Chasing Kane

by Andrea Randall

  The blinking stopped without a message coming through, which admittedly deflated my sails. But, the phone rang and Regan’s name appeared on the screen.

  “Hello?” I was breathless with nerves.

  “Are you serious?” Regan’s voice was an excited whisper. Airy and soft, and a little hesitant. Restrained hope.

  I grinned, biting my lip as heat spread to my cheeks. “Yes.”

  “Jesus …”

  “Good or bad?” I asked, peeking at the future bride and groom who were still peering through my cake pictures.

  He let out a sigh inside a laugh. “Good. So good. I love you.”

  “And I love you. See you in Massachusetts?”

  Regan’s voice dropped, now producing a low moan. “That’s so far away.”

  “It’s like a week, champ. I think we can manage,” I answered with a chuckle.

  “Tonight,” he whispered. “Can we … you know?”

  I set my eyes on the newlyweds in my shop, making sure they were out of earshot, before I whispered back, “Sext or phone?”

  “Phone,” he replied without a second thought.

  “Eight my time?”

  “Oooooh fine,” he answered with a comical sigh. “I guess I can manage.”

  The blond, suntanned couple in my front-and-center booth signaled me with matching waves and pearly white smiles that they were ready to discuss their options.

  “Gotta go. Business to conduct. Be amazing tonight.”

  “You, too, Babe. Oh, wait—” he stopped himself with a bright question in his voice. “You’re sending cupcakes, right? Cookies, too?”

  A lump formed in my throat at his eagerness. Despite the standard sweets-delivery protocol we’d had for all his other tours, this was the first package I’d be sending out for this one.

  He hadn’t asked.

  I hadn’t done it.

  We’d fallen apart on the most basic levels in ways that were no more evident than when missing things turned up. Requests for phone sex, cupcakes, and cross-country rendezvous among them.

  “Yes,” I answered after a lost-in-thought pause. “Of course. I love you.”

  “I love you.”

  Thirty-Three

  Regan

  And finally, we were in Massachusetts.

  It felt like it took forever to get there, and even then I had to face the fact that we were only half-way through with the tour. I was able to meet back up with the tour in NYC, and I was glad for that because it was a trip watching CJ play for a huge crowd in Central Park.

  Moreover, seeing him and Frankie together was reassuring somehow. For him, them, and all of us, maybe. If they could make it—and it seemed like they just might—then there were few excuses left for the rest of us.

  We’d already played our shows in Barnstable and Wellfleet, and were scheduled to start a three-day stint at a wild arts and music festival in Provincetown before being granted a nearly two-week break. During that time, most members of the tour would scatter back to their home bases—mostly in California—or take vacations before we headed out for the second half of our tour. Georgia and I were looking forward to downtime spent between my parents’ here on the cape and Bo and Ember’s in New Hampshire.

  I picked Georgia up from the airport first thing in the morning—she’d taken the redeye—and as we wandered the grounds of the festival hand-in-hand, I couldn’t help but steal a thousand and one glances at her.

  “You’re freakin’ me out,” she chuckled, squeezing my hand. “Why d’you keep staring at me?” She’d only been back on East Coast soil for a few hours, but her accent was thickening by the second.

  I grinned. “I still can’t believe you’re here.”

  “We planned for me to come out here months ago,” she reminded me of our original plans when this tour first sprang into our lives.

  Untangling my hand from hers, I wrapped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to my side as we walked over the grassy sand toward the far end of the festival. I kissed the top of her head and she let out a satisfied sigh that left me wishing we were walking toward our bedroom. Anywhere but where we were headed.

  “You know what I mean,” I whispered as if we were in a crowded room.

  “I know,” she whispered back.

  The fact was, as recent as a few weeks before this moment, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that we would be hand-in-hand on this beach, or that she’d be joining us for the next month—our two-week break, plus the following two weeks on the road. I couldn’t have told you that we’d even be on speaking terms, never mind anything else.

  Georgia stopped, turning to face me as she placed her hand under my chin, eyeing me carefully. “I love you, Regan. I’m so happy we’re here. Not just here,” she gestured with her other hand to the land around us, “but here.” She moved her hand to point between the two of us. “We got a little off-track there, huh?”

  I nodded solemnly. “We did. But, not for long when you really look at it. And, you know what? We got through it together, and back on track together. The same track even.” I gave her a wink, then rejoiced in her yelp when I scooped her off her feet, spinning her around once with my lips locked onto hers before setting her back down.

  “Sure you’re ready for this?” I asked as we resumed our walk, a few paces from our intended destination.

  She shrugged, but I caught the deep breath she took underneath her raised shoulders. “It’s just a building, right? Some salt-worn wood and cement.”

  Her hard swallow highlighted the glaring lie.

  I gave her a smile and grabbed a hold of her hand again. “Yeah. Just a building,” I said softly.

  Dunes was the beachside townie bar Georgia’s father had owned and operated for decades. Long before Georgia was born, all through her childhood, and right up to his death, by which time Georgia had been living with her mother in California for years. It looked like a glorified shack that could blow away with a low-grade hurricane wind, but the emotional weight pulled heavy at the corners of my wife’s eyes.

  Aside from the years Georgia spent tending bar and cleaning up after her father’s messes inside the tattered walls of the place, Dunes had held the complete setting for her father’s rise and fall as a father and a man. It wasn’t even the bar itself, or the alcoholism it let him poorly conceal for years. It was what it stood for—the choices he’d always made ahead of his only child.

  While Georgia had returned to Massachusetts several times in the fifteen years since she left the dank, one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of the bar, she’d never once reentered Dunes.

  I’d been there as a late teenager, watching CJ play with various incarnations of garage bands, and sometimes playing myself, but never when Georgia was there that I know of. I’d met the owner of the place a time or two—Georgia’s dad I found out later—but there’s not much to tell there. He was your standard rundown drunk with a charming smile and a quick deal to turn around every corner. But, I hadn’t been back here since then. I learned early on how painful this pitiful little section of Provincetown was for her, and did my best to respect that.

  “Here we are,” she said with flat intention, like she’d reached the edge of a thirty-foot-high diving board and hadn’t yet looked down. “Ready?”

  I nodded as if she needed my permission—or my readiness—to enter. “Are you?”

  She looked away from me for a moment, furrowing her brow. After chewing her answer over her bottom lip for a while, she answered. “I have to let go of this place if the back of my brain is ever going to let me stop waiting for you to treat me like he did.”

  Her honesty was straightforward, resolute, and firm. A new leaf she’d promised in our counseling sessions to turn over—facing demons with honesty and conviction. To acknowledge their existence which, in theory, would immediately cut their power off at the knees. Then head forward to begin the work of dismantling the rest of them.

  “Well then, let’s do this,” I said
in an effort to remind her that, while this was her past she was facing, she wasn’t doing it alone.

  She arched an eyebrow and set her hand on the door.

  We stood in the breezy quiet outside the bar, only a few inches of wood separating us from the drunken noise on the other side. While it was traditionally a townie bar, the arts and music crowd drew ironic hipsters through the door who looked like they sort of fit in, but didn’t, if you asked me. But no one asked, and money was money, so I’m sure Dunes was more than happy for any extra business that came its way.

  The joyfully raucous noise of stereotypically drunken Irish pub music swarmed into our ears as we pushed the door open. Not long after came the stench of beer, sweat, and sand—a heady combination that oceanside bars specialize in.

  During the steep decline of his health before he passed away, Georgia’s father had handed operation of the bar over to an old friend and part-time manager of the bar—a man Georgia called Creature, without any further explanation. As if that were his name.

  On the mission of a lifetime, Georgia pushed toward the bar, never letting go of my hand as she tugged me behind her to handle all the “excuse me’s” necessary when my pint-sized stunner of a wife hip-checked her way through the thick crowd.

  “Here we are.” She stood up on her toes to speak in my ear as we reached the broad, pine, horseshoe-shaped bar.

  I nodded, waiting for her to make her next move. Normally when a guy wants to peek into his girl’s past they’ll go to her high school reunion, or something. Not us. Never mind the fact that Provincetown High School only existed as a K-8 building now—their doors closed as a high school in 2013 when their final graduating class of eight students gathered their diplomas. Teenagers in P-town had to go to nearby public or technical high schools now. That aside, Georgia isn’t the smiley reunion type.

  She’s the kind of girl who grips the edge of the bar and hollers, “Creature!” nearly out of nowhere.

  But the broad-backed guy she yelled to, who stood about my height, turned around. And, finally, the name was explained. His jet-black hair was wrapped into thick, corded dreadlocks held back from his face with a moss green bandana. He had the weathered skin you’d find on lifelong fishermen in these parts—ruddy and wind-beaten, ashen around the eyes. Those deep brown eyes of his lit up in utter disbelief as he seemed to question his sanity, assessing who stood before him. And, somewhere behind a thick, full-faced dark beard, he smiled.

  “Georgia fucking Hall?!” he hollered back with a deep, barreled voice. Thick and gritty, much like the character of the bar he ran.

  Georgia held up her left hand. “Kane to you, sir. I’m spoken for.”

  Creature slapped the bar as he moved towards us. “You’ve gotta be shittin’ me!”

  Without yet acknowledging the man holding her right hand, Creature grabbed hold of her left and closely inspected Georgia’s ring finger. Despite the crowded bustling of the bar, Georgia and Creature’s interaction garnered the attention.

  “Is that Billy’s kid?” I heard from someone who looked about a hundred and two, but was probably in his late sixties.

  Georgia almost never used her father’s name, so hearing it always took me by surprise. This intense, anti-heroic character from her past had a name. And a face, and presumably a smile, though I know Georgia saw less and less of that as time went on. He was a real person before his liver turned to stone.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes, kid,” Creature said with what seemed to be uncharacteristic gentleness in his voice. Given my few-minute assessment of the man who went by the title Creature. “How’s San Diego treatin’ ya?”

  I eyed Georgia carefully during the entire interaction as she answered questions of varying degrees of intimacy. She seemed surprised that Creature knew which questions to ask.

  “You’ve kept close tabs on me,” she said with mild accusation as two bartenders flitted around Creature, who remained fixed against the bar, leaning over it to talk up my wife.

  He shrugged. “That cocky drummer friend of yours stops in to play once in a while. Kind of a closed book when it comes to you, though—gotta give him that. Took me two years to get out of him where you ran off to. How long you been married?” Creature finally acknowledged my presence.

  Georgia smiled. “Three years. This is Regan—cousin to the cocky drummer friend.”

  His eyes met mine, and I saw the faintest glimmer of familiarity pass through them. “Say if it isn’t,” he said slowly as he extended his hand to shake mine. “You … you’ve been here before.”

  I shook his hand, nodding. “Like a hundred years ago. Used to play with CJ from time to time.”

  Georgia knew all this, but often forgot that we may have crossed paths in our youth without even knowing it.

  Creature nodded knowingly. “Fiddler,” he stated, not asked.

  “That’s me.”

  He tilted his head toward Georgia, dropping his hand from mine. “You taking care of her?”

  “Yes sir,” I answered as if I were speaking to her father. This was the most fatherly conversation I’d ever been in regarding Georgia, so I figured I ought to take it seriously.

  “You bettah,” he replied, his eyes boring into me uncomfortably. “If not, I’ve got guys—”

  “I’m sure you do.” I held up my hands in mock defense. But I knew he likely wasn’t kidding, and I wasn’t interested in hearing about the creative ways they’d separate my insides from my outsides if they got word that I’d somehow hurt Georgia.

  Georgia cleared her throat. “This is going to sound weird, but, who’s living upstairs?”

  Creature shook his head. “No one. Just used for storage now.”

  She swallowed. “Mind if I take a look? And in the office, too?”

  He shrugged, pulling his tree-trunk arms back from the bar, appearing to get back to work. “This place is more yours than mine, doll. Have at it.”

  She winked, leaning all the way across the bar to kiss Creature on the cheek before pulling me across the floor to the tiny office that was down a short, narrow hallway near the bathroom.

  Georgia didn’t say a word as she opened the heavy, steel door. The office was no bigger than a glorified broom closet, holding a metal desk, a rolling chair with a tattered cushion, and a small filing cabinet. There was barely room for the furniture, let alone two people, so I stood in the doorway and watched her.

  Her back was to me for a moment as she stood still in the center of the space and took a deep breath. I imagined that her eyes were closed, as they often were when she inhaled the scent of things. “So you can smell them all the way,” she always said.

  She ran her hands slowly across the top of the desk, as if searching for memory-Braille. With smooth, calm movements, Georgia squared herself in front of the shoulder-height filing cabinet, crouching in front of the bottom drawer, opening it, and reaching into the set of folders in the very back.

  “Um,” I broke my own vow of silence, “what?”

  Unruffled by my vague accusation of theft, Georgia slid a yellowed sheet of paper from the farthest back folder. Soft with age, it didn’t produce a noise when she folded it and tucked it in the back pocket of her jean shorts.

  “Want to come with me upstairs?” she asked, eyeing me with a hopeful, non-criminal look.

  I looked between the filing cabinet and her three times before answering, “Of course. But, maybe tell me about the little klepto-action there?”

  She smiled, laughing once before grabbing my hand. “Creature was right,” she said as she led me up a set of stairs down the same narrow hallway as the office. “This place is more mine than his. My dad owned the building outright. When he died, it naturally went to me, as his only living kin.”

  I stopped midway up the dusty staircase. “Seriously? And you were going to tell me … when?”

  She shrugged. “It hardly mattered. This happened before I met you, and Creature has a lifelong lease on the place, assuming all responsibi
lities for taxes and whatever. Unless he fails to pay them, I guess.”

  “Then you’d be on the hook?” I asked with what I considered an appropriate amount of concern regarding the hefty taxes on this kind of location.

  Georgia rolled her eyes and continued up the stairs. “He’d sooner sell his soul to the devil than fuck me over.”

  “I saw that tattoo on his neck,” I mumbled before pinching her butt, deciding to let it go and trust her judgment.

  “Anyway,” she said as we reached the top of the stairs, “I’m transferring the deed to him. Or selling the place to him for a dollar, or whatever.”

  “Does he know this?”

  She shook her head. “No. We’ve never talked about it since he signed the lease.”

  “This is a hefty piece of real estate.” I peered out a porthole window on the stairwell, which overlooked the ocean.

  Georgia’s voice softened. “Emotionally, too. It’s been like this vestigial organ-thing hanging off me for fifteen years, or whatever, and I just don’t want it anymore.” Her words spilled out faster as she talked, like she was trying to prove something, which I hadn’t intended—not intentionally, anyway.

  Wrapping my arms around her waist, I pulled her close and kissed her nose. “I know. I support whatever you want to do. As long as you let me take you and all your other organs home.”

  She smiled, then put her hands on my shoulders, pushing me back slightly. “So, listen. I haven’t been back up here since I moved out. And my dad lived here until he died, and I’m not sure what condition it’s in or anything like that …” She swallowed hard and took a deep breath.

  Wrapping my hands over her wrists, I gave her a soft kiss on the lips. “Take as much time as you need. I’ll just wait … right here.” I took a seat on the stair below her and waved her on.

  Georgia leaned forward and kissed me on the top of the head. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Turning for the door, she tried the knob and it clicked—locked. I was anxious for her, but evidently I was the only one, because a second later, she reached into a rusted old watering can on the floor and produced a key that allowed her entry.