“Oh, Scott. Stop it.” Mom swats his arm as if this is the follow-up to an earlier conversation. She turns off their light and shoos me to bed with her eyes. When I’m halfway down the hall, her voice follows. “Don’t forget the garage door.”
That night, I dream I’m flying an Audi. Gerry’s riding shotgun. Davey’s wearing ten ties in the backseat and Audi Thomas has installed an espresso machine in the trunk. He’s pouring glasses. Gerry rips out the front seat, tosses it out the window. It doesn’t drop. It flies away like a bird. The rest of the seats go the same way. Suddenly, the Audi is large enough to hold a dance party of four. We jump. We kiss. The horn sings, “I cannot be contained.” Gerry laughingly says, “We are more ambitious than a love triangle. We’re a love square.”
I wake up drenched in a fresh wave of worry over all the love squares in my life.
My best friend is in love with my other best friend. I’m going to have to deal with that at some point.
5
Davey’s Part
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
He called me before I called him. Thom Cahill had a knack for three things: stealing my girlfriends, stealing my girlfriends in such a way that I ended up thinking they were better off with him than they were with me, and calling before I needed him.
Two hours before we’d left summer football workout together, and everything on my emotional monitor registered as level and fine. “How’s it hanging, Winters?” he greeted me over the phone.
“At my feet,” I told him.
“Meet at Bonjo?” he asked.
“Meet at Bonjo,” I replied.
Fifteen minutes later, Thom and I were among the hipsters and writers who populated our favorite caffeinated haunt. Our barista had the day off, but even the second-string made us two Americanos before we asked for them. Impressed, I dropped an extra ten in the jar. A middle-aged lady with a baby abandoned our favorite table as if Thom had sent a text ahead asking her to vacate. The stage was set. Serious conversation to follow.
Thom twisted the square Waylan Academy ring he always wore on his pinkie because it was too small for his ring finger. The platinum gleamed against his skin. He’d had it polished again.
“You need something.” He sounded sure of himself, which he always was. Being sure was a Thom thing—courtesy of a lifetime of being lavishly loved.
He sipped the coffee, and I had a vision of us doing this same thing when we were thirty. He’d chatter happily about his wife wanting him to work fewer hours at the firm, and I’d tell him my daughter spit up on my favorite tie. We’d be rich and annoying. Or we would at least pretend to be rich at thirty, which was annoying. But then the image glitches, and fuzzes like an old television, thanks to John Winters, my father.
Thom had called me two weeks before under similar circumstances. We’d talked about Mom catching Dad with Kaitlyn (“with a Y”), his trainer. We’d discussed the coming shitstorm. Two hours ago, that shitstorm made landfall in Casa Winters.
Thom asked, “What’s the current situation?”
In his early forties (or perhaps before), my father developed a love of working out at expensive gyms. He likes women who know their way around a barbell; he likes toweling off in front of large mirrors. My mom has Betty Crocker hips, Sara Lee thighs, and Mother Teresa’s devotion. They were never a very good match and hadn’t been happy together in years, if ever. I used to obsess over them and my unfortunate role in their continuing relationship. I have since, with Thom’s coaching, learned some distance. Also, my parents met when Mom was seventeen. My age.
“We’re leaving him,” I told Thom.
He accepted this pronouncement as I had, without question. “To where?” was the question. He asked it quietly, already suspecting this was the reason his Spidey sense had urged him to call.
During the family meeting, I’d requested this information too. I’d expected, oh, maybe a condo in Green Hills, there’s a place showing in Lennox Village, I have a friend with a lovely bungalow in East. We’d move from swanky Brentwood, Tennessee, to greater Nashville, Tennessee. Good-bye, cheater. Hello, alimony.
“Otters Holt. Kentucky.” I didn’t hide my disdain, having holidayed there occasionally.
“That’s where they have the very large yellow thing. What is it? A scarecrow?” he asked kindly.
“Molly the Corn Dolly,” I responded with as much enthusiasm as I could manage.
“Yes, Molly the Corn Dolly,” Thom repeated, hiding a smirk behind his mug.
He was right to smirk. My grandfather had that thing constructed, but I’d never managed to tell anyone about it with a straight face, let alone Thom, who found the humor in most things. He did not find any humor in his best friend spending his senior year in a town that didn’t even have a McDonald’s. I tipped my mug on its rim, having already thought well beyond the absence of chain restaurants. Graduating elsewhere. Graduating away from Thom. Graduating from Otters Holt. How could I put that on a college application and be taken seriously?
Small towns (population 2,876, according to the sign next to Molly) were made of nosy people, and I wasn’t village fare. Add to that I was a niche of a niche, and it had taken years to find friends who liked ties, intensity, and costumes.
Thom brooded over my brooding. We were the same age, but he’d always treated me like a little brother. I never once minded this. No one bloodied my nose with Thom around, and I always had someone next to me to ask the really important questions. The ring circumnavigated his finger. I twisted my own in unison, as if we might unlock a secret portal that did not involve me moving to Podunk.
“David, I’m going to break this to you gently: this situation sucks hairy gorilla balls, and you might die a young death of boredom or, at a minimum, never be allowed back into academia.”
He said this because I wanted to hear it.
“That was a joke,” he said.
“Not to me.”
“David, it’s not Outer Mongolia. We’ll be what . . . two hours away?”
More like an hour and a half in the Audi. This was his way of saying he wouldn’t leave me to the country mice. “It’s a year. You can do anything for a year, yes?”
“It’s a prison sentence. All because my dad got sweaty on Kaitlyn with a Y.”
“Your dad got sweaty on Marnie with an M, and Ainsley with an A, and Rhonda like a rumba,” he reminded me. “You can’t blame your mom.”
I didn’t. Nor did I condone Dad’s conduct. All this time, I’d known my mom might not get Botox injections or wear high heels to the gym, but her backbone was toned and muscular. I just hadn’t expected her to move me to Outer Mongolia when she found out. Thom and I had planned to out Dad next year from the safety of a college dorm. Then she could hit him upside the head with a frying pan and everyone would have plausible deniability.
Thom switched tactics again. “Your cousin is there, right?”
“Yeah, Mash. He’s all right, but Thom, end of the day, they’re not like us.”
“So your cousin is one of those aliens from Terminator? A mermaid? Half horse?”