Chapter 7 #2
“I knew lots of people who cheated with all kinds of things. You really shouldn’t do it in a casino, though.”
“He was sure that he couldn’t keep up so he didn’t even try.
He also thought that his girlfriend was better than him and she agreed,” Nolan told me.
“She wasn’t particularly smart or hard-working but she certainly was unpleasant.
They finally broke up when she met someone else and then I introduced him to my cousin Celestine.
I wish I hadn’t done it because they had problems right from the beginning. She hated him for being lazy.”
“Well…” I hesitated. “I can understand how it would upset her, if she had to go and work hard and he just sat back and watched.” Maybe he had even made fun of her for trying, which happened to people.
“She was equally lazy and she was also unfaithful. Now she’s going to have him fired.”
“So, he has an ugly history with women but it doesn’t bother you. And why would it? It doesn’t mean that he’s bad himself. Maybe he’s just dumb.”
“No, he isn’t,” Nolan defended his friend.
“I don’t mean that he’s a stupid person. People who have ugly relationship histories don’t have to dumb, like, in general. They’re dumb about love and choosing wrong but they’re not actually bad people themselves,” I explained.
“Are we talking about my friend Beau, or are we talking about Vivienne O’Keeffe, who was living with the guy who slashed the couch and broke the windows, and who escaped from Vegas because a man there had threatened to kill her?”
I actually had been talking about myself.
“When I was fifteen and I moved in with my boyfriend, I thought that he was like a knight in a suit of armor on a white horse, and all my problems were solved. Now I see relationships more clearly. They’re a way to get by.
Not that I was using the guys I was with…
I guess that I needed Kolter for his house, but he was also using me right back. ”
For example, he had liked to have a lot of sex and it had been convenient for us to live together so he could get as much as he wanted.
He had said that I couldn’t wear any clothes to bed so my body was always accessible.
Then, after the furnace went out, he had dropped in during the day for it.
I’d balanced a pine needle on the door handle so I’d know when he was there and I could prepare myself.
“I really do like to wear at least a pair of underwear a night,” I announced. “What if there was a fire? What if we’d suddenly had to deal with a spirit from the nearby graveyard? I didn’t want to do that naked!”
Nolan didn’t disagree with my logic about sleeping in the nude, although he didn’t really understand why I’d mentioned it (I hadn’t led with the information about Kolter’s constant demands for sex, so it didn’t make as much sense).
“I don’t believe in black magic or spirits,” he said.
“Of all the things in the world to worry about, that would be low on my list.”
“It’s still on your list,” I noted. “It’s near the middle of mine. Up at the top are things about getting old, not about wrinkles or going grey…you know, you won’t have to worry about that. You’re going to be what they call ‘distinguished’ and your blonde hair will hide the color change.”
“Oh. I suppose that’s a good thing? I never thought about it.”
“I worry about bears finding my body, but mostly I worry about getting frail so that I can’t work anymore. What will I do? I keep trying to save but I never seem to make a cushion. I won’t get government benefits, not with my lack of paperwork.”
“How is Cadence doing with that?”
I sighed because the answer was that she was struggling.
If Cadence couldn’t find the answer, I had to believe that an answer didn’t really exist and that was terrible.
There was a very, very real possibly of me getting stopped for not having a valid license plate and then what?
Jail? Tickets I couldn’t pay? Court costs?
He answered his own question by assuming my response. It didn’t make him an ass because he was right. “She’s not having any success,” he stated. “My mother is an attorney. I should talk to her about this.”
“You would ask her to help me?”
“She would probably love the challenge,” he answered.
“I don’t know if anyone can do it,” I admitted.
“I tried for years. And I felt so stupid showing up at different agencies and repeating the same things to different employees, answering the same questions, and then getting sent somewhere else or taking another number to call. It got overwhelming and it was impossible to keep up with everything. How can you sit in offices for hours and hours when you have to work to live? How are you supposed to show up for appointments if your car broke down?” I looked up at him. “Would your mom really try?”
“I’ll talk to her and see.”
“Do you guys talk very often?” I wondered.
He shrugged. “If we could find your mom, would she be able to help at all?”
Cadence kept asking me the same thing. “I just can’t believe that a mother…
” she would repeat under her breath. It was hard to understand that my mom and I had no contact, that she had lost everything that would have proven my existence, and that I’d been on my own for so long.
There was a very stark difference between my life and Cadence’s, since she was totally organized and legal with everything, she still lived with her own mom at the age of twenty-eight, and they had a home that had been in their family for generations.
But as hard as it was to understand, she wasn’t mean about it.
Nolan wasn’t, either. “No, my mom wouldn’t help with this,” I answered. “She never liked to respond to calls or emails if they was about something important. When I was in school, my teachers used to send paper copies of stuff home with me. I got really good at forging her signature on them.”
He nodded again. “I was great at hacking into my parents’ email accounts and redirecting their calls,” he said. “My mom was furious because of attorney-client privilege issues, and my dad is an investment manager. His clients wouldn’t have liked it, if they had known.”
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“Didn’t I mention that I was an asshat?” He continued talking about the tricks he’d pulled as a kid and teenager. He had been much more sophisticated than I had with my faked signatures, but neither of us had ever gotten into real trouble over anything.
“Maybe I should have,” he said when I voiced that truth. “If I had gotten in trouble, serious trouble, I might have stopped acting like that.”
“It’s lucky for the police that you didn’t move onto worse stuff,” I mentioned. “Because you would have made a great criminal.”
“There’s still time,” he said.
“So, your friend Beau had bad taste in women, I have bad taste in men. What about you?”
“I’m straight.”
“I mean, is that why your relationship didn’t work out? Your engagement?” I prompted. I loved that word so much! “No, sorry. I told you before that I wouldn’t bring her up.” I had even crossed my heart.
“That’s ok.” But he sounded slightly angry, as if it really wasn’t. “She ended the engagement because she saw that a future with me was unsustainable.”
I had no idea what that word meant but I guessed something bad. “Why?”
“Because I was a drunk with no ambitions. Not even criminal ones,” he answered. “That’s why.”
“It was good outcome for her but sad for you,” I said, and then held still. My words were of the type to make someone mad, and he’d just shown me that this was a touchy subject.
“You’re right. It was the best possible outcome for her.
She’s married to someone else and they’re expecting their first baby,” he said.
“Beau’s ex-wife, my cousin Celestine, keeps me informed.
She’s angry that I’m still his friend so she likes to try to rub salt in my wounds.
Unfortunately for her, I’m always glad to hear that my former fiancée is doing well. ”
He sure didn’t sound glad and I wanted to get away from this. “I’ll race you back to the house,” I said. “You ready?”
“What?”
But I had already taken off, my feet pounding on the sidewalk. I heard him say my name and then I heard his footsteps getting louder. I had always been fast, but his damn legs were so much longer! I apologized in my head to Beau for that bit of bad language.
When Nolan caught up to me, which took only a few seconds, we both slowed and jogged the rest of the way to his house. And both of us were totally winded and beat when we got there. “I don’t remember breathing like this after I ran,” he panted.
“I used to love running in PE,” I said, but I was gasping worse than he was. “I’m not sure why. What happened?”
“How long ago did you take a gym class?”
“Seven years?” I hazarded. “I dropped out after eighth grade.”
“What?”
“Didn’t I tell you that? Yeah, I dropped out when I moved in with my boyfriend.”
“You said that you were fifteen when that happened,” he said.
“You’re really good with details! I guess I must have been fourteen, because it was the summer after eighth grade and I didn’t go back to school after that.” I hadn’t been attending regularly for years and when I’d actually made it there, I hadn’t had a clue what was going on.
“And how old was your boyfriend?”
“He was…” I had to think. “When we first met, he was twenty-four. No, five. I remember having a birthday party for him at the end of that summer and he turned twenty-six. How old were you when you had your first real relationship?”
“Vivi.” He stared at me. “That wasn’t a ‘real relationship’ because he was a child predator.”