The Edge of Always 5 page

Nah. That’s not likely, considering this bottle was purchased a month ago and is still full. She’s the same old mom I’ve known all my life who’s never been fond of taking anything for pain beyond the harmless over-the-counter stuff.

I start to put it back when I find myself stopping just before the bottle touches the tiny shelf. I guess it can’t hurt. I do have a headache and that qualifies as pain, right? Right. I push down and turn to twist the childproof cap off and shuffle a pill into my hand. I swallow it down with a handful of water from the sink, dry my body off, and wrap my hair in the towel afterwards. Slipping back inside my robe, I tie it closed and go back into my room to get dressed. I hear Andrew talking in the kitchen, but his laid-back tone tells me it’s not my mom he’s talking to. He’s probably on the phone. When I hear him mention his brother Asher’s name, I’m satisfied that my assumption was right, and I get dressed.

I was going to have to tear Natalie a new one if it had been her again. She’s got to stop with that worrying stuff and plotting against me behind my back with Andrew.

After combing out my wet hair, I head toward the kitchen to join him.

“I know, bro, but I don’t think it’s a good idea right now,” I hear Andrew say, and I fall back a little so I don’t intrude too soon. “Yeah. Yeah. No, she’s doing better. She’s definitely not as messed up as she was after the first week. Umm-hmm.” I look around the corner to see him standing at the bar with his cell phone pressed to one ear and his other hand resting on the bar top. He nods here and there, listening to whoever is on the other end, which I get the feeling is Aidan. I’m right again when he says, “Tell Michelle I said thanks for the offer. Maybe we’ll visit in a month or two after Camryn’s had time to—No, maybe in the spring. Chicago is way too fucking cold for my blood in the winter.” Andrew laughs and says, “Hell no, bro, why do you think I prefer Texas?” He laughs again. Finally I round the corner completely, and he sees me.

“I would like to go,” I announce.

Andrew just stares at me for a moment and then cuts Aidan off. “Hold up a second.” He covers the mic part of the phone with the palm of his hand. “You want to go to Chicago?” He seems mildly surprised.

“Sure,” I say, smiling. “I think it would be fun.”

At first, he seems to be working through something in his head. Maybe he doesn’t believe me, or maybe he’s just considering the idea and all he can see is wind and snow. But then his face lights up and slowly he begins to nod. “OK,” he says, hesitates, and puts the phone back against his ear. “Aidan, let me call you back in a few, all right? Yeah. OK. Talk to you soon. Later.”

He runs his finger over the phone and hangs up. Then he looks across the room at me again. “Are you sure? I thought you’d want to stay here for a while.”

I walk into the kitchen and get a bottle of orange juice from the fridge. “No, I’m sure,” I say, taking a sip. “Sounds like it was Michelle’s idea.”

He nods once. “Yeah, Aidan said she’s been worried about you. She offered to put us up for a few days if we wanted to visit.”

I take another sip and set the bottle on the bar top. “Worried about me? Well, that’s nice of her and all, but I hope we don’t go up there and I find myself in the same situation as I’m in with Natalie here.”

Andrew shakes his head. “Nah, Michelle’s not like that.” He backtracks that comment to put more emphasis on just how true it is. “Michelle is nothing like Natalie.”

“That’s not what I meant, Andrew.”

“I know, I know,” he says, “but really, she’s all right.”

Knowing Michelle enough myself, I know he’s right.

Then that pill hits me out of nowhere, and suddenly my head feels like it’s sort of loose on my shoulders. My whole body from my toes to the center of the top of my head is tingling, and it takes me a second to straighten my vision. My hand comes down on the edge of the bar instinctively to hold myself up.

“Whoa.” I swallow and blink my eyes a few times forcefully.

Andrew looks at me curiously. “You OK?”

A smile stretches so far across my face I feel the air from the room hit my teeth. “Yeah, I’m totally fine.”

He tilts his head to one side. “Well, I haven’t seen you grin like that since I slid that ring on your finger.” He’s vaguely smiling, too, but his curiosity dominates it.

I bring my finger up into view and admire my engagement ring, which cost under one hundred bucks and probably isn’t considered an engagement ring by brides-to-be all over the country. I saw it in a little shop in Texas one day and just briefly mentioned how pretty it was:

“I love this,” I said, holding it up to the sunlight at just the right angle. “It’s simple and there’s something special about it.”

I handed it back to the woman behind the makeshift booth, and she placed it back in the glass case between us.

“What, you’re not a diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend type of girl?” Andrew asked. “No wedding rock so big you have to carry your ring hand around in a wheelbarrow?”

“No way,” I said and laughed. “Nothing meaningful about a ring like that. It’s usually about the price tag.” We walked out of the jewelry shop and along the sidewalk. “You said so yourself once, remember?”

“What did I say?”

I smiled and slipped my hand into his as we came to the street corner and took a left toward the café. “Simple is sexy.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. “That day in your dad’s house when you were preachin’ about why I shouldn’t spend an hour on makeup and hair, or whatever.”

I looked up to see him smiling, lost in the memory of that day, and then he pulled me closer.

“Yeah, I did say that, didn’t I? ‘Simple is sexy.’ Well, it is.”

“It’s also beautiful,” I said.

The day after that, Andrew came home with that same ring and held it out to me. Then in proper Andrew style, he got down on one knee and old-schooled it, except a little more dramatic than how it usually goes:

“Will you, Camryn Marybeth Bennett, the most beautiful woman on the planet Earth and the mother of my baby, do me the honor of being my wife?”

“I grinned and looked at him in a suspicious, sidelong glance and replied, “Just planet Earth?”

He blinked and said, “Well, I haven’t seen the chicks from other planets yet.”

Neither of us could resist a laugh. And so we laughed together. But then he became very serious, and his mood shifting like that only made mine do the same.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

The tears streaming down my face. The long, deep kiss I gave him, which caused us both to fall over onto the carpet, said yes a million times over.

Sure, he had asked me to marry him that day I told him I was pregnant, but on this day he did it right, and I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.

“Are you alive in there?”

Andrew waves his hand in front of my face.

I snap out of the past and wake up back in the present, high as a fucking kite from that pill. And I realize immediately how fast I need to gather my composure so he doesn’t know what’s going on.

Andrew

I guess the mood swings hang around even after… well, after pregnancy for a while. Camryn flip-flopped from average to frolicking in La La Land in under an hour. But she’s happy, it seems, and who am I to judge her on how she chooses to express it?

But the fact that she suddenly wants to leave Raleigh and go somewhere entirely different, even just for a weekend, is strange to me, and I just have to ask, “Why so soon? I mean I’m all for going if you want to, but I thought you wanted to be here, find an apartment and all that?”

“Well, I do…,” she says unconvincingly. She’s still vaguely smiling, which is so damn odd to me. “I just think we should go visit while we have the chance, because once I get a job here, finding free time on a weekend will be hit or miss.”

She brings her hands up near her stomach and folds them together, her fingers moving over the tops of her knuckles like she’s fidgeting.

“Are you—” I stop myself. I’m not going to do exactly what she said she wanted all of us to stop doing: worrying constantly about her and asking if she’s all right all the damn time. I smile instead and say, “I’ll call Aidan back and tell him and Michelle that we’ll be there this weekend.”

I wait for her to agree to the time frame, or not, and when she doesn’t say anything, I add, “So this means there’s no point in me going back to Texas for our stuff until after we get back from Chicago.” It was really more like a question. I have to admit, all of this uncertainty about where we’re going to be the next day is starting to make my head spin. It’s different from when we were on the road, living in the moment and defining the word spontaneous. At least then it was our goal to not know what the next day would bring. Right now, I’m not sure what’s going on.

She nods and pulls out a kitchen chair, where she never sits unless she’s eating breakfast. It just seemed like she needed to sit down.

“Wait,” I say suddenly. “Are you OK with getting an apartment? We can get a little house somewhere.” I guess this is my way of probing for answers as to what might be wrong with her without actually saying: What’s wrong with you?

She shakes her head. “No, Andrew, I don’t mind an apartment at all. That has nothing to do with anything. Besides, I’m not gonna let you spend your inheritance on a house in a state not of your choosing.”

I pull out the chair next to her and sit with my arms across the table in front of me. I look at her in that you-know-better-than-that way. “I go where you go. You know this. As long as you don’t want to buy an igloo in the Arctic or move to Detroit, I don’t care. And I’ll do what I want with my inheritance. What else would I do with it anyway, besides buy a house? That’s what people do. They buy the big stuff with the big stuff.”

We’re sitting on $550,000 that I inherited from my father when he died. My brothers got the same. That’s a lot of money, and I’m a simple guy. What the hell else would I do with money like that? If Camryn wasn’t in my life, I’d be living in a modest one-bedroom house somewhere in Galveston by myself, eating ramen noodles and TV dinners. The small bills I have would stay paid, and I’d still work for Billy Frank because I happen to like the smell of an engine. Camryn is a lot like me in this frugal sense, and that makes our relationship kind of perfect. But it does bug me sometimes how she just can’t seem to accept the fact that my money is her money, too. She wouldn’t even let me pay off the credit card she used on her bus trip when we met. Six hundred dollars on a card her dad gave her for emergencies. But she insisted—very stubbornly—that she pay it off herself. And she did with her half of our earnings from performing at Levy’s.

If anything at all bothers me about her, it’s this one issue. Taking care of her is what I’m gonna fucking do whether she likes it or not. And she’s gonna have to get over it.

“Let’s just enjoy a few days in Chicago, and when we get back, we’re going house shopping. Together.”

I stand up and push my chair in as if to say This isn’t up for debate.

She looks surprised, but not in a good way, and the weird smile has dropped from her face.

“No, if we’re going to buy a house then I’m going to save—”

I slash the air in front of me with both hands.

“Stop being so damn stubborn,” I say. “If you’re so worried about ‘your half’ of the money, you can always pay me back with sex and a striptease every now and then.”

Her mouth falls open and her eyes grow wide.

“What the hell?!” she laughs beneath her failed attempt at being offended. “I’m not a hooker!” She stands up and gently slaps the palm of her hand on the table, but I think it’s more to keep her balance than to protest.

I grin and start to walk away. “Hey, you brought that one on yourself.” I make it to the den entrance, and I glance back briefly over my shoulder to see that she hasn’t budged, probably still in shock. “And you’re whatever I want you to be!” I shout as I get farther away. “Nothing wrong with being my hooker!”

I catch a glimpse of her running toward me. I take off through the den, leaping over the back of the sofa like a goddamn ninja, and then out the back door of the house while she chases after me. Her shrill voice and laughter carries on the air as she tries to catch up.

*

Our plane lands at O’Hare late Friday afternoon. Thank God there’s not a mountain of snow on the ground. I take back one thing I said to Camryn, about moving to any place she wants to. I would definitely argue my case if she ever decided she wanted to live anywhere where snow and bitter cold is the norm in the winter. I hate it. With a passion. And I’m as freakishly giddy as Camryn seemed to be on Tuesday when I see a snowless landscape and feel the fifty-three-degree temperature on my face. A little warm for this time of year in Chicago, but I’m not complaining. Global warming? Hey, it’s not entirely a bad thing.

Aidan meets us in the terminal.

“Long time, bro,” I say, gripping his hand and hugging him. He pats my back a few times and looks to Camryn.

“Good to see you,” he says.

She hugs him tight. “You too,” she says, pulling away. “Thanks for inviting us up.”

“Well, you have to give that credit to my persistent wife,” he says and then raises a brow. “Not that I didn’t want you to come, of course.” He winks at her.

Camryn blushes, and I take her hand into mine.

Michelle has a late lunch made for us by the time we get to their house. The woman can cook. And she’s like Aidan and me when it comes to food, so it doesn’t surprise me that she made fat cheeseburgers with cheese dip on the side. And beer. I’m in food heaven right about now.

The four of us eat in the living room watching a movie on Aidan’s sixty-inch television and we talk during the boring parts about this and that. When we first got here, a small part of me was worried about Aidan or Michelle bringing up anything remotely close to the off-limits topic of Camryn’s miscarriage. But the bigger part of me knew they wouldn’t go there. I can’t even tell by looking at them that it’s on their minds at all. Aidan, probably not so much. He stays away from deep topics like that. And Michelle’s playing her cards right, making Camryn feel completely comfortable and not giving her any reason to have to think about what she wants to forget.

And I’ve never seen Camryn around Natalie the way she is right now with Michelle, so this is nice. Looks like this unexpected trip is turning out to be more beneficial than I imagined.

During one of our conversations, Aidan throws his head back and laughs. I’ll never fucking live that moment down with either one of my brothers.

“Yeah, Andrew was drunk out of his mind,” Aidan explains to Camryn to the constant rolling of my eyes, “when the modeling scout came up to him in my bar that night.”

Oh, here it comes, Aidan’s overly dramatic replay of that event. Camryn’s smiling from ear to ear and no doubt getting a kick out of watching me squirm next to her.

“The guy sat down beside Andrew on the barstool and said something about him having ‘the look.’ ” Aidan stops long enough to shake his head. “And before the guy could finish, Andrew turned to him and said with a crazy Charles Manson expression, ‘Dude, did you eat my fuckin’ peanuts?’ The look on that guy’s face was priceless. He was scared, even backed up like he thought Andrew was about to hit him.”

Camryn and Michelle laugh.

“Then the guy pulled a business card from his wallet and said, ‘Ever thought of modeling?’ and handed the card out to him. Andrew just looked at it, but didn’t take it.”

“I did take it,” I say.

Aidan smirks over at me. “Yeah, but not until after you so eloquently explained how you could never be a model because it’s for ‘guys without nutsacks’ and—”

“Yeah, all right, Aidan,” I interrupt and take a quick sip of my beer.

“Why have I never seen you that drunk before?” Camryn asks. She can’t wipe the grin off her face, loving every minute of this, and it makes me smile and give up the act. I reach out and skim her golden braid with the tops of my fingers.

“Well,” I begin, “you’ve never seen me that drunk because I’ve grown up since then.”

Michelle chokes out a laugh.

“Hey,” I say, pointing at her, “you’re one to talk, ’Chelle. I do recall the last time I was here, you dancing like a drunk stripper at the bar after a few too many drinks.”

Her mouth falls open. “I did not strip, Andrew!”

Aidan laughs and takes a swig of his beer. “I don’t know, if I hadn’t been there that night we might be divorced.”

Michelle whaps him across the face with the couch pillow she had been leaning against.

“I never would’ve stripped off my clothes,” she laughs. Aidan, unfazed by the attack, can’t stop smiling.

Neither can Camryn. I get lost in Camryn’s smile for a minute, glad to see she’s having such a good time.

Michelle adds, “You two are awful when you get together.”

“Hey, because you’re married to the dickhead,” I say, “it makes you fair game.”

“Yeah,” Aidan says. “Just be glad Asher’s not here, too, because he’s not as innocent as you think he is.”

Damn right he’s not. That little shit can be devious when he wants to be.

Michelle unfolds her legs from the cushion and stands up to clear away the plates and stuff from the coffee table. Camryn gets up, too.

“Well, I think I’ve been a Parrish long enough to know. Trust me.” She stacks the plates while Camryn helps her clear away the napkins and a few empty beer bottles.

“Why so quiet, Camryn?” Aidan says from the couch. “You may not be married to my brother yet, but you might as well be, and that makes you fair game, too.” He raises his beer toward her as if to toast and then takes another drink, grinning mischievously.

Smart brother I have. If he wasn’t so ugly, I’d kiss him on the mouth for that. Last thing I want is for Camryn to feel left out.

She smirks at him, balancing the stuff in her arms. “I guess it’s a good thing you have nuthin’ on me yet.”

“Yet,” he says, nodding once as if to underline the inevitable in that word. “Guess you have a lot of uncomfortable hazing to look forward to then, huh?”

Camryn wrinkles her cute nose at him and follows Michelle into the kitchen.

Camryn

“I’m really glad you invited us here,” I say behind Michelle as I toss the empty beer bottles into the trash.

Michelle sets the small stack of plates on the counter and starts to rinse them off in the sink before loading them into the dishwasher. “Hey, no problem,” she says, smiling at me. “I needed some company, to be honest. It’s been pretty stressful around here.” She places another plate into the dishwasher rack below.

I move closer and lean against the counter, crossing my arms. Is she giving me permission to probe by saying that? I’m not sure, but I’m comfortable with her enough that I go ahead and do it anyway.

“Your job taking a lot out of you?” What I really wanted to ask was: Everything OK between you and Aidan? remembering what Marna said about she and Aidan having some marriage troubles, but I think that’s probing a little too much too soon.

She smiles warmly and rinses off the last plate. “No, I think being at the clinic is therapy, if anything.”

I stay quiet, but attentive.

“That bar is taking a lot out of Aidan lately,” she goes on, “but he’s doing it to himself. He has more than enough employees to handle things, but he spends a lot of time there dealing with the things he’s paying everyone else to do.”

I look at her curiously. “Why?”

She shuts the dishwasher and glances toward the arched entryway that leads into the living room where Aidan and Andrew are talking and laughing and saying “Shit, bro” a lot. Then she turns back to me and says in a lowered voice, “He’s just upset with me.” She looks away and dries her hands off on a dishrag hanging from the cabinet knob above the counter.

That’s it? I keep quiet a few seconds just in case she’s the really-long-pause type, but she doesn’t go on. It frustrates me a little. Then suddenly she says, “I shouldn’t be bringing things like this up. Not after what you and Andrew went through. I’m really sorry.”

“No, Michelle,” I say, hoping to ease her mind. “Hey, I’m here to listen.”

For some strange reason, Michelle bringing up what Andrew and I “went through” doesn’t bother me like it always did when everybody else would do it. Maybe it’s because I know she’s not trying to force me to talk about it, or is afraid to be normal around me. Right now, it’s all about Michelle, and I want to be here for her.

She hesitates, glancing once more toward the living room, and sighs. “He wants children,” she says and I feel my heart tighten, but I don’t let it show in my face. “And I do, too—just not right now.”

“Oh, I see.” I nod and think about it for a second. “Well, it could be worse. At least it has nothing to do with an affair or that he has suddenly started cooking meth in the basement.”

Michelle laughs lightly and hangs the dishrag back on the cabinet.

“You’re right,” she says, her brown eyes lit up with her smile. “I never thought of it like that. I just wish he’d give me three more years at least. I’m around children all day, being a pediatrician. I love them. You have to, to do the kind of work I do, but I have a deeper level of insight when it comes to the responsibility of raising one. Aidan’s insight stops at Little League and camping trips, you know what I mean?”

I laugh gently. “Yeah.”

A very small part of me wonders if Michelle is saying this to me as her way of trying to ease my own pain, by telling me that raising a baby is hard. Maybe she is, but at the same time, I think it’s just me. Telling me what’s going on between her and Aidan and considering the issue, it would be hard not to say something like that.

“So, how is Andrew’s physical therapy going?”

The mood instantly shifts within the room, like we can both breathe a little easier now that we’ve gotten through the risky subject matter.

“He had some muscle weakness for a while, but he’s been doing great. Doesn’t really go to physical therapy much at all anymore.”

Michelle nods and pulls out a chair, too. “Well that’s good,” she says and there’s an awkward bout of silence.

Aidan and Andrew break that awkward moment when they both come into the kitchen with us. Aidan heads straight for the fridge while Andrew sits his heavy ass right on top of my lap.

“An-drew!” I whine and laugh at the same time, trying to push him off. “Lose a few pounds! Damn, baby, you’re squishing me!”

He turns on my lap, facing sideways long enough to squish my face in both of his hands and kiss me between the eyes.

“Get. Off!” I shout and finally he does. “You’ve got a bony ass.” I rub my hands across my legs to work out the muscles. Of course, his ass is nowhere near bony, but the look on his face was worth the dramatic lie.

“Like little boys,” Michelle says from the sink now.

I didn’t even notice her get up.

Aidan shuts the fridge with another bottle of beer in his hand and sits down in the chair Michelle just left. Andrew lifts me up as if I’m weightless and steals my chair, putting me on his lap afterward.

“Much better,” I say.

He wraps his arms around my waist. “So, Aidan and I were talkin’.”

Uh-oh, I don’t know if I like the sound of that.

“Yeah?” I ask warily, looking more at Aidan since I can’t really see Andrew behind me.

“This should be interesting,” Michelle jokes from the sink, facing us all with her hip propped against the counter’s edge.

Aidan sets his beer on the table and says, “Would you be interested in playing at my bar tomorrow night? Busiest night of the week. The stuff you two play will fit right in with the customers.”

The only time I’ve ever really felt this nervous playing in any bar or club was the first time I performed with Andrew at Old Point in New Orleans. I think it just makes me really nervous to sing in front of his family. In front of people I don’t know and will likely never see again. It’s not so nerve-wracking, but this, I have to say, is causing my stomach to twist into knots.

“I don’t know…”

Andrew squeezes me gently from behind. “Oh come on,” he says, trying to encourage me without being too pushy.

Be pushy, Andrew! Stop being so cautious! Be like you used to be when you told me to get on the roof of your car in the rain, or when you forced me to help change that stupid tire!

“Come on,” Aidan says with the quick backward tilt of his head. “Andrew says you’re quite the singer.”

I blush and wince at the same time. “Well, Andrew is also biased, so you can’t really take his word for it.”

“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Michelle adds and takes her own seat on Aidan’s lap. He playfully smacks her thighs with both hands, and it reminds me of how Andrew tends to do that same thing to me a lot. Aidan doesn’t look as much like Andrew as Asher does, but as far as everything else they share, you can definitely tell they’re brothers.

I think on it a moment and turn at an angle to see Andrew behind me, draping my arms around his neck and interlocking my fingers. He’s grinning from ear to ear. How can I say no to that?

“All right,” I agree. “I’ll do it. But I get to pick the music.”

Aidan nods his acceptance.

“Whatever you want,” Andrew says.

“How long would we play?” I ask.

“However long you choose,” Aidan says. “As little as one song if you want. It’s up to you.”

Andrew and I go to bed late after playing a few competitive games of Spades with Aidan and Michelle. And even though we’re in the spare room right across the hall from theirs, it’s not as awkward being here as it is at my mom’s. Only there isn’t any noise coming from their room like I know there was from ours during the past half hour. I tried to keep my moans and whimpers at a low volume, but, well, that’s not an easy thing to do when Andrew’s having his way with me.

I think I’ve been laying here for three hours since Andrew fell asleep. I hear the noise from the street outside and Andrew breathing softly next to me. Every now and then the light from a car will move across one section of the wall and blink out seconds later.

I can’t sleep. I’ve had a hard time falling and staying asleep since… well, for a couple of weeks. I try not to toss and turn too much so I don’t wake Andrew up. He looks so peaceful lying there.

Finally, I crawl quietly out of the bed and rummage inside my purse for one of those pills. They’ve been helping me sleep. And I like the way they make me feel. Because they make me feel something other than pain. But I’m being careful. I don’t have an addictive personality, and I’ve never taken any kind of drugs ever in my life. Though I did try pot a few times my senior year, but everyone did.

Though I admit I think a lot about what I’m going to do when I run out of these…

I shuffle one into my hand and look at it for a moment. Maybe I should take two tonight so I can get some deep sleep. I want to be refreshed and ready to perform tomorrow night at Aidan’s bar. Yeah, that’s a good enough reason to take one extra.

I swallow the pills down with the bottled water I left next to the bed, and I lie down next to Andrew, just gazing up at the ceiling and waiting for the effect to kick in. Andrew, feeling my movement, rolls over instinctively and lays his arm over my waist. I curl up next to him, carefully tracing the outline of Eurydice down his side. I do this until finally my head feels as light as air, and my eyes are filled with hundreds of tiny butterflies tickling the back of my eyelids and around my temples.

And I…

Andrew

Camryn slept way past lunch. When I finally got her to wake up, she did so with a migraine and a bitchy attitude. Cute, but bitchy. She barely had two beers last night but you’d think she drank a fifth of rotgut the way she’s lying in the bed with her face buried underneath the pillow.

“I brought you some Advil,” I say sitting down next to her. “Maybe you have a brain tumor.”

She knees me in the thigh. “Not funny, Andrew,” she says with a little moan in her voice.

I thought it was funny.

“Well, take these,” I say, removing the pillow from her head. She protests for a second before giving in.

She raises enough from the bed to wash them down with water and then collapses back onto the mattress, squeezing her eyes closed and rubbing her temples with her fingertips. I give her the pillow back, and she hides underneath it.

“Y’know, people usually get accustomed to drinking the more they do it, not the other way around.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 500