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

by LJ Evans

  “Are you belittling our Dairy Queen? Because I will have you know that Dairy Queen has been the savior of many a teenage heart.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at her scold. At her defense of a restaurant that could hardly be called a restaurant. If you could find a Dairy Queen in L.A., it was like eating at something lower than a McDonald's.

  “I guess I just don’t know what good food is then,” I teased her more.

  “Fine. Now I have to take you there.”

  I grinned, and she frowned at my grin. That was okay by me. I didn’t mind. I’d achieved my goal. I’d taken her away from the self-battery that she’d been doing.

  She drove through the downtown that was full of old-fashioned lampposts, greenery, and brick buildings. It was like a Christmas card, and it made me want to take a whole series of photographs as the sun was setting on the cobbled streets. The light glinted off the bicycles that were parked, unlocked, along the sidewalk. It sparkled on the glasses that people lifted at the tables outside of the mom-and-pop restaurants. The sunrays lit the entire street, turning it into gold and crystalized rainbows.

  I’d already taken a whole book worth of photos of this town, but it never seemed enough. Every time I came down the main street, I saw something in a new way that made me want to take more pictures.

  As we passed yet another unlocked bike, I turned and asked, “I can’t believe that no one uses a bike lock in this town. Doesn’t anything ever get stolen?”

  “I guess, but most kids know that if they go home with a bike that doesn’t belong to them, their mama is going to skin their backside.”

  “Did your mama ever skin your backside?” I was smirking at her turn of phrase, and she caught on.

  “Look, Monkey Boy, you can’t be making fun of our language any more than our Dairy Queen.”

  Damned if I didn’t like it that she could tease me back with such ease. So I just pushed at her more. “You didn’t answer me. Tell me one thing your mama ever got mad at you over, because I can’t imagine you getting into much trouble at all.”

  She shrugged. “Well, when you have Cam for a best friend, there are a lot of things you get into that you don’t know how to get out of before trouble hits.”

  She parked in the Dairy Queen parking lot. The tables outside were littered with teenagers. It was like someone had called out “summer” and they’d all come running.

  “Tell me one thing, just one, and I’ll lay off.”

  “We put slugs in my ex’s sandwich, and he took a bite before realizing it.” She put her finger to her mouth and fake gagged. All it did was draw my attention to her perfectly proportioned lips. She looked like a model. Like a magazine would be dying to have her on their cover, but a cover that didn’t airbrush out all the perfect curves that belonged to her.

  “That’s pretty gross, but I’m sure he deserved it,” I said.

  “He told the principal, and the principal called my mama, but it was my stepdaddy who picked me up.” She got out of the car, and I followed her.

  “What did he do about it?”

  “He wanted to know why Pete and I had broken up. He was more concerned that I was heartbroken than the fact that I’d put a slug in his sandwich,” she said with that self-deprecating sigh again. I could tell it was another bad story.

  “Don’t you have any good stories that have guys in them?” I asked.

  “There was Zack,” she said with a real smile. My stomach lurched, and I tried to convince myself that it was just at the breathtaking view it made when she smiled versus the fact that she’d said another man’s name with that smile. I wasn’t jealous. Not at all.

  We got to the counter, and she ordered for both of us. I’d never had anyone—let alone a woman—order for me before. I don’t think she even realized she did it. She just took charge when she needed to. I wondered if the crazy ex, Grant, had disliked that about her. I thought it was sexy, having someone self-assured enough to order for both of us.

  She ordered burgers, fries, onion rings, and two vanilla shakes.

  “What if I wanted chocolate?” I teased her as we took our receipt and looked for a seat at the picnic benches that were still swallowed up by teens.

  “You don’t want chocolate.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said with a sad shake of her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because vanilla is the best,” she insisted.

  “Maybe to you.”

  “Okay, big baby, do you want me to go order you a chocolate shake?” She started to get up, and I grabbed her hand to stop her.

  The motion took us both by surprise. I looked down at our fingers tangled together. It was the first time I’d touched her when she wasn’t drunker than a skunk. It hit me hard with something strong and feral that was difficult to name.

  “I’m just teasing,” I replied and let go at the same time she tugged her fingers from mine.

  It got quiet between us. Both of us caught in that sensation of joined hands.

  “Why’d you put slugs in the ex’s lunch?”

  “Not going there,” she replied quickly.

  “Come on. High school, right? So, he cheated on you? Kissed some other girl?” I asked with a pointed look to all the teens surrounding us.

  “I wish,” she said with an eye-roll.

  They called our number, and she was up from the bench, grabbing the food before I hardly registered it. But I didn’t miss the fact that she hadn’t told me what happened with Pete the Slug-man.

  When I took the bags from her and went to sit back down, she pulled at my elbow.

  “Not here, Monkey Boy.” And she led me back to her car.

  “We’re eating in the car?” I asked, looking around at the leather seats and pristine carpet that didn’t appear to have ever had anything eaten on them.

  “Nah. We’re going to the lake. That’s the best place to eat food from the Dairy Queen.”

  She turned up the music, opened her sunroof, and drove with a heavy foot that I instantly respected, out to the lake. I’d been at the lake plenty of times in the eleven months I’d lived here. It was a great place for a photo shoot. Especially at times like now, with the sunset starting to fade away.

  She parked and we headed to a picnic bench. It was quiet for a summer Sunday. The kids were all at the Dairy Queen it seemed.

  We ate in silence. And it was all good: the silence and the food. It was a decent burger, the fries were the right texture, and the milkshake was sweet but not sickly sweet. It wasn’t the best food I’d ever had, but the company made up for the lack of greatness in the meal. I guessed that was what made everyone think the Dairy Queen was the best burger in town. The memories. Dreamlike ones.

  “Did you spend a lot of time here as a kid?” I asked as we finished up.

  “Yep. Cam lived in the water when we were little, and of course Jake was always here; so if he was here, then we were here. Plus, Kayla, my stepsister, dated Jake for a while, and Cam used me as interference.”

  “You and Kayla are quite the opposites,” I commented with a smirk that earned me a shoulder shove.

  “No duh, Sherlock.”

  “How did that even happen? It’s her dad, right?”

  She sat thinking about it for a minute. “My daddy died in the Marines.”

  Crap. More screwed up male relationships in her life. Probably was the cause of a lot of her bad moments with guys.

  “God, you are an idiot. There’s no need to look at me like that.” I didn’t even realize that my face had shown any kind of reaction. But she’d read me anyway. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. She continued, “I don’t even remember him. He died when I was two. The only memories I have of him are photos and the stories my mama told me.”

  “Still a big loss.”

  “I guess. It never felt that way to me because I didn’t know him. My mom had met Tim, my stepdaddy, by the ti
me I was four. They were married within a year, and he took over for anything that I would have missed from not having a daddy. He did all the daddy-daughter stuff with me.”

  “How’d Kayla feel about that?” I smirked.

  “Hated it with a capital H. She hated that she’d have to go stay with her mama every other weekend, and I got her daddy to myself. We never had a great relationship, Kayla and I, but we got through it.”

  “So what did your stepdad do about slug-boy?”

  “He didn’t have to do anything. Cam had already run him out of town. The slug was the last straw. He went to live with his daddy, and I got the school back to myself.”

  I laughed. “Remind me never to get on Cam’s bad side.”

  She smiled at me. Her real one with that little bow quirking up in the corner, and I experienced that all-too-familiar lurch in my chest.

  “You really don’t want to be on Cam’s bad side.”

  She stood up and went to the edge of the water, looking out at a wooden dock that seemed like it had been there longer than either of us had been alive. As I watched, she started shedding clothes. Shoes first, then yoga pants, and then the t-shirt.

  My body responded, watching this gorgeous, slender, model-like red-head strip down to her undies and a tank top. I liked women. Loved sexy-as-hell women. And she was all of that and more.

  “What the hell you doing?” I finally choked out, but she didn’t respond. She stepped into the lake and then started swimming out toward the beat-up dock.

  After a few strokes, she stopped and turned toward me. Her hair was wet and shiny, and she wore a smile on her face that made the fading sun and the emerging stars all disappear.

  “Come on, Monkey Boy.”

  “Is it even safe to swim in that?” I asked doubtfully because it was a lake. A green, muddy lake.

  “City boy, you afraid of a little bit of mud?” She laughed at me.

  What could I say to that? All I could do was strip down to my boxers and hope that I didn’t embarrass myself with the hard-on that I was trying to control.

  The water helped. Cold as shit.

  She was already pulling herself out of the water onto the dock by the time I was taking my first stroke. Her body glistened in the twilight. She lay down on the dock so that all I could see were toes. Slender. gorgeous toes that I wanted to take a photo of—like I wanted to take a photo of every piece of her.

  I pulled myself up, and the dock creaked at my weight. I eyed it warily. She opened her eyes long enough to sneer at me.

  “What’s wrong now?”

  “Is this thing even safe?”

  “Yes. It’s been here for fifteen years or so. We were probably, what…nine or ten…when we hauled it out here. I guess Jake would have been about thirteen.”

  “You’re telling me that a bunch of kids made this?”

  “I think Blake and his friend, Wade, helped too, and they were even older than Jake, so maybe fifteen? A whole group of us got it out here, and then we anchored it down. It’s been here ever since.”

  I was kind of impressed by that. A whole group of kids working together to put a dock out in the middle of a lake that they then proceeded to use until it wasn’t needed by them anymore. I bet it was used by a whole new crew of wild teenagers these days.

  I lay down on the dock next to her, keeping a safe distance between us. I was pretty damned sure that if even one part of my nearly naked body touched her nearly naked body that I wasn’t going to be able to keep myself from kissing the hell out of her. Scratch that, not just kiss her, do a lot more than that to her.

  I turned my head back from those thoughts of her body to thoughts of her life.

  “You had an interesting childhood growing up here.”

  “No lakes, and docks, and crazy tomboys in your life?”

  “Nah, but there was the ocean, and surfboards, and Derek’s band, so I guess we had our own kind of crazy.”

  “You surfed?”

  I nodded.

  But talk of surfing made me think of things I didn’t want to think about. People I didn’t want to think about. To Lita. She was probably why I’d felt such a responsibility to Wynn today. Wynn’s mood had echoed my painful experiences with Lita.

  My silence seemed to get to Wynn. “Don’t feel like you have to expand or anything.”

  And I didn’t.

  It kind of made me a jerk, but I wasn’t prepared to talk about Lita today. Which just meant I wasn’t prepared to talk about growing up at all, because Lita was tied up in those memories. Every single one of them. Today was too good of a day to ruin with Lita’s messed up life.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I turned so that I was on my side looking down on her. Which was a mistake because she was her gorgeous self, wet and glistening in the summer heat and shadowy light.

  “Do you ever stop asking questions?” She gave me a weak smile that was not her real one. It was her on guard one.

  “Why’d you leave?” I asked.

  “You mean here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because you like it here so much?” She teased me.

  I nodded. I did like it here. It felt like home. Or like I’d always imagined a home should feel like when my own had never felt that way. I wondered if Lita and I had grown up here, in the countryside, if she would have ended up saner than she was now.

  “College,” Wynn responded to my question.

  “Isn’t there one closer than Nashville? And you didn’t come back after you graduated. Why not?”

  She looked up at the stars that had started to filter into the sky. The crickets started chirping. An owl hooted. She was thinking about a response, and I wondered for a moment if she’d even answer me. After all, I hadn’t answered her unspoken questions about my childhood.

  “I guess I thought this place was too small for the future I wanted to have,” she said after a long time.

  I took that in. Maybe I could understand that. Living where everyone knew everything about you might make you want to run far away. Might make you want to have something for yourself that no one else knew about but you.

  “But you’re back now?” I prodded.

  “Without a future.”

  I could tell she wanted to take it back as soon as it was out. “Shit. You’re only what, twenty-three? Twenty-four? You have a whole life still in front of you.”

  “Okay. But being twenty-five,” she emphasized her age like I should have known it, “and already having a divorce under your belt doesn’t bode well for any future endeavors.”

  I turned back to the sky because looking at her was harder than I could have ever expected.

  “One mistake doesn’t make you a failure,” I replied automatically, but truthfully.

  She didn’t respond, and we just lay there, watching the stars wink into existence in a way I never got to see in L.A. Here, in this part of Tennessee, they were out nightly. And here at the lake, they were stunning. Like her, glimmering...shiny...heart-wrenching.

  “Look at it this way,” I told her. “Now you get to have a whole bunch more firsts.”

  “What?” she asked. I could feel her looking at me, and I risked turning my head to meet her eyes. They were so pale that it was hard to see them in the darkness that had settled over us as the light disappeared completely.

  “You know. First time getting drunk...after the divorce. Well, hell, you already did that.” She smiled weakly, and I continued. “How about first date...after the divorce? First kiss...after the divorce. First time making love...after the divorce. It’s like you get a whole shitload of do-overs now but with more experience than you had when you did those things the first time. You can do them better now than when you did them as a kid.”

  She held her breath at my words and stared at me.

  Then, she leaned slightly forward and kissed my cheek. Her lips hit my skin and filled me with a scent of berries and lake, and I had to cle
nch my fingers into my fist to prevent myself from pulling her all the way to me and devouring all of her, not just those sweet, full lips.

  “Thank you,” she breathed out as she settled back on the dock and stared at the night.

  “For what?”

  “For trying to make me feel better. For reminding me that there’s more to life than this moment.”

  But as soon as she said it, I was struck with a longing I didn’t normally have. A longing to have this particular moment last forever. Because lying on the dock in the dusk with this beautiful creature might be something I could do three hundred and sixty-five days a year. And that was definitely not in any of my plans.

  Pipes & Pills

  WASTED LOVE

  “I'm not supposed to love you no more

  I guess I'm not supposed to care,

  I held you so close, now I'm holding a ghost

  How can love just disappear?”

  Performed by Matt McAndrew

  Written by Kreviazuk / Fiorentino / Moore / Fox

  It was three a.m. by the time Wynn got home on Tuesday. She was barely functioning after covering the night shift at the hospital. With no permanent job available yet, she was just filling in for vacation schedules and sick leave. Quitting her job in Nashville had probably been a stupid overreaction to the divorce. But she couldn’t afford to buy out Grant’s half of the condo, and living in Nashville on one person’s salary wasn’t easy these days.

  At least she was still in the neonatal ward. It was where she normally excelled. But for some reason, today she’d found herself nearly bursting into tears as she’d situated a tiny baby under the heat lamp. The baby was so little, and yet, at the same time, it was enormous compared to the ones she’d lost. The ones she’d never been able to hold.

  She’d gotten really good at storing away those emotions while she worked. But it was as if talking with Lonnie about the babies had somehow uncapped the bottle she’d carefully closed off. She’d felt it threatening to spill over all night.