” he said in exasperation, but this was his fault for not putting the tray somewhere less accessible when he shared a home with a very mischievous feline. Getting the broom, he swept everything up into a dustpan and dumped it back into the tray.
Target was hunkered down in her cat bed when he went inside. The crash had scared her half to death. He gave her a reassuring pat and discovered a spot of blood in her fur along the back of her neck.
She must have pulled the tray down on top of herself by trying to jump up on the counter. He disinfected the tiny puncture wound and searched for more. She let him, too freaked out to do anything more than stay absolutely still and pretend she didn’t exist. Even the sounds he made to soothe didn’t help, so he tended to her silently.
Her head poked up over the bed once he was seated on the sofa and watching television. Then she slunk over the cushions to lean against him. Theo patted her while flipping through the channels, landing on a cooking show just before it broke for commercials.
He fed Target her dinner, stuck a burrito in the microwave for himself, and stepped outside to get the mail in the meantime. It was packed full of flyers, catalogs, and junk about credit card offers. Tossing it onto the coffee table, he retrieved the now-heated burrito and took his seat on the couch just as the cooking show resumed. Target scarfed down her meal and found a toy mouse to bat around while he ate and sorted through the mail.
“-and that’s going to make the most delicious pizza-”
He had completely forgotten about Riley and the pizzas. Well, he’d call later.
Catalog after catalog went onto the recycle pile; bills went onto the keep pile. His house was on a training route for the postal service. A lot of the time, he got the neighbors’ mail or they got his. Today’s mail deliverer managed the addresses just fine, but everything was mixed together in such a jumble that he had to flick through the flyers and catalogs to pick out the important mail jammed inside.
He lifted up the last flyer, which was something about neighborhood safety, and his heart stopped at the merlot envelope beneath.
Despite Derrick’s warning, it hit Theo with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest. All of the air in his lungs was expelled in a sharp whistle. Frozen in place, he stared at the envelope until the aching in his emptied lungs compelled him to drag in fresh oxygen.
He had braced for this to show up at work, not in the safety of his own house. It was an invasion of his private space, Vaughn psychically thrusting himself into a home where he had never been to prove that Theo could not get away from him. Suddenly he was there, picking through Theo’s tiny wine collection in distaste, perusing with scorn the art on the wall
s, taking in every feature of the two-bedroom house and finding its flaws.
To Theo, before he met Vaughn, this house was a big step up. After Vaughn, it was a massive step down. But he liked his home, and it didn’t need a cellar crammed full of high-end wines and walls covered in expensive art to please him. He bridled under the imaginary scrutiny, and picked up the envelope.
His name and address were scrawled in that lovely, silver-swept calligraphy that he selected long ago. Turning it over, he ran his finger over the V-shaped, artfully frayed deckle edge and remembered the afternoons he spent paging through envelope designs before deciding upon this one. Why he was so drawn to it, he couldn’t say. Perhaps it was the imperfection that made it perfect.
He needed to chuck this in the trash.
Instead, he opened it.
Oh, Vaughn.
A visible miasma of hatred emanated from the invitation that Theo pulled out. It was his invitation: tied up in a ribbon the same merlot color as the envelope, a glittering rhinestone brooch pinned at the center. It was laid perfectly at the halfway point of the invitation, bisecting it. Above the ribbon were Vaughn & Matthias in cursive, surrounded by swirls that looked like wind was tilting the names ever so softly to the right. Below the ribbon were the details of the event: the date of Valentine’s Day and the venue, the same venue that Theo once booked of Augustine Hall.
The same card type and paper weight and printing method, the same fonts and silver foil ink color. Underneath was the same response card. These were pricey invitations, from what Theo recalled, working out to between nine and ten dollars each. For the size of wedding that they were planning, the invitations alone cost around twelve hundred dollars.
His lungs rebelled and he gobbled in air, having forgotten again to breathe. Even now, Vaughn was laughing at the thought of Theo’s devastation.
Theo wouldn’t give him that.
No. He wasn’t going to rage, or cry, or shoot an angry text to Vaughn. Nor would he package the invitation back up and write return to sender or addressee unknown upon the envelope. Vaughn would recognize his writing. The only way around this was to pretend he hadn’t gotten it, and to speak of it to no one.