Always Was

by Amabel Daniels

Well, yeah, the guy had made him apprehensive too. But if she was bothered, why not step aside, make up a lie that her boyfriend was waiting on her? Pretend that she only spoke Spanish?

  He’d thought that her cross-country move had been the ultimate symbol of standing up for herself. Had she developed some kind of social anxiety that deliberated her?

  Confused, he nonetheless respected her right to privacy. It wasn’t the time to push. Instead, he reached across the console and patted her thigh. “Well, he’s gone now.” Belatedly not wanting to freak her out with physical contact after such a scare, he pulled his hand back and ran it through his short hair. “And you never have to apologize for being scared.”

  She scoffed, her attention out the window.

  “Not to me, at least.”

  Fifteen minutes later, she broke the silence and said, “Thanks.”

  Calmed but still mystified at her strong physical reaction, he peered at her. “For what?”

  “Rescuing me back there.”

  He still wasn’t convinced she needed saving. In any other circumstance, she could have simply told a stranger to fuck off. Her Millson upbringing had never diminished her short patience and slights of profanity. But her parents had instilled the expectation that she mind her manners, speak only when spoken to, and never cause a scene. He rolled his eyes.

  “I got your back, you got mine, huh?” he said, hoping for a positive turn to their chat.

  “Sure, like you’d ever need my help.”

  “Hmm. You weren’t just checking out my tats last night, were you?” He played up his cockiness, hoping to amuse her as he puffed up his chest in his best tough-guy impression.

  She didn’t reply, but he swore a smile was fighting to the surface.

  “Besides, if that guy was causing us trouble, he coulda kicked my ass in no time at all.” Unwilling to discuss the matter anymore, he quickly asked, “So, tattoos? That’s your expertise?”

  “I don’t ink them,” she said. “I design some, but mostly I help out at the front desk.”

  “Surprised it isn’t your shop.”

  “Because all twenty-year-olds with no real-life experience should have their own businesses?”

  He smirked. “And I bet your parents wouldn’t foot the bill for helping you start such a lowly establishment.”

  “They won’t foot the bill for anything.”

  There was no missing the bitterness and defiance in her tone. “How so?”

  “They disowned me when I left Dartmouth.”

  Funny Jake hadn’t told him that huge chunk of news. He wondered why. Not that the Millsons disowned Sammy for leaving—that was a beautiful fuck-you gesture promising to be stripped of family privileges. But why hadn’t Jake told him?

  “Ah. Well, you’ve made it this far on your own. You’ll have your own shop soon enough.”

  She shrugged. “Who said I wanted my own? Sure, I like tats, but it’s just a part-time gig to pay some bills, help with supplies for school.”

  And it was enough? He couldn’t see how.

  “I sell some artwork too,” she said, as though she’d read his mind. She’d always had the uncanny perception to follow his thoughts.

  “Starving artist?” He grinned at her.

  “I’m not that tiny,” she said quietly.

  No. To him, what was inside her made her larger than life.

  “I had less than a grand in my pockets when I got there. I had no clue what to do, where to go. Kinda different from what I was used to at home.”

  “No shit.”

  “I searched for jobs, but I had no experience to claim. So I got discovered.”

  “How?”

  “I didn’t set out to. I was sketching this old man. I thought he must have been waiting for his wife while she shopped at Fisherman’s Wharf. But there he was, slouched on this bench. So I started to draw him for the hell of it, to pass time.”

  Sketching, to Sammy, meant doodling, like it was so easy, so effortless. Like if Tom Brady were to say he just tossed a ball around, or that Jimi Hendrix merely strummed a guitar. To the rest of the world, it was magic. The strokes of her pencil, her paintbrush, they rendered reality on paper. During one of his heaviest spells of homesickness while overseas—homesick not for a location because he’d moved too often to have one setting, but more for the longing for Sammy’s companionship—he’d browsed online and researched her specialty of illustration. Photorealism, like the works of Richard Estes and Audrey Flack. Depicting paintings of such vivid, tangible detail her works could be confused with photographs.

  “Then I heard this woman gasp behind me. I thought she was having a heart attack. It was her dad I was drawing. Couldn’t believe I’d captured the essence of him so quickly. She ended up wanting to buy the drawing, asking if I did portraits. She paid me two grand to do a still life of her family.”

  “Awesome.”

  She laughed. “Her family of fifteen. Toddlers included. I used photos, anyway. After that job, she spread the word to some friends and I had some little odd jobs before school started.”

  “That’s brilliant. The best and only way you should sell yourself.”

  “But I never wanted to be a portrait painter. Yeah, I did it for cash. I had to eat. Eventually, someone suggested I enter this art contest, and I won five grand, plus tons of free supplies. It was enough to get me through the first semester of school. That’s when I met Pablo and got the job at his tattoo parlor.”

  Pride swelled in his chest. Quiet little Sammy, making her own way in the world. Even though she had options of working with tats, or even freelancing with portraits, she knew they weren’t the venues she wanted to explore in life. Her indecision made him feel less foolish for not knowing how to or even wanting to settle in his own future.

  He chucked a playful punch at her shoulder. “Kick ass, Sammy.”

  “Just trying not to get kicked in the ass,” she mumbled.

  “By what?”

  “Life,” she said.

  Aren’t we all? “Okay, so no to having your own shop, no to strictly doing portraits. Obviously you’ve got a career with painting. What are you planning to do?”

  “I, uh, actually have a real job already.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Maybe I’ll show you someday.”

  Sounded promising, but also another not-so-subtle hint for him to back off. He was pleasantly surprised she’d offered this much about herself so far.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” he said.

  Chapter Seven

  Adam drove the first shift of the morning, giving up on probing her for answers to the questions she dodged about why she’d moved to the West Coast. He also withheld his own story, simplifying her inquiries about his time in the military, opting to reply in short, one-word responses.

  Sammy wouldn’t have called it prying. He did relate that he’d been to Iraq for months, somewhere in Germany for a year. The offer to reenlist with a new unit would expire in less than a couple months. He confirmed his mom seemed satisfied in her second marriage. Other than the polite, basic small talk, he seemed reluctant to give her any more.

  Conversation, though, wasn’t the medium for them to truly reconnect. Music roared from the Honda’s speakers, the trails of chords and notes streaming out the open windows as they sped through the lonely highways of the desert-side waiting for its rain. Despite her initial plan to have another eighties heavy-metal rock-a-thon, Adam switched it up to the alternative tunes of the nineties. She couldn’t judge if he was sexier at crooning “Yellow Ledbetter” or “1979,” but it reminded her of their past, singing the songs when they used to hang out, all those times when Jake had fancied himself an amateur guitarist of hits from the nineties, using Sammy and Adam as his test audience. She wasn’t keen on Adam commandeering control of her radio, but his rich, deep voice covered her own off-key karaoke.

  Being a gentleman or just preferring to stick to the driver’s seat, he offered to drive the rest o
f the way until they stopped for the day. Free to watch the scenery, Sammy caught up on emails from Pablo and the agent she employed with Clare.

  “How about an early dinner?” he asked.

  Sammy leaned forward to lower the volume of The Verve playing on the radio. “Hungry?” She glanced at Ink in the backseat. Pooch could probably use a piss stop too.

  “Kind of. I’d like to stretch my legs.” He tapped the screen on the dash, bringing the weather radar to view. “I’m guessing we have a few more hours of driving before the worst of it hits. If we wait until later to stop, I’ll be starving then.”

  Sammy nodded. “I could eat. Pull over wherever looks good.”

  Gray skies spanned the atmosphere as far as Sammy could see. When Adam pulled over at a diner and parked, she leaned back with her feet finally on pavement, eyeing the premonition of the storm behind them. Strange, having danger chasing them. Seemed her personal bad weather would be in front of them.

  They took a booth in the corner of the nameless diner. Clean enough, Sammy figured as she watched a worn waitress sloppily and absently spray disinfectant on a nearby countertop of laminated retro signs. Enticing, too, she gathered from the scents of fried food and baking breads permeating the non-air-conditioned air.

  Adam ordered first and left to take advantage of the bathroom, and Sammy debated between two burgers. Eh, beef is beef. Indulge. Feeling sorry for the elderly woman’s feet the server kept shifting her weight on, Sammy hurried to finalize her order.

  Probably a grandmother, still raising her kid’s kids, she guessed. Or a left-behind elder, on government assistance yet still needing supplemental income to pay her bills. But wrinkles at the corner of the waitress’s eye hinted at decades with laughter, a visual that immediately tugged at Sammy’s heart. Like Clare. Clare had long life of hardships interspersed with good times. One that shouldn’t end in a damn nursing home.

  Sammy tore her attention from the aged woman sticking her and Adam’s ticket on a spinning wheel to the grill. Tracing her fingertip along the perimeter of the retro sign under the inch of polyurethane of their tabletop, she refused to sink into the depths of worries, refreshed by her observations of her server.

  Other than the asshole at the convenience mart that morning—the monster-size biker who’d asked if she were alone and if she wanted some company in his truck—it had been a good day. Thanks to Adam, she’d been able to let go in the car, simply enjoy the ride, playfully bicker about tunes, and let her thoughts fade with the blur of the landscape they drove through.

  But in this break from Adam as he used the bathroom, it was instinct for her mind to redirect her focus to why she was driving across the country. For that stupid-ass trust fund. A wallop of money she’d planned to never even think about but now needed badly. What would she do if Edgar didn’t play fair? What if she couldn’t get the money to bring Clare back to her own home?

  For work, well, that was a trivial matter. She and Clare were friends before business partners. Yes, they collaborated on the books. But if Clare was in a crappy nursing home, Sammy would be there every day, visiting, and working if need be. Sammy’s illustrations were done at her own apartment, in her solitude with music screaming from the radio, her easels scattered in the teeny space of her living room, paints smeared everywhere, including on crinkled candy wrappers and glasses of water she drank from as she designed. Once the paintings for panels were done, or at a set stage of progress, she’d bring them over to Clare’s for her thoughts. And Clare’s contribution, the stories, the whimsical rhyming tales for children and adults alike, she’d already penned them—either in her mind or on paper with her precise, calligraphy-style cursive penmanship.

  If Clare was doomed to a facility, the Landy books wouldn’t suffer. But that wasn’t Sammy’s drive. Clare would disintegrate. Like a fully blossomed flower wilting, leaning, softening to mush in a vase, Clare would no longer be the bright soul she was.

  “Why the long face?” Adam asked as he slid into his booth, shoving all the way to the wall so he could rest his long legs on the red vinyl seat.

  “Nothing.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  What? Was he so used to her always opening up to him like she had in the past? She’d never had reason to keep secrets from him back then. Other than the little fact she’d fallen in love with him like a sappy, silly teenager…

  But times changed. Then again, why couldn’t she trust him?

  “Come on, Samster, what’s wrong?”

  A low groan rolled from her throat, prompting a rakish smile on his lips around the straw he sucked his iced tea from.

  “How much would I have to pay you to never, ever use that name again?”

  He tilted his head to the side, giving her his full attention. “Hmm. A payment from you? Does it have to be money?”

  She glared at him, shaking her head.

  “I actually thought it was cute,” he said.

  Her woeful mistake of a haircut that induced her abhorred nickname was cute? Like a fuzzy little rodent in a cage running on a wheel, or like a child-like endearment?

  “If you hated the style so much, how come you chopped it all off in the first place?” he asked.

  Bored and curious at thirteen, Sammy had experimented styling her hair with a round hairbrush.

  “According to an advice column in an ancient edition of Seventeen, this fancy brush was supposed to make my hair more”—she did a raise-the-roof maneuver at her head—“voluminous, but it was nothing more than a dowel with evil spikes.”

  Of course she hadn’t known what she was doing. No girlfriends to goof with, no mom or siblings to guide her in girly girl ways.

  “It took all of two minutes to get it stuck,” she admitted.

  Adam’s sexy lips did a poor job of hiding a smile.

  “Marta told me to sit on a kitchen stool. Then she painstakingly removed each individual bristle with pliers. Took three hours to try to get that wicked wand out of there, but in the end, we had no option but to cut it out, along with a lot of my hair.”

  She smirked at him. “So obviously, it was a short ’do. Mother was horrified at the atrocity, as she worded it. But come on, would she have rather had me walk around with a brush stuck in my hair, or tolerate a pixie cut? Not like it wasn’t going to grow back. Said I looked like a boy, though.”

  Bruising words for any teenage girl trying to look her best for her crush.

  Pleasing her mother was an abandoned endeavor by then. She was never perfect enough during her whole youth. But if her parents thought it looked ridiculous—and had exclaimed as much—Sammy had feared what fifteen-year-old Adam would think. When she’d debuted her unintended haircut, she’d been swimming in the pool, surfacing to find Jake and his buddies on the patio.

  “You look like a hamster,” one of the pimply jerks had said.

  “Samster,” Jake had teased, at least with a smile on his face.

  Adam had laughed along with them, but he didn’t seem as harsh in his taunts.

  And sitting across from him in a diner now, his smiles still didn’t strike her as malicious. Hell, if it had happened to anyone else, she would have chuckled, too. “So, no, it was not cute,” Sammy insisted. “Mother nearly had a heart attack. Go figure she’s had a bob her whole life—a guy’s name—and I was the one with hair that made me look like a boy.”

  Adam shook his head. “Sammy, you could never look like anything but a girl.” He cleared his throat. “A woman. But I did think it was cute.” He fluffed his hand in the space between them, like he was shaping something at her head. “Like an … elf, a fairy.”

  Laughter escaped her lips, lightening her attitude again. “I’ll take elf over hamster any day. You could call me Tinkerbell. Besides, it was so easy having short hair in the summer.”

  In a smooth pivot, Adam dropped his legs from his seat and faced her, his chin in one hand as he stared at her.

  She knew that look, his narrowed eyes like he was solving a
puzzle. No. No more questions.

  “Was she ever not a bitch to you?” he asked.

  Sammy scoffed. “You’re saying I had a bad childhood? Surrounded by millions?”

  He didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. She had a hunch he, too, already knew happiness couldn’t be bought. In a way, she suspected he had sometimes pitied her and Jake for having such demanding and cold-blooded parents. Not that he was living in the Partridge Family either, considering his mom and dad had divorced. His mom seemed sad and needy at times, while his Army father was largely absent.

  “Good thing you had Marta,” he said.

  The Millsons’ housekeeper did counter the lack of love all those years. Sammy had a best friend in Jake, then an additional pal in Adam. Marta provided some affection, even if she were forced to be in the residence by employment, not familial bond.

  “Your mom never appreciated your talents. Your drawings. Your paintings,” he said. “I remember that portrait you did of Audrey Hepburn. Remember?” He shook his head. “It was so realistic. Like a blown-up photograph.”

  And all Mother had remarked of it, when she’d spied it near the pool when Sammy brought it out to show Jake and Adam, was to “get rid of that garbage because company was coming over.”

  “Of course she didn’t,” Sammy said. “If she had, she would have let me sign up for one art class my whole life. She would have at least looked at the stuff I did.” Reverting her gaze to the tabletop, she resumed tracing the rectangles of sun-bleached images. “She encouraged me to leave that ‘nonsense’ alone and focus on studies.”

  Adam nodded. “Like you weren’t a straight-A student already.”

  “Hey, I’ve got nothing against with numbers, and laws, and science, and… One of the only friends I made in college is a grad student in ecology. To each her own.”

  “But none of that is you. And she’s a fool to turn a blind eye to it. You’re an artist, Sammy. And you should never be ashamed of it.”

  God, his blunt honesty. Why couldn’t he have been there when that horrific incident on campus happened? Why couldn’t she have imagined his encouragement and words of wisdom in her darkest moments? He’d always been a rock—indirectly—standing right behind Jake. How easily she’d forgotten his strengths when he’d been overseas.