43. Keeley
KEELEY
I am staggering through my days.
I want to curl into a ball under a blanket and eat ice cream until it all feels bearable, but I can’t. I have a horrible job to get through, day after day, and a baby to prepare for.
Paul and Jacobson push Graham’s mattress against the wall when the rest of the baby furniture is delivered and politely suggest I let them know if I need help “moving anything out.”
When they leave, I stand in my daughter’s room. I thought I’d feel better, seeing everything in its place, but with the mattress against the wall and no splashes of color anywhere, it’s all a little grim.
I don’t want to be like my mom—trying to buy us a better life with money I don’t have—but looking at this room simply makes me feel like I’ve failed.
I guess I’d probably feel like that anyway, though.
“You look like shit,” Mark tells me when I bring him his breakfast.
I laugh. It’s kind of nice to have someone refusing to skirt around the obvious truth. Just like Graham did , I think, and then I’m sad all over again.
“I’m thirty-six weeks pregnant. I’m supposed to look like shit.”
“Tammy says—” he begins and I tune out the rest. Mark has found himself a lady friend who is slightly less homeless than him.
She lives in one of the tents over on Venice Beach and was, once upon a time, a dispatcher until her child overdosed and her husband left and she found herself in bad shape financially.
A series of hard blows at the wrong time…
I can see now how that would make you just walk away.
“You know…Graham really cared about you,” he says. “I mean, the guy was head over heels.”
“He had a contract written up,” I reply, assuming he’s forgotten. “He was going to try to buy my baby.”
Mark shakes his head. “Nah. He’d come down here, ostensibly to talk about the markets but really because he wanted to talk about you. You were his favorite topic and the one thing that made him smile. A guy doing that isn’t trying to buy your baby.”
I feel my temper ratcheting higher. “Mark, I saw it with my own eyes.”
“I don’t care what you saw. That guy was never, ever going to do anything to hurt you, and I think somewhere inside, you know that.”
I brace myself to stand—it’s nearly impossible at this point. “I need to get going.”
“Keeley, you know what people see when they look at me now? They see a guy they assume is on drugs, or crazy, or just lazy as shit. And maybe all that is true, but you knew I could be homeless, and might also have gone through some stuff, so you listened. You got so drunk that you married a stranger in Vegas, but you’d gone through some stuff too.
My point is that everyone has a story. And if you ever cared about Graham…
you at least ought to ask. Because maybe he has a story too. ”
I want to believe that. I can feel the way hope is already blooming in my chest, and I squash it flat immediately. If anything Mark’s saying was true, Graham would have tried to explain, or defend himself.
He didn’t care enough to do either.
“I’d better get going.”
“Did you sell the stuff from the storage unit?” he asks.
Last week, at his suggestion, I pulled some of the unworn or barely worn designer things from the storage unit and put them up for sale—three pairs of Louboutins that hurt too much, the Tom Ford dress I never wore once, a few Hermes bags, including the Birkin.
I need a safety net for the not unlikely possibility that Fox fires me. I’m not asking Graham for shit.
“The Birkin already sold. I sent it out yesterday.”
“That had to hurt a little.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t bad.”
All that matters going forward is this baby, and nothing else.
Unless Graham finally comes to his senses and tells me why he fucking did it. And then maybe I’ll allow him to matter too.
I guess I haven’t squashed all the hope after all.
“Sorry we kept you waiting,” I tell the woman sitting on the exam table the next afternoon. I’m fifteen minutes late, which is what happens when you’ve got double the number of patients any doctor could squeeze into a three-hour period. “I’m Dr. Connolly. What can I help you with today?”
She smiles. “I’m Ally. We’ve actually met before. Last winter. You were outside Native Planet with Drew Bailey. I guess you don’t remember. It was pretty early in the night, like nine.”
I gulp. She’s referring to the night I married Graham which is, obviously, quite a blur. And she’s claiming we were still in LA at nine. So how the hell did we get to Vegas before midnight ? “Oh, sorry. It was kind of a crazy night.”
She nods. “It was. Anyway, right before the fight with your boyfriend—Graham, I think?—you told me I should get this mole looked at, so here I am.” She stretches out her forearm, and I know immediately that Drunk Keeley was right.
“Do you see how the borders are irregular?” I ask. “We need to do a biopsy.”
She shrugs. “Sure, whatever.”
I turn to the nurse assisting me and ask her to get the lidocaine.
“So are you still with that guy?” Ally asks, glancing at my stomach.
My throat tightens. I wait for the sadness to pass, knowing it won’t, entirely. “Um, no. But given that you saw me fighting with him even last January, it’s probably for the best.”
“Oh…I meant the fight he got in, when that guy tried to kiss you? Man, I thought he was going to kill him.”
I’ve just inserted a needle into the lidocaine but stop to stare at her. “I don’t remember that.”
She tilts her head, dumbfounded that I could have forgotten. My ability to appear sober when I’m not strikes again. “Remember that guy just grabbing you? He, like, threw you against the wall, and Graham had him on the ground in seconds. It was crazy.”
I smile weakly as I return to what I was doing. I’m a little embarrassed both my nurse and my patient are aware of this story, especially when I’m not . I must look extremely classy right now. “Yet somehow, I managed to notice a mole on your arm. One-track mind, I guess.”
“I wanted to talk to you about it but you guys went around the corner, and then like two seconds later, Drew grabbed you both and pushed you into a limo.”
I stare at her. I should play this off and act like I remember, but I’m too stunned. “She did?”
Even as I ask the question, though, I’m starting to put some things together. Like Drew telling me how “relieved” she was. Like how she’d “heard an earful” from her husband, but “all’s well that ends well”.
Like the fact that we were still in California at nine but somehow got to Vegas well before midnight…which we could only have managed by private plane.
Something Drew would have on speed dial.
Drew calls me back within the hour.
“I heard about you and Graham. I’m so sorry. You guys were so cute together the other week, at Ben’s house. I really thought it was all going to work out.”
Maybe it’s my imagination, but she sounds guilty.
“Actually, this is related: that night, the night we went to Vegas? I don’t really remember how we got there.”
She is very quiet, for a long moment. “I’m so sorry,” she finally says. “You seemed okay. I mean we were all drinking, but according to Josh, I was the drunk one. You don’t remember anything ?”
I run a hand over my face. I can no longer claim I regret getting that drunk because I wouldn’t have this baby coming if I didn’t. But it’s probably going to remain embarrassing for a good long time. “Very little. Did you…get us a plane?”
She sighs. “Yes. Fuck . I took care of the plane; I took care of getting you to the airport before you’d even agreed .
I even had my assistant arrange everything in Vegas.
I was drunk and felt like I was playing fairy godmother, and it wasn’t until I woke up that I realized it might have all been a really bad idea. I’m so, so sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault. I mean, clearly, I was the one pushing to marry a stranger.”
“Oh,” she says. “Not really. I mean, you were on board, but the whole thing started with Graham.”
“ Graham ?” I repeat. That can’t be right. Graham Tate was coerced into this nonsense by me and me alone, possibly with Drew’s assistance.
“Wow,” she says. “You really don’t remember anything, do you? It was so cute. He said he knew he was going to marry you the first time you ever spoke on the phone.”
If things hadn’t ended the way they did, I’d think that was the most romantic story ever. But they did end, so now it’s just really sad.
And really confusing.