The Fable of Us

by Nicole Williams

  When Boone came around to the driver’s side after buckling his mom in and getting her door shut behind her, he paused. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.” I nestled a bit lower into the bed to get comfortable. The drive from here to Dolly’s place wasn’t far, but riding in the back of an old truck while bouncing down washboard roads that hadn’t been repaved in over a decade wasn’t the definition of comfortable.

  “You don’t look okay.”

  “Gee, thanks. I guess I probably don’t.” I glanced at him from the corners of my eyes. He’d moved close to the bed, draping his long arms into it as he watched me. “But when I woke up this morning, I wasn’t anticipating getting called an uppity bitch before half a bottle of water was launched into my face.” I could still feel the water on my hairline and the neckline of my dress, but I wasn’t really upset over that. “I guess I’m just a little surprised. For your mom to have gone from hating me to loathing me with every fiber of her being, you must have told her what happened between us . . . even though you promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.” I had to shift my position in the bed. There was nothing comfortable about this.

  “I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, Clara, and I didn’t.” Boone’s voice was so low it was almost a whisper. “But instead of telling her how things really went down, I told her you left me—that it was you who ultimately walked away.”

  My forehead folded into creases. “Why would you tell anyone that?”

  “Do you really think anyone would believe that I was the one who’d walked away from you?” He let that hang between us in the muggy Charleston night. “Do you really think anyone in this town would have bought that Boone Cavanaugh broke up with Clara Belle Abbott?” He shook his head. “No one would have believed that, and those who did would have figured out real fast there must have been one hell of reason for me to do so. I didn’t want anyone to do too much digging to get to that hell of a reason . . . so I told everyone what they’d all been anticipating since the day we walked through the county fair the summer we were sixteen, holding hands—you got your slumming out of your system and were moving on to bigger and better things.”

  My head shot in his direction. “I never once treated you like you were trash, Boone, so don’t try to staple your insecurities to me. Where you came from and who you came from didn’t matter to me. All I cared about was where you were going and who you’d become.”

  Boone hung his head between his arms, kicking at one of the tires absently. “Yeah, well, no matter what you thought of me, I was well aware what the rest of this town thought, and the easiest way to explain what happened between us was to tell everyone what they’d been waiting to hear. It was simpler that way. Less explaining involved.”

  I curled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “So you never told anyone? About what really happened?”

  Boone didn’t reply right away. Just when I thought he was going to climb into the truck and pretend the question had never been posed, his head lifted, his eyes landing on me. “I made you a promise, Clara. I never told anyone, and I never will.”

  I rolled my head to the side to look at him. Where had we gone wrong? Where had all of that love gone? I knew about the mistakes we’d made, sure, but how had we let them tear us apart? Why had we let them break us? Fast forward seven years to us living separate lives on opposite sides of the country, and I still felt like every part of me was being pulled in his direction, not so much by choice but by something that ran deeper, something between instinct and destiny.

  “Thank you. For not telling,” I said. “I’m sure that must have been hard, not being able to talk with anyone about what happened.”

  “I figured enough people already knew.” Boone’s hands curled around the edge of the truck bed. “And the only person I would have wanted to talk to was you . . . and you were gone.”

  From inside the cab, I heard Dolly’s familiar alcohol-induced snoring. “I guess that explains why your mom’s affection for me has only increased. Although with the way she used to talk, I thought she would have thrown a celebration when she found out I finally took her advice and left her son ‘the hell alone.’”

  Boone’s gaze shifted inside the cab, where his mom’s head was slowly falling from sight. She’d be curled up on the bench before he climbed in. “You would have thought so, right? I guess people can’t decide what they want in the end.”

  “I guess not,” I agreed, though I didn’t really. At that moment, I felt as if I knew exactly what I wanted.

  “Why don’t you climb into the cab? From the smell of her breath, Ma won’t be waking up until about noon tomorrow.” Boone held out a hand to help me out, but I stayed in place.

  “Thanks, but I’m not going to take my chances.” I scooted my hands under my backside to form a kind of seat and settled in. “Something tells me that if Dolly Cavanaugh thought she could break through dimensions to get to me, she would. I don’t want to be in a vehicle flying forty down some back road when she snaps awake and decides to shove me out the passenger-side door.”

  Boone shook his head, smiling. “I won’t argue with you there. My mother does hold a rare kind of hate for you in her heart.” He stared inside the cab where his mom’s head had disappeared from view. “You want to trade places with her? It’s not like she’s going to notice she’s in the back of a truck.”

  I shook my head. “She’s your mom. Leave her where she is.”

  “And yet here I am, still playing parent to her.” He glanced at the bar and let out a quiet sigh. “I’m just so sick and tired of this same old shit.”

  “Then why keep doing it?”

  “Because I love her. I don’t just stop loving someone because they make a mistake, or the same mistake every other night. When you love someone, do it right and love them forever. Don’t leave them wondering the whole time when it’s going to run out or expire.”

  I tilted my head back to stare at the sky. It was a clear night. The kind that made it seem like a person could see all the way to the far end of the galaxy. Whatever else was out there, I knew there was no other place I’d rather be than right here—camped out in the back of Boone’s truck after having just come to Dolly’s rescue.

  “Your mom’s lucky,” I said.

  Boone gave a huff. “Lucky is not a word I’d ever use to describe my mom.”

  “She’s lucky to have you is what I meant.”

  Boone gave another huff, this one sharper. “I’m even more sure lucky is not a word I’d use to describe someone who has me in their life.”

  My eyes landed on the North Star. How many people had clung to that beacon as their compass? How many times had it steered a person in the right direction, keeping them from the wrong path? I stared at it for a moment before my eyes went back to Boone. He’d always been more of my North Star than anything else. “I would. I’d say a person is lucky to have you in their life.”

  I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me, because he slid into the cab before I’d finished my sentence, but from the stiffness of his shoulders, something told me he had. Boone had never taken compliments well. I supposed he’d never had a chance to get used to them.

  After he fired up the engine, he opened the back slider window and craned his head through it. “Just holler at me if it feels like I’m going too fast or your spine feels ready to snap from the potholes.”

  I lifted an eyebrow at him. “I might have been a California resident for the past seven years, but that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten soft.”

  Boone adjusted Dolly on the bench seat, managing to wrangle a seatbelt around her lap. She didn’t move or startle awake once; she just continued to snore.

  “Glad to hear it,” he said after clicking the belt into place.

  When Boone pulled onto the road, I swore he looked both ways half a dozen times before pulling out. There hadn’t been a single car in sight, but I wouldn’t give him a hard time for his vigilance, overkill or not. Once on the road, the truck ke
pt what I guessed was a steady twenty to twenty-five miles per hour instead of the posted forty-five. For as wash-boarded as I remembered this road being, the ride was as smooth as I’d ever had in the back of Boone’s old truck.

  Every once in a while, I’d catch Boone glancing at me, seeming to exhale when he confirmed I was still there. It was a strange thing—where did he think I was going to go when I was stuck in a truck bed going down a middle of nowhere road late at night?—but it seemed more of a habitual tic than a situational one.

  Almost like he’d been looking for me for years.

  It took longer than the ten minutes I remembered it taking to get from Dolly’s favorite bar to her trailer in one of the parks on the edge of town, but when we finally pulled into the Diamond Trailer Park, I saw that nothing had changed here either. The same rusted and broken swing set Boone and Wren had played on as kids was still in the community’s ten-by-ten foot “park,” looking so rusted it might just crumble into pieces and blow away with the next breeze. The same neon letters that had been burnt out the last time I’d visited here—the summer before I’d left for college—were still burnt out. The same shells of cars from decades past were decaying beside the same trailers, becoming more one with the landscape than an invention of human industry.

  When I glanced at Boone, I found his expression flat and his back stiff. He hated it here. Not because it was a trailer park and he was ashamed of the stigma that came with that being one’s home address, but because of the things that had happened here. The lives that had been twisted and shattered, the moments that had been bled of hope and happiness.

  Boone turned off his headlights when he was halfway through the park, creeping down the narrow road until we reached the gray trailer covered in more moss than paint. He came to a slow, rolling stop and turned off the engine.

  “I’ll be right back,” he whispered through the open window as he unbuckled Dolly’s seatbelt.

  “I’ll help.” I stood slowly to get my balance before heading toward the tailgate to crawl out. The drive hadn’t been particularly bumpy, just long.

  “I don’t need help,” Boone replied in a louder whisper once he’d stepped out of the truck. “But thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, swinging my leg over the tailgate and stepping onto the bumper before leaping to the ground.

  He paused with Dolly tucked in his arms when he heard my footsteps shuffle up behind him. “I said I don’t need any help. I’ll be right out.”

  I raised my shoulders and followed him up the creaky wooden steps to the trailer’s front door. “I heard you.”

  “Then why are you following me?”

  “Because I don’t believe you,” I said simply, bouncing up the steps until I was standing beside him, careful to stay just out of claws’ reach in case Dolly caught my scent and went all wild animal on me again.

  “Don’t believe what exactly?” Boone stayed square in front of the door, trying to rifle through the purse wrapped across Dolly’s chest.

  “That you don’t need help.” Abandoning my claws’-distance policy, I stepped up and pulled Boone’s hand out of her purse before slipping my own in.

  Holding his drunken mother on the steps outside her trailer that looked months away from being condemned couldn’t have been easy. Fishing around for a set of keys in her purse while maintaining his hold on her was impossible.

  When I pulled out the keys, I held them up. “See how helpful I can be when I put my mind to it?” I smiled in an attempt to ease the heaviness from his face, but it did nothing. “What’s the matter?” I tried a few keys in the doorknob before getting the right one.

  He didn’t answer right away. “I didn’t want you to see us like this again.”

  I’d opened the door and was about to step inside, but the smell that rushed at me from inside kept me in place, trying to get used to it before getting assaulted by it at maximum strength. “What do you mean?”

  “All this time that’s gone by . . . you’ve really done something great with your life. You’ve made something of yourself.” Boone gave a small shrug, his gaze sweeping around the trailer before landing on him holding his mom. “But look at us. The same seven years have passed us by too, but nothing’s changed. Same old shit, different day. Having you here, seeing this”—he motioned down at Dolly with his eyes—“it’s humiliating.”

  My eyes closed as he uttered the last word. Boone had been through a lot and survived a lot. He’d had so much thrown at him from those who deemed themselves better than him and others who just plain thought judgment was their calling in life. Most people would have assumed he was no stranger to shame and humiliation, but the truth couldn’t have been further from that.

  Boone had never let others box him into feeling any certain way. He’d never let circumstance or situation dictate his sense of self-worth. He’d never admitted to feeling humiliated, not once . . . until right this moment.

  I hated that I was the reason he had to experience it.

  “You have made something of yourself. How can you not see that?” I kept my voice quiet as a force of habit. I wasn’t sure if the old woman who used to keep her window facing Dolly’s trailer open so she could eavesdrop on every word, curse, and shattered bottle still lived next door, but I wasn’t giving her any snooping pleasure if she still did.

  “I tried,” he replied. “And I failed.”

  I stepped closer and lifted my finger. “And you’ll get back up and try again because that’s the kind of person you are. So why don’t you stop acting like you’re this defeatist nothing and get on with it already? I’m tired, and I’d like to crawl into bed soon, so if you’ll be so kind, can we get her settled so we can be on our way?” I waved my arms inside the trailer, waiting.

  He stayed frozen on the porch for another few seconds, then he stepped inside. He had to lower his head so as not to bang it on the top of the doorframe, but he’d had to do that since he was sixteen.

  “What makes you so convinced I’m going to get up and try again?” he asked as I followed him.

  I tried to breathe through my mouth and not through my nose. The scent was so pungent, I could actually feel it swirling in my stomach. “Spending close to ten years watching you get up every time you got knocked down.” I stopped behind him as he lowered Dolly onto the same brown couch I remembered.

  “I never learned when to stay down and admit defeat, did I?” Boone chuckled as he snagged the afghan hanging over the old rocking chair missing one of its arms. He draped it across his mom’s body and tucked it around her.

  It was hotter than Hades in here, but I knew Boone tucking that blanket around his mom had more to do with his deep-seated need to look after her and protect her in whatever ways he could. He might not have been able to save her from the slime of mankind she was drawn toward or keep her from the bottle, but he could tuck an old blanket around her as she slept.

  My throat tightened as I watched him. He didn’t deserve this. He deserved so much better. Life had spent the last twenty-five years cheating Boone Cavanaugh, and I was sick and tired of watching it play out.

  “Why haven’t you left, Boone?” I whispered as he carefully slipped off her boots. “Why didn’t you ever escape this place like I did?”

  Boone stepped back from the couch, staring at his mom with a conflicted expression. “Because if I left, she’d have no one.” His forehead creased deeper. “And everyone should have at least one someone who gives a shit about them.”

  I shouldered up beside him, staring at his mom with him for so long, I didn’t even notice the smell around us. It didn’t take long to get used to. Not with the years of experience I had.

  I didn’t like Dolly Cavanaugh. I’d go so far as to say there were moments in life when I’d flat-out hated her, tonight bordering on that designation. From where I stood, she’d only done one thing right in life and that was managing to bring the kind of person Boone was into this world. That was all I could give her credit for thou
gh, because she’d done little else for him. Other than take him for granted and do everything in her power to keep him from becoming the good person he was today.

  “And who’s the someone who gives a shit about you, Boone?” I asked, though it was a question I’d meant to keep to myself.

  He sighed but cut it short. Turning around, he headed for the door like he suddenly couldn’t get out of this place soon enough. “Hell if I know.”

  He waited for me at the door and sealed it closed behind us. He stayed close to me as we moved down the stairs and didn’t start the truck until I was in my seat and buckled up. We didn’t say anything else the entire drive back to my parents’ place.

  I was as content with the silence as he was.

  The house was dark and quiet when we pulled up, which made both of our shoulders relax. I’d missed plenty of calls and texts from Charlotte wanting to know what I was doing and where I was when I was supposed to be spending the day with “the girls,” and I knew I didn’t have the patience to explain anything to her in phrases that weren’t peppered with words I’d wake up tomorrow regretting.

  Instead of parking beside the handful of guests’ cars around the side of the house, Boone pulled up the driveway to the front door, keeping the engine running as he lifted his chin at the front door. “I’m going to run back and get your dad’s car. I don’t want it to get lifted or graffitied overnight.”

  I shook my head. “It’s late. You’ve had a long day. We can get it in the morning. My dad’s got five other cars he can drive if he needs to go anywhere.”

  “But he’s only got one ’72 Chrysler.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Boone shook his head, keeping his hands on the steering wheel. “It’s the right thing to do. I borrowed it today. I should return it today as well.”

  I twisted in my seat to face him. “And since when have you and my dad been under some kind of ‘doing the right thing’ policy when it comes to each other?”