47. Anthony
forty-seven
anthony
At this rate, my place will be move-in ready by New Year’s Eve. Hell, I could probably host the combined River Valley and Meadow Ridge staff with the way things are coming together. Between my brothers and I, and all of the sleepless hours put in between the end of Christmas Day festivities and now, my kitchen is fully outfitted with custom cabinetry and a farmhouse table with benches; my custom built, king sized bed has a matching dresser; and the guest bedrooms are almost all the way complete.
The office on the main floor has remained closed since I got home. I refuse to look at it.
“Ant, buddy, I think we need to take a break,” Ian says. The sound of his buzz saw halts, and all of a sudden, there’s no way to drown out the bees in my head—the ones that have been drilling me since that day; the ones I have been drowning out by going non-stop. I stop what I’m doing and stomp over to him.
“We can finish this dresser,” I insist, taking over for him even though I was in the middle of a task myself. The sound of the saw fills in the cracks, and my muscles unclench.
“Ant—”
“We’re almost done,” I insist. The saw comes to the end of the two pieces, but I push too hard, causing the blade to shift and ruin the cut. I curse, take the broken pieces, and toss them to the garage floor. When I feel my brother’s hands softly guide my shoulders, I know he knows something is up.
“I’m going to shut the power tools down, and then we’re going to eat, crack open a cold one, and figure this out. Okay?”
My heaving breaths apparently aren’t a good enough answer, because he squeezes my shoulder and drops his voice down to a low demand.
“Anthony. Okay?”
The hard edge to my brother’s eyes forces me to surrender. I drop my head, raking my hands through my wild, damp hair, bark out some semblance of Okay , and stomp inside.
The house is coming together. It’s everything I once imagined as the place where I’d start my family. The day my eyes finally opened with Pen, I knew I was building it for her. But without her, without everything I thought we were building, this place is just a building—a bunch of walls filled with junk and a sad shell of a man.
The words on her pages gutted me from the inside out, left me bruised and bleeding, gasping for air in outer space without a helmet. I haven’t breathed the same since.
We were supposed to go back to that hotel and order room service at two in the morning while she talked off her runner’s high. I was supposed to tell her how proud I was between kisses and chocolate covered strawberries. Our love was supposed to twine with the champagne to give us the greatest high either of us have ever tasted.
I ruined it all. Again.
Part of me wants to blame her. Part of me wants to say that she knew what she was doing when she took our story and turned it into her livelihood. While I still believe that to be true, I don’t think she did it in revenge. I’ve seen the peeled back layers of Penelope Barker over these past few months, and while she’s been bruised in the past, she doesn’t act in malice. She protects herself by walling off her heart. When she revealed it to me again, we both had our wounds reopened.
By the time I’ve had a quick shower and changed—a few of my things now stocked over here so I don’t have to go back and forth to Mom and Margie’s old place—Ian has a Bill’s pizza and a six pack waiting for us. He gets right to the point as soon as I’ve downed two slices and cracked open a beer.
“Spill.”
And I do. Starting from the very beginning. He and Grant hadn’t come to Florida, so he wasn’t even aware that Pen and I had a history. By the time I’ve exhausted every end of the story—chock full of side tangents, rants, and a few unnecessary detours—I finally feel exhausted. It’s like the days leading up to now that I’ve buried into work were all piling atop the built up feelings, and as soon as I let out the pressure at the base, it all came spiraling down.
“Shit.” He shakes his head. My brother isn’t a long winded type. We’re polar opposites in a lot of ways, this being one of them. “You two need to fight.”
I tilt my head.
“Did you miss the part where that’s all we’ve been doing?”
“No, you haven’t,” he chuckles, swigging down the last of his beer before setting the empty bottle on the table. “You’ve stored stuff inside and talked around the problems. You ran, and by the time you were ready to talk, she ran. You two have been addressing your problems in circles and half-reconciliations. If you both keep throwing stones at the glass house, it’s going to fall down twice as fast. You need to set aside the bitterness at each other and start fighting the problem head on.”
I stroke my chin between my thumb and index finger.
“You know, for a single guy, you sure seem to know a lot about how to handle relationships,” I chuckle. Ian’s silence speaks volumes, only turned up by the deep crease that settles between his brows. We still haven’t talked about Andi. I want to ask him if she’s the one putting that look on his face, but he shakes his head and keeps raking my issues over the coals.
“Can you stop deflecting for a minute?”
The sharp edge, one that doesn’t typically edge into the smooth eb and flow of Ian’s tones, has my head tilting in question.
“This is always your default: Deflecting instead of facing things head on. Your senior prank involved cops? You blamed it on ‘senioritis.’ You got caught throwing a party when Mom and Dad were out of town, and you shrugged and said your friends peer pressured you into it. You got a ticket for underage drinking in college that almost lost you your scholarships and cost you the ability to get a teaching license, and all you said was, ‘I’m only a freshman once.’ I thought I saw a change in you when you took on this new job, but you’re doing it again. You aren’t owning your actions, Ant. What gives?”
All these years, I didn’t think he noticed. I thought my family saw my avoidance tactics as my given personality, but my younger brother sees me for who I am. Having all of those childish behaviors chucked back at me when I’m this vulnerable stings like salt in an open wound. I swallow them down like thorns, and when I finally speak, my words are gutted and raw.
“If I deflect, I don’t have to face it head on. And if I don’t have to face it head on, I never have to fail. Even better? I never have to know if I could’ve ever measured up in the first place.”
As understanding washes over my brother, I let Penelope’s words, the ones that are still there along the edges of my aching heart, worm their way back in.
It’s how you get back up again that determines if you’re meant to do great things. And I think you are.
Back then, she’d been talking about my ability to succeed in the workplace. She had no idea I was vying for her heart, for the job of holding her up in case the world fell down around her.
“But you do ,” Ian says, finally breaking the silence with his fractured tone that offsets me a little. “Ant, you put on a mask of insecurities when what’s beneath your surface is more than enough. None of us are perfect. We all fail. You’ve just decided that it’s all that you’re allowed to do. When are you going to put the mask down and let yourself be vulnerable? I think now, with your girl, seems like the perfect time.”
Your girl .
I can’t fathom Penelope being mine because I’m not sure if she still wants me in the first place. But my brother is right. I can’t fail if I don’t try; but if I never try, I’ll never even have the chance to tell if we could’ve made it.
“You’re saying we need to fight the problem?”
“Fight the problem,” Ian nods. “Not each other.”
I nod thoughtfully, staring out over the home that is void of everything I built it for in the first place.
Ian stands, taking with him the empty pizza boxes and beer bottles, leaving me alone to mull over what exactly the problem even is.
On the surface is my pain at her secret—she wrote an entire book based on her heartache, splitting my chest wide open for all of her readers to see. But so much deeper than that is the way that I’ve left her with no other choice. In my absence, she put her heartache into her work. I can’t fault her for that. I can only fault myself for not being there for her in the first place.
I think of all the ways I said I was going to be her solid ground only to crumble beneath her, and then of all of the ways I’ve been patching up the pot holes over the past several months. I don’t know where to begin, but I know that right now, the only thing on my mind is going to her.
I picked Ian up from Mom and Dad’s place, where he and Dad were working over some business things, so I head in that direction, intending to drop him off at the front door.
“Mom’ll be pissed if you don’t stop in and say hi,” he says, unbuckling with a Cheshire smile and one brow raised. He reminds me of Pen, and my heart aches with my gear shift in reverse. I hang my head and exhale, knowing he’s right.
Ian heads straight for Dad’s office, and I toe my shoes off. I might be in a hurry, but no one walks on Debbie Ellis’s clean wood floors with dirty shoes and doesn’t pay the price. Sawdust kicks up and I leave behind a cloud of it to find not my mom, but my dad in the kitchen.
“Sweetie, you know I’ll drop everything to be there for you… Okay, just let me know what I can do… Anything… Of course, sweetheart… Give Margie my best… Yep, buh-bye.”
“Margie?” I ask, tilting my head in question at the sound of Pen’s mom’s name. The grave face my own father wears does nothing to quell the twist of my gut. “What’s going on? Who was that?”
“That was your mom. Margie was in an accident. She’s?—”
I don’t even give him a chance to explain. The sawdust hasn’t even settled around my shoes as I slide my feet back into my unlaced work boots. I’m halfway out the door when I hear him calling after me.
“Anthony!”
I turn around, and that’s when I notice.
My dad is wearing my mom’s apron, and the hand not holding tightly to the phone is cased in an oven mitt. As if on cue, the oven timer dings loudly, and the panicked look on his face tells me he doesn’t want me to leave, but also doesn’t want the house to burn down. I have to fight every nerve ending in my body as I follow him back to the kitchen instead of hopping into my cab and speeding down the driveway to… I don’t even know. Her .
By the time I’m back in the kitchen, Dad is sitting at the table with what looks like tonight’s dinner balanced on a hot plate. The heavenly smell of Mom’s lasagna fills the kitchen as my dad, hands clasped loosely over the kitchen tabletop, asks, “Did I ever tell you about the time I almost lost your mother?”
My heart thuds. I know that he wasn’t in my life for two years, but after they found one another again, I didn’t question it. I’ve never actually heard the story. He shakes his head and chuckles humorlessly.
“I shouldn’t say ‘almost’ so recklessly. I did lose her, Anthony. And I had to fight like hell to get her back.”
It’s then that I see the absolute terror in his eyes. No matter that they’ve been together for three decades now. No matter that I’ve never seen two people more head over heels for each other, more with every single day. That time in his life still haunts him. In this moment, I’ve never felt him more.
“We met when your mom was in college. When I was a punk. I was finishing up trade school, deciding what I was going to do next, and your mother and I had a lot of fun together. But when my program was coming to an end, I had a decision to make: Work for your grandpa, or make a ton more money down in Miami. A bunch of guys from my program were heading down for work, and I was invited. Your mom asked what our future looked like, and I panicked. I was young. I didn’t want to be tied down yet. So I told her thanks for the memories, I packed up my truck, and I spent the next three years of my life living in regret.”
My chest is tight, my skin warm to the touch. Part of me wants to reach across the table and grab him by the collar for what he did to us, but when I realize there are tears in his eyes, every part of me softens—not only because I did the same thing, and can feel all of his feelings trying to burst right through me, but because I can feel the regret wafting over him, thirty years later.
“Why are you telling me this?” I croak, only now realizing how choked up my old man has me.
“Because, son.” His gaze tilts back to mine, and I feel every word that comes next. “I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did.”
My legs, that not ten minutes ago were itching to get out the door, weigh me down like lead.
“Whatever happened between you and Penelope is fixable, Anthony. I believe you’re capable of so much more than you let yourself believe. Save you and that girl both any more heartache and don’t run away from the best thing life has to offer just because you’re scared that you won’t be good enough.”
I don’t know if he’s talking to me or himself at this point. I stand at the same time that he does, and when he reaches out to hug me, I let him.
“You are good enough, son. I don’t think I tell you that enough.”
A sob catches in my throat at those words. Ones I didn’t think I needed to hear.
When I pull back, we both laugh. My father grunts, then slaps me on the shoulders.
“We’re a mess,” he chuckles.
“Little bit.” I swipe at my eyes, and then we both sigh.
“If I know anything about that girl, it’s that she can handle the mess. Don’t make her wade through it alone. Be there to hold her while you do it together.”
He steps back into the kitchen, wraps some tinfoil over the lasagna, and hands it to me.
“I’ll text you the address.”
The issues between me and Pen, the ones we need to fight together, can wait. Right now, all she needs for me is to be the ground beneath her feet. I’ll lay myself down for her to use as her red carpet as long as she needs me to.