4. Rickie
Rickie
The first restaurant on our list is a steak place outside of Burlington. And when I pull up behind the building, Daphne refuses to let me carry the crate of alcohol into the restaurant. She insists on doing it herself.
She’s in a mood today. I think she’d expected to spend the day alone. And she doesn’t trust me. She can’t believe I don’t remember meeting her that first time.
Girl, same , I think as I watch her disappear into the back door of the restaurant. My life has been a crazy ride since those days I spent in Connecticut. I don’t tell the people in my life the whole story, because I’m sick of being that guy who lost six months of his memories.
Honestly, it’s easier to be a rude asshole than a freak.
Something tells me I’m not the real root of Daphne’s unhappiness, either. Something else is bothering her, and it doesn’t have a thing to do with me.
I have a few ideas for cheering her up, if only she was open to it.
Daphne reappears just as I’m having this thought. She’s wearing a serious frown that doesn’t invite discussion. And I know how to read the room, so I stick to the business at hand. The moment she returns to the truck, I point us downtown.
Our second and final delivery is to a wine bar. Vino and Veritas is on Church Street, where cars aren’t allowed to go. But there’s an alleyway behind it that makes the drop-off easy enough. Daphne disappears again into the back door of the place and reemerges a minute later.
“Why are we delivering this stuff by hand?” I ask as I carefully back out of the alley. “Griffin has a distributor for his cider, no?”
“The applejack is a beta product,” she says. “He can’t make enough of it to meet the distributor’s minimum.”
“Oh. Your brother is a fun guy. He’s a tinkerer, right? Always experimenting with the chemistry behind various alcoholic beverages. What’s cooler than that?”
“So cool,” she mutters. “Can you drop me at the social sciences complex? I don’t want to be late for my first day.”
“Sure, gorgeous. No problem.”
I do even better. A few minutes later I pull up right in front of the School of Public Health. “I’m parking in that lot,” I say, pointing at the garage on the next block. “When do you want to meet me back there?”
“Um, is five o’clock too late?” She glances nervously at the building.
“No, that’s fine. I have errands. And I’ll kill some time in the coffee shop.”
“Uh, thanks.” She swallows hard, and I realize that even Daphne Shipley is capable of first-day jitters. Who knew? She shoulders her backpack and gets out of the truck.
I roll down the window. “Hey, Daphne?”
She turns back, a tiny crease of irritation on her forehead. “What?”
“You’re a badass.”
“What?” She blinks.
“A total rock star. Now go on. Be early. Impress the world of public health. You know you want to.”
“Thanks.” She gives me a smile so small that you’d practically need an electron microscope to find it. And then she strides off, long legs like honey in the sunshine, and disappears into the glass doors of the building.
And I just sit here like a bonehead, wishing I could have gotten a kiss goodbye.
* * *
The class I’m taking this summer is Ancient Philosophy, and the first lecture is a lot of fun.
After my injury, I lost two semesters of school. It took me a year to reboot my life, enroll at Moo U, and settle into Burlington. So even though I’m twenty-two, I’m not yet close to graduating.
But school has always appealed to me. And ninety minutes in a lecture hall listening to the professor explain Sophocles is entertaining.
Afterward, I spend some time in the bookstore before heading to the coffee shop like I said I would do. But only for a little while. I have another appointment in Burlington that I neglected to mention to Daphne.
It’s time to visit my shrink.
Lenore is a young postdoc in clinical psychology—which is precisely what I hope to be in a few years.
Sessions with her are useful in more ways than one.
Not only is Lenore helping me with my issues—and there are quite a few of those—I learn things from her as well.
She’s smart and she speaks to me like a future colleague as well as a patient.
“My God, you’re so tan!” she shrieks as I walk into her office. “And so healthy I hardly recognize you.”
“So you’re saying I was pale and ghostly before?” I plop myself down in my chair.
“Oh, please. You’re very prompt today, Rickie. I think you missed me.”
“For sure. Nobody has asked me any prying questions in a month .”
“Well let’s fix that. How’ve you been? Tell me everything. Are you milking cows?”
“I mostly shovel their shit. But it’s still a good time.” I tell her all about the Shipley farm, and my aching muscles, and yesterday’s bear sighting.
“Something tells me this bear gets more ferocious every time you tell that story,” she says, playing with the pendant she’s wearing around her neck.
“Are you calling me a liar? Is that good patient interaction?”
“Not a liar,” she says with an eye roll. “An embellisher.”
“Fine. Sure. I cheated death, but you think I’m embellishing it. I see how it is.”
She gives me an indulgent smile. “You seem content, Rick. And it looks good on you.”
“Thanks,” I say softly. And I guess she’s right. These last three years have been hell. Contentment is something I thought I might never find.
“Have you seen your parents?” Lenore asks suddenly.
“Nope.” I feel a stab of guilt over this. They live maybe forty minutes from where I’m staying. But things are so strained between us that I don’t make visiting a priority.
“Could you have lived at home this summer?” she asks, holding me to this uncomfortable subject.
“I guess. Yeah. I would have had to find a summer job, though. At the Shipleys, the job is built in. Plus, the Shipleys aren’t disappointed in me for bombing out of the Academy, and then taking a settlement.”
She doesn’t weigh in, yet. She waits me out, like a smart shrink would do.
“I suppose I should go visit them, just so this shit doesn’t fester, right?”
“That depends,” she says quietly. “There are parents who absolutely deserve to be cut out of one’s life.
There are toxic people in the world, and you don’t owe toxic people anything.
But if you think your relationship will matter to you in the future, then maybe it’s time to find some common ground. ”
Outwardly I’m as calm as ever. But I’ve only been in Lenore’s office for three minutes and she’s already found a sore spot and pressed it. I used to have a great relationship with my parents. I’m their only kid, and we spent my childhood traveling the world together. We were tight.
Then I went off to my father’s alma mater, the US Tactical Services Academy.
I wasn’t that excited about choosing it over Middlebury, where I’d also been accepted.
I wasn’t a military kind of guy, like my dad.
But a few things weighed in its favor. One, the price tag.
It’s free . I could’ve graduated with no loans at all.
Two, my dad was proud when I got accepted. So proud. And I drank that shit in.
And, finally, I was interested in military intelligence as a career. Even if marching in formation bored me silly, I liked the idea that I could become a spy someday.
But near the end of my first semester, I went to an off-campus party and got hurt. I was in the hospital for two weeks. And I haven’t been the same since.
That was the end of the USTSA for me. I dropped out. And when the college dragged its feet on giving me credit for the semester, my parents warily helped me force their hand.
“I hate lawyering up against my own college,” my father had said. “But one stern letter will probably do the trick.”
The lawyer had bigger plans. “Credits aren’t the only thing you should be leaving with. Your doctor doesn’t even know when you’ll be able to go back to school. I think you’re due some more party favors.”
“Like what?” I’d asked.
“Like cash.” So, with my permission, he asked them for a million dollars. “They’ll bargain us down,” he’d added.
But that’s not what happened. They’d written me a seven-digit check two weeks later.
My father still isn’t over it. I sued the college who gave him a free education. “I can never show my face there again,” he’d raged at me. “It wasn’t even the college’s fault that you went to a damn party!”
He might have a point. Except the college has never actually told me what happened that night. When I hit my head, I lost my memory of that evening. All I know from the hospital report is that three cadets brought me into the emergency room.
We tried to find out more, but the Academy kept dishing out unsatisfying answers. “We’re investigating.” “There was some confusion.” “It happened off campus.”
After I got my settlement, they stopped pretending to take our calls. And my father lost his taste for pressing them. “I guess you don’t need answers now that you’re a millionaire.”
Before then I’d sometimes struggled to win my father’s approval. He didn’t understand my intellectual interests. And he really didn’t understand that I was pansexual. But he mostly dealt with that. He was a good dad.
But now I’d become a true embarrassment to him. It’s not an easy thing to be. The settlement money has helped me get back on my feet. I bought a house in Burlington, and started school again, this time at Moo U. It’s not like I bought a yacht or first class seats to Vegas.
It doesn’t matter. He’s never getting over it.
The rest of the money—after the house and the lawyer’s hefty cut—is invested in bank CDs that mature right before the start of each semester. So my tuition is covered through graduation, and I don’t have piles of cash free to waste on weed and booze.
I get good grades. I made new friends. My life is back on track, even if my relationship with my parents is not.
And I never miss a session with Lenore. She gets me.
“Tell me something fun about the farm,” she says. “Besides the bear.”