“I’m not staying past Tuesday,” I said firmly.
“Find a physical therapist here,” Andrew said. “Stay until your leg heals.”
“Let your family take care of you,” Mel said.
I withdrew my hand from hers. I was about to reiterate that I’d be leaving early the next week, but my niece interrupted me.
“How long will it take your leg to heal, Aunt Hope?” asked Gigi.
I hesitated. “A while. A few months, at least.”
“Can you dance anymore?” Max asked. “I saw a story on the news, and they said you — ”
Melody shot him a deadly look. “Hush.”
Max looked from me to his mother. “Why?”
“I already told y’all not to listen to anything the news has to say about your aunt,” Melody said.
“But why?” Gigi asked. “Can you dance, Aunt Hope?”
A lump formed in my throat. I might never be able to dance again. I knew that. But I couldn’t say it out-loud.
“All y’all go put your dishes in the sink,” Mel said abruptly.
“But I didn’t even say anything!” Thomas protested.
“Now,” said Mel.
The kids grumbled but obeyed, depositing their dishes in the kitchen sink and turning towards the living room.
Andrew stared down at his lap, picking at a fingernail. Mel avoided my gaze.
I sighed. “Max, Gigi, Thomas, c’mere,” I said, stopping Max with my hand as he led his siblings past the dining room table.
They stopped in a row and stared at me with puppy-dog eyes.
“The bullet that hit my leg was a really big one,” I started. I took a breath. “You know the armor that soldiers wear?” Max nodded; the other two looked befuddled. “Well, the bullet that hit me is designed to go through armor like that even from a long ways away.” Five hundred yards away, I thought, remembering what the doctors had told me. Three thousand feet per second. “The bullet was so big and so hot and moving so fast when it hit me that it sent a…” I stopped. They probably wouldn’t know what a shockwave was. “You know how when you drop a rock in the lake, it makes all the water around it turn into little waves?”
The kids nodded.
“That’s what the bullet did inside my leg — it sent out waves that hurt everything in my leg.”
“Hope,” Mel said softly. “Gigi already has nightmares a couple times a week about what happened.”
I turned to face my cousin, wanting to tell her about the nightmares I had almost every night, but I didn’t. I just nodded.
“The point is,” I said, “it’s going to take my leg a long time to get better. So I can walk now, but I can’t — ” My voice cracked. I swallowed and got myself under control. “It’s going to be a while before I can dance again.”
The three kids didn’t say anything. Then Gigi flung herself at me, wrapping her arms around me.
“Stay, Aunt Hope,” she said. “Stay til you get better.”
I hugged her back. I couldn’t say anything.
Thomas decided hugging seemed like a good idea, so he piled on. Then Max did.
“I’ll think about staying, okay?” I said past the lump in my throat.
These kids. They were my kryptonite.
#
Two glasses of wine and dishes scrubbed clean and dried later, Andrew announced, “It’s a good thing you came for Thanksgiving, Hope. The kids and I have been working on something special just for you. We were going to show you over FaceTime, but since you’re here in person…”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Go get comfortable on the couch,” Andrew said. “We’ll be ready in a couple minutes. Max, go get my guitar.”
The fact that Andrew could play guitar competently was one of his few redeeming qualities. But I guessed a boy who didn’t play guitar would never have earned Uncle Billy’s approval.
Max nodded and scurried up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
A few minutes later, the kids settled in on the floor, and Andrew sat in the chair behind them, guitar across his lap. He tuned it, then started in on the opening cords I knew all too well.
“Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago — two years ago on Thanksgiving,” Andrew started in his best Arlo Guthrie impersonation, “when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant…”
My eyes misted as I laughed and looked at Melody. Her eyes were misty, too. “Alice’s Restaurant” had been Uncle Billy’s holiday favorite, something we’d sing together as a family each and every Thanksgiving.
I was so busy reminiscing that I lost track of the song until the kids broke into a jumbled harmony with the chorus:
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant
You can get anything you want… at Alice’s Restaurant
Walk right in, it’s around the back
Just a couple miles from the railroad track
You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.
9
Thanksgiving Day
I swatted Max’s hand as he reached for the tray of pumpkin pie-flavored cookies cooling next to the oven.
“No you don’t,” I said. “That’s for later.”
He smirked and shrunk away from the counter.
I hummed “Alice’s Restaurant” to myself and went back to work on the green bean casserole. My leg was bothering me a lot today, probably the after-effects of traveling across the country, so I stood with almost all my weight on my right foot.
“Thank God you built me a house with two ovens,” Melody said as she pulled out pies from the smaller oven.
“You wouldn’t need them both if you’d do some of the preparation beforehand,” I admonished.
When Aunt Tina was in charge of Thanksgiving, the cooking started weeks before. The house filled up with the smells of baking casseroles, pies, cobblers, and cornbread for days before the actual event.
Melody, on the other hand, did all her cooking the day of.
“I’m not Mom,” Melody said, as if she’d read my mind. “She was always more organized than me. You take after her. I take after Daddy.”
We both fell silent after that, probably because we each realized that this would be our second Thanksgiving without Uncle Billy.
Uncle Billy wasn’t much of a cook. He’d try to help Aunt Tina, but inevitably he’d get chased out for chopping something wrong or sampling too much pie. Once she’d shooed him from the kitchen, he’d grab his guitar and sit out on the front porch, nursing coffee and picking at different songs for an hour or two before he got too bored or too cold and came back inside.
I probably learned to play at least three or four new songs out on the front porch with Uncle Billy every Thanksgiving that way. And once I was in college and writing my own music, I used our Thanksgiving “porch sessions” to try out my new material on him.
“What if you tried an A chord there instead?” he would suggest, and we would sit there together, tinkering with my songs until Aunt Tina called us in to eat.
He wasn’t the kind of uncle who told me everything I did was amazing. He was a tough audience to please. But he made my music better.
“I like that,” he’d say with a satisfied nod, and that’s how I knew the song was finally finished. I finalized almost every song on my first album that way, sitting with Uncle Billy on the front porch, playing them over and over again until I got that final, definitive nod.
Coming back to the present, I asked Melody, “What’s your mama gonna say when she sees you didn’t cook a single thing ahead of time?”
I cringed when I heard myself: I’d been back in Georgia for less than forty-eight hours and already the accent I’d tried so hard to get rid of was back in full force.
Melody shrugged. “She’ll do the same thing she does every year. She’ll fuss and hobble around the kitchen, point out everything I’m doing wrong, then complain that her back hurts and go sit down with Andrew to watch football.”
We both laughed.
“What time will she be here?”
Melody glanced at the clock above the stove. “She’s all the way in Austell. So… probably an hour yet. Enough time to get that turkey cooking before she gets here.”
“It’s strange, thinking of Aunt Tina in one of those assisted living places,” I said. “Strange to think of her admitting she needs assistance at all.”
Melody raised an eyebrow. “At least we know where you get it from. The whole not admitting you need help thing.”
I didn’t respond.
“Have you thought any more about what we talked about last night?” she asked. “About staying here until you finish recovering?”
I looked down at my leg. “I’m probably as recovered as I’ll ever be.” A lump formed in my throat. “My days of dancing on stage — or for a music video — they’re over, Mel.”
Melody picked up the dish towel and snapped it in my direction. “You stop that. You’re going to be back to twerking across a stage in no time. I know you. Nothing stops you.”
“A bullet might.” I paused. “Fourteen dead fans and one dead bodyguard. That might, too.”
She didn’t say anything for a second. Softly, she said, “You know it isn’t your fault, right?”
“Most days I do.”
“And the other days?”
“And the other days… I couldn’t go to my bodyguard’s funeral. Charles. Don’t know if I told you that. His wife — his widow, Margie… Those two loved each other so much. He used to call her every single night when we were on the road, didn’t matter what time zone we were in or how exhausted he was. He’d call her, and they’d talk for at least an hour. When it came to Margie, Charles was just a big ol’ teddy bear.” I gazed at Melody’s feet so that she couldn’t see the tears forming in my eyes. “I couldn’t see Margie. I just couldn’t. So I sent flowers. Like a chickenshit. Paid for the whole funeral but I didn’t show up.” I gave a sardonic laugh and looked back up. “That’s what you do when you’re rich. You make yourself feel better by throwing money at the things you don’t want to face.”
“You’re not a chickenshit,” Melody said. “You’ve always been the most fearless person I ever met.”
I shook my head. “I’m the opposite of fearless. Everything I’ve done, I did it out of fear. I was scared of being stuck in Georgia the rest of my life, so I moved as far away as I could. I was scared of spending the rest of my life selling CDs out of the trunk of my car, so I changed up my style and sold out to a big label.”
And I’m scared of having my heart broken again, I added to myself, which is why none of my relationships last more than a few weeks.
“So stop feeling sorry for yourself and use fear, then,” said Mel. “Be scared of letting some whack job with an assault rifle dictate what the rest of your life is going to be like, and do something about it.”
“You think I’m not doing anything?” I said defensively.
“I think you…” Melody paused, gazed up at the ceiling as if the right words might be up there. “I love you, and I want you to be here, and I want you to stay here. I really do. But I want you to stay because you’re fighting. Not because I’m hiding.”
I crossed my arms against my chest. “Hiding? I thought you just said I was fearless?”
“You can stay here because you’re fighting or because you’re hiding,” Mel said. She tapped the side of her head. “They look the same on the outside, but there’s a difference up here.”
A timer went off, and Mel slipped on a mitt and opened the oven, pulling out a sweet potato casserole and setting it on a cooling rack on the counter she’d been leaning against.
Her phone buzzed with a text. She glanced at it quickly, put her phone upside down on the counter. Probably just Andrew, texting to say he was headed back from Austell with Aunt Tina.
“By the way, I invited someone to Thanksgiving dinner,” Melody said, her back to me. “Someone you haven’t seen in a while. If Andrew and I can’t straighten you out, I’m sure they will.”
I frowned. “Who?”
Her voice was sing-song when she said, “You’ll see.”
The doorbell rang.
“Would you mind getting it?” Mel asked. “My hands are…” She turned around, holding up hands covered in vegetable flecks and gravy smudges.
“Yeah, sure,” I said, and limped towards the front door.
10
Monday, November 3 (two and a half weeks earlier): “I Will Buy You a New Life,” Everclear
JULIE ARON
[ SECOND VERSE ]
National Public Radio cranked up along with the engine, and I turned it down reflexively as I checked the rearview and backed out of the driveway.
“…thirteen confirmed dead,” said the familiar baritone male voice I associated with Morning Edition, “with at least three more listed in critical condition.”
Great. Another mass shooting. Just the news I wanted to hear to start my week.
“Concert goers said that at first they assumed the gunshots were a part of the show’s pyrotechnics,” said a female reporter.
“We heard this rhythmic ‘pop, pop, pop,’” a man said. “But we just kind of tuned it out, because — ”
I flipped from NPR to Pandora. “Tuning it out” sounded like exactly what I needed to do. I’d fought with Karen again the night before and had a full day of back-to-back-to-back clients; I didn’t want to begin the morning with depressing news.
I had Pandora set to ’90s Alternative. The lead singer from Everclear started to croon almost immediately.
Here is the money that I owe you
Yes so you can pay the bills
I will give you more
When I get paid again
I ground my teeth and hit the skip button. From bad news to a bad song that reminded me too much of the fight Karen and I had over money the night before. I’d thought Karen was on board with my plan to save up for the gym I wanted to open, the gym that had been my dream for years, but then her parents invited us to Tybee Island for Christmas, and all of the sudden it was, “You aren’t really going to open a gym, are you? That’s not going to work around here,” and “You’ve never been good at business,” and “What if you went back to school, became a real physical therapist?”
But I knew it wasn’t about my capacity to run a business. It was about her wanting to use what we’d managed to save to splurge on Tybee. About her proving to her parents that we could keep up with their lifestyle.
I thought we’d resolved it. We weren’t going to Tybee Island; we’d stay local, celebrate Christmas with our friends. But last night Karen picked and picked and picked until she finally succeeded in drawing me into the fight over Tybee Island.
We need to stick to the plan, I’d said.
It’s your plan, not mine, she’d answered.
I thought you supported me, I’d said.
I do support you, but I don’t think you’re being realistic, she’d said.
You thought it was realistic before we your parents invited us to Tybee Island, I’d said.
Pandora picked a Cranberries song for me and I turned the volume up, singing along in an attempt to drown out the memory of last night’s fight.
But it didn’t work. The fight kept replaying itself in my head for the rest of the day, same as that damn Everclear song.
I hate those people who love to tell you
Money is the root of all that kills
They have never been poor
They have never had the joy of a welfare Christmas
I knew all the words even though I didn’t like it. “Welfare Christmas” I thought when I finished up with my first client. “Welfare Christmas” I thought as I drove to the second.
They have never had the joy of a welfare Christmas
“You and your so-called plan,” Karen had groused. “Saving for something that will probably never even happen.”
“Then go to Tybee Island without me. I�
��m sure we could afford that,” I’d said, proud of myself for not retaliating at her for invalidating my dream. “I’ll stay here, take care of the dogs.”
I thought it was a reasonable suggestion. A compromise. I had no idea it was going to be the opening volley to World War III.
“Why do you have to be so stubborn?” Karen demanded. She slammed the dish she was washing down in the sink so hard that Wilson and Spalding, our two huskies, lifted their heads in alarm. “When you were a physical therapist assistant, you made more money and worked fewer hours. Now we can’t even go anywhere together for Christmas!”
“Karen, I — ”
“With the amount of money you’re about to pour into that stupid gym idea, you could go back to school and become a real physical therapist.”
“I told you before. I don’t want to be a — ”
“You don’t want to be an adult. That’s what you don’t want to be.” She snatched a dish towel off the counter and dried her hands with such force that I was surprised she didn’t take her skin off along with the suds.
I counted to five slowly in my head. Concentrated on my breath instead of the sharp retort I wanted to throw at her. It was one of the corny anger management techniques our couples’ counselor had taught me.
“Karen,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I’m not going to have this discussion with you again.”
“No, you’d much rather take what little savings we have and flush it down the toilet than discuss it. Wouldn’t you?”
One. Two. Let out a breath. Three. Fou —
I snatched my keys off the pile of mail sitting on the kitchen table. “I’m leaving,” I said. “You don’t want to be reasonable and I still need to go to the grocery store.”
“Whatever you say,” she snarked, crossing her arms against her chest.
Karen is wrong, I told myself. I have a good client base already. There isn’t a lot of competition out here. I can make a gym work. I can make it work, and eventually…
They have never been poor
They have never had the joy of a welfare Christmas
looped in my head over and over again for the rest of the day. I was still humming the song as I pulled into Mel and Andrew’s driveway:
Winter Love Songs Page 5
