Chapter 6 #2
Like God struck it on purpose. Phelps wouldn’t have been surprised if there was a God, one who hated Phelps. Who enjoyed targeting
him in some special, sadistic way.
Well, no worries, because Phelps hated him right on back.
Phelps coughed out the last of his laughter. The irony. Phelps had been voted Most Likely to Be President for their senior class, and now, the person Phelps was most similar to—and
this fucking killed him to admit—was Doug.
Phelps had managed to avoid him since he and Hellie moved back.
Doug meant drama, and Phelps was a dad now for fuck’s sake, which Doug didn’t seem to get when he called at two in the fucking morning wanting to talk about some new music he’d heard on some obscure radio station or some bizarro podcast he’d found through Twitter.
It pained Phelps to think about how naive he’d been during the intervention he’d organized so many years ago.
How naive about the capacity of people to change.
Doug’s. His own. Poor Hellie deserved so much better, and Phelps would have counted himself lucky to have a girl like that, a rock, someone who didn’t waver even when you went through rehab twice and to prison twice and wrecked her car and stole her money.
But you didn’t disinvite anyone to New Year’s.
The crowd was the crowd. That was their vow, that first New Year’s, when they were all twenty and stupid and pricked their fingers with the tip of the wine opener and rubbed their blood together like it was some kind of cheesy coven.
He took another slow drag, deep down into his lungs. He held the smoke until it burned, then released it slowly. He surveyed
the large mud-and-snow-filled backyard. To the left was the cornfield that had been too moist to harvest. The tall wintering
corn gave a nice feeling of privacy. He squinted toward the shed, which sat at the end of the yard, among the host of pine
trees that blocked their property from the next. He should probably clean the shed up before the party too. Maybe hide the
weed, since Jenn would disapprove. He’d never forget the New Year’s when she smelled the weed they were smoking in the back
bedroom, and left with Will in the middle of the night. Phelps wondered at the time if that was the end of their friendship.
But no, they’d come back the following year and all drug usage had been done in secret. Will didn’t approve either, but at
least he didn’t try to control everyone else.
One hoped Jenn would have loosened up with age, but you never knew.
She wasn’t Phelps’s favorite person. Too conservative.
Too Christian. Cute, he gave her that wholeheartedly.
And, judging by social media, an enthusiastic wife and a devoted mother to their three girls.
It was a little stomach turning, how saccharine she was about Will and the girls.
She didn’t just post on their wedding anniversary, but on their date-iversary, their engagement anniversary, their baptism anniversaries, the anniversary of their fucking first kiss.
Phelps pulled out his phone and navigated to her Facebook page. Sure enough, the Christmas post.
So thankful on this Christmas day for our Lord and Savior who saved us from our sins!! So thankful for my beautiful family,
and William, who will always hold my heart!! Thank you babe for being my rock, the leader of our family, an incredible father
and husband! We all just love you so much! Looking into the New Year with so much hope in my heart for our family’s beautiful
future!
Phelps took one last drag, because that’s what Jenn’s posts did to him. Then he put out the joint on the handrail of the deck
and returned it to his pocket for later use.
Sometimes he worried about Will. Was Jenn for real? What shit was hiding under her glowing social media self? No one could
be that enthusiastic about their husband and small children eleven years into marriage . . . right? He’d tried to ask Will about his
marriage, his life, man to man, the few times they’d talked on the phone in the past couple years, since Will was always too
busy to drive the three hours to Michigan City, and Phelps’s life was so complicated between his job and the custody schedule
he could barely imagine leaving town either.
“How are things?” Phelps might say. “Level with me. Are you really as happy and fulfilled as Facebook says?”
“This is what I always wanted,” Will might say. Or, “I can’t complain. I got everything I asked for.” Or any other number
of variations on a theme.
And what did Phelps know? He wasn’t one of the fucking Wise Men.
Maybe Jenn and Will were perfectly matched.
Ooey-gooey sincere people who were truly as happy as they seemed.
Maybe Phelps was the cynical one. Maybe he was so jaded by his own shit he couldn’t see something good even if it bitch-slapped him.
The shed shouldn’t take long to clean up. It was his man cave, from when he and Kylie lived here together. She had ruled the
house and told him to do his “gross boy stuff” in the shed, which suited Phelps just fine, since he didn’t want her breathing
down his neck when all he wanted to do was smoke and peace out in front of some obscure piece of foreign television. The shed,
with its plywood walls and twin windows, was just big enough to fit an old plaid love seat, a coffee table for resting his
feet on, a mini fridge and microwave, and a TV he’d mounted himself. The little radiator was also a must, since the place
wasn’t heated or insulated. He’d installed blinds in the windows so he could watch foreign porn without Kylie spying on him,
and strung Christmas lights all over the walls. It smelled musty, like weed and beer, and in the months leading up to the
divorce, Phelps had slept out there more often than not. Hence its nickname, the Dog House, which remained even after Kylie
moved out and married Craig Curtis, CPA. Her Insta feed was no longer the dark midnight bar pics she’d posted with Phelps,
but bright sunny interiors taken in their gorgeous house with fully loaded Christmas trees, and selfies after she got extensions,
or a mani-pedi.
High maintenance. She’d disguised herself as easygoing and fun, but she’d turned out to be high maintenance to the core. It
cost five hundred dollars a month to keep up with her hair and nails alone! They’d fought a lot about those credit card bills.
Nope. Phelps needed someone low maintenance. Like Olivia. Glam as they got, but also somehow simple. Effortless. He doubted if she spent a penny on her hair.
There was a loud humming sound. Phelps turned a little and eyed through the glass doors the pert little figure of his surprising New Year’s date, running the vacuum cleaner through the kitchen.
Someone like Allie? Maybe. He didn’t like to think too far ahead.
Allie was cute, and fun, and, yes, quite young—twenty-four to his thirty-four—but she had a proper career as a kindergarten teacher and had the most glorious pair of tits.
He turned back around. Ironic that Phelps thought of himself as such a tits man when the best sex of his life had been with—
“Hey.”
Phelps spun—Allie had cracked the sliding door and poked her head out. Her hair was in an adorable topknot and she’d stripped
down to a tank top.
“Looking for something?” he said with a grin.
“A sponge of any kind.”
“Under the kitchen sink.”
“You need a woman in your life,” she sang out as she closed the sliding door behind her, leaving Phelps squinting again in
the bright gray.
By all accounts, he should feel lucky. He could draw women. Gorgeous women too. Bunny . . . Kylie . . . now Allie . . . He
just couldn’t seem to fucking keep them.
His phone dinged and he pulled it out. Hah. Speaking of the devil—Bunny was actually coming. He’d invited her to mess with
her, never thinking she’d accept. Well, well, well. Now he knew who would be performing the embarrassing musical number. He’d
put that in the invitation as a joke, but maybe he’d pull out the old guitar at the right moment, hand it to Bunny, see what
happened. As for the dark secrets he’d alluded to in the invitation, he’d been joking on that count too, of course.
He didn’t have very many. His mistakes had mostly been made in the open.
But the mistakes he’d managed to keep to himself? He spat some gray phlegm onto the clean snow just beyond the deck, then turned toward his kitchen, where the ingredients for the chocolate mousse were waiting on the counter.
Those would only come out over his dead body.