Chapter 46
Forty-Six
The scene in Nash’s backyard could be painted as a Norman Rockwell replica.
Kids scream. Grills grill. In a pot the size of a small bathtub, potatoes, corn, shrimp, sausage, and enough seasoning to coat everyone’s taste buds boil before being dumped across a table covered in newspapers.
We gather around it to eat without plates, napkins, or couth.
When Danimal shows up, it’s in a haze of smoke and with a pan of brownies I tell the kids they absolutely cannot touch. They don’t mind because Nash, in his anxiety-induced shopping spree, bought every frozen treat available.
It’s chaos and laughter. It’s fun and it’s play. An entire afternoon filled with everything I didn’t know my life was missing.
When the sick feeling creeps in that I could have been having nights like this for the last eight years, I smash it like a Murano candlestick holder against a concrete floor.
I may have missed out, but unlike some stories of history—including Anson and his wife and even my own parents—I have it now.
I get today. With a little luck, maybe even tomorrow.
In a lawn chair next to my mom, she and I watch Sunny and Cap start the electric slide to the tune of yacht rock playing on a small stereo. I roll my head to the side to look at her—she’s happy; I’m happy she’s here.
“What’s it like seeing him?” I ask, taking a sip of my sangria.
“Probably what it’s like for you to see Nash,” she says, sipping her own drink. “Just with more wrinkles and a fake leg.”
I laugh at this.
Cap’s feet shuffle through the yard, his cane balancing him out as he goes.
Sunny claps her hands overhead. The kids wiggle all around them like a pack of sugar-crazed monkeys between cannonballs into the pool.
Off to the side, Nash and Reese are in an intense-looking conversation, hands waving wildly.
From the engaged look on Reese’s face, I have no doubt it’s about his expansion.
I hope she talks him out of it.
“Dad told me you lied,” I say without heat. “About him not knowing about me.”
“I did.” Her eyes stay on him.
“Why?”
“Why,” she repeats with a scoff. “You know why. And you’re glad I did.”
“Debatable.”
We exchange a familiar look before her eyes quickly go back to him.
“You want him back?” I ask. “Like to be with him?”
She lets out a resigned sigh. “Afraid that ship has sailed.”
“Why?” My attention goes from the makeshift tiki-torch-lit dance floor in the yard where everyone else is now dancing—even Reese—back to my mom. “For the woman who insisted I could figure things out with Nash. Which—” I gesture through the air between me and him. “Kinda nailed it, Mom.”
“Bet that hurt you to say,” she says with a knowing cinch of her lips.
I roll my eyes. “I’m serious. If we can do it, why not you and Cap?”
“Not always that simple,” she says. “Not always time.”
“There would be if he came back to Fontain with us,” I argue. “I asked him to.”
Her brows lift. “And?”
“He said no. But maybe you could ask and he’d change his mind. I see the way you look at each other.”
“Hm.” She smiles and waves at him when he looks our way. “It’s for the best anyway. I sent you here to get Nash—he’s the love of your life and you’re the love of his—but your dad—” She stops to sip her drink and avoids my gaze. “I sent you here to tell him goodbye.”
“Goodbye?” I parrot. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Because really, what the hell is that supposed to mean?
Across the yard, Cap and Nash are flapping their arms like wings, Bennie between them with hearts in her eyes. She is so damn happy.
Yet my mother says nothing.
“Mom?” I sit straight up. “Because of your surgery? Because—” I swallow, glancing at Cap again. “I know we’ve pressured you into it, but we can wait a little, I guess. Or try the radiation even though it won’t remove it. Or—”
“It’s not that. I’ll get the surgery. I know I need it—I’ve known since the doctor said it, I’ve just been scared,” she admits. “And I put you through all this. Least I can do is hold up my end of the bargain.” She laughs softly. “Sometimes we have to get old to wise up is all.”
“Okay . . .” That makes no sense. “And?”
“And . . . he’s sick, Rue. Life doesn’t last forever,” she says, quoting herself as she pats my knee and stands.
“So?” I look at him dancing. “His oxygen tank can travel to Fontain. We have a pharmacy—that man downs his pills with liquor. He can handle it.”
I don’t know how to read the look on her face—maybe I don’t want to. There’s pity. Sadness. Regret. So many things that don’t belong in this idyllic backyard.
“Let’s go have some fun,” she says with a jerk of her head. “You seem to have at least figured that out since you’ve been here.”
I give her an annoyed look, but there’s nothing else to say. Something is off, missing from her explanation, but there’s no telling what because she’s left me for them. Once her hand is in Cap’s, they move their bodies to the beat, her laughing the generous way she always has.
“Get your skinny white ass over here,” Sunny hollers across the yard. I do as she says, laughing when she adds, “With swagger, honey child.”
Any concerns over my mom dissolve the moment Nash’s arms are around me.
“Kinda feels like magic out here tonight, doesn’t it?” he asks, dopey smile on his face.
It’s full-blown pandemonium around us. Reese shouts into her phone between long sips of her drink, Remy has a distant look on her face as she dances with Sunny, and the kids are feral.
I have no idea where Danimal went.
“Hm.” I lean into Nash. “Maybe that’s the sangria.” I tilt my chin so our eyes meet. “This dance isn’t bad, though.”
His chest rumbles with an amused sound. “You know dancing has been part of every good moment of history, right?”
I fight my smile. “I think I’ve heard that before.”
Perfectly timed, Bennie grabs our hands.
“Twirl me,” she begs.
And we do.
Over and over until in a fluid transition, she and Nash are hand in hand and I’m with my dad, miserably doing half-assed steps to the Shag.
“Fun party, eh, kiddo?”
“Fun party, Dad.”
He rock steps then twirls me. “Wish I would’ve had more of these.”
Come back to Fontain and you will, but it’s not the time or place. Worrying about what comes next will steal this day faster than I can enjoy it. “Then we better make this one good.”
He laughs through a cough and moves with a little more. “Okay, kiddo.”
We don’t say anything else; we don’t need to.
“Gimme back my partner,” Sunny demands with a snap and pop of her hips. “That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout, Cappy baby.”
Reese pulls me into a huddle with her, Remy, and Mom; we aren’t even remotely on beat.
“Look at us Conway bitches tearing up the tatted-up teacher’s yard,” Reese says.
“More shocking is you without a phone glued to your face,” I tell her.
“I threw it in the pool,” she retorts. “Fuck ’em.”
“Reese Conway,” Mom scolds. “Don’t talk like that.”
“You did not,” I argue, ignoring Mom. “That thing’s a damn appendage. Is your job just to yell at people?”
“Actually,” she says in a snide tone, “I find bastard antique dealers who don’t know diddly-squat about running a business and turn them into cash cows.”
“If you weren’t such a bitch, I’d have questions.” We trade looks of sisterly contempt as we sway. “You ca—”
Remy blurts “I’m moving back to Fontain” and stops us cold.
Reese, Mom, and I say at once, “You’re what?”
“Darren has asked for space,” she says with a too-calm, too-big smile as she brushes her long blond hair out of her face. “And I thought the best way to do that would be to give him enough of it he’d be able to think clearly.”
We stare at her.
“So I found a house to rent—month to month for when he’s ready for me to—” She clears her throat but the smile doesn’t waver. “And there’s a short-term opening at the elementary school for a librarian.”
We are mute; she continues. “Mom will need help after the surgery. Rue and I can tag team it. Until I go back home.” She clears her throat again. “Surprise.”
She’s calm and smiling, but I know beneath her ribs, Remy’s romantic heart is shattered. I wrap my arms around her. “I’m so sorry, Rems.”
There’s the slightest bit of moisture in her eyes when we pull apart, but she blinks it away. I get it. She’ll start and never stop, just like me.
“Fuck Darren,” Mom says, shocking us all. Our jaws drop and she shrugs. “Darren deserves that, Reese’s job didn’t.”
She pulls Remy into her chest—hugging her with silent words the way only a mother can. Reese and I join in, our heads resting upon theirs.
“We should jump in the pool,” Reese says, slipping her phone out of her pocket and tossing it on a chair. “Like a baptism or something. Wash all life’s shit away.” She pauses to look at me in that bitch way she does. “Not that I’m trying to get rid of you.”
She’s the worst, yet I grin.
Then, hand in hand, fully clothed and with laughter-laced screams, that’s exactly what we do. Four grown women covered in life’s shit, swimming like children though we’re anything but.
One by one, the kids fall asleep on blankets covering the living room floor as a movie plays on Nash’s jumbo TV. The rest of us are out on the patio around the table littered with remnants of dinner and the glow of flickering citronella candles.
Nash is next to me, randomly blasting into his harmonica, and Cap is next to Mom; everyone else fills in the spaces between.
Reese is mid-telling of a very Chicago story when Danimal steps out of the bushes and makes us all fall silent.
He’s casual, like this is just the sort of thing he does, and takes a vacant chair. Out of his pocket: two joints.
“May I interest any of you fine folks in some wacky baccy?”
We all have open-mouthed, apprehensive smiles on our faces. The kinds of smiles that say yes, but nobody wants to go first.
“Light ’er up, Danimal,” Cap says, gruff as ever. “These crazy sons of bitches need to get stoned.”
And with the kids sleeping inside, that’s exactly what happens. We smoke, we choke, and we laugh until we cry—every single one of us.
Nash tells funny stories about history, Cap tells stories about flounder, and Danimal spits out the most ridiculous one liners I wish someone would have been coherent enough to write down. The only one I retained was his ironic title of Captain Cashflow for my dad. It was too funny to forget.
Sunny snaps her fingers with her eyes closed and random chants of “Ooh-wee, Danimal. You unleashing the beast.”
The whole time, Nash’s hand is on my thigh and my mom’s head teeters toward Cap’s shoulder.
Maybe it’s the weed, the music, or the fact I’m with everyone I love all in one place, but for one single night, all is right.
I wouldn’t change a single thing out of fear it wouldn’t lead to this moment.
Maybe life has to happen the way it happens to get us to days that are worth more than gold.
After we pillage the freezer of all the desserts Nash bought, we sleep like kids at a slumber party. Across floors and beds and draped over couches. Reese ends up curled up on the pool table, and my mom and Cap sleep in the shed.
I want to go to my grave never knowing what happened on that accidental futon.
The next day, we go to the beach.
I laugh.
I dance in the sun.
And as I watch Nash chase his daughter up and down the beach then get buried in the sand, for the second time in my life, I fall in love with a man who’s everything I never knew I needed.
Cap buys us all ice cream sandwiches in the middle of the afternoon.