Authors: Shannon McKelden
“Do you have your tickets yet?”
“What tickets?”
“Your airline tickets to the wedding.”
“Why would I buy airline tickets when I’ll be driving?” Shit. I hadn’t meant to remind him I’d be there in time for the wedding.
He wandered back to the living room. “So you
are
going.”
I dropped a half-folded shirt into my lap. “What part of ‘I’m not going’ don’t you understand?”
He lowered himself to the couch, where he stared at me through narrowed eyes. Finally he spoke. “How much do you want to go on this trip?”
I placed the newly folded shirt in the suitcase and picked up another before turning my most charming smile on my best friend. “I’m going on the trip and that’s final. I’m not going to the wedding, and
that’s
final. I don’t care if the interview takes place in the church…during the ceremony.”
“Let me rephrase the question. How much do you want to
live
through this trip?”
“Ha, ha.”
“I’m not kidding,” Chris said, suddenly pissed off. “Hell, you can’t even walk down the hall without clipping the walls. And what if you have a dizzy spell while on the highway? What if you hit someone because you can’t tell up from down? What if you kill someone?”
I dropped my hands into my lap and stared at them. Deep inside I knew he was right, but giving up this trip felt like defeat. It felt like, if I skipped this trip, I’d never get my act together, never get another job, never put the pieces of my perfect life back in place. I’d originally thrown out the idea for this vacation just to annoy my best friend, and now it somehow seemed like a matter of life and death. However, it wasn’t worth taking someone else’s life.
“How much do you want to go on this trip?” Chris repeated, leaning back and resting his hands on his thighs.
“Stop asking me that!” I shouted. “You know I want to go. And you know, just like I do—” I tossed the shirt, still in a rumpled ball, back into the suitcase, “—that I can’t.” I sagged against the stack of boxes and willed myself not to cry.
“Are you willing to go to your mother’s wedding, if it means you can go on your trip?”
I looked up. “What does one have to do with the other? If I can’t go on my trip, I’d have to fly to California for the wedding, which still means no trip.”
“What if I drove you?”
“You mean like a surrogate?”
“A what?” He cringed like I said an ugly word. Like
vagina
.
“A surrogate. Driver, that is. Adair mentioned it.”
Chris shook his head. “Whatever. I just meant that I have to go to L.A. anyway, for business…and for the wedding.”
“You’re really going?”
“So are you, if you want me to drive you halfway across the country on some Fanatical About Elvis tour.”
“Dedicated to Elvis.”
“Whatever,” he repeated, rolling his eyes. “So, are you going to the wedding, or staying here and pouting—and putting a cramp in my love life—until you’re healed and can get your lazy butt back to work?”
I frowned. The idea of going to my mother’s wedding was possibly more depressing than missing the trip. I looked over at my Elvis bobblehead, sitting motionless on the coffee table among Chris’s sports magazines and business journals. This might be my only chance to see Graceland.
Where I could pretend all my problems didn’t exist…if only for a few days.
I bit my lip and looked back at Chris. “You hate Elvis.”
“I’ll adjust.”
“I’m touring Graceland
and
Graceland Too. I’m staying at the Heartbreak Hotel. I’m eating fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. I’m going to the Elvis-A-Rama Museum in Vegas.” With each sentence, Chris’s lip curled a bit more. I took no pity. “I’m going to see a show with Elvis impersonators.”
Chris’s nod was slow and painful.
“I’m serious. If you drive, you have to remember this is my vacation. You’ll have to live and breathe Elvis.”
“I’ll…suffer through it. Literally.”
I sighed. “Okay.”
Chris grinned. “Now, for my rules. We’ll take my Jeep, not that SUV thing you rented.”
“But the SUV is bigger.”
Chris raised a warning eyebrow at me.
“Fine.”
“I get to do some things
I
want on this trip.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
“You’ll go to the wedding. No fuss?”
I took a deep breath. “No fuss.”
“And you’ll wear whatever dress your mother picks for you, no matter how lacy it is?”
I threw a pair of socks at him. “Don’t push it.”
Chris smiled. “I don’t want you to miss your trip.”
“You don’t want me to stay here any longer, keeping you from having sex.”
“That, too. The sooner you get Elvis out of your system, the faster you can get back to your life. Which means I can get back to mine.”
“Sorry I’ve cramped your style.” I pushed myself up from the floor, deciding the packing could wait until tomorrow morning. Suddenly something occurred to me. “How are you going to take the time off work?”
“I’m the boss. I can do what I want.” He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number I assumed was Chip’s. While he waited for an answer, he plucked his cordless phone from the side table and tossed it to me. “Call your mother. RSVP for the both of us.”
Well, gee, that just about took all the joy out of going on the trip after all.
“What the hell is that?” Chris asked, staring at it like he’d never seen it before in his life.
“Elvis. My good-luck charm.”
“Good luck, my ass!” He grabbed it and started to heave it into the rear recesses of the car, but I stopped him with a quick hand. My reflexes weren’t totally gone.
“Put. Him. Back.”
“In. Your. Dreams.”
“Chris, you said this was my trip.”
“This is my Jeep. Jeeps don’t have Elvis bobbleheads on the dash.”
“This one does.” I reached up with my other hand and removed Elvis from the clutches of The King Hater and stuck him back on the dash. “Touch him and die.”
“Big threat,” he shot back, but he put the car in gear and pulled out into traffic without trying to dethrone Elvis again. Although he did tend to slam on the brakes in a purposeful way, trying to dislodge Elvis from his position on the dashboard. He wasn’t successful and after a while gave up.
The traffic, of course, was hideous at this hour of the morning. It’s hideous at any hour in the city. By the time we drove through the Lincoln Tunnel and into New Jersey, I’d discovered riding in a car was hell on vertigo symptoms. I finally gave up and closed my eyes, resting my head back on the seat.
“Dizzy?” Chris asked, with a smile I could hear.
Not willing to concede weakness this early in the trip, I lied. “No, just tired. I didn’t sleep well. You need a new couch.”
“I need to not have a guest on my couch that was meant for sitting, not sleeping.”
I ignored him. “When are we going to get there?”
“In about nine hours. Want to drive?”
I groaned and glared at him through slitted eyes. Long car trips, at least when you weren’t occupied by driving, were boring as hell. Without thinking, I reached over and punched the seek button on the radio until it stopped on WKUP. For a moment, it sounded like any other jazz radio station. Music was music in any language. But, when the DJ came on, completely unintelligible to English-speaking listeners, it hit me that WKUP Wake Up Country was gone. Forever.
“Miss it?” Chris always picked up on my mood.
“I’ll be back.” I repeated the phrase I’d used on my listeners two short weeks ago. “One door closed but another will open.” Stupid cliché, I know, but I needed to believe it.
“Ever thought of trying another type of station besides country?” Chris made the peace sign at a passing Jeep that looked like it was on steroids, painted with a rainbow of colors, hyped up on monster truck wheels and with enough lights to illuminate a night game at Yankee Stadium.
“I’m not exactly an R&B or hip-hop kind of girl. Easy listening puts me to sleep, and gospel would be kind of blasphemous, don’t you think?”
Chris laughed, but I was serious. Sure, the thought had crossed my mind that it might be easier to settle for a job at another type of radio station. But I dismissed it just as quickly. Jockeying for anything other than a country station made as much sense for me as being a fashion consultant at Bergdorf Goodman.
I huffed out a breath as I trudged up the dusty hill behind him, and it wasn’t only from exertion after being confined to a tiny car for nine hours. “Do I have to?”
“It’ll give us something to talk about.”
“How about the weather?”
“How about what you did to make Kevin throw you out with less than a week’s notice?”
At first I didn’t answer. It took all my concentration to keep walking without giving in to the dizziness that had been threatening ever since we got out of the car. I wasn’t quite ready to collapse, but if I gave in even for a moment I would be.
Chris glanced back over his shoulder, and I straightened up so he wouldn’t see how much of a toll this relatively easy hike was taking on me. “You okay?”
“Fine. Keep walking.”
He turned back and my shoulders sagged again. I desperately wanted to ask how much farther.
“So? Spill.”
Giving up, I answered the question. He’d find out soon enough anyway. Actually, considering the size of the mouths on all my friends, I was surprised he didn’t know already. I took a deep breath and blurted it out. “He asked me to marry him.”
Chris stopped so fast, I ran into the back of him.
“Geez.”
He grabbed my shoulders to steady me, but I moved away quickly, sucking it up.
“Marry him?”
I made a face and played it casual by reaching up and taking my ponytail out, making a big production of nonchalantly redoing it. “Yeah. Can you believe anything so stupid?”
“You obviously said no.”
“Of course, I said no! I’m not my mother.”
I turned and led the way up the path myself, assuming Chris would tell me when to stop.
“So what brought this on?” He caught up to me and took my arm as we climbed over a fallen tree.
I shook him off. “Heck if I know. One day everything was perfect and the next he told me we needed to go house hunting and get married. Then,” I said, halting in the middle of the path, causing
Chris
to run into
me,
“when I said no, he became this raving lunatic. He didn’t like my clothes. He didn’t like my job. He didn’t like Elvis.”
“Can’t say I disagree with him there.”
I slugged him in the stomach and continued walking. Obviously I didn’t hit him hard enough, because he followed.
“The point is, we’ve been together for more than two years, and he never said anything about any of that stuff. Then, when I don’t agree with the change of game plan, he goes off about how childish I am and how it’s time I got a
real
job. I mean, if he felt that way, why was he with me in the first place?”
“Free milk?”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious.” He veered off the path to a clearing in the trees. “Over here.” Birds sang all around us, obviously considering us friend instead of foe. Chris dumped his pack onto the dirt and pine-needle-packed ground and turned to take mine from my back. I bit back a sigh of relief to be relieved of the burden. It was hard to believe a week of enforced laziness could decondition a person so much. I couldn’t have run Central Park right now if I was being chased by a mugger.
I ran my hand through my hair. “Well, you’re right. Why does he want to marry me if I give it to him for free?”
“Beats me. Here, hold this.”
I took the end of the tent pole and held it while Chris pieced it together. We didn’t talk for a while, just worked together to set up the tent, enjoying the cool, fresh air, ripe with oxygen. Our lungs were probably in severe shock from the lack of carbon monoxide in the Virginia hills.
“So,” I finally said, as I closed the tent flap and brushed off my hands. “Kevin should have been happy getting sex for free and left it well enough alone.”
“Well, seeing as how he’s not getting it at all right now, you’re probably right. I always knew that guy wasn’t too bright.”
“Why couldn’t he be the stereotypically commitment-phobic guy?” I asked. “Like you.” Chris shot me a sidelong glance. “Or at least leave me out of it.”
He didn’t bother to answer.
Well, I thought, as I headed into the trees for a potty break, maybe that was exactly what Kevin had done by dumping me when I turned him down. He’d left me out of it.