I thought of Trevor, asleep, like a little child in my little place between the truth and denial. I guess we all have things we hide from ourselves and scramble, desperately, to hide from the world. It’s just that Jared made it so that Jane couldn’t hide it and at the same time, forced her to try. I wouldn’t say a word about her pregnancy until she said something, but she just stared at me with eyes so sad and so ashamed that I wanted to reach out and give her a hug. So I did.
She tensed in my arms so I pulled back and just smiled the fakest, most pretend-sincere smile I could manage and said, “We need to get together more often.”
Brushing a stray strand of hair out of her face, the ends of her overgrown haircut split and frizzy, she smiled a wan, bland grin. She looked so tired, so beaten down and literally beaten up. “I’d like that, too,” she said, breathlessly, as if it were some new thing that I’d brought up for the very first time, like we were brand new friends getting to know each other. “Let me see when I can,” she said and a genuine smile pranced across her lips as she turned and wrote some numbers down on an inventory sheet.
The next half hour was filled with school kids coming in and out, buying soda and candy and crap, littering the bottom of their cars, floating along on joyrides because around here that’s about all you could do if you weren’t in an after-school sport. A few short years ago, we were those kids and it pained me to think about the fact that we would never be that way again. I vowed to never be the way that Jane was, trapped and miserable.
As she went to leave I reached out again and touched her forearm. Her brown, stringy hair floated in front of her face and she kept sweeping it back with one hand, brown eyes ringed by dark circles, her skin paler than I remembered. She carried a little bit of pudge around her hips but otherwise was thinner than we’d been in high school, which surprised me. I took a good, long look at her for the first time in what felt like forever and said, “Tell Lucas his Aunty said ‘hello’.”
“I will. You take care of yourself, Darla.”
“You too, Jane.”
My mouth was bursting to tell her everything about Trevor, to tell her all about Joe, about the hidden BMW in my trailer parking lot, the purple passion place that she would be thrilled to know existed. I’d talked about doing something like that for years and had only recently actually executed it. There were so many things I wanted to share with her, so much I wanted to explore with a friend, and the impact of choosing to be so self – sufficient was starting to take its toll on me. If my one friend could evaporate into the shadows of Jared so quickly, leaving me a recluse without a confidante, then maybe that said more about me then it said about Jane.
Jared, on the other hand. I knew that two phone calls, one to my Uncle Mike and one to just about any guy who’d ever liked Jane in high school, could make it so that Jared learned a lesson that would at least buy Jane enough time to get through her pregnancy without being struck like a dog. I also knew that it could backfire. If Jared got the shit kicked out of him by a crew of guys at the bar he was smart enough, clever enough – really, sociopathic enough – to figure out how to turn it to his advantage.
There had to be a different way to disgrace him, to either make him either leave, which was about as likely as me leaving this town, or to make Jane leave. I didn’t think she would. The Bible says, the Bible says, the Bible says had become her mantra lately and the Bible seemed to be Jared. Whatever he said the Bible said, she took to heart, and she had decided that she just wasn’t submissive enough. At least, that’s the rumor I heard. I wouldn’t know it from the horse’s mouth because Jane had turned into a ghost of her former self. Was that my future if I stayed?
Over the next few hours customers came in, customers went out, and I operated on autopilot, knowing the job so well that I could have done it in my sleep while whacking off as I watched Magic Mike… ew, that’s one hell of an image isn’t it? I think I need to revise that in my own mind. At any rate, you know what I’m saying. The job was dull, robotic, and it didn’t take more than three brain cells to do it – which described pretty much everything in my life at the moment…except for Trevor.
I finished my shift, handed the keys off to my boss, who had come in to fill in to keep labor nice and low. As we changed drawers, I smiled to myself and then my phone rang. “Hello?”
“Hi, Darla?” It was Joe. That was about the last voice I thought I’d hear on my phone.
“How’d you get my number?” I asked, confused.
“You had Trevor call me,” he said, slowly.
“Oh, oh, yeah, you’re right. What’s up?”
“Can you come get me here at the hotel?” I hadn’t thought about that but it made sense.
“Sure. Sure. I’m gettin’ off shift right now. Gimme ten minutes.”
“Will do. Thanks. Bye.”
That was probably the most perfunctory conversation I’d had with a human being in years. That was just about all we needed to say to each other. I climbed in my car, unbuttoned my work shirt, threw it in the back seat and made sure that I looked reasonably decent, because after I picked up Joe I’d be swinging back to meet up with Uncle Mike and to find Trevor.
It really was close to the end now. I thought about Jane and Jared as I drove toward the truck stop. If I could just avoid being trapped then I…I what? I’d live like this? Shit. Maybe I was trapped, too, and just didn’t know it. It didn’t take a baby or two or an abusive husband to make you feel like you had no options. It didn’t take a disabled mama or no money either. It was all about your own core, what you thought you could do. Trevor and Joe were just as trapped as I was. The question was: how could we break free?
* * *
I wasn’t looking forward to the trip between Joe’s hotel and picking up Trevor. The last thing I needed was another ten minutes of grief in my life, and snobbish grief was really the last thing I needed. So, as I drove to the hotel, I paused and realized that what I really did need was a quick phone chat with my aunt. I had Josie on autodial and thankfully she picked up, the phone ringing twice before I heard her say, “Darla, what the hell are you doing calling me?”
“Oh, just slumming.”
She laughed. “You OK? You finally going to take me up on my offer to move out here?”
“Nope,” I said. Yup, I thought. Where the hell did that come from? There was no way I could actually move out to Boston. She’d been trying to get me out there for years. Mama needed me but now, with Trevor living right outside the city and Joe…
“That’s not what I want to talk about.”
“You talk about what you want to talk about, then.”
“I need to talk about a man.”
“A man? How can you talk about a man? There aren’t any men out there.”
“No kidding,” I muttered, “but I actually managed to find one.” Maybe two.
“So, who is this man you found?”
“I literally found him, Josie. He was naked, wearing nothing but a guitar on the side of the road.”
Silence.
“What?”
“I’m not kidding.” Why did I always have to say that to her, all the time, and Mama too? “I’m not kidding” had become as commonplace in my daily vocabulary as “Sure, let me help you.”
“He was just standing there on I-76, wearing a guitar and a collar and sticking his thumb out, and so I stopped.”
“Did you fuck him?”
“Wow, way to be blunt Josie. Yeah, of course.”
“How can I be blunt if I’m right?”
“You can be both.”
“I often am but don’t accuse me of being too blunt when, in the end, the direct question I’m asking relates exactly to what you’ve actually done.”
“I don’t want to talk about that, either,” I snapped.
“So, what do you want to talk about?”
“I want to talk about this man.”
“What’s his name?”
“Trevor.”
“Trevor what?”
“Trevor Connor,” I said, struggling to keep the grin out of my voice.
“Trevor Connor…where have I heard that name? Why is that so familiar?” she said. I paused, giving her a taste of her own silence. “Wait a minute!” she practically screamed. “Trevor Connor? From Random Acts of Crazy?”
“Yup.”
“Darla.” Calm seeped into her voice, the kind of placid, dulcet tones you use with a florid schizophrenic. Or a drunk redneck.
“Yeah?”
“Are you on something? Because you don’t just conjure a naked man on the interstate, wearing nothing but a guitar, who happens to be the lead singer of your favorite band. Honey, do you need me to call someone?”
“I swear to God, Josie, I am not making this up.”
“Okayyy,” she said, skeptically. “And you fucked him?”
“Yup.”
“Any good?”
“Hoo boy,” I said.
“That good?”
“Yup.”
“So what’s your problem?”
What’s my problem? I thought. What’s my problem? Great question. That’s why I called her, right? She always knew how to get to the heart of something. The problem was that I didn’t know what my problem was. So, I said that.
“My problem is that I don’t know what my problem is and Trevor is about to leave any minute now and I’m going to pick up his friend Joe, who – ”
“Joe? Joe as in Joe Ross, the bass player?”
“Yup.”
“Quit saying yup.”
“Yes, ma’am. Is that better?”
“Actually, yes.”
“OK then, ma’am.”
“You’re telling me that you’re hanging out with the bass player and the lead singer of your favorite band in the middle of Peters?”
“Yup – yes, ma’am, I mean,” I corrected myself.
“You know they’re from Boston, right?
“Well, outside of Boston, some suburb named Sudborough.”
Josie snorted. “More like Snob-borough.”
“I picked up on that,” I said as I pulled into the hotel, right in front of Joe’s room.
“Are they being assholes?” she said, coldly. “Because if you need me to – ”
“What? What are you going to do, Josie. You’re a hundred pounds soaking wet. You gonna go and raspberry them to death? Shake your finger in their faces extra hard?”
Silence.
“Fair enough,” she said. Her voice softened, “So, what’s really going on?”
“Well, you knew I already had a fangirl crush on Trevor so the problem is that now that I’ve spent most of the past twenty-four hours with him, I don’t want to let him go.” I could feel the mournful tone in my voice and willed away the choking, salty tears that filled my throat.
“So, don’t.”
“Don’t what?”