The world below disappeared into the darkness that is nowhere, North Carolina, and I gripped the poor excuse for a seat with all my might. Anita sat up front jabbering away, her hair squishing out between headphones like a puffy clown’s wig.
Tina pulled out a cigarette and lighter from her tiny hooker purse. I grabbed her arm. “Please don’t.” If we were going to crash, I’d rather not explode into flames first.
Anita turned back to me, eyes glowing with excitement, but when she registered my terror, she said, “Susan, yew need the in-flight beverage service. Here.” She tossed me an airline-sized bottle of Bacardi rum, and I sucked that puppy down like a starved infant.
“Another,” I demanded. After my fourth, a balmy calm set in, and I cared a lot less about dying.
The pilot swung out over what I presumed to be the ocean then headed towards a strip of land, aglow with multicolored lights. We set down at an airstrip only slightly larger than New Bern’s and tumbled out laughing. As we sauntered towards the taxi awaiting us, I was surprised to find I was steadier on my platform heels than I’d imagined. But then again, the shot of white-hot adrenaline coursing through my veins during our extremely rapid descent probably burned off every bit of alcohol in my system. The driver took one look at us and didn’t even ask where we wanted to go.
We arrived at a long row of seedy-looking bars. It was now well past eleven and the sidewalks were bustling with people, many of whom were sailors from Virginia Beach’s Naval Base. Anita dragged me into a classy joint called The Brass Ass and raced away for drinks. To my horror, Tina squeezed her tired butt into a booth occupied solely by brawny, heavily-tattooed males, and said, “Hey y’all, this is Susan. She’s gettin’ married tomorrow, and somebody needs to change her mind.”
They literally stood as one, and I was on the dance floor in a mash of roaming hands and gyrating hips before I could say full steam ahead. Lights pulsed sickeningly as I fought to keep these sexually-starved men at bay. They weren’t being jerks, and I didn’t feel particularly threatened; we were all just having—well, innocent would be a misleading term—fun. I bumped and ground with abandon, successfully keeping my lips in the no-fly zone. Anita wiggled into the mix beside me and threw her arms in the air, laughing. In the periphery, I noticed Tina was doing her good deed for the evening by giving some drowning victim mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
A large platter of shot glasses arrived at the table a short while later, and the men began passing me from lap to lap, taking turns pouring alcohol down my throat. Tequila and I had a long and unpleasant history, and before long, the room was swimming. I don’t recall when it happened, but at some point I found myself lying flat on my back across the tabletop.
It turns out, the concept of a wild bachelorette party and the reality of one are two entirely different things, but as the smiling faces leaning over me blurred, and the ceiling began dancing to the pulse of the music, I decided this was a pretty awesome way to spend the last night of the Susan Wade era.
Near the point of passing out, Anita suddenly grabbed my hand and dragged me right out the door and down the sidewalk.
“I’ve got to sit down. I just need to sit,” I slurred.
“Honey, you are sittin’.”
“I am?”
“Lordy, I’ve done my job well!” she hooted out.
While trying to get my bearings, I suddenly realized we were missing the poisonous tip of our triad. “Anita, we lost Tina!”
“She had to go to the ‘bathroom’,” she chortled, air-quoting. “She’ll be along shortly.” Oh.
Looking thoroughly annoyed, Tina soon staggered out, still putting herself back together. “The damn bars are closin’, and we just got here.”
“What the hell? They have no right!” I said indignantly. “We’ve gotta go back in and stop them!”
“Bitch is making sense now,” Tina said, laughing.
Anita let loose a shrill whistle, and a cab screeched to a halt right in front of us.
“I miss taxis,” I mumbled as we fell out onto the airstrip’s parking lot. I promptly vomited to make my point clear.
16
The Best of Us All
In all honesty, I do not remember flying back to New Bern, the limo ride, or even where Tina ended up. All I know was that at some point, Anita and I were lying flat on our backs beside the Trent River, laughing hysterically.
“I’m scared,” I suddenly announced, rolling onto my side.
“Everybody in their right mind’s scared. But you’ve got nothin’ to worry about. Pete’s gonna be the best husband there ever was.”
“But what if I’m not the best wife? What if I’m not, well—what if he gets tired of my crap and throws me out one day? What if I’m not enough woman for him after a while? What if—”
“What if a thousand butterflies swoop down and carry your ass away?” Anita interrupted, tacking on a mirthful snort for good measure.
I belched loudly, flopping back into the damp fescue of her back/front/I’m really not sure yard, giggling madly.
“What you’re sayin’ is crazy. He loves you more than I’ve ever seen any man love a woman. The way he looks at you…” She shook her head. “Lord, Susan, he’s in it for life.” She sat up suddenly. “C’mere, I want to show ya somethin’.”
I righted myself, and on wobbly legs—I have no idea where I’d lost my shoes—I followed her to the floating dock.
“See those lights?”
I nodded.
“When I was twenty, I dreamed of swimmin’ across the river from there.”
I sank to my butt. “I am not drunk enough to get in that water.”
Anita dropped beside me. “What I mean is, I thought I could get away from all my problems if I swam away from them. My first marriage was goin’ to shit. I ran off with Tommy to get away from my daddy. Turns out I married someone just like him.”
I looked at her, shocked. “I thought everyone in your family was so…honorable.”
“Lordy, we put on a good show, I suppose. There’s a great deal of love and loyalty for sure, but I think the reason we’re all so close is we’ve been through an awful lot together.” Her gaze returned to the river. “Well, one night I drove down to the wharf—ya know, over by the bridge?”
I nodded, all too well acquainted with that spot after once seeking its shelter during a fierce electrical storm.
“I drank down nearly a half a bottle of vodka then jumped in the river and tried to swim away. It was Hambone who came to my rescue.”
“Who’s Hambone?”
She chortled and lay back on the planks. “Mike Herring.”
“Pete’s never called him that.”
“No, I s’pose not. Pete wasn’t even born then. We started callin’ him Hambone ’cause his mamma used to send in hambone soup for his lunch—you know, with the white beans and all? He’d fart all afternoon.” She laughed heartily. “So Hambone stuck.
“Hambone—Mike—and I went all through school together. Lord, we got in so much trouble. It was like our thing. We dated on and off—well, not dated so much as just screwed around.”
My eyebrows hit my hairline. “I thought you two were related.”
“Lord no! We’re just good friends. He’s Kirk’s cousin, but he isn’t related to me. He introduced me to Kirk after my divorce.
“Anyway, when Tommy got drunk, he got ugly. And he got ugly a lot, know what I mean? He’d accuse me of havin’ affairs about once a week, which would have been near miraculous since I was workin’ two jobs and takin’ care of a newborn at the time.
“One night, after an especially bad fight, I decided I’d had enough. I left Taylor with Mamma, and Mike met me down at the wharf—before it was all pretty like it is now. I told him what’d been goin’ on. I hadn’t told anybody else, not even Mamma, though I think she’d started noticin’ the bruises. Mike pledged to kill him, of course—and he nearly did, but in the meantime, right after he left to go find him, I realized things we
ren’t gonna get better even if he did beat the shit out of him. In the morning, I’d still be married to what was left.
“I know it was selfish to Mamma, my family, and to my baby, but I just walked to the edge of the pier and jumped in. It was January. Now you know the river’s shallow in places and it’s never really all that cold, but we’d had rain for days, and it was swollen pretty good. There was a bunch of logs and trash and such that’d been carried down by the current. I got swept under the bridge pretty quick,” she said, flicking her hand in that general direction, “and then a big ol’ tree trunk hit me in the head. I went down, and the next thing I knew I was tangled up in some branches and couldn’t get out. Things get real calm under water when you stop flailin’.”
A chill ran through me, and I shivered.
“I decided to just let it happen, ya know? Go ahead and drown and be done with it. But just as I was making peace with God, an arm jerked me to the surface and dragged me to shore.
“Evidently Mike’d started gettin’ worried after he thought about what I’d said and not said. He came back to look for me and saw me go under. He dove in and swam like the dickens to catch up with me. He ain’t Olympic quality, but he’s a good swimmer by anyone’s standards.
“After he forced air back into my lungs, and I stopped coughing, I cursed him good. He promised he’d get me out of the situation, and I went to Mamma’s. Her house was already filled to the brim with my two older sisters and all their kids—they’d both just left their husbands as well.” She laughed cynically. “T’was the season, evidently.”
In my drunken stupor, I had no idea how to respond, though honestly, had I been stone cold sober, it wouldn’t have made any difference. And this story wasn’t making me feel any better about marriage. In fact, though Pete was beyond honorable, my terror was escalating.
“It was Aunt Maggie, Pete’s mamma, who took us in. She was the wisest woman I have ever known. And the stubbornest! You remind me of her in that respect,” she said, laughing.
“Aunt Maggie told me I could stay as long as I needed to under one condition. I had to better myself. See, she was all about education. She used to say, the more you had, the better off you’d be. I hadn’t been ready right out of high school to think about anything but love.” Anita dramatically rolled her eyes. “Of course, by then, working so hard just to keep my baby in diapers, I realized she was right. She helped me apply to college, and Lord help me, that woman found a way to pay for it.
“With Uncle James long gone, God rest his soul, and Maggie workin’ so much, herself, I took classes in the mornin’ and got Pete where he needed to be in the afternoon. At that point, he was plenty old enough to take care of himself and plenty dumb enough to get his ass in trouble. Know what I mean?”
I fell back laughing.
“Between the two of us, we made sure he got his homework done and kept his nose clean. Plus, then he had two people ridin’ him about grades. He was smart as a whip to begin with, but when he buckled down and really applied himself, well, offers started floodin’ in. He was plannin’ to go to ECU so he could stay close to Maggie, but she wouldn’t have it. She made him apply everywhere and told him he was goin’ to the best school he got into, no matter where it was.
“When the packet from Vanderbilt arrived, she filled out the forms, wrote a check for the deposit, and mailed it all back before he even got home from basketball practice. Pete respected the hell out of his mamma, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so mad in his whole life.
“Every day for the next three weeks, he came up with some new reason why he shouldn’t move all the way to Nashville. They went round and round about it, but soon as Vandy coughed up the scholarship money on top of the financial aid, she told him it was a sign from God and the answer to her prayers. Well, that finally shut him up. Lord, that boy loved to argue.”
I snorted. “That hasn’t changed.”
Anita grinned. “And you’re as bad as he is. I think that’s why he fell in love with you in the first place.”
I thought about all the clashes we’d had those first few months in Havelock, and how, in hindsight, they were merely our version of foreplay. “Probably.”
“Soon as school got out every summer, he was back home, workin’ his butt off to help out in any way he could. And then later on, when she got sick… Well, anyone who’d walk away from a big paying job to move back to this little bit of nowhere only does so out of love, ya know?”
She let out a big sigh and turned to me. “Susan, I’m tellin’ yew all this because I need you to understand that you’re not making a mistake marryin’ Pete. He’d never enter into something so important without committing his whole heart and soul to it.” She shook her head and smiled, her dimples imploding. “He’ll do anything for you—anything. He’s the best of us all. And you can take that to the bank. The very best.”
17
Cremation
“Rise and shine. Time to get hitched.”
I groaned as morning light scorched my eyes. “I’m going to die.”
“Yeah, but aren’t we all? Oh Lord, you stink!”
“Shower,” I moaned.
“Let’s get somethin’ in yew first.”
The smell of coffee was a propellant, igniting a base need. I dragged my dew-sopped body up the steep slope after her, grass clippings clinging to my whore-dress and bare legs. I grasped the cup like the Holy Grail and gulped down the scalding liquid of everlasting life.
“Here, take these.” She dropped four aspirin in my palm. I swallowed them obediently. She then popped open a beer can and poured half its contents into a small glass. “Now, drink this.”
My stomach recoiled at the mere thought. “I’m not drinking that!”
“Trust me. It’s how I clear my head after a long night. Just pinch your nose and chug it down.”
I’d never met a woman who could bounce back from a late night of partying like her. Considering this was the most important day of my life, I dutifully did as she said, vanquishing a hollow burp.
She then handed me a roll of saltines. “Eat five then go shower. When you get out, I’ll finish your wake up call.”
I staggered to the bathroom and nearly screamed when I saw my reflection. My up-do was now a smashed side-do, and my face was pale and blotchy. Great globs of mascara had smudged around my eyes, lending them the appearance of a rabid raccoon. I scrubbed my face and body furiously, and then simply stood under the spray, swaying, nausea flirting with my stomach. Once dry, I realized with a shock that my head had somehow reattached itself to my body, and I felt fairly human.
Wrapped in a wet towel, I padded to the kitchen and caught Anita pouring a tiny bottle of energy boost into a giant plastic glass of iced tea. “My patented secret ingredient,” she said, nodding to it. “Mine’s way better than Bojangles’.” This comparison was, I assume, in regards to its restorative powers, rather than its taste. Grimacing, I drank as much as I could stomach, and then set it on the counter.
“Drink it all and eat the rest of these saltines.” She popped a stack of three in my mouth. “By the time your mamma gets here, you’ll be fresh as a daisy.”
“My mother?!” Crumbs exploded from my lips, avalanching down my damp chest.
“I texted ’em last night and told ’em you were stayin’ with me. Wanted to make sure you didn’t cut and run.” She cocked an eyebrow accusingly, and for a real moment, I feared she was serious, but then her dimples made an appearance as she broke into a huge smile.
Anita glanced at her watch. “They ought to be here soon.”
I gasped, horror-struck. There was no way in hell I was meeting my mother in a soggy, grass-covered, hooker dress. “Do you happen to know where my clothes are?”
“In the drier.”
The peal of the doorbell, which launched into a too long version of “Dixieland”, barely even hurt my head. I stared at Anita in awe, and she smiled smugly. “Bow to the master.”
“Thank you for
last night. I’ll always treasure it—the part I remember, anyway.”
Suddenly, she threw her arms around me and hugged me tightly. “Don’t forget what I said. He’s the very best of us all.” Anita then swung open the door, revealing Mona, grinning like a crazy woman, and my crazy mother grinning right beside her.
Mona grabbed my shoulders. “Ya ready?”
With a quick glance at Anita, I nodded. “Let’s do this.”
♥
“I don’t think I can do this,” I whimpered as Dottie yanked at my hair. Though Anita had worked hard to quell them, what ifs still swarmed my brain like yellow-jackets around an amusement park dumpster.
“’Course you can,” Ginger, who was playing both hairdresser and assistant wedding planner (aka Dottie’s minion), said. “I’d be lost without Bobby, and you wouldn’t last a week without Pete.”
“A day,” Anita corrected, laughing.
Along with her, I’d chosen Piper Skarren, Priscilla, Pete’s doll baby of a cousin, and Taylor, Anita’s daughter, as bridesmaids. Had I my way, it would have been just Mona, but at the mere suggestion, there’d nearly been a family riot. These were the women—girls, for the most part—I was closest to, and more importantly, the ones who meant the most to Pete. Assessing them now as a unit, I suddenly feared they might outshine me.
“Do you love him?” my mother asked, surprising me.
“More than anything in the world.”
“Then what’s the problem, honey?” Mona chimed in.
“It’s, it’s marriage!” I sputtered. “It’s forever and final.”
“You’re not gettin’ cremated. Lord, we’ve all lived through it at least once, and we’re still breathin’,” Dottie quipped.
“But what if things change?”
Back Where I Belong: A Wonderfully Witty and Completely Absorbing Love Story (Susan Wade Series Book 3) Page 14
