Chapter 13
Graham
“Graham!”
I could hear my kid sister’s squeal from a hundred feet away and watched as students’ heads turned to follow Marley tearing across the school lawn.
Bracing myself for impact, I laughed, pleased that despite being one of the “popular” girls in school, it had never deterred her from unabashedly showing her love for her big brother.
Especially today, seeing as I’d flown from New York to Colorado to surprise her on her eighteenth birthday.
“Happy birthday, kiddo,” I said as she leapt on me in a tackle hug.
“Hey,” she said, quickly letting me go and standing back, hands on hips. “I’m officially an adult now. No more of this kiddo stuff!”
“You paying for your phone and car insurance?”
She glared.
“Kiddo it is,” I said.
“Your reasoning is stupid. I don’t have a job to pay for that stuff.”
“Fine. Let’s go with degenerate.”
Her bubblegum pink lips formed a shocked “O” and she took a swipe at me, which I easily ducked.
“Miss Forrester,” a stern female voice called. “We don’t hit others.”
“But he’s my brother,” Marley whined while I laughed, put her in a headlock, waved good-naturedly at the teacher standing by, and pulled my little sister along with me to where I’d parked my rental car as she punched me repeatedly in the thigh until I let her go.
“Are you here until my graduation?” she asked, throwing her backpack into the back seat and smoothing her hair as she got into the passenger seat.
“No. Just for a couple days,” I said, sliding behind the steering wheel. “But I’ll be back.”
“You’d better be.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah!”
She reached forward and paired her phone with the car and then turned up the volume to a decibel level that threatened to shatter our eardrums.
I turned the volume down again and she pouted for a good half second before launching into her plans for her birthday party, which was happening on Saturday, two days from now.
I wouldn't be here for that though. I’d be leaving that morning, escaping before I could be put to work on decorations or made to sit through a fashion show while Marley pretended to need my opinion and then ignored every single one I gave.
“Smart man,” my stepmother, Lisa, had said when I’d told her and my dad about my early flight out.
My father had leaned into me quietly. “Take me with you,” he’d begged.
“So then,” Marley said now. “We’ll have cake and all that boring stuff to please the folks of course, and presents—”
“To please you,” I broke in.
“Obviously. And then movies and music and snacks…”
She went on and on, and I grinned, letting her words and excitement wash over me.
For the first sixteen years of my life I’d felt I’d missed out on having a younger sibling, but had made my peace with it.
So when Marley came along, I’d not known at first what to think of her.
But one look at that impish face, which had only grown lovelier with each year, and I was hooked.
The doting big brother, reporting for duty.
I tried not to spoil her, but it was hard.
She was intelligent, funny, and had more style in a single discerning raised eyebrow than I did in my entire body.
Not only that, but she saw people. Really saw them.
Not in the same way I did, which she said was through some romanticized hazy lens, walking across misty moors.
She could tell a person’s character within seconds of meeting them.
Which was why I’d never live down marrying Nadia.
Marley had warned me, but I’d blown off her concerns with a “you’re too young to understand” na?veté that had bitten me, quite hard, in the ass when I’d learned my now ex had been cheating on me for the better part of a year.
Or, to put it another way, for most of our marriage.
There had been no “I told you so” from my little sister, which had been kind of her, since I’d been shell-shocked, demoralized, and heartbroken.
But anytime she got even a whiff of a woman in my life, she became a bloodhound keen on the scent of female pheromones.
Because she didn’t just read other people. She could read me as well.
I pulled up to a stoplight and felt her eyes on me.
“Are you seeing someone?” she asked, turning down the volume so that it was still loud, but with only minimal bleeding from the ears.
“No,” I said, keeping my eyes on the intersection. It wasn’t a lie, but for some reason I still felt I’d been caught out.
“Interested in someone?”
I took a long breath in, held it, and exhaled before turning to her scrutinizing glare.
“No. Why?”
“Because I’ve been blasting sappy love songs for the past ten minutes and you haven’t said a word. Normally you’d threaten to embarrass me with one of your butt rock songs from prehistoric times if I didn’t turn it off.”
“I’m evolving as a man,” I said and turned back to stare imploringly at the traffic light.
“Bout time.”
“I’m offended.”
“Sorry. You’re right. You’re the most evolved man I know. Wanna talk about my menstrual cycle?”
The light mercifully turned green and I simultaneously hit the gas and turned the volume back up.
We pulled into the illustrious cul de sac my father and Lisa had moved into when I’d left for college.
Marley was a whirlwind of movement as she grabbed her things and bounded towards the front door, shouting over her shoulder, “Don’t think you’ve knocked me off the scent.
Something is up with you and I’m going to find out! ”
I groaned and slid from the car, shutting the door and locking it before following along, meeting my dad’s grinning face as he waited for me on the threshold of the house.
“Already got her hooks in you?”
“She’s relentless.”
“She on to something?”
“Is she ever not?”
He laughed and wrapped an arm around my shoulder as we walked to the kitchen together, the smell of something baking filling the air and making my mouth water.
“Marley’s birthday cake,” my dad explained. “As well as two different kinds of cookies.”
“How are you still so fit?” I asked, eyeing my dad’s physique admirably.
“See that pool outside?” my dad asked with a laugh. “And the home gym? And the bikes and kayaks?”
Lisa, a successful attorney-turned-baker, owned a high-end bakery in Boulder.
When she wasn’t there, she was often trying out new recipes at home.
I’d received overnighted boxes of treats at least twice a month for years, which I’d had to stop when I’d married Nadia because, “I cannot have that homemade, country-bumpkin, sugar-filled junk in my home”.
As soon as she moved out, the boxes had resumed.
Marley’s birthday cakes had never been made by anyone but her mom. Beautiful creations that you almost felt bad about digging into. Until you got a taste of them. And then all the guilt would quietly slip away as you began unabashedly shoving them into your face.
A timer rang out and Lisa appeared, flour in her dark hair, waving a yellow, ladybug-decorated potholder at us, before turning off the timer and opening the oven.
The scent of chocolate wafted over.
“Help yourself,” she said, nodding toward a plate of peanut butter sandwich cookies. “There’s strawberry frosting inside.”
“How have you done all this in the time I was gone?” I asked, snagging a cookie and taking a bite.
I’d only left two hours ago, after flying in this morning and then going to peruse a couple of bookstores before surprising my sister at school.
In that time, Lisa had somehow baked two layers of cake, two different kinds of cookies, and there was a bowl of frosting sitting in wait on the end of the counter.
She shrugged, her freckled nose crinkling as she smiled.
It was interesting to me that my father ended up with Lisa after being with my mother, who’d had a similar look, temperament and style, although she couldn’t bake to save her life. Somehow, whenever she’d tried to make cookies, they’d spread so thin we’d always joked she’d made pancakes instead.
Why does one pick someone so similar when it clearly didn’t work out the first time?
Or the second… or the third…?
It was this very thing that scared me about getting into a relationship again.
I had chosen, or had been chosen, by women who found me charming and interesting in the beginning, and then tried to change me, got angry when I didn’t adhere to some strange set of rules they thought I should have, and wound up deciding I was actually boring.
Which they had no problem telling me. Often quite brutally.
What did that say about me, that I ended up with people like this? And could I break the cycle? How could I know if the next woman I ended up with would be any different?
I didn’t. And that’s why I’d determined I was going to most likely end up alone, writing increasingly depressing stories about humans trying to escape their lives in one way or another.
“So,” my dad said. “I was thinking, since the big party is Saturday, the four of us would go out to dinner tonight to celebrate Marley? Somewhere nicer than the usual burger joint?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
Lisa finished covering the cakes in cling wrap and put them in the freezer.
“I’m in,” she said, untying her apron. “Just let me shower first.”
“As you wish,” Dad said as she grabbed a cookie, took a bite, and gave him a crumby kiss as she passed by on her way to the staircase.
“Wanna beer?” Dad asked me.
“Yes, please.”