Brick by Brick

by Maryn Blackburn

  “Indeed. Had a friend with him, both of them in shirts and ties.”

  “Tall, dark, and handsome?”

  Red nodded. “You’ve met him?”

  I’ve slept with him, I wanted to say, and stood there while he took my husband away. I could only nod back. We probably looked like bobble-heads.

  Red must have seen something in my face that told him things I never would have. He patted my arm in a fatherly way and called to a beefy guy, “Tim, watch the bar?”

  Red scooped up my drink and led me to an ancient wooden booth in the back corner. Moments later Tim brought Red a 7UP and both a scotch and bourbon bottle to top me off. I assumed he must work the bar often; he inhaled as he served Red with a flourish and poured the scotch unerringly and without doubt. He had the nose.

  “So Jimmy’s tight with this fella?” Red’s voice was quiet, discreet. “Prefers his friend’s company to yours, tonight?”

  I decided not to share everything with a kindly bartender I saw less than once a month. “Something like that.”

  “That might make a pretty woman feel small.”

  And an ordinary woman disappear altogether. “He feels what he feels, Red. So does his friend.”

  “So do we all.”

  “We do.” I smiled. He couldn’t fix a thing, but he was a sweet man. “I need to think. Weigh my options.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to it. You let me know if I should call Molly. Know that I don’t mind waking her up, either. When she was a baby, she did her share of waking up.”

  So had James, and I’d risen with him in the dark five days a week, often six. I was eleven years older than when we’d met. Those years had been very kind to James; he’d lost the youthful softness of blond good looks and had become more masculine.

  Meanwhile, I had sprouted gray hairs, carved my laugh and worry lines deeper, and seen my body soften. Gage was flat-out gorgeous, his posters on thousands of girls’ walls. Add to that the fact that he’d serve as James’s doormat, with gratitude for the mud, and what would James need me for except as a socially acceptable front?

  Hell, these days that wasn’t even necessary. Nobody cared what their mason did in bed.

  Or the kitchen.

  My eyes overflowed, but nobody noticed except Red. He set a faded box of tissues on the table and refilled my glass without a word, patting my hand before returning to the bar.

  I’d started the third drink and the fifth or sixth Kleenex when Red said, loud enough to ensure my hearing, “She’s in the back, there.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  They walked in step, quickly, like the gestapo. James slid into the booth next to me. Gage eyed the beat-up wooden bench seat across from me, then sat suddenly, his blank expression no doubt hiding his discomfort. I was trapped, without a word being spoken.

  Neither of them looked handsome now. Gage’s dark eyes were set in violet-brown circles, as if he’d missed a night’s sleep. James appeared to have a cold; the tender skin around his eyes and nostrils glowed an angry pink.

  Had he been crying? Over me?

  He sure didn’t act like it. “Where the fuck have you been?”

  Several of the people in the bar looked our way.

  Across the table, Gage added in a deep and phony voice, “Your mother and I have been frantic!” He laughed loudly.

  For an instant I loved him for it. Then I remembered why I’d left. James frowned at him too.

  Gage shrugged. “You want her to come home? Be somebody she’d want to come home to.”

  “I had no idea where to find you.” James’s voice wasn’t as loud, but his anger seemed unabated. “You scared the shit out of me, Nat. I was frantic.”

  “He was,” Gage said. “I was too. Also pissed, because I’m not allowed to leave when things go bad, but either one of you can just take off.”

  “Things didn’t just go bad,” I said.

  Red brought the scotch bottle and two more glasses, then retreated.

  “Good bar.” Gage poured a half inch into the bottoms of the new glasses.

  James sipped and made a face.

  “This is serious,” Gage said, “and my fault. Natalie’s got a right to be as mad as she is.”

  “You didn’t screw up alone,” James said. “I did too.”

  Gage took a healthy sip. “I’m still the whatchamacallit. Instigator. My fault.”

  “What does it matter whose fault it is?” I said. “Cocksucker.”

  James’s eyes widened. “I’ve never heard her use that word.”

  “Just calling them as I see them. You’re an abusive, cheating bastard, and he’s a fucking cocksucker.”

  Gage rose to the occasion. “I am. I’ll take all the heat for what happened. I mean it.”

  “This isn’t all about you. There’s a ten-year marriage at stake.”

  That shut him up.

  “James, I know you’ll want to keep the house, but to get started I’m going to need at least some of my half of what it would sell for.”

  “What?” He twisted toward me and held me by both upper arms. “No. No! This is where ‘for better or worse’ kicks in. You’re not leaving, and neither am I. We’ll deal with this and come through stronger. I love you.”

  I could feel the people in the bar watching again. Although they didn’t turn their heads, all conversation stopped.

  My voice was low, guaranteeing our privacy. “I’m sure your love will make what you did just fine with me.”

  James blushed, and his jaws bulged with the effort of containing his reply, but he didn’t look away.

  “You think you’d be okay with it if I fucked Gage while you were at work? No. In fact, I remember you spelling it out. It’s supposed to be all of us.”

  “Nat, I didn’t mean for it—”

  “Did you mean it when you said you love him?”

  “I know what you should do,” Gage said earnestly to James, “but please, I’m begging you, don’t do it yet. Not tonight.”

  “Shut up,” I said without turning away from my husband, “unless you want your ass paddled twice in one night.”

  Gage went on bravely. “If that might help, I’d hold still for it, but I meant don’t dump me on James’s birthday.”

  Now I looked. That wall behind his eyes had dropped into place. Nobody was going to see inside, but I didn’t have to. He hurt, and not just physically.

  “That’s the first step in fixing your marriage, getting me out of here. Things were fine before I came along, and now Natalie’s talking about divorce. Because of me. Kick me to the curb, but do it tomorrow. You don’t want your birthday to roll around every year all mixed up with this.”

  James lifted his drink but did not sip. “Right, you don’t break up with somebody on your birthday, or Christmas. I didn’t think of that. Did you, Nat?”

  Gage looked both pained and ill, like James had sucker punched his gut.

  “No. I’ve just been worrying how I’m going to manage all by myself.”

  “You could, just fine, but you don’t have to,” James said calmly. “I hope you don’t really want to, either. We need to talk about what happened, and what it means, and what we want to happen in the future. I think we can save whatever we agree needs to be saved, starting with our marriage.”

  None of us said anything for a moment. I set down my glass and left my hand on the scarred table. James’s hand hesitated just short of contact, then went for it, two squeezes. Two more. And two more.

  “We’ll talk, but not here,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m going to yell, for sure, and maybe cry too. I don’t need an audience.” My eyes welled full. “I don’t know if I can ever trust you again.”

  “I’m so sorry, baby, so sorry,” James said. “Come on; we’ll talk at home. We’ll fix this.”

  “I should go to Rowan’s.” Gage’s voice was as flat as his eyes.

  “No. This is only partly about her and me. The rest is about
us. We all three have to decide how to fix that too.”

  “You’re not breaking up with me?”

  “No.” James slid out of the booth.

  I followed, but when I stood, the room tipped ten degrees. “Whoa.” I pressed both my hands to the table and waited a few seconds for the world to right itself. “You never realize how much you had until you stand up, huh?”

  James took one arm at almost the same instant Gage got the other. Although the dizziness passed quickly, I let them walk me out.

  “Natalie, tell me with your own sweet lips,” Red called, “that you’re going with these two fine gentlemen voluntarily rather than being forcibly escorted from my drinking establishment.”

  We all laughed. “I’m fine, Red. I think—I hope—we’re all going to be fine.”

  James released me, pulling out his wallet as he approached the bar.

  “Should I be paying?” Gage asked quietly.

  “No. Let him. The money’s more a sore point than I realized.”

  “Good night, Natalie. Jimmy. Jimmy’s friend. You fellows aren’t letting her drive, right?”

  “Right.”

  I didn’t feel anywhere near as drunk as when I’d first stood up, but I supposed my reaction time would be slowed, if nothing else.

  “And you’re good to drive yourselves? I’ve got friends at every taxi service.”

  “I didn’t finish my drink,” James said, “and neither did he. We’re sober.”

  Outside, the night was summer perfect, the sky starry and the air silken, warm with a faint trace of the coolness that would arrive just before the sun’s return. It was a night to be naked. I wondered if Gage knew how amazing makeup sex could be.

  “Who are you riding with, Natalie?” Gage said.

  “If you choose me, you get to stop for gas,” James announced.

  “If you choose me, I’ll just be grateful. Hell, I’m grateful to be standing here instead of home kicking furniture.”

  James kissed me. I could barely hear his whisper. “Go with Gage.”

  I found the new truck’s key in my purse and handed it over. Gage’s smile dazzled.

  “Good call.” James spoke normally now. “See you back at the house.”

  The truck still smelled new. “Can you really return it?”

  “Sure. Just not for anywhere near what I paid.” The big engine hummed to life, but we sat without speaking as James’s truck did its usual balking before starting. We followed James, lagging a few hundred feet. The silence in the cab grew uncomfortable.

  “Some birthday,” Gage said finally. “I need to order business cards. ‘Gage Strickland, Fuckup’ and below it, in smaller letters but heavier, ‘I’m sorry.’ I wonder if a thousand is enough.”

  “For now, probably.”

  He turned onto a four-lane street divided by a landscaped median. “I’m sorry, Natalie. I really am. I only thought about making things right between me and James. I never thought about it affecting anybody else. I never meant for what we did to hurt you, only me. I’m so sorry.”

  “Order two thousand.”

  He grinned, then sobered suddenly. “What the fuck?”

  A car’s headlights came toward us, the vehicle headed the wrong way for this side of the median. Gage pulled into the right lane. In front of us and at almost the same time, James did too, and flashed his high beams.

  The driver drifted toward his own right, squealed against the curb, and corrected, coming squarely toward James.

  James sounded his horn as he moved into the left lane quickly, but the driver seemed to steer toward him.

  Gage honked too. The car moved over, now straddling the two lanes, approaching dangerously near James’s truck.

  “Holy shit…” Gage leaned on the horn continuously. It blared painfully.

  James floored it, judging from the belch of smoke. The old truck jumped the curb, its two left tires chewing the median’s desert landscaping. The car veered farther into his lane. It was going to hit him!

  He moved deeper into the median, but the curb here was higher and his right front tire refused to make the jump. I hadn’t known the truck could go that fast; Gage, cautiously keeping up as far to the right as he could go, was doing just under sixty.

  The car whizzed between the two trucks, honking short beeps, the teenagers inside shouting, laughing, and waving. I turned, trying to get a plate number, only seeing a B or perhaps an 8, near the middle, and a 7 or a 1 too.

  I never saw James’s truck hit the light pole so hard it turned 180 degrees. The sound was sickening, the silence afterward worse.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Gage became the action star audiences loved. The big truck screeched to a halt right in the street. In a single swift motion, he hit the truck’s flashers, took the key, and was out the door at a dead run, glancing to his left for oncoming cars only when he was already crossing the street. “James! James!”

  I followed, but my heel hooked the chrome tube step and I sprawled on the asphalt, still warm so long after the sun had set. My knees and palms stung as I got to my feet. I’d gone numb everywhere else.

  I had to wait for a car to pass. Across the street, Gage fought to open the driver’s side door. It was winning. I couldn’t even see James.

  “Don’t move him,” I shouted, but only a croaked whisper came out. I wobbled, careening on otherworldly legs like the drunk Red had feared I was, but I made it.

  One foot braced against the truck’s body, Gage tried again. “Come on, you fucking bitch-whore, let go!”

  It didn’t. For the second time tonight, Gage upended himself, showing me the seat of his trousers.

  The passing car had pulled into a parking lot. A woman shouted, “We’re calling 911!”

  “Don’t move him.” This time the words came out, quaking but loud enough.

  “I know.” Gage’s muffled voice came from the shadows inside the truck. He slipped back out the window to his feet, graceful as a dancer. “I think I felt a pulse. Fucking kids!”

  James slumped over the wheel, motionless. The seat belt kept my husband upright, but his head lolled forward the way it did when he nodded off in front of the TV. Something in the engine must have ruptured. Oil drenched his mouth and chest.

  It took me a moment to realize the streetlights played tricks with color. My husband was blood-soaked.

  On jellied legs, I circled the truck and climbed in the passenger side. James’s mouth gaped open, releasing a small, steady stream of seemingly black liquid, which joined a lesser rivulet from his nose, pouring into the shadows between his thighs. The flats of my fingers were cold compared to the blood coating his neck, but I found the pulse at his throat that I’d kissed a thousand times, as strong as my own but slower. “He’s alive.”

  “The ambulance is coming,” I told James, in case any part of him could hear.

  The man appeared at the passenger door with a blanket. “D-d-d-d-d-d-don’t move him. Here, p-p-put this over him,” he said. “Sh-sh-sh-sh-shock.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” I murmured, spreading the blanket over him and covering half of myself. “He’s alive. Thank you. You called 911?”

  The man didn’t speak but nodded emphatically, jerking his thumb toward the woman, still with a cell phone pressed to her head, approaching the truck.

  “About a hundred yards, before the Circle K,” she said into it too loudly.

  “Thank you. Thank her for me, when she’s off the phone.” Inanely, I wondered why Gage hadn’t transferred his phone to another pocket when he left his suit’s jacket behind.

  The woman recognized Gage. She didn’t turn off the phone when her call ended. Its tiny screen glowed blue against her white shorts, and she walked right up to him. “Aren’t you Gage Strickland?”

  “No.” He leaned in the driver’s window. “James, wake up! You’re scaring the shit out of us. Natalie, did his eyelids move? I think he blinked.”

  I moved closer to James. How long could a person b
leed at this rate before they bled to death? What if he was dying, right this minute? Why wasn’t he bleeding someplace I could tourniquet? What was taking the ambulance so long?

  “Please, God,” I said, even though I’m not religious. “Jamie, please.” I dared to move him, just enough to take his dangling right hand. I squeezed it, twice. “Oh, please, please…” Was that sirens?

  “Yes, you are.” The woman was certain.

  Gage turned away from James, stood straight, and roared like I’d never heard before, not even on the screen. “Has it occurred to you that this might not be a good time!” His neck bulged, and the vein throbbed in his forehead.

  She shrank away. Her stuttering husband touched her hand, shook his head no. She nodded.

  “We s-s-s-saw some k-k-kids,” the man offered.

  “Driving crazy,” the woman added, her phone forgotten. “Wrong side of the street, and all over the road.”

  “Could you please stay until the police get here?” Gage asked politely.

  “Of course. Mr. Strickland—Gage—I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. I hear sirens.”

  I stayed close to James, squeezing his hand in twos, a pause, and two again, under the blanket wicking up his lifeblood. I found my mantra. “I love you, Jamie. Please don’t die. I love you, Jamie.”

  Faintly, through the truck’s open window, I heard Gage saying almost the same words.

  The people from the car did something that touched me deeply. They knelt on the curb of the median, put their hands together beneath bowed heads, and prayed silently and unobtrusively for a stranger, not looking up when the ambulance arrived.

  “You’ll have to get out of the truck, ma’am,” an overweight EMT said.

  I landed on my feet but was glad he was there to help me find my balance, gladder that another EMT had already crawled into the cab. Gage wrapped a meaty arm around me, his hand blood-sticky on my shoulder. A glance down revealed that I’d already wiped my own bloody hands on the linen dress.

  We watched helplessly as the EMTs moved James, taking vital signs and calling them out to someone in the ambulance who apparently recorded or relayed them. My husband did not move. The ambulance crew did not meet my eyes.