JEDSON: The Ruins of Emblem

by Brent, Cora

  “I haven’t seen Eddie around tonight,” I said, although I already knew I wouldn’t.

  A wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows. “I’ve been running the bar for the past six months. My dad is…well, he hasn’t been in great shape since my mom died. I moved back home to help him out.”

  Here was the part when the right thing to say was something like, “Sorry to hear about your mom.” But there was only so much hypocrisy I could stomach and Leah would never believe those words coming from me anyway. From what I heard, Luanne’s death had been slow and painful and while I wasn’t vicious enough to wish that fate on anyone, not even her, I couldn’t say I was all busted up to hear it either.

  Leah bit her lip, the mention of Luanne an obvious conversation killer. I pretended nothing was amiss.

  “So,” I said, “What were you doing before retreating to Emblem to rescue your dad and the Dirty Cactus?”

  She looked at me. Leah wasn’t an idiot. She probably had the ability to detect sarcasm. But she answered anyway.

  “I was enrolled at Arizona State. Studying to be an accountant.”

  “You didn’t finish?”

  She shook her head. “No, I still have another year. But my dad needed me so I didn’t hesitate to come home.” She was probably used to people telling her how awesome and noble she was to abandon her accounting dreams and return to her crappy hometown to prop up a failing bar and play nursemaid to her loser of an old man.

  Meanwhile, the steroid king was standing nearby, filling glasses and eyeing me in an unfriendly way. He looked vaguely familiar, like standard character actors looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t be bothered to sort out why. He was obviously displeased that I was taking up so much of Leah’s time. Or maybe he was only bothered because she appeared to like the attention. Slowly, deliberately, I raked my eyes over her body once again, partly because I knew he was watching and partly because it amused me to watch her squirm.

  “The years have been good to you,” I noted, taking a leisurely look at her bare legs, her oversized t-shirt, her small hips. Yeah, she’d grown up all right even though physically she didn’t do much for me. Not because she was ugly. She wasn’t remotely ugly. A lot of guys got off on that frail doe-eyed eyed look and had fun with small tits. Good for them. But give me a girl with substantial assets worth sucking on for hours, tall enough so I didn’t need to bend in half to locate her lips, a girl who could keep up when I fucked her hard and without mercy, not some porcelain doll that could hardly fit me inside and might crack if I rode her too rough.

  As for Leah Brandeis, she had all the hallmarks of a fragile piece of crystal that needed to be locked in a cabinet or kept on a remote shelf.

  On the other hand, if someone decided to remove her from that shelf and shatter her to pieces then it was no less than what she deserved.

  She grew flustered as I took my time letting my eyes roam over her. Her cheeks reddened and she tossed that unreasonably long swath of hair over her right shoulder. But the way she shifted her legs told me she liked being examined this way. She really liked being studied by me in particular. She would have changed her mind in a hurry if she could read what was going on in my head.

  A sharp whistle cut through the din. A few bar stools down sat a pair of young guys who didn’t have the look of Emblem about them. They’d probably driven down here from some prissy master planned community to see how the other half lived.

  “Get a couple of tequila shots down here,” one of them barked. If they were smart they’d keep their heads down. I could see a few of the Emblem regulars had taken notice and weren’t impressed.

  Leah took a look around to see if any of her employees could cover the order so she could spend another minute on this conversation but the waitress was across the bar and the steroid king was now dealing with some squabble over by the dartboard.

  “Sorry, we’re busy tonight,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Let’s cut the socializing and make those shots happen,” shouted the second guy as his buddy snickered. A few of the other bar stool inhabitants were really eyeing them with distaste now. I was one of them.

  “You should come back again,” Leah blurted. “I mean, it was nice to see you, Ryan.”

  “Nice to see you too.” I kept my face as neutral as possible. “Yeah, I’ll stop by again real soon.”

  She searched my expression a little anxiously, trying to determine whether all was forgiven, or if all was even known. It was known. And unforgiven. But I kept those truths to myself.

  Leah must have been satisfied that I held no grudges because she broke into a smile. She had a pretty smile and the sight of it stabbed me in the gut a little. I remembered the way she used to turn that shy smile on me like I was about to lasso the moon and then hand it to her.

  But that was a long time ago. Another era. Another life.

  Now she was a woman smiling at me in a hopeful way I was all too familiar with. She had no fucking shame.

  Leah didn’t have time to stand there grinning at me for long because her customers kept making demands. When her attention had returned to pouring one glass after another I stood up and dropped some cash on the bar.

  I left something else too. I took a few steps back into the crowd, waiting for her to get around to picking it up. She finally did and I saw her head whip in a double take. She was frozen, staring down at the thing I’d left behind. But before she could do anything about it I lowered my head, turning and heading for the door.

  I didn’t have much confidence that the neutral expression on my face remained intact.

  Chapter Four

  Leah

  I woke up because I was sure that someone had just roared my name.

  “LEAH!”

  The cry, distinctly masculine, still rang in my ears and my heart thudded as I sat up on the thin mattress, listening for the next sound.

  None came.

  There was no one shouting, no pounding on the door and no alarm had been activated. There was only the vague sigh of the air conditioner and the chatter of the birds outside. Nothing out of the ordinary. I was listening for an echo from my dreams.

  My sweaty hair was glued to the back of my neck and I twisted it up into a loose knot before settling back among the three pillows that populated my lonely bed. I never did accept Terry’s lukewarm hookup offer last night. Partly because I struggled to find any enthusiasm for him and mostly because it felt like the wrong thing to do when I was so preoccupied with other things. Terry didn’t seem especially disappointed when I muttered something about being needed at home. After locking up the bar I drove straight home, checked to make sure my father was sleeping in the house and then retreated out here to the old trailer.

  Originally I moved out to the Jedsons’ place in a desperate bid to get some sleep. Ever since childhood I’d been plagued by bouts of insomnia, a flaw I might have acquired from Luanne, who always needed a shot of alcohol coupled with some pharmaceutical assistance just to doze off for a handful of hours.

  In the grim weeks following her death my father became a lost wraith, sobbing and wailing and wondering out loud what reason he had to live and I barely slept at all. The needs of the bar kept me on my feet all day while I struggled to adapt to a role I’d never expected to fill. Then I’d drag myself across the threshold long after most of Emblem had settled down to listen for my father’s late night wandering footsteps. It was a hollow, despairing sound as he padded from room to room like he was in search of something he’d misplaced.

  I don’t think he really believed she would die. Not when the lung cancer diagnosis came, not when the treatments were unsuccessful, not when she stopped being able to rise from bed. Maybe not even when hospice care arrived to oversee her final days. Luanne was more than a decade younger than him. The thought had likely never crossed his mind that he’d outlive her. Maybe that was why he couldn’t accept it, not even when Luanne Danziger Brandeis quit cursing at everyone who dared approach her be
dside and wheezed out her final difficult breath.

  Between the sorry bottom line of the bar and the avalanche of medical bills that still arrived daily there wasn’t a lot of money, just enough to hire widowed, retired nurse Mrs. Albertson from down the road to watch over him when I was occupied at the Cactus. At first I assumed the situation was temporary and I expected to be back at school for the fall semester. But when weeks turned to months and my father still couldn’t resume his place in his old life I stopped thinking in terms of a timeline. After Luanne’s funeral I raised the subject of selling the bar but quickly realized that was a nonstarter. My father needed the Dirty Cactus. He’d lost his identity as the husband of Luanne and all he had left was the bar. He needed the bar even if he still could hardly bring himself to leave the house, let alone act as the proprietor.

  Last month I finally reached my mental frontier. I couldn’t leave. Yet I couldn’t stand living in the house that vibrated with death, sadness and rotten memories. Night after night I would lie awake in my pink girlhood bedroom and stare at the wall until the first tendrils of daylight crept around the edges of the window shades. And then finally, fitfully, I’d lapse into an exhausted sleep for a few short hours until my father awoke and knocked on my door asking why I wasn’t up yet and dealing with the Cactus. It wasn’t his fault that I couldn’t sleep. But the house was the epicenter of all my unhappy moments. My mother’s death only made the feeling worse. I imagined her disapproving ghost glaring down at me every time I closed my eyes.

  The trailer had been unoccupied for years and I couldn’t understand why it had even been kept. It had been purchased by my parents solely to give Celeste and her young son a place to live for very little rent. Celeste and Ryan were long gone and my folks could have sold the thing and had it moved elsewhere instead of being left out beyond the citrus orchard to decompose year after year. Yet somehow it had remained in good shape. I cleared out some old junk that had been stored inside, purchased a few pieces of furniture at the consignment store in Grande and made it nearly as homey as it had been when Celeste lived here. My father didn’t argue with me when I gave him the excuse that I didn’t want to disturb him any longer by remaining in the house. And it was there, in a tiny bedroom where Celeste Jedson had once hung blue butterfly curtains on her window that I was able to finally sleep for more than two hours at a time.

  By some odd twist of coincidence my move to the trailer occurred only days before I heard Ryan Jedson was back in town. Maybe I should have been as plagued by ghosts and memories in Ryan’s former home as I was in my parents’ house but that wasn’t the case. The trailer managed to be a little corner of serenity. A place where I was finally able to sleep.

  I wished I were still asleep. Once my mind started working I began flashing back to last night. For weeks I’d braced myself for the inevitability of Ryan Jedson walking through the door. But I never could have been ready for the tsunami of conflicting reactions.

  Sorrow.

  Unease.

  Anger.

  Yes, anger. I’d never been able to scrub away the revolting sight of him with my mother.

  “My bed. Your bed. Leah’s bed.”

  And there was one more warring emotion to deal with.

  The worst one.

  Temptation.

  I’d caught him looking me up and down in a way I used to wish he’d someday look at me. Everything came rushing back in a riot of confusion and I was a lovesick teenager with a hopeful dream. I wanted him to keep looking at me. In some warped way I actually wanted him.

  I groaned and yanked a pillow over my head. The idea was nuts. Whatever fantasies I’d once cultivated about Ryan had died years ago. Or at least they should have.

  Breathing underneath a pillow wasn’t a good long term plan so I flung it away. I might as well shower and get on with the day. My dad was no doubt awake by now, probably waiting less than patiently for me to show up and take a seat at the kitchen table. Sunday mornings had become our unofficial appointment to go over the bar numbers for the week, although he would just kind of nod vaguely when I gave him less than satisfactory news. The problem wasn’t the volume of business. The problem was he had repeatedly taken out new and ever riskier loans in part to tackle renovation work that was never started, let alone finished. So now we were saddled with a high interest rate excessive mortgage on a building that was badly in need of widespread repairs.

  To make things worse, he’d obtained a second mortgage on the house. My father’s financial situation was precarious. Getting this message across to him and coming up with a strategy was proving difficult. I was afraid if I pushed too hard he would relapse so I tried to tread carefully. It was encouraging to see that he was a little less broken these days, even playing cards with old friends on occasion. His buddies at the bar asked about him all the time for the first few months of his absence. They didn’t ask much anymore. I think people were starting to believe he might never return. I was starting to believe it too.

  I hated myself a little for the sense of dread that enveloped me as I walked from the trailer to the house. Of course I loved my dad. I’d suspended my life to come back here and help him as much as I could. But so many months had passed and I was starting to feel like we were locked in a holding pattern. He couldn’t sit in the house and brood about his dead wife forever. And I couldn’t carry the weight of our circumstances on my back forever. I was exhausted. And there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

  At least I had lunch with Cadence to look forward to this afternoon.

  The house I’d grown up in was one of the prettiest in Emblem, a custom designed sprawling ranch style with a Tuscan face, complete with stone and wrought iron scrollwork. I stood in front of the house for a moment, silently judging it. Given the current real estate market in Emblem I didn’t know if we could even get enough from a sale to pay the outstanding debt. There weren’t many people searching for an estate smack in the middle of a vanishing town.

  Except Ryan Jedson.

  It was a mystery how a high school dropout who’d spent years on the run from law enforcement managed to have enough cash to buy the house on the hill. There were rumors about what he’d been doing during those years. Drugs were the most likely guess. He’d vaguely mentioned getting some lucky breaks in real estate but if the truth was shadier I doubted he’d admit as much to me right off the bat. Ryan wouldn’t be the first to make a killing in something illegal before figuring out how to launder the money to make it look like it came from somewhere respectable.

  With a sigh I worked my key in the copper door lock. Whatever the deal was with Ryan’s past, he obviously planned to stay here now. And at some point I really needed to talk to him, and not just superficial bar chatter. I owed him an explanation no matter how awkward it felt to choke the words out. I would have done it years ago if I’d known where to find him. My back pocket didn’t feel any different but I knew it was there, the St. Christopher medal. Last night I’d been stunned to discover it sitting atop the cash he left on the bar.

  It couldn’t be the same one he’d given me. Luanne had taken that one and I’d never seen it again. This one was shiny. Brand new. The fact that he’d left it for me to find was obviously intended as a message. I just didn’t know what he was trying to say. Was it simply an acknowledgement of an old friendship?

  Perhaps.

  It could just as easily mean something else.

  He’d left before I could ask. That move, I knew, was also intentional.

  The house was cold. Literally cold. My dad kept the air conditioning turned all the way down to sixty-eight degrees no matter the season.

  The interior was like a Luanne museum.

  Here she was on the wall in an enormous canvas print wearing an electric blue sundress among a forest of sunflowers.

  There she sat in a duck-faced pout in an eight-by-ten framed glossy photo on the living room end table.

  A caricature sketch done on a cruise.

  A sti
ll photo of a high school performance of Grease.

  Luanne, Luanne, Luanne. Everywhere you fucking looked.

  My mother had intended to leave Emblem. The old yearbook photos I used to thumb through showed a girl I never knew, a girl with honey-colored hair and a blazing smile that was tinted with a hint of daring. That was the girl who wanted to perform in off-Broadway musicals and never planned to circle back to her hometown less than a year after leaving, bruised and defeated and humiliated by a rumor that she’d been reduced to stripping (and perhaps worse) in the seediest clubs of Las Vegas. Maybe that was why she’d gotten involved with an older friend of her father’s, reluctantly agreeing to accept a ring on her finger when she became pregnant. Daisy was born with a natural chip on her shoulder and a disdain for nearly everything and everyone. I joined the party five years later, scrawny and needy. She liked neither of us.

  There were a handful of pictures of the rest of us sprinkled in with the Luanne gallery. There was one of my parents on their honeymoon to Mexico, my father sunburned and goofy-grinning while my mother smirked, pressing a diamond-accented hand over her pregnant belly. A small collage in the dark corridor between the kitchen and living room revealed me and my sister in our younger years, the most recent picture in the collection taken when I was thirteen and sullenly short-haired. Some girls looked adorable with short hair. I was not one of them. With my gangly body and tense face I didn’t look like a cute adolescent girl. I looked like an unhappy ten-year-old boy. She’d known I would.

  A spoon clattered from the kitchen. “Leah?” my father asked. “Is that you?”

  “Yeah, Dad.” I tore my eyes away from the sad girl in the collage photo. “It’s me.”

  He was seated at the kitchen table and wearing a grey bathrobe that looked like it had been moldering in a landfill before he fished it out and draped it over his thin body. My mother had given it to him as a Christmas gift about fifteen years ago. The patchy hair remaining on his head was wispy and uncombed. Sporadic white whiskers decorated his jaw but instead of making him appear distinguished they only increased the impression of befuddlement. Tired eyes lifted when I planted a kiss on his cheek.