by Rachel Del
Lily helped herself to a sip of red wine from the glass in front of Nathan. “Think about it, Nate. Think about what he just told us about the book he’s working on. And all the while he’s been dating my sister?”
“I mean I’m with you, Lil. The guy’s a little rough around the edges, but this book…” he hesitated looking for the right sentiment. “This book is going to be fucking huge… and we’re going to look like heroes.”
“Is that all you think about? How it will affect your career? How much money you’ll make off of him? What about my sister?”
Nathan lightly rested his hand on her shoulder. “Of course not, Lily. But your sister is a big girl. I know you’re protective and you only want what’s best for her but she has got to live her own life and make her own mistakes.”
“So I’m just supposed to sit quietly and act as though I don’t know that he’s playing her?”
“You can’t hover over her and control her every move.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” she snapped.
Nathan responded without skipping a beat.
“Actually I do.” He pressed his thumb against his chest. “Two older sisters, remember? I know what it’s like to be the little brother taking all the heat.”
Lily exhaled a deep breath and felt some of her anger disappear with it.
“I know your concern comes from a place of love, but I promise you that all Leah sees is you smothering her.” Then he quickly added, “I’m not saying any of this to hurt you. It took my sisters and I some awkward, terrible years to get where we are now, but we’re as close as ever and I hold their opinions in the highest regard. I’m sure that deep down Leah feels the same way about you.”
“This is going to break her heart…” she whispered.
“I’ve only met her once but I get the feeling that she’s a lot stronger than you give her credit for.”
Nathan was right of course. Lily had always been envious of Leah’s ability to push on through life no matter what came her way, and do so with an amazing sense of ease.
Lily, on the other hand, felt everything much more deeply and held it all close to her chest. She found that she was one of those people who could forgive but never truly forget. Maybe that was part of the reason why she wasn’t able to think of Tanner as a good person; his fate had been sealed long ago when he had referred to her son as baggage. It has hard to take a man seriously who didn’t appear to be serious about himself. Every time she was in the same room with him she was left with the same feeling: that there was something terribly wrong with him. What her sister saw in him, she would never know. But then again, what did it matter? It wasn’t her life. Nathan had reminded her of that.
“Do you really think the book will be that big of a hit?” Lily asked out of genuine curiosity. While she had more years of experience in publishing than Nathan, she often found that he possessed the uncanny ability of knowing very early on when something was going to be a hit… or a flop.
Nathan’s eyes locked with Lily’s. “I’d bet my life on it.”
Chapter 7
Tanner was never the kind of guy to be afraid of taking chances. He firmly believed that there was little that life could throw at you that you could not reverse if need be. If you didn’t like your job you quit and find a new one. You don’t like your husband? Leave him. He never understood people that lived their lives on the sidelines, or worse still, didn’t live their lives at all out of fear of the unknown.
Tanner leapt first and thought later.
It was this thinking that had drove him to show up at Leah’s front door.
“I have to go. You shouldn’t even be here.”
“I thought I could take you to the airport,” Tanner replied. Leah shuffled him back out the door, dragging her suitcase behind her.
“I’ve already got a cab waiting.”
Leah’s iPhone buzzed in her pocket and she paused to look at it, ignoring the look on Tanner’s face. Whether it was Lily showing up at her door uninvited or her phone going off, she was always being saved from awkward conversations.
Leah looked down at the name lit up on her screen and inhaled sharply, noticeably. No…
“What is it?” Tanner asked, somewhat hiding his annoyance.
Leah stared at the words, reading them over and over.
Heard you’re coming to New York. Would love to get together if you have time. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
She smiled, allowing the words – and their meaning – to soak in.
“What is it?” Tanner repeated. “Is everything okay?”
Leah fought back a smile. “Everything’s great.”
She caught sight of the cab and walked off towards it, Tanner following closely behind.
“Can we please talk about this?” he asked. Leah responded with a deep sigh.
“Just because you think we should be exclusive doesn’t mean I have to agree. I’m not some puppet on a string,” she snapped. Were they really having this conversation again?
“You’ve made that very clear,” Tanner muttered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean you’ve made it very obvious that you’re the one calling all the shots here.”
Leah snorted. “You’re such a child.”
She handed her suitcase over to the cab driver, who popped open the trunk and tossed her bag in, pretending not to listen to their conversation.
“Okay.”
“If telling yourself that makes you feel better, than okay. You do what you have to do.”
Tanner couldn’t believe his luck. Despite the impressive number of women that had come and gone from his life, he had fallen for the one woman that didn’t want more from him.
“Why are you always pushing me away?” he asked suddenly.
Leah opened the car door and leaned in to it, sighing. What had happened to them? Tanner was supposed to be a fun, easy distraction. Instead he had suddenly decided that he’d had enough of his screwed up ideas of values and morals, which apparently meant that he now wanted a real relationship… with her.
“I’m not pushing you away Tanner. I never asked you to come so close in the first place.”
She climbed into the cab and shut the door behind her, effectively ending the conversation.
In hindsight it had been a terrible thing for Leah to say right before she was leaving for ten days but she couldn’t help it. Tanner had gotten under her skin.
Whether that was good or bad she had yet to decide.
__
“Last time you were here, you mentioned living in New York for a while.”
Tanner let his gaze fall from Dr. Schultzs’ face to his hands. “Yeah. I was eighteen when I left for Brooklyn. I moved back to Vegas about five years ago.”
“What took you to Brooklyn so young?”
Tanner felt his skin heat up. "Let’s call it teenage rebellion.”
“Could you expand on that?”
“I just needed to get out of my parents place,” he responded, hoping that his answer would appease her. When she simply stared back at him, silent and unmoving, he continued.
“My mom was great, don't get me wrong, but I had this undeniable feeling that there was more to life than eating homemade buttermilk pancakes every morning before work and having your laundry appear spotlessly clean and folded at the foot of your bed."
“Most kids would probably love that.”
“I guess I wasn’t most kids.”
"You said 'before work.' Were you not in school at that point?"
"I had graduated about five months earlier. I had a vague idea that I wanted to write for a living but wasn’t quite sure how to pursue it. You know: some people insist that you need some kind of formal schooling, and others tell you that you need to live your life first and write second. I kind of liked the latter, so I got a job at a local factory… made some good money too."
"But you felt there was more to life than that.
"
"Of course."
"And so you left home.”
That had been about the long and short of it. There had been no real plan; only the desire of two young men to build a life somewhere new.
“What made you choose to go to New York?”
“A friend of mine had delusions of grandeur at a young age. His first choice was obviously LA, but that would have emptied our wallets too quickly.”
“And what did you and your friend do in New York?” The way she said the word ‘friend’ made Tanner uneasy. He hadn’t said his name in years.
“His name was Manny,” he said, surprising himself. He sat quietly letting the words settle around him.
“Was?” Dr. Schultz copied the name onto her notepad. Tanner nodded but went no further.
After all this time, he still didn’t know the words to say when Manny’s name came up. He had spent most of his adult waking hours ensuring that his past stayed in the past where it belonged.
Except now he was laying it out on the table, spreading it around for everyone to see.
“I sense that you’re hesitant in talking about him.”
Tanner chose his words carefully. “I just haven’t talked about him in a long time.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you did in Brooklyn?”
“Oh, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I got a job cleaning bars after closing. It didn’t pay much but it was easy and it left me plenty of time to think.” Which back then hadn’t been such a bad thing, he thought. “I slept through most of the day and started work around three a.m. I would write whenever I could, which wasn’t much, but that first year I wrote the first draft of a novel that I eventually had published.”
“And Manny, what was he doing?”
“I never really knew what he was up to, but he was gone a lot. Mind you, our apartment wasn’t really the kind of place you want to spend an extended period of time in unless you’re sleeping, but it was what we could afford. And honestly, we didn’t need much.”
“You said ‘his name was Manny.’ ”
“Yes.” Tanner remained stone faced as he replied. The Doctor gave him a few moments before pressing on.
“Did you want to talk about that?”
Tanner didn’t have to think about his reply. Not even for a minute. The pain answered for him. “No.”
Silence filled the space between them, but the noise in Tanner’s head was deafening.
“Living in New York is like living in a completely different world,” Tanner said eventually. “You hear people say that all the time and you think, sure. But then you move there and you realize just how bang on they really were. We took a bus and arrived really late at night. It was a Monday. I’m not really sure why I remember that. We didn’t have anywhere to go so we found a hole in the wall that didn’t check I.D. and we hung out until they closed, talking about our dreams the way only teenagers do. We both bought one beer and nursed it because we didn’t think it was smart to waste what little money we had on booze.”
“You had said that you worked for five months before you left. What did you do with the money that you made during that time?”
“Oh, I still had it. Well, the majority of it anyways. When I say we had little money I mean that Manny had very, very little money and adding that to mine in a city like New York wouldn’t get us very far.”
“But you managed to find a groove I assume, seeing as you stayed for ten years.”
“It was easy to find work in New York if you weren’t picky about the hours or the job description.”
“And you said that you weren’t sure what Manny was doing?”
“Not a clue.”
“But he had a job? He was bringing in money to help pay for the apartment and the bills?”
“Yeah. He always managed to cover his share of things.”
“Did you ever approach him about it? Ask what he was doing?”
“Nah. He was paying for his share of the rent and the bills and didn’t seem to be on any kind of drugs or be in any kind of trouble so I figured it was just better to leave it alone. I may be a terribly curious person, but I know when people need their space.”
“Did you make any new friends in New York?”
He nodded, smiling. “Yeah, some really great ones too.” As quickly as the smile had appeared on his face, it faded, turning into a frown. The memories swirled around in his head and he felt suddenly dizzy.
Dr. Schultz leaned forward in her chair. “Are you okay?”
He shook the thoughts from his head. “I think I’m tapped out for today.”
Dr. Schultz glanced at the expensive gold watch on her left wrist. “We still have twenty minutes.”
Tanner stood and smoothed out his shirt. “Consider it a gift. Go grab a coffee before your next patient, or take a cat nap.”
“I’ll see you next week,” she shouted after him before he disappeared through the doorway.
Fifteen Years Ago
“We could do it at your place?” Manny slammed his locker shut and pulled on his dirty baseball cap.
“Not if my mom’s home. You know what she’s like – we won’t get a second to ourselves without her interrupting.”
Manny straddled the metal bench, impatiently drumming his fingers on his knees. “Can we go now? I hate spending a second longer here than we need to.”
The two friends turned co-workers exited the change room and maneuvered through the cold, cement lined halls and stepped out into the hot summer heat. At three in the afternoon in the middle of July the heat exhaustion hit them almost immediately. They unchained their bikes and headed towards Tanner’s place.
“Ready?” Tanner questioned as they dumped their bikes on the driveway and headed for the front door. They were barely through the doorway when Tanner’s mother asked if they want something to eat. He muttered a nearly inaudible reply and the two boys scrambled up the stairs and into the privacy of his bedroom. Without delay Manny tore open his backpack and removed a battered coil notebook and a slew of brochures.
“Wait” Tanner whispered, and he was at his door before Manny barely even had time to register the warning. With his ear pressed against the door Tanner listened for the inevitable footsteps. With an annoyed sideways glance at Manny, he opened his door wide, revealing his mother with a plate of cookies balanced in her right hand, her left arm raised, poised to knock. Manny eased effortlessly into character.
“Mrs. Young…” he cooed. “You spoil us so much. I don’t know what we ever did to deserve you.” Tanner’s mother absorbed the compliments like a sponge, blushing.
“Oh Manny. You always were such a good kid.”
“I’m still a good kid, Mrs. Y.”
“I know.” She stared at the wall between the two boys, her eyes appearing suddenly glazed over and then just as quickly as it had occurred, she shook her head and returned her focus to Manny. “I’ll just leave these cookies for you boys and if there is anything else you need just let me know.”
“Thanks Mom.”
“Yeah, thanks Mrs. Y.”
Just as she was about to exit the room she turned back. “Oh, Tanner. I washed a pair of your work pants, so if you were wondering where they were they’re outside on the line. I’ll bring them in for you tonight so you have them for tomorrow morning.”
Manny stifled a laugh, releasing it only after Tanner’s bedroom door was securely closed. “Dude.”
“I know, I know. This is why I need to go with you.”
Maybe it was a silly thing to do: leave home because of a mom whose only fault was that she cared too much. Never mind his absentee father.
Tanner had made up his mind. In a way, it was his way of rebelling. There were kids who went out and egged houses or smoked pot because they had parents that didn’t care where they were. Others stayed at home all night and every weekend because they’re too afraid of a world outside of their family. Still there were some who, having grown up having everything they could p
ossibly want or need handed to them on a silver platter, took off in hopes of gaining some kind of perspective on their lives. Tanner wasn’t quite sure of Manny’s motives for leaving, but he was certain of his own. And that was enough for him.
“So run me through the plan again.”
Manny shuffled through his papers until he found a black and white print out. He handed it to Tanner. “Greyhound will get us all the way to the Port Authority bus station in a little over three days. Tickets are running for around one-twenty a piece.”
“How much do you have saved up?”
“About eleven-hundred,” Manny responded. “What about you?”
“I’m a little shy of three grand.”
“I have a friend who will let us crash at his place for a few days, but we’ve got to find some work right away. Forty-one hundred isn’t going to get us too far.”
__
Tanner reached over and turned off his alarm mere seconds after it sounded. His eyes felt heavy and dry as he rubbed at them, the red numbers on his clock becoming a large blur. He slipped on an old pair of jeans, pulled a t-shirt over his head and covered his mess of hair with a baseball cap. He retrieved his pack from under his bed and after taking a final inventory of his room flipped off his light and left the room in darkness.
Having snuck out of the house many times in the past Tanner had no problem descending the dark stairwell and finding his way to the back door. He hoisted his heavy pack onto his back and secured the waist straps with a click. As he lifted his hand to the doorknob he felt something brush his leg. Even through the darkness he could make out the shape of Chester, his cat. He bent down slowly, the weight from the pack forcing him downwards, and stroked the feline, smiling as he began to purr.
“Bye buddy,” he said, feeling his first pangs of indecision. He glanced down the long, dark hallway and then turned, stepping through the doorway and running along the side of the house out to the idling car waiting three doors down.
“I didn’t think you’d actually come,” Manny said when the car door shut behind Tanner.
