Here, Have a Husband

by Heather Gean

  Ashley put his hands in the pockets of his jeans, wrinkling the bottom of his polo shirt. I studied his smile, probed it for anything suspicious. When I reassured myself that he was being sincere, I returned the expression. “I didn’t know he had any stuff down here,” Ashley said. “But Van is a man of mystery.”

  “Yeah, Elsie Sappho signed it in.” I’d offered it up for the possible satisfaction of my own curiosity. I couldn’t tell if there was a glimmer of emotion in Ashley’s eyes, and his nod was standard. Elsie Sappho could have been his best friend or a complete stranger, but I couldn’t tell either way. I fished further. “Do you know her?”

  Ashley gave an uncertain nod, sort of bobbing his head side to side instead of up and down. “Eh, I used to, sort of,” he said. “She lived in New York for a while. She ran in the artist circle.” It made sense.

  Wes grunted. “A little help, Rainy?” He was still pissed at me for knocking his things out of his arms. I rolled my eyes and held my side higher, taking the drill from him and pushing the tip of it against the screw.

  “Stop acting like such a fucktard,” I said to him over the whir of the drill. I passed it back to him, but he glowered at me. I sweetened things with a smile. One more screw in the middle, and we were finished.

  After making a few necessary calls to the no-show artist and my mother, I drove Ashley to one of my favorite sub shops in the city. Memphis wasn’t impressive like New York was, with its towering skyscrapers and taxi cabs, but it had character. I parallel parked down the street from the shop, and Ashley and I walked down the store-lined sidewalk. It was small, low-key, and delightfully cool inside with fans slowly rotating from the ceiling. As usual, the line was short for that time of the afternoon. I watched Ashley study the menu posted up on the wall behind the counter and realized how weird it was to see him in my world. He hadn’t shown up in his tie and coat, but in his polo shirt and jeans he still looked more than casual. I wondered if Ashley’s square-jawed, strong-featured, clean shaven face could look anything but preppy. I also wondered why that bothered me.

  “The roast beef is really good,” I said to him. He looked as if he was having trouble deciding.

  “I’m a ham and turkey kind of guy.”

  “Want to get a roast beef, ham, and turkey to share?” I gave Ashley a half smile. I was trying to play nice. He finished out my smile with his own half and agreed.

  Ashley and I had ordered and were paying at the counter when I heard the girls in line behind us. “That has to be them,” one whispered.

  “No, it is not. That looks nothing like them,” the other said more loudly.

  “I’m going to ask.”

  “That’s rude and stupid.”

  “They’re on the effing cover, do you really think they mind if people know who they are?”

  That’s when I realized the two girls were talking about me and Ashley. I stiffened up a little and watched Ashley fold his wallet back up. I was knocked out of my comfort zone. “You okay?” he asked. I took a deep breath.

  “I’m fine.”

  We sat down in a booth near the window. It was the first time I had sat across from Ashley with plastic trays and paper cups between us. I unwrapped the foot-long sandwich and took my half of it. A few loose trimmings fell onto the table as I did. Ashley teased me about being messy, and we shared a short chuckle. The scene was almost normal.

  “Everything okay?” he asked. He glanced over his shoulder to see what kept drawing my gaze.

  I shrugged and shook my head. I leaned forward on my elbows and drew myself closer to Ashley across the table. “Those girls in line were talking about us.” He looked again to the couple that was now at the counter then back at me. He didn’t understand. “Our cover came out today. They recognized us.”

  Ashley’s face spread into a smile. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “I kind of like to maintain a certain level of anonymity.” He nodded as he took a sip through his straw. “I guess soon I’ll have to wear those big ugly hats and glasses and walk with a newspaper covering my face?”

  “Don’t worry about it. It won’t be that bad. We’re a media phase. They’ll be over us as soon as the next star gets himself thrown into prison or a rehab center.” It amazed me how reassuring Ashley could be at times.

  “Have you heard from your sisters lately?”

  “Penelope called me the other day from Seattle. She’s living on the tour bus with Sebastian’s band. She thinks it’s cool, but I worry about her. All those guys and the drugs, you know,” he confessed. “But Walker hasn’t returned any of my calls. Rumor has it that she’s blowing off steam in LA night clubs with her friend that hosts a show on MTV.”

  “Rumor?”

  “A tabloid I saw in the airport.” He rolled one shoulder as if trying to shrug it off but led directly into why he couldn’t. “It irritates me a little. I’ve spent my whole life being brought up to make the family look good, and it only takes her a week away from home to carelessly undo everything I’ve done.”

  “Responsibility is hard for some people,” I said.

  Ashley leveled his eyes with mine. It was a sore subject with him. “Responsibility is hard for everybody.” We ended the conversation with that.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said. The two girls from the line earlier had positioned themselves in the booth behind us. One of them was now turned around in her seat, directing conversation at us. Ashley looked over his shoulder at her. “What are your names?” My heart stopped as she looked expectantly at me.

  Ashley turned back to me long enough to wink and then turned back towards the girls. “Why?”

  The girl wasn’t put off. “Are y’all Ashley and Rainy Schroeder?” It was the first time I had heard us referred to like that, and it echoed mockingly in my ears.

  “Um… no. I’m Louie. This is Marie.” His statement was so matter-of-fact that the girl turned red and apologized before spinning back around in her seat.

  I smiled in relief at him though I still had my head down. His choice of names was entirely too strange. “So… what were we talking about?” I asked. “The French Revolution?”

  He laughed. “Something like that.”

  ~*~

  Ashley had come and gone almost as quickly as James Wellington’s review of the exhibit. My family was so excited I’d brought Ashley over that they couldn’t see past his perfectly polished exterior. My mother loved him because he loved her mashed potatoes, or maybe that was just her excuse to love him. My dad loved him because he had a “good head on his shoulders.” Neither were adequate excuses for me to love him. My grandparents were the salvation, though, and had taken him at face value. My grandmother said he was handsome through thin lips and then had slunk away to help with the dishes. My grandfather admired his work ethic, though he couldn’t fathom why a man would spend his time making household appliances, especially since my grandfather was a man who couldn’t operate any mechanism in his kitchen but the sink. All of this considered, my family was wonderfully informal with Ashley… until talk of the wedding.

  “So, have you two considered where you’re going to get married? The location is very important,” my mom said. She leaned across the table to dump extra spoonfuls of the praised mashed potatoes onto Ashley’s plate.

  “I agree one-hundred percent. The location is important,” Ashley said. He didn’t discourage my mom from piling potatoes up in front of him, but when he dropped the bomb about the Plaza, it guaranteed he’d be receiving no more special attention from her.

  “Oh,” she said. The word oh is one of those words that could mean a myriad of things. It could mean oh as in Oh! How exciting! or Oh! I understand now! or even Oh! What a surprise!, among other things. But the oh that fell from my mother’s lips as she abruptly stopped spooning mounds of starch onto Ashley’s plate was the kind that really meant Oh no you don’t, you sonofabitch.

  “Yeah, we’ve booked it for December. It’s amazing that we could get a date that soon th
ere! Plenty of room for cameras. The wedding photos should be spectacular. And our publicist is negotiating which news outlet will be allowed to cover the event. It’s going to be something!”

  My dad shifted in his seat. “Are you sure you want media coverage of the wedding?”

  “I assure you, Mr. Clarke, it will all be done in excellent taste. You’ll hardly even know they’re there!”

  “It just seems a little intrusive, for a wedding. Like bringing cameras into a funeral.”

  Ashley laughed, his perfect, white teeth pairing charm with his questionable motives. But it wasn’t Ashley who took the heavy burden of blame from my family.

  “Rainy, I can’t believe you haven’t mentioned any of this!” my mom said. Her words were sugar-coated, but the way her eyes bore into me made it clear she was furious.

  “Well, nothing’s for sure.”

  Like any respectable Southern woman, she took a drink of her tea and fumed quietly throughout the rest of dinner. My father stared into his plate until it was empty. Ashley had successfully turned me into the bad guy. I drove away from the house that night with no consolation or immediate solution to the problem. Needless to say, Ashley slept on the couch like any gentleman or ousted lover would.

  Liz and Sasha popped over to meet him before he left. I thought Liz was going to rape him right there in my living room. She went absolutely ga-ga, hanging on his every word. It was incredibly entertaining. And though she would’ve tied him up and held him captive in Memphis forever, I was glad when he was gone.

  All of this had been hanging over me throughout the weekend and into my Monday-morning errands. I had been at the post office mailing off invitations to all of the artists featured in the exhibit to attend Artists’ Weekend in two weeks. I was also dropping Piper one as well, hoping to wrangle her down to Memphis for even more publicity. I had just slid the stack of envelopes into the slot when my cell phone rang with a call from my dad. It was the first I had heard from any of the family since the dinner with Ashley.

  Once the small talk was out of the way he began with what he really called to say. “It was nice meeting Ashley… but…”

  “But…”

  “Rainy, the government makes mistakes. I think Ashley is a wonderful guy, but if you think he isn’t the guy for you, which for some reason I seem to think you don’t, something needs to be done.” My heart sank.

  “What do you mean?”

  “As much as it pains me to say this, you can file an appeal to your marriage license. I’d rather you think this through and realize what sort of opportunity you’ve been given, but I also don’t want to see you as miserable as you were the other night at dinner for the rest of your life.”

  “You and I both know that’s pointless. It has to go through the Supreme Court. It could take months – years – if they ever even address the case at all.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Well, if you don’t get the appeal, then you know that you need to do what you can to work things out. Your only hope of getting out of this is doing it the right way.”

  I took the fatherly advice sprinkled with “I’d sort of like to get reelected” undertones, dabbed at my stinging eyes, and took the rest of the day off to think things through. After having lunch and talking things over with Liz, I found myself standing in line at the DML. Half an hour of waiting found me staring over the tall counter at an unenthusiastic, underpaid government worker. She gave me the no-nonsense blank stare that must have been required for a government desk job since all of the other employees wore matching ones. “Can I help you?”

  I slid the appeal form I had filled out across the counter. She took it between her fake, red fingernails and checked all of the required fields before clicking around on her computer keyboard. Though this could possibly become one of the most liberating days of my life, I felt like I had swallowed five gallons of guilt and couldn’t digest it all. The thought of telling Ashley that I didn’t want to marry him hurt me as much as the public embarrassment we would both endure. I was sacrificing my name for my happiness, and it was incredibly difficult to do.

  “You and Mr. Schroeder are filing a joint appeal?” the desk worker asked me.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You and Mr. Schroeder are each filing appeals to this marriage.”

  “No, um, just me.” My face burned with guilt and embarrassment. I must have looked ridiculous wearing my gigantic sunglasses indoors. Though I had worn them as a disguise, they probably attracted more attention than anything else I could have done.

  “No, ma’am, I mean that Mr. Schroeder has already filed an appeal and now you are filing an appeal.” I pulled the sunglasses from my face in hopes that they hadn’t broken from the imaginary brick that hit me in the face. “Y’all need to fill out the joint appeal form instead--”

  “Ashley Schroeder has already filed an appeal?”

  “Yes, ma’am, eleven days ago.” My mouth was actually hanging open. Eleven days ago… I quickly calculated that it must have been filed the day I left New York. That bastard and all his fake emotions. “Ma’am?” I closed my mouth and came back into focus. “I need you to sign this at the bottom. Now, I can go ahead and enter it into the system as a joint appeal. It may take a few extra days to process the two separately and then create a joint appeal from the two.”

  I picked up the pen attached to the desk and scribbled my signature as big as I possibly could across the bottom line. I threw the pen to the counter and returned the form to her. “Anything else?”

  “No. We’ll call you.”

  “Thanks.” With a dramatic lowering of my sunglasses back over my angrily narrowed eyes, I stormed out of the DML in a fit of rage. I passed the banner staked into grass bordering the sidewalk: Find happily ever after. Apply today! I kicked it as I walked by. If by happily ever after they meant manipulative backstabbing bastard then they had it dead on.

  Chapter 12

  The sultry, summer afternoon surrounded me as I sat on Sasha’s front porch with a sweaty bottle of beer in my hand. A condensation ring was on the bare skin of my thigh where I had rested the bottle. I tugged at my tank-top and wished I could crawl out of my skin in hopes of being cooler. There were other places to be, like inside with the air conditioner, but Sasha lived in a house with four other people, one of which was playing the saxophone in the living room. Something about sweating was cleansing, anyway, and if I needed anything I needed to be cleansed.

  “You know, there’s this girl, Claire, who works at the organic market, and she claims that aromatherapy is incredible for stress,” Sasha said. She sat cross-legged in front of me on the porch.

  “It’s just… I know I was doing it too… going behind his back to file an appeal, but I never fed him all these big lines either. I had every intention of telling him today. But now, I’m not sure I will.” I took an angry swig of my beer. “Now, I think I’ll return the favor and make him find out from someone else.” I slammed the back of my head against the wall behind me. “God, this feels so high school.”

  “You and Ashley are too much alike to get along.”

  “I am nothing like him.”

  Sasha tilted her head to the side as she pensively swept the hair up off of the back of her neck. “You’re both really into your jobs. You’re both unwilling to compromise on anything. You both filed an appeal behind the other’s back. I mean, I haven’t met the guy, but it sounds right.” I narrowed my eyes at her. Her face flashed guilt, and she tried to smooth it over. “Rainy, I’m not saying that you’re a bad person. Two good people who are too much alike can create a horrible couple, though. It’s like two positive ends of magnets repelling one another.”

  “Nice analogy.” I was halfway through the bottle, and I suddenly realized that the beer was disgusting. Knowing Sasha, she had probably picked it up at the organic market. It was a sign that I was coming back into reality. “I’m still pissed.”

  “Well, obviously. You should probably
wait to calm down before you confront him about this. Give yourself a few days?” Sasha swatted a bug from in front of her face. “Think of this as a good thing, though. With both of you having filed an appeal maybe there will be more of a chance that it will be taken seriously.”

  “I’m still not out yet. Appeals get ignored all the time.”

  Sasha shrugged her thin shoulders with a whimsical smile. “Hope is better than nothing.” Her statement was punctuated with extremely loud saxophone jazz that was slightly off-key. As we laughed, I melted away another ounce of anger and felt a little more human. Thank God for non-government assigned friends.

  ~*~

  I tossed a box of Twinkies into my half-filled shopping cart. Liz trailed behind me with the slapping of her flip-flops echoing down the aisle. We always did random shopping during the weeknights, usually in sweatpants and T-shirts. After all, you couldn’t predict when an incurable case of the munchies might hit and preempt it by penning the items onto a weekly grocery list and picking them up at regular times. This is what found us standing in front of the Jell-o.

  “We don’t need anymore Jell-o. We have green jell-o.”

  “Why the hell do we have green Jell-o? Why not this kind?” Liz asked as she picked up a blue box. She held it under her chin with a serious expression and did her best Bill Cosby impression using the words ‘pudding pop.’ I snatched the box from her and added it to the small mountain in our cart.

  “That’s it. Nothing else. We have to check out. We’re going to weigh five hundred pounds.”

  “You’re such a fun-sucker,” she said before sticking her tongue out.

  We were engulfed in giggles as we neared the only open checkout line. The unenthusiastic cashier was slowly sliding the items belonging to the nurse in front of us across the scanner. I was entranced by how slowly she was moving. I had no sooner than snapped out of it and begun stacking things on the free end of the conveyer belt when I heard Liz gasp as if the breath might be her last. When I turned to look at her she was holding a tabloid. “Oh fuck.”