19.
Wren
I knew exactly what Ollie would look like if he was clean-shaven, wore high-end clothing, and had a penchant for hair gel, because his brother, Darren, looked just like him.
“Ollie’s,” he said as he settled himself into a seat at the counter.
He winked. “I like the name. Any correlation . . . .?”
“There might be,” I said. “Can I get you a coffee?”
“I don’t suppose you have an espresso machine in here.”
“We don’t usually get too many customers interested in drinking espresso.”
“That’s a shame. They don’t know what they’re missing. Actually, espresso’s a little too harsh for my taste—I like a latte. Or, if I’m watching my waist line, a cappuccino with skim milk.”
I looked at him sitting there, his long, slender frame. “Right,” I said with a smile. “I can totally see why you might need to be watching your waist line. You’re a whale.”
“Girl, you didn’t see me three years ago when I was basically subsisting on caramel lattes and that pub cheese from Trader Joe’s. And pita chips, but the pita chips were really just a vehicle for the pub cheese. God, that sounds so disgusting now.”
I laughed. “Well, whatever you diet secret is, the pounds just melted off.”
He leaned forward, his face stoic. “Methamphetamine,” he said. He was only able to hold the serious expression for another second before his face broke out into a grin. “Kidding! I’d never do meth. Well, maybe I would if it didn’t do such awful things to your teeth and complexion. I’d be down for being able to stay up for days—think of how much more shit you’d be able to accomplish!”
“I like sleep too much to ever forfeit it,” I said.
He gave me the once over. “You certainly don’t need your beauty rest. My brother did all right for himself. I am assuming that he mentioned going to San Francisco?”
“He did.”
“And I’ll now go a step further and assume that you’re going to help talk him into it? I can tell that he’s on the fence.”
“You’re good.”
He smiled. “I know. But really. It’d be great if the two of you would come for a visit. Ollie might not love it, but I know you will. And I think he’ll appreciate the change of scenery, even if it’s just for a little while. All he’s ever known is either this town or prison. Talk about depressing.”
“I love this town,” I said.
“Sweetie.” Darren patted my hand. “No need to get defensive. Hell, if I wasn’t a gay man, I might not mind this town that much, either. But I really would love for the two of you to come out and visit me in the city. I was a little presumptuous and went ahead and talked to Ollie’s boss about him getting a few days off, and he agreed that he could go in a couple of weeks. For just a week, mind you, but I went ahead and bought the tickets. I figured—”
“Oh, you don’t need to buy us the tickets!”
“I know I don’t, but it’s my treat. They weren’t that expensive, anyway, so don’t even give it a second thought. I even took a trip down nostalgia lane and printed them out at the library, and I want to give them to you to hang onto. I figure if I give them to Ollie he might misplace them, or, they might conveniently blow away in the wind or something.” He dug around in the leather satchel he had placed in the seat next to him. “Here they are,” he said.
“That’s a nice bag.”
“It’s Kate Spade. Got it at Saks Fifth Avenue, where I will most certainly take the both of you and we can go on a little shopping spree, if you’d like. San Francisco’s changed quite a bit since Facebook and Twitter moved their offices in, but the shopping is still excellent. I know Ollie will hate every second of a shopping trip, so maybe we could send him to explore the Botanical Gardens or something while we make a day of it. There’s so much to do out there, so many great restaurants to eat at. You could even look at it like you’re going out there to see how other restaurants are doing things—not that I’m saying you need any improvement.” He cast his gaze around the dining room. “Well, there might be a thing or two I’d change about the décor . . . .”
I laughed and swatted him on the arm. I couldn’t remember ever feeling more comfortable with a person in such a short time. I felt like I’d known him for years. “I would love to do that,” I said. “And don’t worry about Ollie—I’ll convince him that he wants to go.”
Darren grinned. “I have no doubt you can,” he said. “Throw in a blow job or two if you have to.”
That evening, I was lounging around my house, thinking about what I should pack when I went to San Francisco. Ollie’s brother just reappearing again after so long had been an unexpected but very welcome development, and I was thrilled at the idea of getting to go on a little vacation with Ollie, to a city I’d always wanted to visit. Having Darren as our host would just make everything even more fun.
I was rummaging through my closet for my old suitcase that I had last used when I packed up my stuff and left my parents’ house when I heard my phone beep. Incoming message.
It was from Allison. Are you home? I’m coming over, she wrote. I need to talk. Please tell me you have some wine.
Affirmative on all counts, I typed back. She was over less than two minutes after I pressed send.
“Where’s the wine?” she asked, immediately going over to the refrigerator.
“Where it always is. Pour me a glass, too, while you’re at it. I have something to tell you, too.”
She poured a rather large glass and took a big gulp before setting it down and pouring me a smaller, more modest glass.
“What’s your news?” she asked. “I think I’d rather hear yours first.”
That should’ve been a clue, but I felt the grin stretching across my face before I could stop it. “I’m in love. I can’t believe I’m actually saying that out loud, but I am.”
“Aww!” Allison held her almost empty wine glass up to me. “Now that deserves a toast! Really? That’s certainly the best news I’ve heard all day.”
“Really. But what’s going on? We can talk about me being in love later.”
She put her glass down and rubbed her eyes. “Well, I can’t believe that I’m going to say this. How old I am? Wait, don’t answer that. I’m old enough to know better.”
I gave her a quizzical look. “What are we talking about . . .? I’m a little lost.”
She sighed. “I’m pregnant.”
“Oh!”
But I could tell by the look on her face that this was not something to be celebrating.
“I thought I was just getting a cold, then when that didn’t go away, I figured I was just chronically run down, but then yesterday, and this morning, I woke up and barfed, so I took a test. And despite the fact that I’m on the pill—and I remember to take it every day—I still somehow managed to get pregnant.”
“So, what are you going to do?” I asked as she killed the glass of wine.
“I’m obviously not keeping it,” she said as she poured a refill. “There’s no way. Three kids? I know plenty of women can handle it, but I am not one of them.”
“You’re a great mom,” I said. “You really are.”
“Looks can be deceiving, and, just because I’m a great mom to two kids, doesn’t mean it’ll be that way for three. The days of not sleeping through the night and changing eight million diapers are long past. I am not going back and doing that all over again. That part of my life is over. Finito.” She raised her glass again. “Which is why I am indulging in all these glasses of wine. Oh, and another thing—you can’t tell Nigel.”
The whole time I’d been nodding along, prepared to support her in whatever decision she came to. But I frowned when she said that about Nigel.
“Really?” I asked.
“You’re going to keep it from him?”
“I have to, Wren. And I know it makes me sound like a cold heartless bitch, but
you don’t know the man the way I do and though Nigel will tell you he’s
pro-choice and he’s even donated money to Planned Parenthood before, if it’s his child, well . . . it’s different,
then. It’ll turn into this huge awful argument and then he’ll try to stall me
or something until it’s too late. Or, I tell him, and tell him in no uncertain
terms that there’s not a fucking thing he can do about it, and he gets his
heart broken. I know it sounds dramatic, but that’s really how he’s going to
take it.”
“But don’t you think—”
“No.” She shook her head firmly. “I know. And do you know how? Because Annabel was not planned. She was an oops and I wanted to go ahead and get an abortion then because I didn’t want to start having kids until . . . well, until about now. I always figured I’d be in my early to mid-thirties. But then shit happens, as they say, and I let Nigel talk me into keep it. And yes, of course I’m glad I did and I can’t for a second imagine my life without Annabel. But the fact remains that I let him talk me into something that I still feel regret about. And you’re about the only person I could ever admit this to; anyone else I tried to talk to about it would just get stuck on the fact that it sounded like I regret my children, which I don’t. It’s two different things. But that is why I am not going to tell Nigel.”
“Okay,” I said. “That makes sense. And I’m here to support you however you want me to. I won’t say a word to him.”
“She should tell him,” Ollie said. I’d waited until the next day to tell him. We’d finished with my riding lesson and were sitting on lounge chairs underneath a box elder tree, drinking lemonade. The tone of his voice made me look at him in surprise. He clearly felt rather strongly about it, when I had just been expecting to have him listen and tell me, at most, that whatever Allison decided would be the best.
“Really?” I said. “Even though he’s probably going to insist she keeps it? Wait a second—you’re not pro-life, are you?” That had never occurred to me before, though maybe it should have.
“Is it a problem if I am?” he asked mildly.
“No.”
“That wasn’t very convincing.”
“Well, I am a firm believer that everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, except when those opinions happen to infringe on the rights of others. And it seems more men than women are pro-life—at least the ones I’ve encountered—which, if you ask me, is kind of fucked up.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said. “I do happen to think that it’s not any of my business—unless it is.”
“I don’t see how Allison’s pregnancy could be any of your business. It’s not even my business, really.”
“I know,” he said, “but I’m not talking about Allison. I’m just saying, no, I don’t think that a guy should be able to choose whether or not a woman is able to get an abortion. But at the same time, the guy in question does have a right to know. So, I think she should tell Nigel. It’s not really fair to him if she just goes and does it.”
There was something in
his voice that told me he was speaking from personal experience. “Did that
happen to you?”
He paused but the nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “With Carolyn. It was kind of
different, though, because by the time she found out, I was already in prison.
And then she tried to come see me, but I didn’t see anyone while I was inside;
I refused to. So, she would have told me if she could have. I guess that whole
thing was really my fault.” He took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. “We
only slept together that one time, but I guess that’s all it takes.”
“Do you think she would have done things differently, if she’d been able to tell you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We didn’t really talk about it. Well, she ripped me a new asshole over it, but I deserved that. I didn’t do things right with her at all. Not breaking up with her properly, not seeing her all those times she came down and tried to see me.” He gave me a little smile. “It’s not going to be that way with you, though. I want to do things right.”
“So far, so good.”
We finished the rest of our lemonade and he asked if I wanted to go for a little walk before I left. Just being around him made me happy, and I said yes. We walked down past the barn, where Ryan was just heading out with a group of riders. He looked our way but didn’t acknowledge us. We started walking along the fence line of the main pasture when I heard someone begin to shout.
I turned, thinking that something had happened with one of the people in Ryan’s group. That’s where I looked first, but they were all there, sitting atop their horses, looking at something. The woman shouted again.
“That horse just escaped!” she yelled, pointing.
Ollie’s head jerked in the direction, right in time to see Ditto careen past us at breakneck speed, nearly running into a guy and his young son.
“Shit,” Ollie said, and he took off. For a second, I thought he was going to try to run after Ditto on foot, which would have been foolish, but he instead ran over to the barn, where one of the other employees was halfway through getting a horse ready for a ride. The horse wasn’t saddled or wearing a bridle, just a halter and a leadrope, but, after grabbing a coil of rope by the barn door, Ollie somehow got up on there and took off.
We could see Ditto running, as though he realized he was free of any gates or corrals trapping him in. He was getting further and further away, but then there was Ollie, catching up to him. A crowd of people had gathered, and we all stood there watching, wondering what was going to happen, though part of me knew exactly what was going to happen: he’d lasso the horse, we’d all clap and cheer, and he’d put him in the corral, where he was supposed to be.
I could see that Ollie was swinging the rope above his head, and in a second or two he’d let it go and it would fall around Ditto’s neck, chase over. All of a sudden, though, Ditto veered sharply to right, as if he knew the rope was coming for him. A few people gasped.
“Something happened,” one of the guys next to me said.
How did he know? They were too far away for me to be able to tell anything, but then it seemed like he was right; Ditto was still running, but not in that smooth, fluid way he’d been just a few seconds ago. He was running parallel to us now, not away from us, and though my eyes were seeing it, my brain couldn’t quite seem to compute what was happening.
“Oh my god,” someone said, and someone else let out a cry.
Ditto, it seemed, was running on three legs. His right foreleg had snapped and the lower half was dangling grotesquely, hanging on it seemed, by a thread. And then Ollie was right there behind Ditto, and this time he managed to lasso him. He jumped off the back of his horse and I started to run toward them, even though I knew there was nothing I’d be able to do.
By the time I reached them, Ollie had gotten Ditto onto the ground, his knee pinned on the horse’s neck, holding him there. As I got closer, my stomach turned, but I couldn’t look away. I could see bone and blood, and what looked to be tendons or ligaments, shredded, the lower part of his leg bent away the rest of his leg at an almost ninety-degree angle.
“You need to go get Garrett,” Ollie said. “And tell him to bring his shotgun.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling tears well up in my eyes. Ditto lay there, his own eyes wide with fear and pain, and I could see the sheer amount of agony he was in. I turned and ran as fast as I could, but someone had already gotten Garrett and he must’ve known it would be bad, because he had his rifle.
He took one look at Ditto’s leg and nodded grimly. I looked back to where the crowd of people were, and I could see Marie and a few of the other ranch hands dispersing the crowd.
“You might want to go with them,” Garrett said. “I don’t know if you want to see this.”
I didn’t want to see it either, but even if I looked away, I’d still be able to hear it. I’d heard rifles go off before, but never so close, and my heart flew into my throat when Garrett fired the shot. Tears welled up in my eyes but I blinked them back. Ollie rose slowly, a blank expression on his face. They both stood there for a long time without saying anything. I knew I should probably walk away, but I couldn’t move. My feet felt rooted to the ground.
“What in hell happened?” Garrett finally said, anger in his voice like nothing I’d ever heard before.
“I don’t know,” Ollie said. “He got out.”
Garrett’s eyes blazed. “That much I can see. The whole damn ranch saw that.”
Ollie looked completely stricken. He started to say something but Garrett cut him off. “I’ve got to go get the tractor and dig a hole. You go get a tarp from the barn and cover this up.” He turned briskly and walked away.
“Ollie,” I said.
He shook his head, not meeting my eye. “I’ve got to go get that tarp,” he said. He walked toward the barn, and I knew not to hurry to catch up with him, I knew that what he needed right now was just to be left alone.