Rob doesn’t seem to notice my reaction but Brendan certainly does. He’s smirking as he accepts Rob’s offer. I suspect he’s agreeing solely to piss me off.
“I cannot believe you did that,” I hiss at Rob once I hear Brendan’s car pulling away.
“Come on, hon. We have this huge place, and the pool house is detached. It’s not like he’ll even be living here. It’ll be more like having a neighbor.”
“Which is great if I wanted Brendan as a neighbor,” I reply. “As I’m sure you can imagine, I don’t.”
“He’s nice enough to you.” Rob sighs. “I just don’t get why you have such a problem with him.”
“My problem is that I’m 26 years old, and I have a full-time job, and I don’t feel like coming home every night to discover he’s turned our house into the Playboy Mansion. You’d better make sure he knows I’m not dealing with him having threesomes in the hot tub—or whatever else it is he’ll inevitably do.”
“I’ll warn him about the hot tub,” Rob says with a weary smile. “You know, when Harper has a threesome, you can’t wait to tell me about it. You think it’s funny that she sleeps around. But Brendan does it, and you’re ready to perform an exorcism.”
Yes. Because it’s totally different when it’s Brendan. “He’s just…a bad influence, Rob.”
“A bad influence on whom, Erin?” he asks. “I’m not even home half the time.”
That’s probably a good question.
3
Brendan
Four Years Earlier
I don’t understand why anyone buys a fucking bread maker. You know how much good bread you could buy for $150? A lot. A lot of really, really amazing bread. Bread of every color and taste and variety, without lifting a fucking finger.
Bread makers are like relationships. I don’t know why anyone would give up all that freedom, all that variety, to be with only one girl, and for a far heavier price than any bread maker—remembering holidays, visiting her family, listening to some long-winded story about what Friend A said to Friend B. And you can’t even bank on getting laid once you’ve put in all the work. I’ve seen it play out with my friends again and again: the amazing high of those first few weeks, followed by months and months of lame shit like farmer’s markets and playing Pictionary, the sex getting a little duller, a little more infrequent with each week that passes.
My buddies all express dismay when this happens, as if it’s somehow surprising that it’s gone down that way. That’s when they laud me for my ability to stay single, which also makes little sense. Relationships are remarkably easy to avoid if you know what you’re doing: don’t take a girl out who isn’t going to sleep with you, and don’t sleep with girls who will expect a call the next day. It’s that simple.
Everyone knows these are my rules, so I laugh when my brother tells me to stay away from Erin Doyle, his fiancée’s best friend. In fact, he goes so far as to make it a condition of getting me a job with his old tour company.
“Erin?” I scoff. “You really think you have to warn me to stay away from Erin?”
Erin is exactly the kind of girl I avoid—the sort who will want to hold hands for six months first, who gets a subscription to Brides magazine right after your first date. I’ve only met her a few times, but I know the type.
“Do us both a favor,” Will says, “and stop pretending you’re not attracted to her.”
“You couldn’t pay me to go out with that girl,” I tell him. Just contemplating it makes me feel suffocated. “Not if she were the last woman alive.”
4
Erin
Present
Olivia can’t stop cackling. “I hear you’re getting a new roommate!” she says. Then she starts laughing again.
“I should have known you’d enjoy this situation a little too much.”
“You want to know what I would do if Will invited someone to live with us without asking me first?” she asks.
No, not really. Although she’s now married and a mother of two, Olivia’s still the girl who broke one teammate’s nose and took a baseball bat to another. Her solutions always involve objects I should threaten to shove up my boss’s ass, and any time Rob upsets me, her helpful suggestion is that I “cut him loose.”
“You talk a good game, but we both know you wouldn’t do anything,” I tell her. “You can’t stay mad at Will for two seconds.”
“Okay, maybe. But I sure as shit wouldn’t have agreed. I thought you hated Brendan.”
“I don’t hate him,” I say. Okay, yes, I totally hate him. But I’m adult enough to lie about it. “I just don’t need him smoking pot or having threesomes in my hot tub.”
Her voice softens. “He’s changed a lot, Erin. That girl in Italy really messed him up. I don’t think you have to worry about it.”
“I thought Brendan never wanted anything serious with anyone,” I mutter. I feel inexplicably bitter, although I shouldn’t after all this time.
“I guess she was the exception,” Olivia says. “And I have no idea what went wrong, but it definitely changed him.”
A piece of me is glad someone broke his heart. He deserves it after all the damage he’s wrought. But mostly I’m just wondering what this girl had that I didn’t.
The next afternoon, Timothy leaves the office for his weekly meeting with the chancellor—another person on my shit list, given his constant last-minute demands—and I call my brother. I try to check on Sean each week, the way a parent might, just to make sure he’s happy and staying clean and caught up on rent, and it’s easiest to do it from work. Rob has strong opinions about my brother. I can’t even mention Sean’s name without seeing a look of disdain on his face. I suspect he might look at me that that way too if he knew everything.
Sean asks if Rob and I have set a date yet, and when I tell him we haven’t he offers—just as my father did—to come beat a little sense into Rob. Everyone assumes it must be Rob dragging his heels because women are supposed to be giddy over the prospect of a wedding, as if we’ve just won the lottery. No wonder my reluctance bothers Rob so much.
I ask him if he’s registered for class, and when he sighs heavily, my heart sinks. Sean has more bad news than anyone I’ve ever met, most of it entirely his own fault. But when he emerged from rehab last month determined to become an addiction counselor, I really believed he was turning things around.
“I don’t think it’s going to work out,” he says. “It was too late to apply for financial aid. And I probably wouldn’t qualify anyway. No one’s gonna bank on a convicted felon paying them back.”
I hate that defeated quality to his voice, especially because it always seems to precede the manic quality his voice gets when he starts using again.
“There must be a way,” I urge. “Did you talk to Mom and Dad?” It’s only desperation that makes me ask. I know for a fact that my parents don’t have the money. I’ve had to help them with their mortgage twice in the past year.
“Right,” he laughs. “They can’t even help themselves. It’s okay. I’m waiting tables, and they said I can move up to tending bar at the end of the month.”
I feel panic rising in my chest. “You must know that’s a bad idea.”
“I’m not an alcoholic, Erin,” he says testily.
I press my palm to my face, trying to rein in all the things I want to say. Spending time around people drinking inevitably leads to spending time around people who are doing coke and meth and every other thing he’ll wind up doing. He knows this. But reminding him of his failures will get me nowhere. In many ways, he’s a lot closer to 13 than 29.
“How much do you need?” I ask, desperation leaking into my voice. “For tuition?”
“Like 20 grand or something,” he says. “It was a crazy idea. You know how long it would take me to pay it back?”
“I’ll pay it,” I say impulsively. I’ve been saving ever since graduation. It’s money that’s given me a feeling of safety I never had growing up. But I guess I can learn to l
ive without that feeling for a while.
He asks if I’m sure Rob will be okay with it, and I feel slightly queasy. No, Rob will not be okay with it. If it were up to Rob, I’d have written Sean off entirely by now. But Rob has no siblings, and he certainly doesn’t get to determine how I treat mine.
“It’ll be fine,” I tell him.
The second I hang up the phone, Harper is leaning over my cubicle wall. “Did you just give away all your money to your brother?”
“I know we can hear each other’s conversations,” I reply primly, “but we’re supposed to at least pretend we aren’t actively listening.”
“Shouldn’t you have spoken to Rob first?”
Shit. Yes. Probably. “If he can invite someone to live with us without asking me, I guess I can give away 20 grand without asking him.”
“To a recovering addict,” she reminds me.
“I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to give him the money directly. I’ll just pay his tuition.” I sense, based on the look she gives me, that it doesn’t help my case.
We both hear Timothy’s tuneless whistling in the hallway, which means today’s meeting with the chancellor was woefully brief or didn’t happen at all. He appears at my cubicle a moment later with his standard look: dour and suspicious, with a dollop of resentment on top.
“Erin’s cubicle isn’t a water cooler, Harper,” he says. “Don’t you have someplace to be?”
She shrugs, because unlike the rest of us, Harper does not give a flying fuck about Timothy’s opinion. Sometimes I think she wants to get fired.
“It’s after 4:30, Tim-O. I’m off the clock.”
“There is no clock, because you are salaried,” he says. “So if you are truly done for the day, which I doubt, please move along and let the rest of my employees get their jobs done.”
She, naturally, doesn’t move a muscle, just stares at him until he walks away.
“You know what I dream about sometimes?” she asks. “Working in a factory.”
I tilt my head to the side. “Huh?”
“Think about it.” She pushes away from the wall and comes around to my desk. “Some job where you just push a button or something every three minutes—without Tim coming around to suggest ways you could push the button better, or waxing poetic about what it means to push the button, and where there’s a union telling him he’s not allowed to let you push the button even a minute after you’re off.”
“That still sounds sort of tedious.”
“Okay, how about if I add in a hot factory guy who spends the entire day saying dirty shit in your ear? And so you push the button and get your paycheck and go home and do unspeakable things for hours with the hot factory guy.”
I laugh but feel a stab of envy. Sex, for Harper, is like some kind of ultimate amusement park—a ride that just keeps getting better every time she hops on.
“If I had that factory job, I’d probably just spend more time asleep.”
“Then Rob’s doing something wrong,” she counters. “You haven’t been with him that long. It should still be exciting.”
I don’t expect her to understand because she didn’t grow up like I did. But I’m not looking for excitement. I simply aspire to the absence of pain. And therefore, I have exactly what I want.
5
Brendan
Four Years Earlier
I walk in for my first day of work at the tour company and find none other than Erin standing there. She looks different. Will could have at least mentioned how fucking pretty she’d gotten. And I also forgot about those lips of hers—I’m not sure how—but it makes no difference. She smiles at me with her heart in her eyes, and I know immediately that she’s still the same girl, the type who wants a relationship straight out of 1955, complete with promise rings and corsages and chastity. Worse yet, she’s also the kind of girl who’ll develop a crush, who’ll create all kinds of fantasies in her head about spring weddings and what our children will look like, without me saying a word to encourage her.
And when I don’t make all of her dreams come true, she’ll get upset, and my brother will blame me.
She grins as she hops on the sign-up desk, swinging legs that are much longer and leaner than I remember. “Hello, fellow summer hire. You want a tour?”
I shake my head. “I’ve seen it before. Where’s Mike?”
Her smile falters a little. I know I’m being a dick, but something about her brings it out in me.
“He’s in the back office working on next week’s schedule. I think he meant for you to just use today to get oriented. You want me to call him?”
I walk past her. “I’m a big boy. I can find him all by myself.”
I sidle through the rows of bikes and get to Mike’s office. I know him fairly well through Will, who worked here almost two years before moving to Seattle.
Mike raises a brow. “Surprised to see you back here,” he says. “I thought Erin would give you a tour.”
“She offered,” I say. “I’ve been here enough. Don’t really need it. You want me to get started on something?”
“So I just gave you the chance to hang out with one of the hottest girls who’s ever set foot in this building, and you want to work instead? I thought I was hooking you up.”
I shrug. “She’s not my type.”
He gets this strange look on his face. It takes me a sec to figure it out.
“No, Mike, I’m not gay.”
It looks like he doesn’t believe me, and that makes me like Erin even less.
6
Erin
Present
My father is slurring, but that’s nothing new. And he sounds desperate, distraught, but that’s nothing new either. Thank God Rob is a sound sleeper. I don’t think these calls have ever woken him, and that’s a godsend because there’s a whole lot about me and my life I don’t want him to know.
“Hi, Daddy,” I whisper, walking out of the bedroom and curling up on the living room sofa. “Where are you?”
He mumbles something that sounds like Anson Street, and I ask him if he’s called a cab.
“Don’t need a cab,” he slurs. “M’ fine. But I can’t find my car.”
“Dad, I need you to promise you won’t drive, okay? Give me the name of the bar.”
He argues, of course, but he doesn’t argue for long. He’s too exhausted and drunk for that. So I put him on speaker while I look up the address and call him a ride. We stay on the phone while we wait for the car to come, and as always, his anger at the cards he’s been dealt in life turns to tears. He says the things he always says: that he never got a break, that he failed, that he should have been a better father.
“You were a great dad,” I tell him. “You still are.”
We both know it’s a far cry from the truth, but my father has enough unhappiness in his life without adding mine to his.
He’s still crying, still apologizing when the car arrives to take him home. I’m 26, but right now it’s as if I’m back in high school, juggling all the unhappiness afloat in my household to keep it from crashing down on us. And just like I did back then, I wait until he’s safely in bed before I let myself cry too.
I make it through the next day on four hours of sleep, which is less than ideal as—at Rob’s insistence—we are meeting Brendan out for dinner. In theory, tonight will be a double date, though I’m not sure if date is really an accurate way to describe Brendan’s relationship with any female.
Brendan and his exploits are the reason I no longer believe in things like soul mates and love at first sight. Because those were the things that went through my head the first time I ever saw him, climbing out of his brother’s truck over winter break our junior year at at ECU to help Olivia move. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and every ridiculous romantic ideal became real to me the second our eyes met. Discovering what an epic douche he was—taking a different girl home every night, each of them stupider than the one before—cured me of it…eventually.
His fingers slide through mine. “We don’t have to stay out all night,” he says. “Just a quick dinner. Give him a chance.”
“And is he actually bringing someone he knows, or is this is some girl he slept with last night and can’t shake off?”
“Erin,” Rob says with a raised brow.
“I bet her name is Bambi and she works as a spokesmodel. Or one of those girls at the auto show in a bikini.”
“Erin.”
I could go on like this for hours, but we’re entering the restaurant. Inside, Brendan waits with a lovely, vacuous redhead, and I change my prognosis: Bambi isn’t smart enough to be a spokesmodel, although I imagine she performs pretty well with her mouth.
I realize it’s not fair to hate her just because she’s dating Brendan. If anything, that should make her an object of pity. But I resent women like her, the ones who trade on their looks and never bother to develop any other quality.
We are introduced. Her name is instantly forgettable, so I don’t attempt to remember it. How could it matter anyway? She’s with Brendan. It’s not like we’re ever going to ever see her again.
“So how long will you be in Amsterdam?” Brendan asks Rob.
“A week,” Rob says. “But possibly longer.”
The “possibly longer” part is new information to me, but before I can ask him about it, the waiter comes to take our order. Bambi, predictably, orders a salad with no dressing. A hundred bucks says she won’t finish it.
“Oh my God,” Bambi says to me after the waiter walks away. “I can’t believe you ordered steak frites. Do you realize how toxic that is?”
Drowning Erin Page 2