My Life as an Album (Books 1-4): A small town, southern fiction series

by LJ Evans

  I hadn’t realized that I was harboring that anger. Toward both of us, for screwing around with your life. But I guess when you’re ten and thirteen, it doesn’t seem like those things are so very critical. You feel like you’re going to live forever. We didn’t understand that not taking care of yourself then could end your life in just a few short years.

  I have to say, the group was really nice. I mean, here they were for their own support, trying to find a way to make themselves feel better about this disease that they had been diagnosed with, and here I was, dumping on them the most painful realization of the worst that could happen to them.

  After I’d blurted the story out, with no tears shed, just anger and tears in my eyes, the group remained quiet for probably a whole minute. Then, the woman next to me hugged me. And then they were all surrounding me and telling me how brave I was to share that story, and thanking me for reminding them that the small choices they made every day were making a difference, if not to them, to the ones they loved.

  They broke up to get snacks. Veggie tray. No cookies for this group. The leader, Anne Pavilotti, came over to me and introduced herself with a handshake.

  “I’m sorry I ruined your group,” I told her honestly.

  She stared at me in a way that reminded me a little of your stare. “I think that must have been a long time coming. How long has Jake been gone?”

  “Eighteen months, five days six hours.”

  She stared at me a while longer.

  “Would you be interested in sharing that story again?”

  I laughed in a very sarcastic way. “God, you’d want me to torture more people with that?”

  She smiled. “I’d especially like you to come and talk to our juvenile diabetes group. I think your story could really make a difference for them.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  It’s funny. Because, in a way, you had found a path for me again. It was like you’d shown me the way one more time. I was moving in a new direction. Anne set me up volunteering with the diabetes and endocrinology department and talking with groups. I wasn’t leading groups, but I was sharing our story… a briefer version of our story, and I was listening to kids and teens talk about their struggles. I got to keep reminding them about the importance of taking care of themselves right then.

  I realized at that point that I wanted to continue to do this. I didn’t want to be a nurse or a doctor. I wanted to be a counselor. Not a psychiatrist. I wanted to be Anne. I wanted to lead groups through life’s ups and downs. To help them make better choices. Better choices than the ones we had made.

  Anne told me about the coursework that I should take as an undergrad and recommended a graduate program. She became a mentor. It was good to have someone to direct my energies again. To keep me on a path going in a right direction. Like you had. Like Coach had tried to.

  It meant more college than I would have ever have expected me to have the patience for. But my mama and daddy were glad to pay for it because they were relieved I’d found a road to go down again. And somehow I knew that you’d be happy too. That our story would lead me somewhere.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  Wynn graduated, passed her nursing exams, and got a job at Vanderbilt. We’d commute together if our schedules overlapped, but that wasn’t often because as a newbie nurse, she often got the worst shifts. She was dating a guy who was getting his PhD in philosophy. He wanted to be a professor. I laughed at that. You would have enjoyed Grant. He was funny but so serious. I guess that was good because Wynn was sort of serious too.

  She was happy though. And it showed.

  And I finally realized that I’d like to feel happy again too. I had a purpose now, but I wasn’t filled with happiness yet. I wasn’t sure I could be, but I’d like to try. For you. For me. For the memory of our story.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  But at that point, I was just putting everything I had into school and the groups I was part of at Vanderbilt. I was doubling up classes and trying to catch up from backpedaling for so long. I was more me. A me on a mission. I was going everywhere fast like I used to. Like when I was racing to get back to you or racing to beat you. But now, it was just me, racing to be the new me.

  It was good. Not great. But better.

  I even went out on a date. It didn’t end so well. And I realized that that step was maybe too much. That for right now, having a career direction and helping others was going to have to do, because even if I wanted to be happy, I wasn’t really ready to let anyone take your place. I wasn’t ready to open my heart up to someone who might end up leaving me again. But at least I tried, mama said.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  On your birthday, your mama came to see me. It was strange to have Marina come instead of my mama. My mama had been the one to make the drive to Nashville the most. Checking in to make sure I wasn’t feeding her a line of BS, and that I was really navigating this world without you.

  I took Marina to the hospital to meet Anne. Anne hugged her tight and said how sorry she was that Marina had lost her son. She told Marina how proud she was of me and that I was really making a difference for dozens of kids by sharing Jake’s story with them.

  After, Marina and I went to dinner, and Marina got quiet.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  She nodded, but I could see the tears threatening to burst through. I knew if she cried, I would too. I was better. Maybe only shedding them once a month these days instead of forty times a day, but if she cried, I’d lose it completely.

  “I never forced him, you know? Sometimes I hate myself for not forcing him,” she finally breathed out, dabbing her eyes.

  “To give up football? To get the pump earlier?”

  She nodded.

  “You couldn’t have.”

  “I could have. I was his mother.”

  I shook my head and reached for her hand.

  “Marina, I don’t think even I could have made him give it up. He had to come to the realization that he wasn’t a football god on his own.”

  She reached for a Kleenex and squeezed my hand.

  “I love you, Cami. No matter what, you’ll always be my daughter, and I want you to know how very proud of you I am. I know that he’d be proud of you too.”

  And then I did cry because I couldn’t help it.

  Begin Again

  “I've been...thinking all love ever does

  is break and burn and end,

  but on a Wednesday in a cafe

  I watched it begin again.”

  - Taylor Swift

  Never would I have thought that this song could be anything I’d relate to after you were gone. Never. But I guess that’s what makes amazing artists amazing. Their songs are written for all kinds of times and places. Things that you thought were the weak part of me, someone else might find fascinating. Things that I thought I’d never find interesting about someone else all of a sudden strike me as just that. So eventually, this song did mean something to me.

  I hadn’t written in a long time because, well, I didn’t think our story had any more to say. We’d spent the entire gamut of emotions. Our lifetime together had been twenty short years, right? But then something happened. Something that made me think of you. Not something sad or something I’d remembered about you and me, but something that made me scratch my chin and think, “What would Jake have thought about this?” So… I wanted to think about you as I wrote it. In the end, I think you would have liked it. Maybe you would have laughed and reminded me about that summer I was going into fifth grade. It makes me smile thinking about it, and what you would have thought.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  It happened just after I’d been accepted into my graduate program at Tennessee State. I’d taken on a paying part-time job with the counseling department at Vanderbilt, and Wynn had convinced me to chop my hair for the first time in my life. It was a sharp A-line. Super short in the
back and angled long in the front. It made me look different. Grown-up. I wondered every time I looked in the mirror what you would have thought of it. Would you like to run your fingers through the short, crisp layers at the back? Would you like that I’d had them bring out the chestnut highlights and that somehow they’d made my pale eyes stand out more?

  Speaking of, my eyes didn’t look so bloodshot, and the darkness underneath them seemed to have improved. I started wearing makeup again. Not much, but enough to show that I was putting effort in. I got some new clothes. More trendy. More grown-up than teenager. Wynn was as excited about my new transformation as she had been that summer when I’d bought my first miniskirt for you, and you’d promptly found Brittney.

  Wynn had just gotten engaged to Grant. She was moving in with him in about a month, so I was looking for a new apartment. I kind of wanted one of my own. One that I could pay the rent on so that I could stop leaning on Mama and Daddy quite so much and become the grown-up that I was trying so hard to be. That I’d been trying so hard to be for years without really ever realizing what that all meant. I did now. Or at least, I had a better notion than I had at twelve.

  Anyway, none of that was what really made me think of you in a way that made me want to sit down and write to you. It was this other thing. The thing that happened while I was in a Starbucks perusing the apartment rental sections, circling away, that made me want your opinion. That’s when I heard a smooth voice say, “Super Girl?”

  My heart did a flip of sorts. Not the kind of flip when you said my name, but a flip that took me back for a moment to all those summers longing for you, and I looked around, hair swinging about my face, trying to find the person who’d said it. Only two people had ever called me Super Girl.

  It took a second for my eyes to land on him, because he looked so different, but I couldn’t help the smile that emerged when I did. It was Blake. Still shaggy and baby-faced, but somehow also grown-up with a scruffy chin and an expensive suit that seemed incongruous together. I could tell he’d been walking out when he’d caught sight of me because he was in this weird posture of half going and half coming.

  “Blake!”

  He came over and hugged me. A good, long hug that reminded me a little of your bear hugs before you’d fallen in love with me and before your hugs had taken on a totally different context.

  We stood staring at each other for a moment.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you!” he said with that sheepish grin that had always been him as he eyed my hair and grown-up dress. But today, I still had my cowboy boots on and that felt a little like the old me.

  “Says the pot to the kettle. Can’t believe you’re in a suit!”

  He laughed.

  “Can I join you? Or are you waiting for a hot date?” he asked.

  My turn to laugh, and I waved him into the chair.

  “How are you?” he asked. It was usually a question I dreaded because it always came with a silent, how-are-you-now-that-Jake-is-gone kind of tone, but Blake’s didn’t seem that way at all. Just seemed like a normal question he’d ask anyone. But I still gave him my canned answer.

  “I’m good.”

  “You’re looking a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw you.”

  I was both slightly offended and puzzled at the same time, trying to think back to the last time I’d seen him. Had to be years.

  “At Jake’s funeral.”

  I grimaced. “Honestly, the president could have shown up, and I wouldn’t have known.”

  We kind of let that settle down in between us. And it wasn’t uncomfortable, which surprised the heck out of me again.

  “So, Nashville?” he asked, moving on but not in a way that felt like he was trying to avoid the discussion, more like he was really interested in asking me.

  “Well, I figured with all the moody, starving musicians in this town, I’d fit right in.”

  He laughed at me. Right out loud. No one had laughed so hard at me in a long time. “You always were a little firecracker.”

  I threw my napkin at him. He grinned again as if to say that I’d just proven his point.

  “How long you been here?” he asked.

  “Almost three years.”

  “That’s unbelievable. I can’t believe we haven’t run into each other before now.”

  “And you, what happened to Mississippi?”

  “Graduated. Came home. You were right, of course, Mississippi can never compete with Tennessee.”

  I looked puzzled again.

  “Don’t you remember calling me a traitor for going to Ole Miss?” I suddenly did remember. And I blushed a little because I’d been so brash about it. How the hell did I ever think that I could tell people what direction their life should take?

  He was all grins again. I wondered if he ever stopped grinning. Had he always been this way? “I see you do remember! Ha. Who knew a skinny-ass kid like you would be right. Anyway, I’ve been here about two years.”

  “Doing what?”

  Impossibly, his smile turned even bigger. So big that I thought his face might break open, “Entertainment lawyer, specifically music.”

  My turn to smile. “Well, now that does fit. Except I always imagined you’d be the starving musician.”

  “Nah. I knew early on that I wasn’t good enough. Doesn’t mean I don’t know when someone else is though.”

  “That’s pretty cool. You’re all grown up.”

  “Sometimes. I still like a good race though.” I looked into his smiling eyes with a little wonder. I almost thought maybe he was flirting with me, but that didn’t seem to fit. I’d always considered Blake way older than me. Not like you. Blake had a good five years on me. If your three years had been a mountain back then, Blake’s five years would have been an entire planet.

  His phone beeped, and he ignored it, but when it beeped again a few minutes later like an impatient kindergartner waiting for a snack, he sighed. “I’m going to be incredibly rude for a minute, do you mind?”

  It was so gentlemanly, like you would have done, that I couldn’t help but nod with a smile. He stood up, stepped outside, talked on the phone for a minute, and then came back in. When he sat back down, he caught me circling another apartment listing. He took the paper and looked at it. “Apartments?”

  “Well, Wynn… do you remember Wynn?”

  “Is she the one that played tonsil hockey with my kid brother, or was that you?”

  I about choked on my chai tea I laughed so hard, and I had to wipe the spray down. It was embarrassing and yet still funny at the same time. He was grinning like a kid who’d just had Christmas early.

  “That was me. God. I’d wondered where I picked up that term. Must have been from you. Jake hated it.”

  “Probably because you were always teasing him about doing it with his long line of fabulous women.”

  I loved how he hadn’t shied away from my bringing you up, how he dove right into the story and added on. And what he said was true. I felt my smile widen again. I don’t think I’d smiled so much in an hour since… well, before Virginia even.

  “Sorry. We got sidetracked, so what’s the deal with Wynn?” he asked.

  “She and I have been living together, but now she up and got engaged and is moving in with her fiancé.”

  “How dare she do something so terribly predictable!”

  This time I tossed a grape at him, but he was prepared, caught it, tossed it in his mouth, and ate it. I noticed for the first time that he had really nice lips. Not too small or too big. Like they’d be just right for kissing.

  Embarrassed at my own thoughts, thoughts I hadn’t had in forever, I looked down at the circled listings to escape. I could hide behind my swinging A-line, which made it an advantage these days.

  “Anywho, I decided it was about time for me to get a place on my own.”

  “Big step.”

  I couldn’t help but glance up to see if he wa
s teasing me again, but he wasn’t. He was all seriousness. He looked down at the ads and handed them back. He put in his own two cents about which ones he thought I should or shouldn’t call on.

  “God, I had the most horrible experience just down the block from this one, so with much prejudice, I say don’t ever rent on that block,” he said it with much drama, and of course, he expected me to ask about it, so I did.

  “Okay, mama’s boy, tell me what happened.”

  He threw a grape at me, and this time I caught it, but he stole it right back out of my hand which I wasn’t prepared for. Whenever you teased me, I knew exactly what you were going to do before you did it. With Blake, I kept being caught off guard. And… I found I liked it.

  “Blind date that went psycho,” he told me.

  “No? With you? The Southern gentleman reincarnated?”

  He grinned again. “Yep. We’d just left the Italian place on the corner, and I was asking if she’d like me to walk her to her car, and she went all feminist on me. Screaming about how women nowadays didn’t need big, burly men like me to throw down their clubs and lead them by the hand.”

  I was laughing again. It felt so delicious. Like candy I’d denied myself for too long.

  “So, I guess I’m down to these two, as you’ve declared everything else a disaster area.”

  “You going to call them now?”

  “Was planning on it.”

  “Would you like me to tag along? You know, as your lawyer and all?”

  “Because I need a lawyer with me to rent an apartment?”

  “You never know,” he teased back.

  So, I called the two numbers, and they both could see me. Blake tagged along. He was wrong though, they didn’t like to see him coming at all. They thought that he was renting the apartment for me. You know, like a sugar daddy thing.

  It was hilarious. They were both a bust.

  We stopped for lunch at a meat and three.

  “That’s it. You’re officially fired as my apartment lawyer,” I told him mockingly.

  “Thank God. I hate looking for apartments anyway.”