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“It doesn’t have any pictures,” I said from the doorway.
Austin put the book on the coffee table. “This is nice.”
He hadn’t risen to the bait, though I’d made a point of pushing one of his buttons. “The book?”
“The coffee table,” he said, still not rising.
“It was Stella’s.”
Austin nodded, like that made sense. “Glad I didn’t put my feet up on it.”
It took me an actual five seconds before I realized he was trying to tease me without pissing me off. He was actually just…kidding. I knew how to handle him trying to seduce me or piss me off. I didn’t know how to take that.
“I miss you,” Austin said.
The words were hard to hear, and I don’t mean because he spoke too low, or mumbled. They were hard for me to listen to because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want him to miss me.
I sat across from him, instead. The recliner’s springs sometimes poked through the faded material, though I’d tossed a fleece throw over it. One did now, and I winced as I shifted.
“I do,” he said, as though my expression had been in response to his statement and not a coil of wire in my butt.
“Austin.” Nothing else would come out.
He shrugged. I hadn’t fallen in love with him because of his way with words. Back then it hadn’t mattered if he spoke more with his hands than his mouth. Back then we’d both been young and dumb.
“You look good, Paige. This place,” he gestured, “it’s nice.”
“Thanks.”
His hair used to be bleached almost white by the sun, and he wore it so short I could see his scalp. When I ran my fingers through it, my nails scraped skin. Now it fell forward over his ears and forehead and was the color of wheat in a field, waiting to be cut. His eyes, moving over my face, made me think he was waiting to be cut, too.
I almost couldn’t do it. I mean, the night before I’d let him put his tongue down my throat and his hands all over me. When the warmth of him wafted over me, I wanted to close my eyes at how familiar it was. How easy it would have been to take him by the hand and lead him to my bedroom.
I kept my eyes open, a lesson I’d been taught a long time ago but had taken me a long time to learn. “I don’t miss you, Austin. Last night was a mistake.”
“C’mon, Paige. Don’t say that. We were always good together.”
“We haven’t been together for a long time,” I said, not quite as evenly as I wanted.
“It’s not just the sex.” Austin leaned forward, too, his hands on the knees of his dirty denim jeans. A white spot had worn through just below his kneecap, not quite a hole, but on its way to becoming one. “I didn’t just mean that. I can get laid anytime I want.”
“I’m sure you can.” I got up, my arms folded across my chest.
He got up, too. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
I wasn’t going to bend. Not over the chair, not over the bed, and not over this. “It doesn’t matter how you meant it. I think you should go.”
“Same old Paige,” he said with a shake of his hair. “Still hard as nails, huh? Hard as a rock. Can’t ever give me a break.”
“You don’t need a break from me. Besides, you can just get laid whenever you want. Look, Austin,” I said when it looked as though he meant to speak. “We can’t keep doing this.”
“Why not?”
I studied him deliberately until I couldn’t hold in the sigh any longer and it seeped out of me like air from a nail-punched tire. “You know why not. Because fucking doesn’t solve every problem. And we had a lot of problems.”
He crossed his arms and looked stormy. I didn’t point out the arguments we’d had about money, about religion, about monogamy. I didn’t remind him of the nights he’d gone out for a few beers with friends and had come home smelling of perfume and guilt, or that it didn’t matter whether he had or hadn’t fucked anyone else, it was that he was content to choose a night with his buddies over staying home with me. I didn’t bring up the times I’d said I was studying for school when I was really someplace else, with someone else.
“I just want you to be happy, Austin.” I meant it.
He leaned back and frowned more fiercely. “You want me to be happy so you can feel better about yourself, that’s all. So you don’t feel so bad about what happened.”
The truth of that stung me like a wasp, smooth-stingered and able to jab more than once. “I think you should go.”
Damn him, he didn’t. He moved closer and cupped my elbows in his palms so I had to uncross my arms to push him away or let him snuggle up close. I put my hands on his chest, but didn’t push. His muscles beneath the tight T-shirt were hard and firm. He leaned, and I didn’t pull away. If he’d kissed me, I’d have been lost, but if he’d ever thought he knew me, he proved himself wrong again. He didn’t kiss me. He spoke, instead.
“I’m your husband.”
I pushed my arms straight. His hands slid from my elbows along my arms and fell away at my wrists. I stepped back, my hand against his chest preventing him from following unless he pushed me, too. Austin looked for a second as if he meant to try it, but didn’t.
“I have a folder full of paperwork that says otherwise,” I told him.
“Okay, so not officially. But you can’t tell me—”
“I can tell you anything I want, so long as it’s true,” I shot back.
“Can you tell me it’s true that you don’t miss me, too? Not even a little?”
“I miss fucking you,” I said flatly. “The rest of it? Not so much.”
Austin grinned and spread his fingers. “It’s a start, right? I’ll call you.”
“I won’t answer.”
“I’ll call again.”
I pointed at the door, and he went. I waited until it closed behind him before I gave in to the urge to sigh. What is it about bad boys that make them so, so good?
I’ve known him since kindergarten. Austin. In my elementary-school class photos, more times than not, his freckled face is beaming from the row behind me. In one, we stand beside each other, our grins showing the same missing teeth.
In high school, we had nothing in common. Austin was a jock. I was a gothpunk girl with multiple piercings and a tattoo of a dragonfly on my back. We shared college-level classes and the same lunch period. I knew who he was because of his prowess on the football field. If he knew me it was maybe because I was one of the girls every boy knew, or maybe just because we’d been in the same school since we were five. We didn’t say hi when we passed in the halls, but he was never mean to me the way some of the boys could be. Austin never called me names or made crude invitations.
In the fall of our senior year, Austin went down under a pile of boys pumped up with testosterone and fury. We won the homecoming game, but instead of riding in Chrissy Fisher’s dad’s 1966 Impala convertible, Austin took a redlights-flashing ambulance to the Hershey Medical Center.
He recovered, nothing miraculous about it. His body, bones broken and skin torn, healed. Nobody ever said he’d never play football again. Austin simply never did.
Nor basketball, either, and in the spring, not baseball. By then his chances of going to anything other than community college had vanished along with the scholarship offers, but if he ever cared he wasn’t getting a full ride to Penn State, he never said so to me.
And by then, he would have. By the time our senior year ended, Austin told me everything.
We were an odd couple, but nobody shunned us for it. I didn’t hear whispers in the halls. No jealous cheerleaders tried to pull out my dyed-black hair, and no slick rich jocks tried to convince him he was better off without me. We didn’t go to the prom, but only because we decided to stay home and watch soft porn and fuck, instead.
When I told my mom we were going to get married, she hugged me and wept. Her belly poked between us—she was pregnant with Arthur, then. If she suspected I wanted to marry Austin as much so I could move out of the house as for passion, she didn’t say anything.
When we told his parents, his dad said nothing and his mother’s eyes dropped to my waistband. She didn’t ask me if I was pregnant, and she must have been surprised as the months of our marriage passed and my belly stayed flat, but no matter how she might have felt about the prospect of me as a daughter-in-law, the idea of a bastard grandchild must’ve been worse.
I wore a thrift-store wedding dress and Austin wore a suit of his dad’s we’d paid the dry cleaner to take in. In pictures, my thick black eyeliner and my spiked black hair make me look pale, wan. Tired. Scared, even.
The truth is, I was happy.
We both were, I like to think. At least at first. Austin went to work for his dad’s construction business, and I kept up work at my mom’s shop. My granddad had died and it was hers, full-time, and now that she had Arty, she couldn’t spend as much time with it, so I managed the shop.
We were happy.
And then, we weren’t.
Chapter 07
When I was younger, the prospect of Sunday dinner at my dad’s had so excited me or stressed me out I’d vomit. Never at my father’s house—even when I was little I knew Stella wouldn’t approve of a puking kid. I didn’t puke anymore, but I’d never managed to get rid of the knots in my stomach, either.
I popped an antacid tablet now as I sat in my not-expensive-enough-to-be-impressive car in their half-circle driveway of stamped concrete. This was the fourth new house my father’d had in the past seventeen years of life with his second family. Before that he’d lived in a stately Georgian-style half mansion with his first family. He’d never lived with my mother.
Birth-order studies claim that an age difference of six or more years between siblings complicates the normal oldest, middle and youngest personality traits by also making each child an only. That’s why, though I have five half siblings and an uncle who’s more like a brother, I’m an only child. I’ve tried identifying with being the middle kid—but what it comes down to, in the end, is I’m not.
The door opened and Jeremy and Tyler ran out. They both favor my dad, too. All of us look more like siblings than we were raised to be. I was fourteen when Jeremy was born, sixteen for Tyler. They’re more like nephews or cousins than brothers. I’m not sure what they think of me, just that they’re always glad to see me and aside from the fact they’re spoiled brats who could use a good spanking now and then, I’m usually glad to see them, too.
“Hey, Paige.” Jeremy at twelve no longer ran to clutch at my legs. He settled for a half wave with limp fingers.
Tyler, ten, was nearly as tall as me but squeezed me anyway. “Paige, c’mon, we’re going to play Pictionary. Grandma and Grandpa are here already. So’s Nanny and Poppa.”
“And Gretchen and Steve, too, I see.” I pointed to the two minivans that belonged to my dad’s kids with his first wife.
“Everyone’s here,” Jeremy said somewhat sourly, and I gave him a glance. He’d always been a pretty upbeat kid. Today he scowled, blond eyebrows pinching tight over the smaller version of our father’s nose.
I leaned back into my car to grab the gift, then locked my car. It was unlikely anything would happen to it parked in my dad’s driveway, but it was habit. “Come. Let’s go in.”
I slung an arm around Tyler’s neck and listened to him babble on about school, soccer, the new game system he’d found under the Christmas tree. He had never known Santa to disappoint him. I’d stopped trying not to be envious of that, even though I no longer believed in Santa Claus.
Inside, Jeremy slunk to a chair in the corner and sat with crossed arms, the scowl still in place. Tyler abandoned me to round up pens for the game. That left me to the socially torturous task of making nice with Stella’s parents, Nanny and Poppa.
Like their daughter, they weren’t bad people. They’d never gone out of their way to be cruel. I wasn’t Cinderella. And I understood, now, what it must have been like to try to find a place in their hearts for their new son-in-law’s children, and how awkward it must have felt. A hastily wrapped Jumbo Book of Puzzles and a prewrapped box of knit mittens would always fall short in comparison to exquisitely wrapped packages in shiny foil paper with matching bows, the contents new clothes or toys. I understood. Spending Christmas at my dad’s had been last minute, haphazardly planned and rare. At least Nanny and Poppa had made an effort.
It seemed easier for them now that I was a grown-up, though it was more difficult for me. As a kid it had never occurred to me they wouldn’t like me. Now I was convinced they didn’t.
“Hello, Paige,” George, also known as Poppa, said. “How nice of you to come.”
He meant well, but the unspoken insinuation of surprise made me bite my tongue against the shout of “Of course I came! She’s my father’s wife!”
But, like Stella herself, I could never hope to impress them. I just wanted not to prove them right. So instead of shouting, I smiled.
“How are you?” I couldn’t call him George, Mr. Smith sounded absurd, and I would never call him Poppa.
I’d been asking out of politeness, but he told me exactly how he was. For fifteen minutes. And I listened, nodding and murmuring in appropriate places, as though I cared. I didn’t know half the people he mentioned, but he acted as if he thought I should. He never asked me about myself, which was fine, because then I didn’t have to answer.
Finally, the game of Pictionary got under way. Gretchen’s husband, Peter, begged off, volunteering to take care of Hunter, their three-year-old son. Steve and his vastly pregnant wife, Kelly, played, though, as did my dad and Stella, all the grandparents and Tyler. And me. Jeremy had disappeared. We split into teams, boys against girls.
“I’ll sit out,” I said when we’d counted up the teams to find the girls’ side had an extra player.
“Oh, no, Paige, are you sure?” Stella protested, but not too hard. She liked things even and square.
“Sure. Not a problem. I’ll go check on dinner, if you want.”
Okay, so maybe I’d cast myself in the Cinderella role. Just a little. But it was a relief to get into the kitchen and set out platters of vegetables and dip, cheese and crackers. Decorative breads and soft cheeses with pretty spreaders that matched the platter. Stella loved to have parties.
I found the cold-cut platters in the garage fridge and brought them into the kitchen to put them out on the table, which was serving as a buffet. I startled Jeremy when I came back in, and he whirled, can of soda in hand, from the open fridge.
From the living room, the sound of laughter wafted. I set the platter of meat on the table. Jeremy and I stared each other down.
“You’re not supposed to be drinking that before dinner,” I told him.
“I know.” His chin lifted. He hadn’t yet cracked the top.
“I’m not going to tell you on you, kiddo.” I turned to the table and took off the platter’s plastic lid so I could get rid of the fake greenery around the edges. I knew how to make things pretty.
“Don’t call me kiddo,” he said.
I expected him to slink away with his stolen prize, but he didn’t. When I turned to look at him, he was still playing with the can, shifting it from one hand to the other.
“Something up?” I moved past him to the big, mostly empty pantry, to pull out the fancy plastic plates and plastic-ware, the matching napkins.
“No.” Jeremy shrugged and disappeared up the back stairs.
After that, the party really started.
It was easier for me with more people there. Stella’s friends knew who I was, of course, and avoided talking to me so they didn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of how to address their friend’s husband’s illegitimate daughter. My dad’s friends knew me, too, but had fewer inhibitions for some reason. Maybe because I’d known them longer, or because they had no conflict of loyalty. Some of them didn’t like Stella much, and maybe that was part of it, too.
Of my father’s other kids, I saw very little. Gretchen, Steve and I had never been close, even though it wasn’t my mother who’d finally won our dad away from their mom. Of course, their spouses weren’t sure what to make of me, either, and it was easier for us to be superficially polite without trying to get to know each other. Their children were and would be my nieces and nephews, but I doubted they’d ever think of me as an aunt.
“Paige DeMarco, how the hell are you?” Denny’s one of my dad’s oldest friends. Fishing and drinking buddies, they’d known each other since high school. He’d known my mom, too.
“Hey, Denny. Long time no see.”
“Yeah, and you a big-city girl now, too. How’s it going?” Denny gave me a one-armed hug.
“It’s going great.” It wasn’t an entire lie. Most of my life was going great.
“Yeah?” He tossed back the dregs of his iced tea. I guessed he was hankering for a beer, but Stella wasn’t serving booze. Not that I blamed her. Alcohol always made a different kind of party. “Where you living at? Your dad said someplace along the river?”
“Riverview Manor.”
There was no denying the pride swelling inside me at Denny’s impressed whistle. “Nice digs. And your job? You’re not still working with your mom, are you?”
“I help out once in a while, if she’s got a big job.”
Denny grimaced at his empty cup, but didn’t move to pour more. “What’s she up to? She still with the same guy?”
Questions my dad never asked. I was the only part of my mother my dad needed to know about. He’d never said as much, but I knew it.
“Leo? Yes.”
“And that kid, how old’s he now?”
“Arty’s seven.” I had to laugh for a second. “Wow. Yeah. He just turned seven.”
“You tell her I said hi, okay?”
“Sure.”
We chatted for a while after that. The party got louder. Stella reigned over it like a queen, even if she was claiming to still be only twenty-nine. When it came time to open the gifts, I thought about slipping out, but forced myself to stay.
Stella sat in the big rocking chair in the living room, her presents arranged at her feet and her closest girlfriend beside her getting ready to write down the name of every gift and its giver. Stella opened gift cards, packages of bath salts, certificates for spa treatments. Sweaters. Slippers. A new silk robe someone had brought from a trip to Japan. She oohed and aahed over each gift appropriately.
By the time she got to mine, my stomach had begun to eat itself. The harsh sting of acid rose in my throat, burning. My heart thudded sickly. I had to turn away to pop another couple antacids and sip from a glass of ginger ale, even though I knew the soda would ruin the effects of the medicine.
It’s silly to hold on to the past, but we all do it. I was almost ten the first year I’d been invited to Stella’s birthday party. The paint had been barely dry in their new house. Gretchen and Steven were living one week with their mother and one week with my dad and Stella. I, of course, lived full-time with my mom and saw my dad on an occasional weekend or holiday, a practice he’d only started after leaving his first wife.
I’d picked out Stella’s present myself that year, using my allowance to pay for it. I’d bought her a silky red tank top with a lacy hem. It was the sort of shirt my mom would’ve loved and wore often, and she said nothing when she helped me fold it and wrap it in some pretty paper that had come free in the mail to solicit money for a charity.
I’d been so proud of that present. I’d been sure Stella, who wasn’t nearly as pretty as my mom but who tried hard, anyway, would open it and put it on right away. Then she’d smile at me, and my dad would smile at me, and we’d all be happy.
Instead, she’d opened the box and pulled out the shirt. Her gaze had gone immediately to my father’s, but men don’t know anything about fashion beyond what they like and what they don’t. She didn’t put it on. She fingered the red satiny fabric and peeked at the label, her eyes going a little wider at what she saw. Then she put the shirt back in the box with a thank-you even a nine-year-old could tell was forced. I never saw her wear it, but I did find it in the garage a few years later, in the box of rags my dad used for cleaning his cars.
I wasn’t nine years old any longer. I wasn’t even a teen in too-thick eyeliner and a too-short skirt. I’d learned how to dress and how to speak, but part of me would always be my mother’s daughter, at least in Stella’s eyes.
“Oh, Paige, what a thoughtful gift.” Stella lifted out the box of paper and opened it to pull out the pen. She wiggled it so the tiny tassel danced. “Very pretty. Thank you.”
I let out a long, silent sigh. “You’re welcome.”
“Where do you find such pretty things?” Stella continued. She turned to face her audience. “Paige always finds the prettiest things.”
That was it. Bells didn’t ring, little birdies didn’t fly around on rainbow glitter wings. She’d said thank-you, and I thought she meant it. That was all.
I still managed to slip away before the party was over. My dad caught me at the door. He insisted on hugging me.
“Thanks for coming.” I’m sure he meant it, too.
I doubt there’s anyone who does not have a complicated relationship with his or her parents, so I’m not saying I’m special or anything. Considering the circumstances of my birth, I’m lucky to have any sort of relationship with my dad. For the most part, at least, it’s an honest relationship. Except of course when honesty is too painful.
“Of course I’d come,” I told him. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Of course you would,” my dad said. “Well, I’m glad you did. How’s the new place?”
“It’s great.” With his arm still around me, I wanted to squirm away. “It’s a very nice place.”
“And the new job?”
The job I’d had for almost six months didn’t feel so new anymore. “It’s great, too. I like my boss a lot.”
“Good. You’re up on Union Deposit Road, right?”
“Progress,” I told him. “Just off Progress.”
“Oh, right. Well, hey, maybe I should swing by some day and take you to lunch at the Cracker Barrel, what do you say?”
“Sure, Dad.” I smiled, not expecting him to ever follow through. “Just call me.”
He kissed my cheek and hugged me again, making a show of making me his daughter. It was nice, in that way we both knew was shallow but served its purpose.
The moment I got in my car and the door to the house shut, my every muscle relaxed. I blew out another series of long, slow breaths and lifted my arms to let my pits air out. I’d be sore tomorrow in places I hadn’t realized I’d clenched. I was already getting a headache. I’d made it through another big family event without anything going wrong.
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