by Cameron Lowe
“Want to switch?” Gwen asked lightly. It was a bad joke. There was no way she could slip past the couch to help out. The two men of her life were on their own for this one.
Thankfully, it was the last two flights of stairs. They’d accumulated something of an audience for this, as two shirtless boys no older than three or four sucked their thumbs as they peered into the stairwell as the men lifted and grunted. Vanessa turned around and made Frankenstein arms at them. The younger one yelped and ran for the open door to his apartment, while the other one backed away slower, his eyes huge.
“Don’t upset the wildlife,” Hugh said irritably.
“But it’s so much fun.”
“They might be feral.”
“Good point,” Vanessa admitted.
Malcolm hefted the couch high to help clear the bannister on his end, resting it for a moment on the concrete ledge while he shifted so he wouldn’t get squished. “Be nice. We have to live with these people.”
“Yeah, but we don’t,” Vanessa said. “Do those kids even own shirts?”
“Not so loud,” Gwen hissed. “Their parents are in there.”
“Good,” Hugh said. “I can shout out some tips on how to put clothes on their kids. The big hole’s for the belly, the second biggest hole’s for the head.”
The door to the kids’ apartment slammed shut, and Vanessa broke into a fit of giggles. “Oh, we’re awful.”
“The worst,” Hugh agreed. “Want to do butt stuff on the couch when we’re done here?”
“Um,” Malcolm said.
Alarmed, below them, Gwen said, “No. You are absolutely not.”
“We were kidding,” Hugh said.
“We were?” Vanessa asked. “Damn.”
Hugh stopped and shifted his hands, glancing backwards at the last few steps. “On second thought, sis, we’re gonna need twenty minutes of alone time.”
“Come on, be honest,” Vanessa said. “Three. At most.”
This was the first time Malcolm had ever really interacted with the pair outside a few short conversations, and he found himself enjoying the sharp back-and-forth between them. “You two have been together a while, I take it?”
“Off and on since junior high,” Hugh said.
“Longer than that,” Vanessa said. “He was my first kiss.”
“I don’t think me ramming my nose and mouth into your cheek when we were seven counts as a first kiss,” Hugh grunted. “Shit!” He missed the last step, stumbled, and nearly went down.
The couch dipped low, and Malcolm nearly fell backwards, but Gwen was there, dropping the chair and propping the couch up with him. He glanced aside at her gratefully.
“If you two would stop talking about butt sex and concentrate for a second or two,” Gwen growled.
They made it the rest of the way without incident, and finished hauling it down to the apartment, each of them doing a duck’s waddle to get it there. Vanessa ran ahead and shoved the door open, clearing the way as Hugh and Malcolm twisted the couch sideways and up to clear the jamb. With the couch finally in the apartment, the guys were high-fived by their significant others.
“Just give me a minute,” Malcolm said, sitting on the edge of the couch and holding his lower back, grimacing. “And then I’ll help grab the rest.”
“We’ll get another load,” Gwen said. “You two rest.”
“We will?” Vanessa asked. “But I’m so exhausted too from… standing. And… talking. Woe is me.”
Gwen smacked her hip. “Come on. I’ll even throw in garlic bread.”
“Now you’re just sweet talking me,” Vanessa said, and they headed for the hallway again.
Hugh shifted on the couch, trying to find a spot free of lumps. “So… your roommate’s bed and couch, huh?”
“It’s what we’ve got for now,” Malcolm said. “Someday we’ll get some better furniture.”
“Oh, hey, I’m not judging. Must be pretty weird though, having lived with a guy who went to jail for drug dealing.”
“Nic’s…” Malcom settled back on the couch and put his hands behind his head. “Nic’s a good guy who just did some dumb things to help himself out.”
“We all make mistakes.”
“Amen to that.”
“So… you don’t think he maybe left anything behind, do you?”
Malcolm had trouble framing the question, given the furniture they’d just hauled up and the little things around the apartment that belonged to his former roommate. “Sorry, what?”
“You don’t think he left any weed behind, do you? Or… anything else?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. The cops swept through and…” It finally dawned on Malcolm why Hugh was asking what he was asking, and glanced over sharply. “Hugh…”
“I’d pay,” Hugh said quietly, keeping his eyes locked on the open door to the hallway. “I got plenty of cash from this summer. I know you two need it.”
“He didn’t leave anything behind, and even if he did, I sure as hell wouldn’t sell it to my future brother-in-law. Jesus, Hugh.”
Voices coming up the stairwell. Gwen, laughing.
Malcolm started to stand up, but Hugh grabbed his arm. “I just need something now and then to put me in a better mood. Don’t say anything to Gwen, please.”
“Whatever,” Malcolm said, jerking his arm free. He definitely wasn’t going to keep something like that from his fiancé. Calvin had done nothing but put on a front with her. Malcolm had no intent of ever doing the same.
The pair burst into the apartment, Gwen lugging a big box, Vanessa carrying a laundry basket full of pictures and mementos. Gwen caught the mood, cocked her head, and started to ask a question, but Hugh jumped up and took the box from her.
“How much is left?” he asked. “I could eat a whole pizza by myself, I think.”
Malcolm shook his head slightly at Gwen, and she seemed to get the message. Her attention shifted to her brother and she grinned. “If we all head down and grab one more box, we’re good.”
“Perfect,” Hugh said, and slapped Malcolm on the back. “After you.”
* * *
As Malcolm slid the leftover sausage and pepperoncini pizza into gallon sized baggies, he related the strange incident to Gwen, as she paced the tiny kitchen interconnected to their living room.
“Shit,” she muttered. “Shit shit shit. First my parents, now this.”
“If it had just been weed he was after, I wouldn’t be worried,” Malcolm said. “But he asked for something harder.”
Gwen nodded. “He’s smoked weed for a while now. I don’t like it, but it’s better than his anxiety pills. Those make him paranoid and he can’t sleep at night. When he smokes, he seems more like himself. I didn’t realize he was trying anything else, though.”
“Think Vanessa knows?”
“She’s got to, right? I can get her alone, try to talk to her about it. Then I’ll talk to my parents, if they’ll even let me get two words in.”
“For this, I think they would.”
She stopped and came over to pick off bites of onion from the pizza. “There’s something I haven’t told you about him. Something you should know, just in case. He’s a cutter.”
“Like… with a razor blade?”
“Yep. Under his armpits. He used to do it to relieve stress.” Gwen explained about the day she’d caught Hugh in the bathroom cutting his armpits, and had to stop halfway through the telling to cry into a dishrag. Malcolm wrapped her in his arms and rocked her against his chest until she was able to keep going. “That’s why they needed to start him on the anxiety pills.”
“Does he still…?”
“I was scared about it a few months back and had him show me he wasn’t. But now that he’s in college… I don’t know. It’s a different environment. A different kind of stress. He’s smart in his own way, but he’s never been great at school. With deadlines and cram sessions and all that, I don’t know. I’ll talk to him. I can make him dinner one night and inv
ite him over. Not ambush him, exactly, but… well…”
“If you want some support and a friendly face, I could help out.”
Gwen thought about that and shook her head. “I think it’s best if I do this one on one. He’ll know you talked to me, no getting around that. But sometimes he shares things with me he doesn’t with anyone else, except maybe Vanessa. I don’t think he’d open up if you were around. No offense.”
“None taken.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “Just let me know what I can do.”
Chapter 17
Hugh vehemently denied asking Malcolm for anything stronger than weed, as if that was okay in and of itself.
“He just misinterpreted what I was saying, that’s all,” Hugh said, his smile full of alligator’s teeth.
Even if Gwen knew he was lying, she couldn’t force the issue, not without driving a wedge through another relationship in her family, and that she just couldn’t bring herself to do. He showed her he wasn’t cutting, though some of the scarring seemed fresher than what he’d shown her months ago. That troubled her, but maybe she was misremembering and the scars had been there back then too. It wasn’t like she didn’t have enough to stress out about. When Hugh drove away from their apartment, Gwen felt deeply uneasy but unsure what she could actually do. If her parents listened to the message she left that night on their answering machine asking them to maybe talk to Hugh’s therapist, it went unanswered.
Attention shifted to the holidays, and what Malcolm and Gwen wanted to do as opposed to what they could actually afford. Gwen thought someday she’d love to host a Thanksgiving dinner for their friends and family, but she wanted more practice first, as she had never tried cooking a turkey or most the sides that went with it. Instead, they decided to spend it at his parents’ place so his family could meet Gwen.
Despite being pissed off at Malcolm for telling Gwen about his query about the drugs, Hugh and Vanessa came over for dinner a few days before Malcolm and Gwen left for Minnesota. They spent a fun night playing board games and eating turkey sandwiches and too-moist stuffing. In private, Vanessa agreed to call if Hugh seemed to be steering any further in the wrong direction.
Before they headed east that Wednesday night after her shift at Dr. Robertson’s office, Gwen asked Malcolm quietly if they could stop at her parents’ house. She had bought a card wishing them happy Thanksgiving and wanted to drop it off with the hopes of talking to them in person. They walked up to the front door together, Gwen slightly ahead. She could hear Billy Joel playing inside, and knew they were home from the cars in the driveway, but no one answered when she rang the bell and knocked. Undeterred, she dug out her spare key and slid it home. Only as her hand brushed the doorknob did Gwen stop. Her shoulders shook as she contemplated the door, and Malcolm stepped up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing the side of her neck. She turned to him, smiling despite the pain in her eyes, and kissed him softly.
“Sometimes you know what to say,” she whispered.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Exactly.”
She slid the card into the tiny cleft under the door her father tried to fix every other year or so, and together they headed back down the sidewalk. Back at her car, she glanced up at the living room window and caught her dad peeking out, his own eyes damp as he pushed the curtain back into place.
* * *
Thanksgiving at the Irving headquarters – and that was how they referred to their home – was a madcap fishbowl teeming with life, and it always would be. Gwen fell in love immediately with the holiday at their place, and every year they could manage it, they got back there, first by themselves, and then later with the kids.
The Irvings took it upon themselves to host dinner not just for their own four kids, but the vast extended family as well. Eight aunts and uncles crammed into a home where just two adults and four teenagers had been cramped when Malcolm grew up there, and that wasn’t counting the army of nieces and nephews. They ended up having to park Gwen’s car half a block away given how long the string of vehicles were.
Within three minutes of entering the Irving household, Malcolm’s mother Janet had already asked no less than five questions about their engagement – how Malcolm proposed, where’d they get the gorgeous ring, when was the wedding, where would the wedding be, and did they need anything for the wedding. Shell-shocked at the woman’s limitless enthusiasm as compared to her own family’s distaste for the engagement, Gwen found herself bawling and hugging Janet tight, astonishing the older woman. It was the kind of questioning she’d hoped for from her own family and friends, and in it, she found a warmth she’d been missing from everyone apart from Malcolm himself.
Malcolm’s dad Adam was a fan right from the moment he saw Gwen. She’d done her hair on the trip in an elegant chignon and it framed her beautiful face wonderfully. He said so twice, first to Gwen, then to Malcolm, giggling like a lovestruck boy. Malcolm couldn’t blame him one bit.
“He sweet to you?” Adam asked Gwen as they led a charge through the piles of children and cousins and extended family.
“So much so, yes,” Gwen said, favoring her fiancé with her fondest smile.
“Good. He isn’t, you give me a call and I’ll drive out there and thump him.”
Given that Adam was a thickset man who, with a little white in his hair and beard, would make for a fantastic Santa Claus, the visual cracked Gwen up. Or maybe she was just riding out the emotions of actually being accepted into the Irving clan. Hard to tell, and it didn’t matter to her one bit anyways. Malcolm’s parents were a delight.
There came a whirlwind of introductions, a sea of names it would take Gwen years to master. The youngest was newborn, just weeks old and belonging to a harried, exhausted, and pleased cousin and his wife. Malcolm fawned over the baby while Gwen watched, listening with half an ear as Adam and Janet rattled off more names. He tickled the little one under its chin, and the child stared up at him, its mouth parting in a massive yawn. Malcolm glanced over and grinned, and oh Lord, her ovaries practically begged for him to drag her to a nice, mostly quiet corner of the house and just take her there. It was strange. As much as she enjoyed sex with Calvin – he was a phenomenal lover – she’d never had that sort of visceral “be my baby daddy right now, damn it” reaction to him. Now, with Malcolm, her body pulsed with it.
Allegedly, there was food, but the human tornado that was the Irvings wiped out everything in sight within minutes of Janet calling them to grab a plate. Afterwards, people began to blessedly trickle away, a few making promises to keep in touch even if they’d just met Gwen. The kindness was overwhelming. A few hours later, it was just Adam, Janet, their other children, and the newly engaged couple.
Malcolm and his siblings were all close in age. Brent, the oldest, would be graduating from college soon and aimed to become a PE teacher there in Minneapolis, just like his mom. Similarly, Eliza would be graduating from high school soon. When asked if she was going to college, she wrinkled her nose and shuddered, drawing a smack on the shoulder from Brent. She’d attended a high school job fair and found out one of the local factories paid new hires ridiculously well.
“Why wait?” Eliza asked, shrugging. “I can go into massive debt or start earning that green. Dolla dolla bill, y’all.”
“Ah, Malcolm’s hip-hop love infected you,” Gwen said. “If you need a cure, I’ve got country music out in the car.” The horrified look Eliza gave her made her laugh.
The youngest sibling, David, was just a year behind his sister, and hadn’t figured out what he’d be doing after high school yet. His grades weren’t the best, so he thought he might follow his sister to the factories in town.
Adam talked briefly about his twenty some-odd years as an EMT, and when probed, Janet chimed in about her time as a teacher. Malcolm added that she taught English as a second language too, and that spurred a brief conversation between Gwen and Malcolm’s mom in conversational Spanish. Gwen was fairly rusty but managed t
o trade back and forth a series of basic comments about Malcolm’s nervousness about what they might be saying. Janet tittered at that, but could take no more dilly-dallying around the topic and soon was begging – in English – to be told about their relationship, their plans, their everything. She wanted to know about Gwen’s family, her work as a vet, her plans to go back to college as soon as life settled back down. Though pleasant, the questions were nonstop and exhausting, and finally Malcolm had to pluck Gwen away from there to escape. They drove around for a while, taking in Malcolm’s old stomping grounds and eventually came back to crash on his old bed.
Touristy stuff waited until Saturday, because Janet was insistent on dragging Gwen shopping with her through Black Friday to get to know her better. They hit a dazzling number of stores and despite Janet’s promise they’d be home in time for lunch, they didn’t stagger into the house until the sun had nearly set. It was a fun time, but when they came back, Gwen looked as though she might throw some elbows, so once again, Malcolm stole her away and they found time to make love in the backseat of their car, cramped and uncomfortable, but mad to touch each other.
Saturday, along with Eliza and David, they walked much of Grand Avenue and the Nicollet Mall, enjoying the festive spirit of the shops switching over into full-blown Christmas magic mode. His siblings insisted on driving to see the Cathedral of St. Paul. The gorgeous architecture took Gwen’s breath away, as did the follow-up drive through the old Victorian mansions of Summit Avenue. The Mall of America was high on Gwen’s to-see list, but they just didn’t have time during that visit. It was a good day – a great one – and though Malcolm and Gwen couldn’t afford much more than the meals they bought, they loved window shopping and just being together with his family.
Far too soon it was Sunday and they were polishing off breakfast at the Irvings’, being escorted out by Adam and Janet with a cooler full of food and drinks, and heading west again, into a city neither of them were sure they wanted to live in anymore.
* * *
Gwen wrapped the throw tight around herself. It was an early Christmas present from Janet to help keep her warm on the return trip. Several other presents from Malcolm’s parents lined a box next to the cooler in the backseat. She looked forward to buying a little fake tree with Malcolm and putting the presents under it. Her own parents were probably setting up their own about that time. Despite the gut-wrenching pain of her dad’s words, she wished she was there with them for that. She loved setting up for Christmas.