The Fable of Us

by Nicole Williams

  “I still have the microscopic-sized-diamond ring to prove it.”

  Good-bye, beating heart. It was nice knowing you. Hopefully the vultures enjoy the taste of bitterness. “I guess you didn’t make it to the house part then.”

  “Actually . . .”

  “Oh, God, Boone. Tell me you didn’t . . .”

  “It’s okay. It all worked out.” He shrugged like none of this was any big deal. Like him buying an engagement ring and a house to marry his teenage girlfriend who may have been knocked up with his childhood nemesis’s baby was what anyone else would have done. “It was actually my uncle’s place, but he’d been trying to sell it for years, and it was such a project. No one wanted to put the time and effort into it. He worked out a rent-to-own thing with me and handed over the keys.”

  That was when Clara Belle Abbott started to cry. Again. Round 2. It didn’t quite hit the body-rocking-sob territory, but it came close. Finally, I had Boone’s attention.

  “This is all so damn unfair,” I cried, wiping at my face with the back of my arm, but it was no use. The tears were on full-bore. “I think I might want to go back to the way I believed things were before. I think I’d rather have my opinion of you being an asshole back, rather than this new one of you being prepared to spend your life with the person you thought cheated on you, raising a child that may or may not have been yours.”

  He nodded, looking like he was wrestling with the choice to wrap his arms around me or keep his distance. God, I knew that feeling too well. I’d been steeped in it this whole week.

  “I think it might be easier for me too,” he said, going with the wrapping-his-arm-around-me option. “If I still thought you were that other person.”

  “I’m sorry about the house, Boone.” I was still crying, so I didn’t know how he was able to understand what I was saying, but he did.

  “It turned out okay. Really.” He nudged me gently, rubbing circles on my back. “It’s the one you were in a few days ago. It took me five years to turn it into something decent, but it worked out. The ring though?” I felt his shoulders rise. “Maybe I should have tried to return it or pawn it or hell, throw it into the river, but I couldn’t.”

  “Why?” I sniffed.

  “I guess I wanted to hold on to some part of you. You were right about that the other night, about me holding on to a piece of you. I’ve tried letting it go. God, I’ve tried, but I just can’t.”

  “I’ve tried too. Same result.” The tears were slowing, though they hadn’t stopped. “So where does that leave us?”

  Beside me, Boone took a deep breath. I never heard him let it out. “In the exact same fucking spot.”

  My body froze, but that beating thing inside me froze faster. “Which is?”

  That was when Boone let out the breath he’d been holding. “Nowhere. It leaves us nowhere.” He pressed a quick kiss to my temple before standing and moving for my open bedroom window.

  “So that’s it?” I popped up in place too, feeling like I was playing a game of tug-of-war I could never win. “You’re leaving and all of this is just going to haunt us for the rest of our lives?”

  Boone paused with his hand on the window frame. “Where should it leave us?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe with a second chance?”

  He paused long enough for me to believe he was really considering that. But when he looked at me, I knew his answer. I might have believed in second chances, but Boone didn’t. I should have known. He’d stopped believing in fairy tales before most kids even learned what they were.

  “You live in California. You have a successful, growing business,” he said. “I live here. I’m unemployed. I get calls from the bartender to pick up my mom, from the sheriff to come pick up my mom, or from bill collectors wondering why my water bill’s late. Taking our past out of the equation, our current lives don’t leave much hope for us either.”

  I stood staring at him, wanting to hold on and knowing I had to let go. “When did you start caring about shit like that?”

  “When I realized shit like that matters.” He swung his leg through the open window and crouched to lower the rest of him inside.

  I lunged forward a few steps, but part of me knew that no matter what I said or how I tried to hold him down, Boone was already gone. “What matters is how we feel about each other. What matters is what we could be together.”

  He was already on the other side of the window—in a different world—when he tried to look at me. He tried again. But he couldn’t. Just when I thought my heart had been ripped apart, frozen whole, transformed into vulture carrion, and wrapped tightly in barbed wire, I realized that couldn’t have been true, because how could it break the way it was now if it hadn’t been whole before?

  Boone tried to smile, but he couldn’t do that either. “What matters is that I didn’t deserve Clara Abbott back then, and I sure as hell don’t deserve her now.”

  I was suffocating.

  The humidity was nearing the eighty-percent margin, and the temperature was nearing ninety. I was encased in The Thing, staggered around the back lawn with my family as the wedding photographer prepared to take the family photos. But I didn’t want to have my photo taken with my family for the family photo. After everything I’d learned last night, I didn’t feel they deserved the title of my family anymore . . . or maybe I didn’t belong with their family anymore. One of those things.

  My dad had told a terrible lie to the person I cared about most when I was seventeen, a lie that drove him away. How could I ever look my father in the eye without being reminded of that?

  Charlotte had stolen my boyfriend right out from beneath me, betraying me in ways arch nemeses would have hesitated over first.

  My mom, who had no direct fault tied to her pertaining to Boone’s and my breakup, had been quite the opposite of supportive the entire time we had been together.

  Avalee was the only Abbott worth a darn, me included, but next spring, she’d be the one leaving the Abbotts.

  My family was more a formality at this point.

  The wedding was still a couple of hours away, and once Miss Charlotte Abbott officially became Mrs. Charlotte Abbott McBride, the four hundred wedding guests would flock from the big white church in town back to my parents’ house to dance and eat and celebrate an evening that my parents had shelled out a cool million to bring into being.

  It was excessive and obscene and appalling. Caviar wouldn’t be on the menu at my wedding should that day ever come, nor would fifty-year-old scotch for the men and elegant charm bracelets for the women be party favors.

  I didn’t want the fifteen-person symphony playing Mozart and Beethoven, and I didn’t want the towering ice sculptures that would be decorated around the west lawn by the time the reception started, and I certainly didn’t want the Grammy-award-winning singer my parents had booked as a surprise for the newlyweds to serenade them in their first dance.

  I didn’t want excess. I didn’t want show. I didn’t want the veneer of perfection when all one had to do was scratch at the surface once or twice to see that nothing about the Abbotts was as it seemed.

  My parents were being ushered into position with Charlotte and Ford, my mom’s hand draped around Charlotte’s elbow while the photographer positioned my dad’s hand around Ford’s shoulder. It went there naturally. It stayed there just as naturally.

  Ford was the type of person my father approved of. The kind who was deserving of Quincy Abbott’s respect and one of his daughters. Ford McBride, the man who’d lied to Boone that he’d been in bed with me too, implying what he had to drive Boone away . . . the same person who’d cheated on me with my sister . . . this was the type of person who deserved my father’s respect?

  No wonder Boone had never gotten a lick of it from him. He didn’t measure up in the immoral and devoid of decency categories.

  Boone. Just thinking his name made my heart wring hard enough I had to shuffle back a few steps and lean into the giant oak behind me.
He’d left last night after our rooftop talk, leaving the check I’d made out to him on my nightstand.

  He was gone. Again. At least this time I had an explanation for why, but it didn’t change the way my heart felt like it was twisting over itself, attempting to wring itself dry.

  I found myself staring at my dad’s hand cupped around Ford’s shoulder, the two of them smiling for the camera like they were best friends and life was just all so grand. I couldn’t take it. I’d managed to keep up appearances up to now, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I could. Charlotte’s wedding day might not have been the ideal time for me to drop the façade, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. Not after everything I’d learned last night.

  “The Abbott family?” the photographer called to the small group staggered around the yard, waiting their turn to smile and suck it in with the bride and groom. “I need the sisters now too.”

  I hung close to the tree, wishing a few more layers of Spanish moss would magically appear because that might have been thick enough to keep me hidden from them.

  “The other sister? Where’s she?” The photographer had the kind of voice that made a person believe he spent half of his life waiting and the other half of his life being bored. With the way he’d been hollering orders and commands all afternoon, hearing him continue to call for the “other” sister was making me want to wrap a few layers of duct tape around his mouth.

  “Clara Belle?” First my mom, then my dad, called out.

  “Clara Belle?” Next Avalee called, and finally Charlotte joined in, although hers was edged with annoyance.

  “I’m here,” I said under my breath, making myself shove off the tree and start in their direction. “I’m right here.”

  “What took you so long?” Charlotte asked as I approached, fanning herself with her bouquet, although I didn’t know why. I’d never once seen Charlotte’s hairline damp with sweat, or her face flushed from the heat, not even as kids after we’d sprinted circles down the driveway in the middle of the day in August. The perks of being someone who had ice running through her veins.

  “Just trying to figure out if I was still a member of this family,” I answered as I headed toward where Avalee was lining up beside my mom.

  “Of course you’re a part of this family, dear,” my mom replied with a nervous chuckle. I wasn’t sure if she knew what had happened last night, but she could sense the tension. “You’ll always be a part of this family.”

  “I meant that more in the way that I’m trying to figure out if I still want to be a member of this family,” I said matter-of-factly, to no one in particular but to all collectively. It might have been me, it might have been them, but I knew one thing—I didn’t fit. I really never had, and after this past week, I knew I never would.

  I felt both of my parents’ eyes on me as I lined up behind Avalee, relaxing my stomach muscles instead of contracting them like I knew everyone else in line was. The seamstress had supposedly let out The Thing, but where she had I couldn’t tell because I still felt like my body had been vacuum-packed inside a layer of satin.

  “Oh no, that won’t work.” After messing with a few dials on his camera, the photographer came rushing over to us.

  Guiding my mom out of line, he stuffed her behind Avalee and started to pull me to the other end of the line. I dug in my heels when he tried to stuff me between Ford and my dad. That was like being tossed into the snake pit and the lions’ den at the same time.

  “I’m not standing there,” I said, shaking off the photographer’s hold on my arm. “You want the ‘other’ sister to smile for the family portrait, you put me somewhere else.”

  Ford let out a sigh while my father shifted. My father knew why I was fighting this, and he knew I had every right to. He stayed quiet, which was a first for my dad when it came to getting one of his family members to “fall into line.”

  “Oh no, that won’t work.” The photographer shook his head.

  “Yeah, you already mentioned that. Why not?” The humidity was clinging to me, coating my skin in what felt like twelve layers of sweat.

  “Well first, because we need to have an even number on either side of the bride and groom.” The photographer waved his finger down the line, like that should have been obvious.

  “Here, I’ll stand down there and Clara can be here.” Avalee stepped out of line and started to slide between Ford and our dad.

  The photographer grabbed her hand and pulled her out. “Eh, no. That will not work.”

  “Why not?” Avalee and I asked at the same time.

  Next he pointed at my dress, his nose curling just enough to give away what he thought of my bridesmaid gown. “I can’t put that shade of . . . whatever you want to call it next to the shade of pink the mother of the bride is in. All anyone would see when they looked at the family portrait would be the clashing colors.”

  “Sounds like an accurate depiction of the family,” I added, not as under my breath as I’d intended.

  “Clara Belle, why can’t you ever, for just once, do something without putting up a fight?” Charlotte stepped out of line and angled herself toward me.

  The photographer opened his mouth as he tapped at his watch, but Charlotte lifted her bouquet into his face to shut him up.

  “My whole life, all I’ve ever done was what this family wanted me to do, and be who this family wanted me to be, and smile when told to”—I threw my arm in the direction of the photographer—“never once putting up a fight except when it really mattered.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right, you had to fight for your one true love, Boone Cavanaugh.” Charlotte threw her hand on her hip. “A hell of a lot of good that did you because you lost him then and you’ve clearly lost him now. Maybe you should pick your fights a bit more carefully in the future.”

  I heard Avalee hiss Charlotte’s name, but everyone else within hearing range looked too shell-shocked to say anything. There it was, the great war of the Abbotts about to take place on the east lawn while family portraits were being snapped two hours before the first sister got married off. No one could say I didn’t have style when it came to my timing.

  “I am picking my fights carefully.” I eyed the empty space between my father and Ford, the place meant for me. I’d been trapped between those two, a victim of their lies and falsehoods, for enough of my life. No more. “I’m not standing there. You want me to be a part of the family photo, choose somewhere else.”

  “You could just not be in the family photo at all.” Charlotte’s gaze cut to Ford, whose gaze was clearly focused on me. That would explain why I felt the urge to simultaneously shiver and throw up.

  “You won’t hear an argument from me. I won’t even shed a tear to pretend like I am heartbroken.” When I went to settle my own hand on my hip, I only made it to my upper thigh. The Thing was more like The Strait Jacket.

  Charlotte’s face started to go red. “Get into line, Clara Belle!”

  I tried crossing my arms. Same result. Couldn’t move. “No.”

  “Now.” Charlotte stabbed her finger at the empty space between Ford and our dad.

  “Order me, threaten me, beat me, try to force me”—I shook my head hard—“I will not stand there.”

  “Get into line, Clara Belle or so help me God—”

  “God’s long past helping you, Charlotte, so no need for the idle threats.”

  Her face went another shade of red, the serpentine vein running down the center of her forehead beginning to pop through her skin. “Get into line, damn it!”

  As she lost her cool, I got cooler. “No.”

  Half of a shriek, half of a grunt of frustration came from the bride. “Stop being so stubborn and thinking of what you want for once in your life! There is more to this family, to the world, than the needs, wants, and tragedies of Clara Belle Abbott, for God’s sake.”

  Her words hit me like a slap. So much so, I almost reached for my cheek to rub it. At the same time I tried to convince myself her accusatio
ns had no merit, I knew to a degree they did. But that wasn’t what I wanted to focus on. That wasn’t what I wanted to tackle as the photographer continued to stare at the spot between Ford and my dad, flashing me expectant looks in between stabbing his finger at his watch’s face.

  I went for the quickest way I knew to throw Charlotte off balance, if only for a few moments. “You want me to stop behaving like the moon orbits around planet Clara? Fine. Why don’t you stop sleeping around with your sister’s boyfriends?”

  Charlotte’s mouth fell open and a sharp gasp came from it, followed by a collective gasp circling the rest of the family. They all knew the first low blow would come at some point, but it almost always came from Charlotte.

  I’d taken them all by surprise. Though it wasn’t exactly in the way I’d intended.

  Charlotte took a step closer. Then another. Looking at me with such contempt in her eyes, I could have shriveled up into a pile of sand if I hadn’t built up a sort of immunity to her brand of hatred.

  “Stop getting knocked up by the town trash.” She enunciated each word painfully slowly, looking me up and down like I was the town trash in question. “Please, did you really think Ford was actually going to marry you after that? You were nothing but used goods, a rung on his climb to the Abbott sister who hadn’t defiled herself with the likes of Boone Cavanaugh.”

  Another gasp circled my family. My mom covered her mouth and shook her head, backing away a step. Surely this wasn’t the way she’d envisioned the wedding day of her first daughter to get married going.

  I was the only one who hadn’t gasped or responded with some level of shock. Mainly because I knew what Charlotte was capable of. After finding her and Ford together like I had, words were nothing. She could throw them all at me, woven tightly together in as cutting a way as she could, and I doubted I’d flinch.

  “What’s it like being the most spiteful person on the planet?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow and waiting a moment for her answer. It didn’t come. “You got the guy, but you and I both know who he’d rather have standing next to him in that pretentious white dress.” I let that settle in, making sure her gaze was good and locked on mine before adding, “And it’s not you.”