A Toast to the Good Times (7 page)

“Mom, I know I’ve had a couple rough patches
—
”

“Rough patches? You haven’t had a steady girl since Annie, which is fine. The last thing you need is a girlfriend messing with your head. But a dozen girls in and out every week, Landry? You keep putting off finishing your business
degree,
you spend every second you’re not at the bar with that loser friend of yours,
Tyler
...what’s going on with you, Landry? When are you going to wake up?”

“I am awake!” I groaned miserably. “I’m wide awake, Mom, and shit just sucks right now.”

“Shit just sucks right now?” She mimicked my voice with such accuracy, it made me slump into the passenger seat. “You have a roof over your head, a full belly every night, your family loves you, and you have employment during one of the worst recessions in history, but ‘shit just sucks right now’?”

“I don’t know if this is what I want to do with my life.” I regretted the words before they left my mouth.

“You don’t know if this is what you want to do with your life?” She echoes the question back like it was the rock-bottom most entirely idiotic single thought ever pondered in the history of humanity.

I had no idea the simple act of repetition could be used as such specific, dramatic torture.

“Hear me out
—
”

“Enough!” She crunched on the brakes and we pitched forward a few yards from our driveway. “I have a husband with a black eye in my house because our idiot son lost his temper. I have a business falling apart under my nose because that same idiot son wants more time to
figure things out
. I have to keep this family together, Landry! We have all made sacrifices while you tried to
figure out
exactly what it is you need, and I feel like the more time and energy we put towards that, the more selfish and stupid your actions get.”

I shook my head, regret and rage and total humiliation all
sucker
-
punching
each other for the chance to get to beat the shit out of my already mutilated ego.

“I feel like no one listens to a thing I have to say.” I tried to start things neutrally, to say what I needed to without making things worse, but my mother was in rare form.

“No one listens to you? No one listens to poor Landry? I feel like all I ever do is listen to you whine and cry about how hard things are! And I’m done with it! I’m done! Done, done, done, done. You want out? Leave. Please, be my guest and leave. If you think you can do better on your own, please, go ahead and try.”

My mother’s hands death-gripped the steering wheel. Her words knifed at my already beaten-to-a-pulp conscience.

“Fine.” I knew, in that moment, that I was doing something insanely, totally stupid. I knew I’d regret it. I knew I was being completely childish and was letting the whole stupid, crazy night take me by the throat and shake me around, but I didn’t care. “Fine. I will. I know I’ve been a huge pain in the ass. Now you won’t have to worry about it anymore. Or me. Or whatever. I’m fucking done.”

Before my mother could yell at me for swearing or tell me what a lousy ass I was being or talk me out of my latest temper tantrum, I slid out of the car, slammed the door shut, and jogged to my friend
Tyler
’s house and crashed semi-permanently.

A few weeks later my inheritance was released.

I left New Jersey and hadn’t looked back until Paisley’s call.

             
The snow crunches under the tires of Paisley’s Accord as she pulls into the driveway of my parents’ house, a few yards from where Mom and I sat that night she bailed me out of jail and I bailed out of my family’s life for months on end.

It looks the same. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this is the longest I’ve gone without seeing it, and I just sort of thought it’d look a little different. The Snoopy Christmas scene is lit up in the front yard, the snowflakes made out of white lights are staked into the walkway, and the creepy-ass Santa face is staring at me through the octagon shaped window in the second story. It’s the same as it always was.

But the feel is different.

Because I’m not welcome.

             
There aren’t any lights on inside the house from what I can tell. That’s not really odd, because it’s late as hell. Paisley turns to look at me as she tosses the car keys into her purse and senses what I’m thinking:
this was a bad idea
.

The entire night was a bad fucking idea.

I’d like a do-over.

I’d like to rewind and go home with the cute girl from the bar, instead of having gone to my apartment where I fucked things up with Mila. I’d like to have ignored Paisley’s call and not gotten on that damn train and kissed Toni.

I want to be passed out in my messy apartment after a satisfying but unemotional lay and not staring up at that freakish St. Nick in the window of my parents’ house with thoughts of Mila and Toni and the stupid mess I made of everything past and present bludgeoning my brain.

             
“Don’t worry, if they’re awake, I’ll tell them that I begged you to come.” Paisley’s big green eyes are pleading with me not to run away like the scumbag I am.
             
I rub the back of my neck and close my eyes. I’m that that kind of tired that, once my eyelids are closed, I feel everything start to spin in the blackness. If I weren’t so exhausted, I’d probably high-tail it back to the train station right now.
             
“Could we, like, go inside?” Paisley rubs her hands together and blows into them.

The temperature in the car has gone from toasty warm to nearly-freezing-my-nuts off in the two minutes since she turned the engine off.
 

“You go ahead. I’m going to take a walk.”

“Landry, it’s freezing out.”

“I’ll be fine.” I zip my jacket up to my neck and pull the hood on.

“Are you kidding?
T
hat’s not even a real coat.” She flicks one of the strings of my hood with her finger and purses her lips like she used to just before she threw a huge temper tantrum when we were kids. She’s outgrown the tantrums. Too bad I never outgrew dodging every problem that ever darted in my way. “Jesus Mary and Joseph, Landry, you’re going to freeze to death. On Christmas Eve. ” Her eyes are wide and worried.

“We’re still a few hours away from Christmas Eve, so don’t get all the violins out for me just yet, okay? I’ll see you in the morning, kid.”

I lean over and kiss her on the cheek, then stumble out of the car and into the snow. My parents’ property line goes all the way back into the woods, the same ones I grew up playing in with Paisley and my brother Henry. I follow the line back to the thick trees, then veer off to the left side of the property. There’s a shed out here I used to sleep in when I was torn up over a girl and didn’t want to hear shit from Henry, or too drunk to face Mom, or too sick of dealing with my family’s drama to go into the crowded, suffocating house.

I push on the rough wooden door and it creaks open.

My dad’s voice breaks through the frigid night air and scares the shit out of me. I jump back and almost fall over the crooked threshold.

“Landry?”

He says it like a question, like he maybe doesn’t believe I’m really here.

Or just wishes I weren’t.

I clear my throat, trying to make room for the words around what feels like a lump of coal in my throat.

“Paisley asked me to come...” I let my voice drift off.

The way he’s working his jaw back and forth and rubbing the back of his neck without meeting my eyes, tells me he doesn’t care why I’m here. I open my mouth and start to say something else, what I don’t know, but I let it clamp shut again.

All of the words we could say hang in the air.

The sharp ones that cut like shards of broken beer bottles.

The ones that are sticky and polluted as old fly paper.

And the meaner, nastier, snaring ones that drag in all our regrets and leave them in a tangled, diseased net we can’t break out of.

But neither one of us say any of them.

My dad looks me up and down, taking me in with eyes identical to the ones that stare back at me in the mirror every morning while I shave, and then he walks out on me without one more word.

Chapter 6
 

The logical thing to do would be to go to sleep. But the shed is a hell of a lot colder than I remember it being, maybe beca
use I’m older now and used to
sleeping in an actual bed in an actual insulated apartment, and not a cot in some drafty-ass shed. Maybe also because the remnants of my hangover are wearing away in the frosty night, and the residual warmth the last vestiges of alcohol in my system offered is all gone now.

I kick the door open and stalk back to Paisley’s car, then remember I have no keys. I can just go in the house. The upstairs hall light is on. Paisley is probably bunking down in her bed. Henry is probably up playing video games. Dad is waking Mom with his quiet, brooding fury. And I could head down to the basement apartment I used to play grown-up in and catch up on some much-needed sleep.

But I’m not ready, and my renewed irritation at running into my father led me to catch a dangerously sleep-deprived second wind. I scroll through my phone as I stalk down the street through the bitter cold and see that I have a friend request on Facebook. I have no idea why I’m even on the stupid site. I never bothered to access my account until my asshole ex-girlfriend got it on with my business partner, and then all I used it for was self-torture and stalking. Looking at pictures of the two of them together and knowing they would probably head back to Jersey is part of what kept my ass firmly planted in Boston.

The friend request is from Toni, sent a few minutes before.

So she’s still up.

Mila updated her status an hour ago to: “
Spoonful’s
of decadent amaretto-laced chocolate mousse and back-to-back
Firefly
and
Serenity
marathons can remedy even the most disastrous night. Right?”

Damn it.

Fucking damn it.

She hasn’t pulled out those Blu-rays since the douche she had a crush on for eight months wound up having a pregnant girlfriend tucked away in the dorms he never bothered to mention during all the time he spent trying to crawl up Mila’s ass.

Now
I’m
the douche. Fucking perfect.

I accept Toni’s friend request and stare at my phone. Mila is still up wishing Mal Reynolds wasn’t just some fictional man in a weird space Western TV show.

I could call her. My thumb slides over the screen, ready to push ‘send’ and try to make an impossibly bad situation partially right.

I scroll back instead.

To my most recent added contact.

And I do hit send this time.

Ten minutes later Toni pulls over to the curb in a red Audi, and I’m back in the heaven of a warm car interior, rubbing my hands in front of the vents and trying to think of what the hell to say to her in the glow of the car’s dash.

“I’m sorry I called so late.”

Stupid.

Stupid because I’m not remotely sorry and because she was up and I knew it, so why pretend?

“I knew you would.” Her words are so sure, it makes me narrow my eyes in her direction.

“Oh, yeah?” When I smile she rolls those baby browns, but not before she quirks a quick smile back in my direction. “And how exactly did you know that?”

“Because grown-up Landry isn’t all that different from high school Landry,” she says, her words short and a tiny bit bitter.

We coast down back-roads and roll through stop signs on deserted streets in the silent night of our tiny hometown.

“Look, about
all that
, back then? I swear, I’m sorry.” Now that I already said I was sorry and didn’t mean it at all, my actual apology sounds pretty pathetic and rings totally false.

“You’re apologizing for being seventeen? Really not necessary.”

Toni pulls into the parking lot of The Queen, the lights over the booths so dim, it almost looks closed. It isn’t, but it has a kind of abandoned quality that makes me depressed before we
even
go in. This was probably a really crappy idea.

I rub my hand down the thighs of my jeans and look over at her profile. She’s staring into the front lobby of the diner, her expression unreadable.

“I’m apologizing for being a complete asshole. There were lots of really decent seventeen-year-old guys who would have jumped all over a chance to date you, Toni. Why me?”

I press the button on the vent and adjust the flow of warmth, letting it get cooler on my side as Toni chews on her lip. It’s an old habit, reserved for her most worried, uncertain moments.

Like just before a pop quiz she didn’t study for because I convinced her to make out with me during our ‘study date’ instead of actually reading the material.