by M. O'Keefe
I imagined her in my beach house. The glass walls. The hot tub.
That was the kind of house made for never leaving.
I would take her there. As soon as possible.
“Whatever you want,” I told her.
“Wine in a box?” she asked hopefully, with no irony.
“Ahhh, a woman of taste. Only the finest wine in a box for you.” I leaned over and kissed her lips. Again. And then, because she was so sweet, I did it again. And because she had changed me on a molecular level and in this moment I could not pinpoint the value I added to her. Not my money, or power.
Just my broken and scared self. And that seemed so inadequate in the face of her love.
Within minutes I was over her on the bed in her trailer, stroking in and out of her so slow and so hard that she shook every time I sank into her.
“You feel that?” I asked, deep inside of her. I lifted her hips, shifted her legs, until I was even deeper. Impossibly deeper. I had all of her and she had all of me, and no sex ever in my life had been like this.
“I feel it,” she said, clutching my back as if to keep herself from falling.
“Where?” I breathed against her lips. I licked into her and she opened her mouth.
“Everywhere.”
Good, I thought. That was exactly where I wanted to be.
ANNIE
Dylan went to get provisions for their steak dinner extravaganza and she, restless, wandered over to Ben’s trailer. His garden was a mess, and she opened the gate and got to work on the weeding around his peppers. The orange tops of carrots were poking up out of the black soil and so she gently pulled them up, stacking their long bodies together.
“You stealing my carrots?” Ben asked, and she glanced up to see him under his awning. He looked thin and wan, but the smile on his face was an incredible antidote for the expressions of the faces of the other men she’d seen today. Dylan excluded.
“Have you eaten today?” she asked.
“Well, hello, Ben,” he said in a falsetto. “Good to see you.”
She laughed. “Hello, Ben. Good to see you. Have you eaten?”
“Some crackers. My appetite ain’t so hot.”
“Dylan is going to get steaks and some potatoes. Any of that sound good?”
Ben looked through his lashes at her as he wandered over to the edge of his garden. “Sour cream on the potatoes?”
“Dylan said the works. I’m not sure what that means.”
“For Dylan that means sour cream.”
She stood with an armful of carrots she’d harvested. “I can cook these up, too.”
“Cooked carrots are a crime against nature.”
“Then I can peel them and slice them up,” she said.
“You go ahead and take them. I was never much of a carrot fan.”
“Why’d you grow them, then?”
“Because it’s a garden.” Ben shrugged. She put the carrots down in a pile and moved on to his potatoes. She’d come here to his garden because she wanted to be close to someone who knew Dylan. Who at one point had to have loved him, no matter how badly it ended.
“How long have you lived here?” she asked.
“I read an article about Dylan in a magazine somewhere. And it said that after his accident he was recuperating in his home outside of Asheville. That was what…four years ago. Five?”
“You moved here to be closer to him?” she asked.
He stared at her with dark, empty eyes and she realized, even if he’d never said it, she’d known that all along.
“How did he find out about you living here?”
He pursed his lips. “It wasn’t hard. I sent him a note, just telling him where I was. I thought…maybe he’d come down off that mountain and see me. Come yell at me. Break my nose. Something.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Had the guy that lived in Tiffany’s trailer at the time spy on me. He was the first one.”
“You knew?”
“Not at first; just thought the guy was some kind of weirdo, but by the second spy Dylan hired I caught on.”
“I met Max today,” she said.
“Dylan said. I wish I could say his bark is worse than his bite, but that’s not totally true.”
“I got that sense. I met another guy, Blake.”
“His business partner. Funny, I don’t think his bark is worse than his bite, either.”
“Yeah. He told me Dylan was going to remember sooner or later that he was too broken to love me and he’d leave.”
Ben’s awkward silence seemed proof positive that she needed more traditional friends. The former-criminal estranged father of the man she loved wasn’t so great at this kind of conversation.
But Annie didn’t have anyone else. Tiffany certainly wasn’t going to want to talk about her love life.
“Do you think Dylan is broken?” she asked Ben, looking up from the potatoes to meet his sad eyes. “I mean really know. Not just guess. Not just hope he’s not broken?”
Ben shook his head.
“Me neither,” she said.
Annie was clinging to faith that there was going to be proof of this at some point. Something more than the sex that bound them together. She’d told him she loved him and Annie understood that he wasn’t ready to say it back. That he might not be able to recognize those feelings. Hell, there were moments Annie wondered if she had gotten it wrong somehow.
She even understood that he might never be able to love her.
And how long do I give him? she wondered, thinking of her mom and Smith. How many months, years of my life do I give to a man who cannot love me back?
There was no easy answer for that. Not from her and not from the old man with the garden of regrets.
A few minutes later, Dylan’s car drove up to the spot next to their trailers and Annie pushed away bittersweet memories and sour thoughts.
We have now, she thought. We have tonight. And she was not going to ruin any of it thinking about a future that might not happen.
He will love me, she thought. A wish she had no way of making come true.
“He ain’t gonna want to have dinner with me,” Ben said, heading back toward his door. “But I’d take a potato if you have extra. And feel free to use the oven for cooking. Steaks taste real good over that fire.”
He was gone before she could protest.
Her hands dirty but her heart hopeful, she walked across the grass to meet Dylan.
“You didn’t invite him to dinner, did you?” he asked.
“I didn’t get the chance. But I’m gonna take him a potato later,” she said.
She grabbed the rest of the bags from the back of the car and from the corner of her eye, she caught Dylan looking over at Ben’s trailer. He hesitated, just a moment, as if considering asking him to dinner. In the end, he didn’t. But the moment had been real. And maybe she was deluding herself. Putting together small moments and clues that pointed her in the direction she wanted to go.
But for the moment she took comfort in it.
Nope, she thought. Not broken.
DYLAN
Blake’s direct hit about how I hadn’t been working much and the company was on the edge of a huge breakthrough still stung, so while Annie took Ben into Cherokee for his chemo treatment I sat down at my laptop and got some work done.
Emails were first. Lots of guys were fishing for early demonstrations of the transmission. I shot them all down and started looking at the Dyno testing numbers to see where things could be tweaked.
After a few hours, though, I kept checking my watch, wondering when Annie was going to get back. I finally heard my car pull up beside the trailer. She’d used it because it was so much more comfortable for Ben to ride in. He’d grumbled about it, about everything, until I told him to shut it and get in the car.
I stepped outside to see if there was anything I could do to help and caught her trying to help Pops out of the passenger seat.
“Hey, hey,” I said,
rushing to help her. “Let me do that.”
I edged her out of the way and put Pops’s arm over my shoulder. Awkwardly he tried to pull away from me, but I kept my arm around his waist, my hand fisted in the side of his tee shirt.
“Thanks,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face. “I stopped by the library and got some books on CD for him. The nurses told me he likes those.”
“Does anyone still have a CD player?” I asked, walking slowly toward Pops’s trailer, while he took shuffling, unsteady steps beside me. It was easy not to feel him, not to be aware of his shallow breaths and the faint smell of hospital on his skin. I just pulled way back inside of myself, like a turtle in a shell.
“Apparently Ben does,” Annie said. “I want to grab some soup from my trailer and some crackers. I bought some ginger ale. The nurses said that might help, too.”
“Keep her away from me,” Pops breathed, “just…just for a few minutes.”
I glanced down at him and saw, as much as I didn’t want to, how he was barely upright. Barely keeping one foot in front of the other. This wasn’t about him being tired of her, or a dick in the face of her kindness. He’d been putting up a brave face in front of her and he couldn’t keep it on anymore.
“Go ahead,” I told Annie. “I’ll get him in his trailer.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Yeah. Get what you need. Take your time.”
Annie peeled off toward her trailer and Pops and I just kept walking.
“Bathroom,” he whispered, and we picked up the pace. I threw open the trailer door and just barely got Pops inside so he could lurch to the toilet. I stood just outside the door and listened to him retch.
Shit, I thought. Shit.
I didn’t know how to do this.
“You all right?” I asked when the retching stopped.
“Top of the fucking world.”
I smiled at the tone. If he could be bitter and sarcastic, things weren’t all bad. I leaned in the door to the bathroom only to see the old man sitting back against the wall across from the toilet, his legs splayed out awkwardly in front of him.
“Let’s get you up to your bed,” I said.
He shook his head, his eyes closed. “I’ll spend the next twelve hours like this.”
For a second I was helpless, and then almost immediately I was pissed and ready to just let him sit there. Frankly, he probably had a routine worked out for this. He didn’t need me telling him what to do. That was just awkward for both of us.
But then I imagined Annie seeing him like this.
“You’ll feel better in bed,” I said, reaching into the tiny bathroom to pull him to his feet. “I’ll get you a puke bowl like Mom used to give us.”
The mention of Mom got him to open his eyes and look at me. But he didn’t say anything.
This, I realized, all the hair on my arms standing at attention, was a man at the bottom. The very bottom. My old anger for him retreated. It was useless and ugly in the face of his dying.
“Come on, Pops,” I whispered, and helped him into the bedroom. Gingerly he sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You want a shower or anything?”
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, clinging to his pride.
“Well, I’m already doing it. So, what do you want?”
“Clean shirt,” he said. He was already in gray sweatpants. He pointed at the top drawer of the cockeyed bureau in the corner and I pulled out a fresh white shirt.
Pops was attempting to pull off his own shirt but was too weak, or too sick, or both, to get it done. It was oddly and terribly humbling to see him like this.
“Here,” I said and lifted the shirt up over his head, like he did to me when I was a boy.
The big Skulls tattoo that used to cover his back had been blacked out. From nearly his neck to the top of his pants and from shoulder blade to shoulder blade was dense black ink. It wasn’t done gently, either. There was scar tissue in there.
“Why’d you get kicked out?” I asked, helping him into a clean shirt.
“I didn’t. I left.”
I blinked, and he started to lean back in the bed. I tugged the gray and blue covers down to help him. “What do you mean you left?”
“Paid my final dues and got out. Should have done it years before.” he sighed as he finally got horizontal on the bed.
“When?”
“When I heard about you killing that boy in jail.” He took a deep breath, ragged and wet. Awful. “Your mom begged me when we met. I wish I’d listened to her.”
I stood there, staring at him. All these years he stayed away and I never knew he’d quit the club.
“I wasted more years than some people get on this earth,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Would it have changed anything?”
No. Yes. “I got out of jail and I thought…I thought you just walked away.”
“I did. And that’s the way it should have been. You were right to hate me, son. Right to keep me at arm’s length,” he said, watching me, wretched and pale, from the bed. “Can you get me that puke bowl, please?”
Silently I went and got a bowl and put it down by his bed. His eyes were shut and I thought he was sleeping, so I turned to leave him alone.
“Dylan.” His dry voice made me pause in the doorway. “I know it’s wrong. And it’s selfish and I don’t have any right to it, I don’t deserve it…but, I’m glad you’re here.”
I bit back a lot of words. A lot of old, useless words. Words that wouldn’t even make me feel better if I spat them at him.
“Get some sleep,” I said into the dark wasteland his words left in me.
It wasn’t forgiveness, that I didn’t think was possible, but acceptance.
“Hello?” Annie called out and I stepped out of the bedroom, closing the folding door behind me.
“Hey,” I said in a low whisper, intercepting her at the door.
“Is he asleep?”
I nodded.
“Oh.” She had a slightly stilted look, like her plans had been thwarted. She had an armful of things that I helped her let go of and set down on the counter. A few cans of ginger ale, a CD player with headphones that she must have found in a time machine.
“They’re Ben’s. He listens to books while he’s getting the treatment. You should have seen, Dylan. He looked so…old. And all the nurses were so kind and good to him, no matter how grumpy he was.”
“That’s good,” I said, because there was nothing else to say. It was what my brother had said to me the other day outside the strip club. “That’s real good.”
She took the Discman and the CDs from the library and a can of ginger ale and tiptoed into his room and set them on the table beside his bed. She reached out and stroked his balding head and I glanced away, uncomfortable with the tenderness.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I thought and forced myself to watch. Forced myself to just accept this, too.
She closed the door behind her and walked to me with a tired smile on her face.
“That,” she said, putting her arms around me, “was a day. I can’t believe he did that all by himself for so long.”
“Come on,” I said, leading her out of the trailer. The sunlight accepted us with open arms.
“I’m going to make some soup,” she said. “Something with rice. Or noodles. Something easy on his stomach.”
“Do you cook?” I paused to shut the door behind me and she moved a little bit ahead of me. The other night I’d made the steak, while she sat on the settee and got skunked on boxed wine. It was one of the best nights of my life.
“No. I’m really terrible at it. I probably should not attempt to make this soup.” She smiled at me over her shoulder and there was something in that smile that made me stop. Something revealed in her. Or me. I couldn’t tell.
I stopped in that dirt track that ran down the center of this trailer park, the small road that led back and
forth from Pops’s trailer to Annie’s.
“I’m not going to let you go,” I said.
Pops’s voice, those words he said in the trailer, they roared through my head.
I know it’s wrong. And it’s selfish and I don’t have any right to it, I don’t deserve it…but, I’m glad you’re here.
That’s how I felt about Annie and I wasn’t going to let her go.
“What are you talking about, Dylan?” She turned back and looked at me and I didn’t know what she was seeing. What expression was on my face? Whatever it was, it did not feel neutral.
I felt feral and wild.
“I’m not letting you go,” I told her. “And it’s selfish and wrong and sooner or later you’re going to wake up and realize that I can’t love you the way you should be loved. Or want to be loved, and it doesn’t matter.”
She looked slightly stricken and I realized she’d been thinking about this. Actually contemplating the fact that I might not be able to love her the way she loved me, and that filled me with rage and panic.
“Do you hear me? I’m not letting you go.”
I’d crossed the distance between us and I was standing so close, the buckle of her belt bit into my stomach. I would cross any distance to get to her. On my knees.
“I don’t want to be let go,” she whispered.
“You don’t want my money,” I said. “You don’t care about power.”
She was shaking her head. “I only want you.”
For how long? I wondered. For how long before you realize you should have more? The right thing to do would be to let her go, but I was done with that.
“You’re mine,” I told her, walking her backward toward the trailer.
“No,” she said, shaking her head and smiling at me, the kind of smile that women in movies gave to better men than me. “You got it all wrong, buddy. You are mine.”
She was saying words she didn’t totally believe yet. And maybe I was, too. But I wanted them to be true. For the first and only time in my life, I wanted to belong to someone and have that person belong to me.
And that had to count for something.
“You’re not broken, Dylan. I know you’re not.”
