Trying the Knot

by Todd Erickson

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Ben asked. Feigning disinterest, he pulled a long strand of hair from his head and began flossing his teeth.

  “Nick and Vange were hanging all over each other.” Chelsea digressed, “Vange left the gathering at my house pretty early. I don’t think she got along well with Kate’s college friends.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Chelsea nervously toyed with the beads on her necklace, and she said, “It was as if we were back in high school, except nothing out of line was said.”

  “And no one beat her up,” Thad added.

  “Kate’s friends are mostly education majors. I guess Vange didn’t appreciate their quasi-virginal snobbishness.”

  “I bet you got along with them just fine,” interjected Ben, and he found himself in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Thad kicked him under the table and encouraged Chelsea to continue.

  “After Kate finally turned in, I escorted the bridesmaids to the bar, where Nick was parading Evangelica around on his arm. It was obvious something was up.”

  “I can’t believe you,” Ben said, louder than intended. “You’re too much. It is not like Vangie is some clingy ditz, and Nick Paull is the most honorable guy I know –

  “A jock with a conscience,” Thad interrupted, and Chelsea shook her head sadly as if she had firsthand evidence to the contrary.

  “Well, it’s fair to say something happened between them,” Chelsea insisted.

  “Objection, isn’t that speculation?” Ben asked of the future lawyer. “This is total bullshit.”

  Ben rose to his feet in a huff and fumbled for his wallet. He threw a wad of bills down on the table, along with coins and a folded piece of stationery. Chewing on a fingernail, Chelsea eyed the crumpled paper suspiciously, but Ben snatched the note away before she grabbed it.

  Thad grabbed hold of Ben’s sleeve and tugged him back into the booth. Seated, Ben flung free from Thad’s loose grip, but he made no effort to leave. “It’s too weird. Even if something did happen, it’s their business,” Ben said. “Let it go.”

  “No one is saying anything happened for sure,” Chelsea countered. “This is not from a place of judgment.”

  “I’ll say it happened for sure.”

  “Like how sure,” Ben demanded, again rising to his feet.

  “Like I saw it for sure—outside the bar, near the bushes,” Thad confessed.

  “How primal,” Chelsea said, relieved her suspicions were confirmed. “Like I’ve always said, never trust a man with two first names.”

  Oblivious to the wafting steam and pungent odor, Ben failed to respond when the waitress asked if his coffee needed a warm-up.

  “Hey, guy, wake up,” said the pregnant teenager. Ben looked away, adamantly disinterested, and she flashed him a toothy grin, sucked in her belly, and poured him a refill anyway. “You going to eat that, or just play?” Ben lifted his plate toward her, and she asked, “Yous guys need anything else, or you all set?”

  “Just the check,” Thad said. The server slapped the check down on the table before Chelsea could ask for separate checks, and she turned and teetered away.

  “Yous,” Chelsea repeated. “I don’t know why the proverbial white trash S needs to be added to the end of every other word around here.”

  Ben watched the waitress sashay across the room as seductively as her bowed legs and pigeon feet allowed. “Too skinny,” he mumbled. He felt sorry for the fetus inside her. It’s sure to be born with a greasy spoon its mouth, its only future entailed working in this dump, or out in the strawberry fields with the boys.

  Ben pushed his coffee cup out of the way and said adamantly, “I don’t even drink this shit.”

  “Really? I drink mass quantities,” Chelsea said. “Java keeps me alive. I wish there was a way to have it filtered directly into my veins.”

  Mockingly, Ben said, “I bet that means you’re rilly-rilly busy without enough hours in the day to contact everyone in your Rolodex.”

  “Enough already, Benjamin,” Chelsea spat, smacking her palm onto the tabletop. “I don’t know why you have to be such an antagonistic prick all the time.”

  Thad shot him a look, and for the sake of maintaining peace, Ben sat back down and agreed, “Okay, nuf’s nuf.”

  Sensing another argument percolating, Thad asked casually, “Ben, is Vange still pregnant?”

  Chelsea’s jaw dropped as she exhaled incredulously. “How do you know that?”

  “She told me Easter weekend.”

  Ben shook his head slowly. With his middle finger, he mindlessly twirled a spoon around and around on the table’s sticky, sea-foam surface.

  “Ben—

  “What?”

  “Is she still pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “And how would you know?” Chelsea asked.

  “Because I’m the one who took her to get the abortion. They sent her away because she was too far along,” he said reluctantly. “She had a miscarriage. I was the one who took her to the hospital and stayed with her.”

  “Who’s the father?”

  “I dunno,” he mumbled.

  “Did you even bother to ask?” she inquired.

  Ben continued twirling the spoon and watched it as if hypnotized. He refused to look up. “I guess I was afraid the father was me, not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Well, it’s comforting to know you were there for her in her time of need,” Chelsea said condescendingly. She sat back, folded her arms, and glared accusingly at him. She could not stop shaking her head or shake the awed expression from her face.

  Loud laughter erupted from the back dining room, and it echoed in the silence that had descended on them. It sounded as if the Frat pack were tearing the place down from the inside out. Their distant charged energy only served to feed the animosity bouncing between Ben and Chelsea.

  “What else aren’t you telling us?” she asked.

  “What the hell are you getting at?”

  Chelsea was quiet for a few lingering moments, and then she said tersely, “Whatever would a girl do without such a terrific friend as you?”

  “Screw you, I don’t have to sit here and listen to this bullshit. What a hypocritical bitch,” Ben said, and he yet again jumped to his feet. Guiltily, he burrowed his hand in the recesses of his pocket and fiddled with the scrap of stationery he plucked from Vange’s hand earlier that morning.

  “You know what’s total bullshit, Benny?” she asked angrily. She bounded out of the booth and pointed at him. She twisted her index finger into his chest as if her serrated fingernail was a bayonet.

  “What’s total bullshit, Benny, is you’ve done whatever Nick’s ever told you, probably since you’ve been eleven years old, and you’ve hung onto his every word as if it’s gospel.” Having gathered the needed ammunition from her arsenal of cutting observations, she repeatedly charged at him with her stockpile until he withered defeated. “You’ve been his stupid little sidekick for so long you’ve begun to act exactly like him.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You’re so spineless, don’t even try to kid yourself into thinking you’re Vange’s friend.”

  Ben smirked bewildered. “And you are? When did you start giving a rat’s ass?”

  “I don’t care, not one iota, and I never have – but you, you did! So, why didn’t she make any effort to call you, her wonderful, caring friend before she swallowed a fistful of pills?”

  “You’re insane,” Ben said casually, and he turned away and scuffled toward the bobcat-topped exit.

  “That’s right, call me crazy and leave, but why the hell didn’t she call you when she was trying to kill herself, you outright unmitigated asshole?” she yelled after him.

  Trembling violently, she wished the taxidermied feline would spring to life, leap from its eternal perch and dig a hole through his chest cavity. No doubt, the feline would discover a black hole where his soul should be. Watching him amble across the lawn to his motorc
ycle, she felt Thad’s arm wrap around her shoulder. Ben straddled and started the bike. He did not bother to look back, which only upset her further. With Ben no longer in her crosshairs, she collapsed against Thad as if having completed a marathon. Drained of energy, she shook uncontrollably as he continued to support her lightweight frame. He was unable to guess what she kept stashed away, stewing inside her for so long it erupted with such volcanic fury.

  “He’s such a smarmy cretin bastard,” she said out of breath. She held onto Thad while avoiding the glassy dead eyes of a mounted sturgeon hanging on the wall. “He makes Nick look like a saint.”

  Nick leaned forward with hands clasped on a chair alongside the bed where Kate slumbered contentedly. Her black hair fell away from her flawless olive skin. Drug-induced sleep whisked her so far away from worry she looked more beautifully unaffected than ever. Nick found the faint snoring noises she made when especially exhausted endearing because it undermined her taken-for-granted perfection. She was not the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on, but she possessed a presence that demanded attention.

  They had spent the past couple hours in Ginny Norris’s guest bedroom, surrounded by Laura Ashley floral patterns tangling their way across the walls and drapes. The whole house was decorated in such an overly done boudoir fashion it almost made him blush with embarrassment.

  The Norris’ had divorced so amicably Ginny retained the house and restaurant. She had encouraged her husband to build The Lounge on a lark, but folks speculated it was part of her strategically planned scheme to ditch him. Nick was doubtful the flighty, carefree and sexy middle-aged woman could have possibly been so deliberate and calculating – that was more her daughter’s style. Chelsea was indeed her mother’s Doppelganger.

  Ben once confessed to Nick that Ms. Norris employed his services to satisfy her most intimate needs. The only time Nick was ever jealous of his oldest friend had been during Ben’s detailed descriptions of his endless sexual encounters with his employer. They joked Chelsea would cardiac arrest if she ever learned a quarter of her mother’s frisky exploits with the lounge bar tender. Nick wondered how such a fun-loving, healthy woman could have given birth to a daughter so frigid and uncompromising. Lying in the guest-bedroom, Nick imagined what it would be like to have a simultaneous encounter with both mother and daughter. Sexual fantasies stimulated his interest only for so long, before he became frustrated by even their remotest possibility and the challenge to consummate his desires grew too overpowering.

  As he stroked Kate’s luxurious hair, he noticed a trickling pool of drool winding its way over the florid pillow. He spent the entire morning by her side, and he mulled over the innards of their seemingly perfect relationship. He and Kate had experienced so many soap opera twists and turns on the way to the altar, it was almost unbelievable they were to be married tomorrow.

  After dating on and off throughout high school, they broke up their senior year when she became wise to his philandering ways. Four years of constant make-ups just to break-up, compounded by her fiercely guarded virginity, was more than his teenaged patience could withstand. Nick subsequently dated her best friend Chelsea for a while, and he hoped Kate would hate him with such passion she would never again entertain the notion of being his girlfriend. To his dismay, coupling with Chelsea only succeeded in making her more competitive and even more determined to win him back; it was not until Evangelica seduced him at a senior year Christmas party that he successfully broke Kate’s heart. Curiously, it was not until Nick simultaneously “cheated” on Kate while dating her best friend that she took ultimate offense.

  By graduation, their circle of friends had become too incestuously peculiar, and Nick hoped never to see the any of them ever again. But of course fate would have it otherwise. He and Kate happened to bump into one another around a bonfire during the annual Portnorth Limestone Festival during their junior year in college. He walked her home, and they sat in the Little League Baseball dugouts until dawn talking. Once again, they found themselves together and were an item ever since. Initially it was strange because during their prolonged separation, they both matured into adults, and he had never known her to be so adventurous and forthcoming.

  Although Kate never really severed ties with Chelsea, her rift with Evangelica only grew deeper over the years, as their lives traversed dissimilar paths, even after they became stepsisters. Nick suspected the real reason Kate begrudged Vange was because she had openly slept with him, whereas Chelsea never staked that claim out loud. He could not understand this feminine over-sensitivity. It made no sense to hold a grudge over anything as mysterious and natural as intercourse. Petty jealousy was just one of the things he found unnecessarily attractive about the female species.

  Poor Kate, Nick thought, she had been through too much in the past year. First, her mother died of an extended bout with cancer; moreover, she had failed to share the inevitability of her prognosis. Kaye Hesse’s death messed over Kate’s younger brother, Jack, so badly he spent the duration of her funeral in the hospital recovering from alcohol poisoning. When Kate’s father subsequently remarried, he failed to share with his children the depth of his relationship with of all people, the town floozy Evangelica’s mother.

  Understandably, Kate had not taken the news of her father’s union very well, and Jack once again freaked out. He hated Kate for being so far removed from their nightmare homestead. No matter how often Nick tried to get close to the misguided youth, Jack resisted. His resentment seethed below the surface of his intense animosity. Also, Jack’s penchant for getting into trouble put an unwarranted strain on Nick and Kate’s relationship.

  More often than not, Jack found himself clashing with local authorities. Last autumn, he was suspected of having set a vacant building ablaze, and this spring his prom date’s car collided with a deer. She died on a lonely country road, and he was pulled from school in order to spend time in a mental health clinic, where he perfected the intricate art of self-mutilation.

  “He’s a cutter?” Kate asked. “What does he cut?”

  “Himself,” Nick had to explain.

  When life became as bad as it could get, Kate’s grandfather keeled over dead on Easter Sunday. Sparing her from yet another bout of depressing sadness, he insisted she skip the funeral and vacation in Cancun, Mexico.

  Kate’s family was not the only ones who wallowed in stress-inducing antics. Nick’s parents obtained a secret divorce, although they continued to live together, and his sister Nanette changed her name to Tristana after striking up a long distance love affair with the editor of the local newspaper, the Portnorth Porthole. His sister’s sole purpose for setting foot in town was to humiliate her family.

  Presently with Vange in a coma and Thad knowing about their tryst in the bushes, life had become rather complicated. Nick wished for expeditious removal from the present turmoil, and he hoped Kate’s cousin had sense enough to keep his mouth shut. Certainly, Nick thought, Thad would never intentionally do anything to devastate Kate’s fleeting moment of happiness.

  He kissed her cheek, wiped the drool from her chin and whispered, “I love you so much.”

  Nick thought it a wise idea to check around town to make sure his groomsmen had not cut too wide a swath of destruction, and he gently abandoned Kate on the bed. While he was out and about he intended to drop in at the newspaper office to have a well-meaning chat with his future cousin-in-law, Thad Feldpausch.

  He never especially understood Thad’s alienating remoteness or pathological indifference. Nick always secretly suspected him of being gay, especially after the half-serious proposition he once tossed his way. “If a body is just a body, Nick, then why not have sex with every body?” The blunt remark threw doubt on Nick’s past assertions Thad was merely harmless and an inexperienced novice.

  Nick gave Kate a final kiss goodbye, and he could not help but smile when he noticed her thick ankles. It was one more of her little imperfections he found hopelessly endearing.

 
; chapter five

  After several futile attempts to start the rusted-out Datsun, Thad finally decided he might as well abandon the vehicle in the diner parking lot and walk the five blocks to work at the Portnorth Porthole newspaper. It was the last Friday of summer, and the town was relatively bustling, especially with minivans and SUVs piloted by mothers running last minute errands before sending their kids back into school.

  Chelsea accompanied him, and the mid-morning, lukewarm air tugged gently at her short blond hair as she devoured the breezes that swept off Lake Huron. She clutched her sweater between her fingers, which were still shaking from her confrontation with Ben.

  They crossed Main Street and meandered their way through the little town time forgot until Chelsea made an impulsive left and headed east to the beach. She would not endure moseying past all the empty downtown buildings. It was the quiet well-manicured neighborhoods that soothed her nerves. She considered Portnorth the most splendid spot on earth, in spite its warped affliction of habitually vomiting out its brightest and best while suffering a case of constipation when it came to its less-than-desirables. However, its easy simplicity and slow pace never failed to resuscitate her frazzled nerves. The fresh air of Portnorth was her drug of choice.

  As they walked toward the marina, Thad pointed to the cloudy pink horizon and said, “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.”

  “What?”

  “It’s just what my granddad used to say,” said Thad. “It’ll storm later.”

  “I hope not. For Kate’s sake, ” she said. They climbed onto the rocky limestone breakwater, which sheltered the marina from an ever-encroaching Lake Huron. The air felt still and heavy. “Remember when we used to play ‘The Day After’ in the woods at lunch recess?”

  “Yes, we’d pretend we were sickly sole survivors of a nuclear war.”

  “Don’t you think this morning has the same apocalyptic feel?” Chelsea asked.