Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (27 page)

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how little they’d changed for me. I became their band manager. I never asked them to stop law school. Never asked them to move across the country. I’d taken Joe’s long distance relationship requirement in stride. I’d helped them book concerts, got to know the band members’ girlfriends (and treasured them as friends). I rolled with the punches and the victories, but I hadn’t actually asked them to change one fucking thing about the structure of their lives.

The reality of that hit me like a slap.

The air rushed out of my lungs and I blinked, over and over, stunned by my own realization. Holy motherfucker. That was the truth. The
truth
. I’d changed everything for them and they had changed nothing. I was expected to tuck myself into their lives and...that was that.

I could love them and ache for them and need them with a bleating desperation that felt like it would ring in my ears for centuries, but in the end they expected me to do all the bending.

And I’d finally broke.

I could change and adapt a whole fuck of a lot, but I drew the line at being something for them to be ashamed of. Yeah, I know—I ain’t much better, ’cause look at me not tellin’ Mama the truth. But I suppose I’m a hypocrite, and yet I always felt like I’d tell Mama someday. But she didn’t invite us over for dinner.

Trevor’s parents did.

And the way Joe raced over and crashed the dinner party just so no one would spill our dirty little secret...that made it all dirty.

Filthy.

Like I was a mess you hide because you’re embarrassed to let anyone know you made it.

No.

No fucking way. So sure—I shoulda told my parent, too. I know that. And I can hold that truth inside me and realize it ain’t all Trevor and Joe’s fault.

But I never paraded them around in front of her after we were a threesome and pretended one of us didn’t exist.

The really sick part is that I wasn’t the one they excluded. I had to pretend to be Trevor’s girlfriend. And yet, it was Joe who guarded the secret the most. The guy who was a ghost. The jealous one in our triad.

Think about that for a minute.

The angriest, most jealous person out of us three was the one who moved heaven and earth to make sure we weren’t outed.

A psychiatrist could make enough to buy a yacht off
that
one.

I didn’t know what to feel as I pored over the little photo album. What would my daddy think of all this? Mama said he was a good ol’ boy who liked to drink and fish on weekends, and who loved me like I was the sun in the sky. She said they had wanted more kids and expected more. I wasn’t meant to be an only.

A lot of the ways life turns out weren’t meant to be. Weren’t intended. But if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I guess the road to heaven is paved with fear.

People don’t take any risks if they’re worried about making a mistake. And if that’s what it takes to be good, I don’t wanna be good.

I wanna be real.

I wiped my eyes and pulled my hair back in a scrunchie and got down to work, sorting shit into categories. Keep. Trash. Thrift Shop. Ask Mama.

Within a few hours I had all the Keep set aside, the Trash out in the dumpster, the Thrift Shop boxes and bags on the porch and I walked into the trailer with a smallish box called Ask Mama. She was sitting on the couch, watching some reality television show about storage lockers and pawn shops.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to get my stuff out of here, Mama,” I said, genuinely contrite, setting the box on the dining table. “I meant to come back here more, but there was always something.”

“There’s always something,” she said, taking a long drag off that glow stick e-cig thing. It looked like a bastardized version of a light saber. She stood and ambled over, looking more like Josie than she had a right to. 

Well, that’s not fair. She’s her aunt. Genetics. A pang of jealousy rang through me. Josie looked more like Mama than I did. It felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.

“True enough. It was more important to send you money than to spend it on visiting,” I said in an airy voice, trying to cover up my pain. 

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

Ouch. “I just got so busy with the band, and my new job, and with—” I was about to say
Trevor and Joe
. My throat tightened. I couldn’t say that any more.

I also couldn’t say it at all.

“I know. You been busy with them.”

Them?

I said nothing. Silence wasn’t exactly one of my character traits, so the longer I kept my mouth shut, the more the unease between us built. Mama could wait me out. I was freaking out on the inside, second by second.

This was one of those moments when I had a choice. I could have told the truth. I could have cried my eyes out about the breakup and said something. It would have helped Mama to understand why I had been gone so much. Why I’d— 

“I been busy, yeah.” I started breathing hard, little puffs I couldn’t control. Lots of things I couldn’t control seemed to be converging, all caving in at once. Like my chest, right now. 

“Busy,” she snorted. 

That upped the ante. The silence ticked between us like land mines triggered by gnats.

Finally, just to stop the pain of the gaping quiet, I said, “I don’t know.”

“I may be country, but I’m not stupid, Darla Josephine,” Mama said with a snarl. “
I
know damn well what you’ve been doin’ with those boys—both of ’em—in Massachusetts.” 

“What do you think I been doin’, Mama?”

“Lovin’ them.”

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

The tears came back now. Hard. I couldn’t speak a single word, and you know something’s got to be big when I am struck dumb.

I kept my head down and listened to the rhythm of her inhales, through three, four, five or more of them, until finally her hand reached for mine. She squeezed, hard.

“Darla Jo.”

I couldn’t even look at her.

“You look at me.”

I just couldn’t.

She laughed through her nose. “You’re acting like a shamed little girl.”

“I feel like a shamed little girl right now, Mama.”

She reached out and tipped my chin up, forcing me to look at her. “Why?” Her eyes were narrowed, her mouth set with purpose. 

“Why?” I asked, incredulous. “Do I really need to spell it out?”

“You think you should be ashamed for loving two men at the same time?” Her tone was even. No judgment. Just curious and guarded, like she was handling me with kid gloves.

I was either going to throw up or hug her.

Maybe both.

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I do love two men at the same time,” I blurted out, my mouth filled with the tang of tears, my vision blurring. “Or did. I
did
love them both.”

“And you never told me. I had to figure it out for myself.”

I just sniffed and shut my eyes, tight, like she was gonna smack me upside the head.

“I’m sorry.”

“If you’re apologizing for loving them both, then shut your trap. If you’re apologizing for not trusting me enough to love you no matter who
you
love, then apology accepted, you foolish little girl.” And with that, her arms were around me and I sniffed again, smelling cigarette smoke and baby powder and
Mama
.

I sobbed into her shoulder and she soothed me. Then I heard the telltale inhale of her taking a puff of her e-cig. Pragmatic and stressed, my mama sure was.

“Why ain’t they here? Too good to come back to Peters and be at a hick wedding? That why they broke up with you?”

And blunt as fuck, my mama was.

“No!” I pulled away and wiped my eyes, my insides jangling like a set of car keys in a baby’s hands. “
I
broke up with
them
.”

“You did? Both of ‘em?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Huh. Most women would’ve hung on to one of them, Darla. For security.”

“It don’t work like that, Mama. We’re a threesome.”

She bristled at that word. Ah, fuck. I started to cry again.

“So you break up with one, you have to dump ’em both?” 

“Something like that.”

She studied my face. “I don’t think so,” she said, her face crunched in a skeptic’s scowl.

“What do you mean?”

“I think you broke up with ’em because you didn’t have the guts to tell me about them.”

“What? No.” But a chill ran through me. “It’s the other way around! They wouldn’t tell their parents about me, and they humiliated me at a dinner party Trevor’s mom had.”

She tensed. “Humiliated you? On purpose?”

“Well...” Now that I thought about it, no. Not really.

Mama narrowed her eyes and took a drag off her e-cig. It glowed pink, then purple. Great. The woman was smoking the e-cig version of a Glowworm doll.

“Then what? ’Cause what I’m hearin’ is that you wouldn’t tell me about them just like they wouldn’t tell their parents about you and what all three of you been doin’, Darla.” She got so close to me I could feel the heat of the end of that glowing e-cig thing, even though I knew there was no heat.

“I didn’t raise no fool, Darla, but it looks like I raised a hypocrite.”

I gasped.

“And that’s the only thing I might have to be ashamed about when it comes to your behavior.”

And with that, she slowly lumbered out of the living room and made a
harumph
sound that echoed through my conflicted soul.

C
HAPTER 10

Trevor

“What’s your GPS say? You punched in 26 Old Farm Road, Peters, Ohio, 44444, right?” I read Darla’s address off the piece of paper I’d scribbled it on.

“Yes. You watched me. Like a fucking hawk, you pansy-ass hovermother.”

“So where are we?”

“Lost signal,” the GPS said in a robotic voice.

“FUCK!” Joe screamed. “We’re stuck in Hoopieville, Ohio with a lost satellite signal. This is how every horror movie starts.”

“Not
every
horror movie,” I said, correcting him.

“Shut the fuck up, Trevor.”

“Just making a point of fact.”

“I’ll shove that point of fact up your ass, Mr. Attorney, if you don’t—”

“STOP!” I shouted. “Look. There’s a sign. Jerry’s Bar. remember?” How could either of us forget Jerry’s? It was there that I caught Joe kissing Darla for the first time. Right in front of the cigarette machine by the bathrooms. That moment was frozen in time in my mind. It was the second my life turned, like I shifted from one dimension to another, as if there were multiple Trevors living in parallel in different universes.

And I became the Trevor who didn’t mind sharing Darla. Who enjoyed watching my best friend kiss her. I became that person right here, right there, in that piece of shit, honky-tonk bar off I-76 in truck stop, flyover territory.

I smiled.

“I remember,” Joe groused, pulling a 360-degree turn to head back toward the neon sign. “I remember we nearly got the shit kicked out of us when we performed there.” 

“That’s not how it happened.”

“That’s what it felt like.”

“They warmed up to us afterwards, though.”

Joe blew a long puff of air out of his nose and ran a hand through his hair. “That was then, and they were hostile. How fast do you think word about us spread around town after we pulled that stunt when we were leaving?”

“You mean when
you
pulled that stunt. I remained clothed by the side of the road.” Joe had stripped naked and stood on the side of I-76 for about an hour, waiting for Darla to show up, to make a point. Or to try to get her to come to Boston. Or—for some reason.

“Shut up, Trevor.”

I did. He parked in a spot in the parking lot. It wasn’t hard to find one right near the door, because there were only seven cars in the parking lot.

“No angry mob with pitchforks and torches tonight,” I said.

“Seven cars means at least seven guys in there. More than enough to kick us into little piles of shit they can flush down a toilet,” Joe said tersely, hands clamped to the steering wheel, knuckles like white stones under stretched skin.

“But they won’t.”

He raised his eyebrows and stared straight ahead. The neon sign was broken. It said:

JERRY’S AR 

Like a pirate.

He let out a shaky breath and finally turned to me with haunted eyes. “What are we doing here?”

“We’re—” 

“I mean really doing here, Trevor. She left us. Broke up with us. We’ve been totally dumped, and we’re acting like stupid puppy dogs chasing after her. That’s nice and all in the movies, where the guy goes and gets his woman and they kiss and it’s happily ever after, but Darla left us for a reason. A big reason. An insurmountable reason. What the three of us have is too countercultural. It’s too extreme. There’s no place in society for it, and she walked away because we’re too chickenshit to say to our parents that this is what we do. This is how we live.” 

“This is who we are,” I said with a long sigh that matched his.

Joe’s hands began to shake on the steering wheel. His gut tightened visibly. “Right.”

I turned to him. “What’s the alternative?”

He looked at me with mourning, soulful eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

He snorted. “I do? Then you tell me.”

“The alternative is what we’re doing now. Hiding. Except Darla just shattered that. We can’t hide it any more.”

“Sure we can.”

“No. We can’t. Because she’s gone. The price of hiding it is losing her.”

“I don’t think that’s the price of hiding it.”

“Then what is?”

“Feeling like a phony all the time.”

“You’re turning into J.D. Salinger.”

“I always did like his books.”

“That’s because you’re an asshole like Holden Caulfield.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Only an asshole would.”

“We can bicker at each other like two guys in a David Mamet play, or we can decide what the fuck we’re doing out here. This is one big mistake.”