My brain feels like it’s been pickled in alcohol. Friday was not impressed by my behavior at dinner, but then again I don’t think she was impressed with any of us. She cursed under her breath as she got up and ladled gumbo into plastic Tupperware containers following Coralie’s exit from the house.
“Here. Take this. For the road,” she told me, shoving a container into my hands, and then a larger one into Shane’s. “Y’all can’t even have a civil conversation in my household, then you can leave until you’ve mastered the art of social etiquette.” She then unceremoniously booted myself, Shane and Tina out on the sidewalk, hmmphing at us as she slammed her front door, and that was the last we saw of her. Five hours have passed since then. And those five hours have been filled with Tina screaming at me for being an asshole, Shane bundling Tina into their car and telling her to go home, and then Shane and me drinking our faces off at some new, fancy bar full of kids that wasn’t here when I left town last.
“Are you sure you want to go home now?” I ask, prodding Shane in the gut with my container of cold gumbo. We’re standing at the end of the driveway to my house, swaying like limp stalks of corn. “You’re wasted. Tina’s gonna kill you.”
“Tina won’t kill me. She’ll—” He hiccups. “She’ll kill you when she sees you next. She’s well aware that I know no better. Can’t be trusted, she says.”
“Hmm. Well, you’ll forgive me if—I don’t rush to hang out with your wife between now and the moment I leave this Podunk town then.”
“I get it.” Shane belches, thumping his chest with a clenched fist. “If I were you, I wouldn’t either. So. What are you going to do about…?” Angling his head toward next door, he waggles his eyebrows. “Y’know. Coralie Taylor, and the whole, don’t ever speak to me again thing?”
“She didn’t say I couldn’t ever speak to her again.”
“She didn’t need to. It was pretty damn obvious, Cal. She’d rather stick hot pokers into her eyes than have another chit chat with you, from the looks on her face when she was running the hell away from you.”
He’s right, and I hate it. God, my eyes are stinging like crazy. I’m so drunk and so tired, and the enormity of the day keeps threatening to take me out at the knees. If I let it, I’ll be smashing every single stick of furniture inside the house as soon as I walk through the door, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to get angry and violent, just because seeing Coralie for the first time in so long didn’t go as I’d hoped. It went precisely as I expected, and that, well…
She gets to be mad at me. She gets to be furious. Publishing that photo was a real dick move on my part. “You’d better get back to that pregnant wife of yours before she sends out a search party, baying for my blood,” I say, clapping Shane on the arm. He tugs me into a hug, jabs the knuckle of his index finger into my ribs, and then he walks off down the street, laughing quietly under his breath.
When I get to the front door, I find it open an inch.
The hell? After living in New York for so long, I don’t make the mistake of leaving the front door open. I just don’t. I’m practically OCD about it at my loft space, which makes the fact that this door is unlocked highly irregular. And worrying. When I was a kid, I used to play baseball, just for fun. I used to take one of Mom’s hessian shopping bags down to the bottom of the garden and collect all of the bitter cooking apples that had fallen from the trees there, and then Dad and I used to stand on the narrow boat dock at the end of our yard. He would lob the apples up into the air, and I would hit them, barking out snatches of laughter as the softened fruit exploded every time the cedar wood of my bat connected with them. The river that runs through Port Royal, snaking its way around the back of the houses on our street, would be littered with chunks of apple, and Dad would have this look on his face, like he figured he was the greatest father on the face of the fucking planet. The air would be full of sugar and sunlight, and I’d think maybe that he wouldn’t leave after all.
He did, though. He left. I never hit apples out onto the river again, though I kept the baseball bat. As the man of the house, I knew I had to protect my mother; I kept the bat stashed in the narrow gap between the front door frame and the bookcase in the hallway, which is where it still lives, gathering dust.