Chapter 7 Easton #2
“Where’s the goddamn remote?” my dad demands. He’s slurring so badly I’d need an interpreter if I hadn’t grown up with this shit, and he probably drove home like this too. “I didn’t ask you to clean in here, and now the fucking remote is gone.”
Do not react. Do not react. Do not react.
I cross the room to the shelf below the TV, grab the remote, and toss it to him.
“Why the fuck was it on the shelf?” he demands. “That’s not where it fucking belongs.”
“I was vacuuming the couch and cleaning the coffee table, so I moved everything while I did it.”
“Then you should have moved it back!” he bellows. “Take some goddamn responsibility, for once in your life.”
Are you really going to lecture me about responsibility, you drunk prick?
Are you really going to lecture me after you drove drunk over the bridge, a bridge kids bike on every goddamn night?
I know better than to say it aloud, but not well enough to keep my fucking mouth shut the way I should.
“Noted,” I reply. There’s too much sarcasm in that single word I uttered, and I know it before my mouth has even closed.
He whips the remote at my face. I don’t have time to duck, to block it. I manage to swing my head to the right so it hits my cheekbone instead of my nose, but that’s not much better.
Bull’s-eye, asshole. Well done.
The one goddamn thing I didn’t want was a fucked-up face at the wedding, and now there will definitely be a bruise.
Sometimes, in Boston, my luck at escaping this life hits me like a bomb blast—sudden, shocking, too huge to be understood.
Like when Thomas and I are having some serious conversation about a point-one degree temperature drop on his Oura ring or the way our favorite restaurant took a beloved item off the menu, and I recognize what a privilege it is to care about something so stupid.
And then a moment like this one arrives, and it’s as if I was simply playing the role of a normal girl and that it was too good to last. That there are people who get to sit around discussing a fractional change in body temperature and people who get remotes thrown at their heads or have brothers making them commit felonies and I’ll always be the latter, no matter who I marry, no matter how many degrees I get.
“Go upstairs,” he says. “Get out of my fucking face.”
I turn on my heel. Thank God I’m leaving tomorrow.
I get up earlier than necessary the next morning to start camouflaging the bruise.
I know this routine well by now: orange concealer first to neutralize the color, followed by two rounds of my regular shade.
My dad has only hit me when he’s drunk. Sean and Kevin, however, were happy to hit me whenever the mood struck, and it struck fairly often.
When I’m done, I carry a mirror to the window to check my work in the sunlight. Someone could see it if they looked carefully. Fortunately, it’s on the right side of my face, not visible to Elijah if I’m in the passenger seat.
I knock on my dad’s door and walk in. “I’m heading to New Orleans early with Elijah. So bye.”
He opens one eye. “Don’t tell him I threw the remote,” he says.
I wouldn’t. I don’t spill my family’s dirt, but why the fuck would my father suddenly be worried about Elijah? And why can’t he just be the tiniest bit sad? The tiniest bit remorseful?
“Elijah wouldn’t care.” Even as I say it, though, I suspect I’m lying. The enduring mystery of what occurred between the two of us is the way he seems to care a great deal while his words insist otherwise.
“Just don’t tell him,” my father says. “And don’t come back.”
He’s said it before. I don’t know why the fuck that hurts as much as it still does.
I wait outside the house—I’ve never invited Elijah in once—until he pulls up in a huge Yukon that looks brand new.
..and expensive. I throw my suitcase and garment bag into the back, then slide in beside him.
“I never took you for the guy who’d continue living with his mom so he could buy multiple cars. ”
He glances over with a quirk of his brow. “It’s a rental, but I’m glad you’re already establishing how the next few days are going to go. Anything else you want to put out there?”
“I would also like to re-establish that you were a dick to me five years ago,” I reply.
“Tell you what, Easton,” he says, throwing the car into reverse. “You get to bring that up once a day for the rest of the trip. I know it’ll be tough, only whining once a day about something that happened that long ago, but that’s my limit.”
This limit feels a little unfair. I’m just trying to address the elephant in the room so we can stop thinking about the elephant, and I can either laugh about what happened or cry. I’m choosing to laugh, albeit somewhat at his expense.
Seems to me he should be grateful, if anything.
“Fine,” I reply. “But that didn’t count as my one for today.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m not taking shit from a girl who dressed up for a fucking road trip. Though I should have expected it.”
The mood was semi-playful, at least for me, until this moment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He sighs through his teeth as if he’s trying not to take the bait when he’s the one who threw it. “It means you don’t look like yourself anymore. You look like you’re auditioning for The Real Housewives.”
Unbelievable. I look good. I look better. But nothing is enough for him. “How would you have any idea what I’m supposed to look like now, Elijah? It’s been years. A lot has changed.”
“Maybe,” he growls, “but no one changes that much without a push.”
Yeah, and maybe you’re part of what pushed me. The words rest on my tongue but I hold them in. I don’t want to use my one potshot about his fuck-up this early in the day.
We hit I-95 and follow the signs for Savannah. There was a time in my life when any sign for another city thrilled me. Boston once seemed as exotic as Paris or Sydney or Tokyo, but you get used to anything, bad or good.
“I need to book us something for tonight,” I say, pulling out my phone. It’ll have to be an Airbnb. Otherwise Melissa will note the paucity of the hotel when she’s relaying this story to everyone back at school.
It only occurs to me in this moment that maybe she and I aren’t actually good friends, if I’m counting on the fact that she’ll gossip about me relentlessly.
“I already got us a place,” Elijah says.
There’s a curdle of dread in my gut. I hope it wasn’t expensive. I won’t eat for a month to pay for it, but if Thomas doesn’t come running back, I’ll be too sick to eat anyway.
I bite my lip. “Just let me know the cost and I’ll Venmo you.”
He laughs to himself. “I’ve got it, Easton.”
“I’m not letting you pay for a place we’re only staying in because I demanded it. We could be staying for free with your grandmother.”
His nostrils flare. “I’m not letting you pay for a place on a trip you’re only taking to help save my grandmother’s life.”
“If something actually goes wrong with your grandmother,” I say, leaning my head against the window, “you’ll realize that this was not money well spent.”
“Are you capable of holding my grandmother’s hand while I call nine-one-one?” he asks. “Because that would probably be enough.”
I snort. “Even if your grandmother was dying, she would not want to hold my hand.”
He doesn’t argue, simply shrugs. “Fine, then you can call nine-one-one. And she doesn’t hate you. I think when you were small she just had some concerns.”
Okay, now he’s done it. My temper flares the way it always has at even the slightest hint of criticism.
It’s not an admirable trait. “Concerns? What kind of concerns do you have about a seven-year-old?” Because I still remember that turned-up nose of hers every time I walked into the cottage, or the way she’d say, “isn’t it time you were getting home, Easton?
” I’d never once worried about overstaying my welcome until his grandmother came to visit.
“You’re not gonna love my answer, but she was worried you’d be a bad influence on Kelsey.”
“At age seven? Was it my rampant cocaine use, or my OnlyFans side hustle?”
He shifts uncomfortably. “It was more about your family.”
I fight that thing inside me that wants to lash out, that wants to argue that she didn’t even know my family, and if she wasn’t such a stuck-up bitch...
But why am I still defending them? My brothers and my dad have done terrible things.
Sean spent two years in jail and will certainly spend another few years there eventually.
My dad and Kevin aren’t much better. Maybe it’s just that I’m one of them, and a hit to one of us is a hit to us all.
Maybe it’s that I’ve done some bad things myself, and I understand the fact that sometimes you feel like you don’t have a choice.
Carol fucking Cabot has always had money. She’s always had a choice.
“I’d like to point out that she was still being an absolute bitch even as I was heading to Harvard.”
Elijah glances away. “She was old. She probably just had it in her head.”
And now she’s older, and even with all of my degrees, I guarantee she’ll still be acting like I’m not good enough for the Cabots. “Then you might want to tell her that the nine-one-one call is entirely dependent on me.”
He laughs. “Are you threatening to not save the life of an old woman just because she’s unpleasant to you? Maybe she had better judgment than I’d thought.”
“I told you this money was not well spent.”
We grin at each other the way we once would have. His dimple flickers to life and my heart squeezes. Already, it’s getting harder to remember we’re not supposed to be friends. Or more.
Soon, the signs for Savannah are replaced by signs for Jacksonville, and I turn toward him again. “Do you remember that trip we took down here?”
There’s a tick in his jaw. “Vaguely.”