For the Love of a Lush (Lush No. 2)

by Selena Laurence

  "Well," she tells me with a big grin on her face. "You’re going to need a place to stay then."

  Walsh

  AFTER SEEING Tammy, I head straight to the bunkhouse. I’m not surprised to find Mike waiting for me.

  "You okay?" he asks as he shoves a paper bag at me, which I’m sure is full of food from Leanne. I set it down on the nearest flat surface, too keyed up to deal with eating right now.

  "Yeah," I mutter, opening up my dresser drawer and digging through it.

  I hear Mike sigh, but he knows he can’t do anything for me right now. My time in rehab made a couple of things really clear—I’m terrible at admitting my emotions, both to myself and others, and I have a very bad habit of surrounding myself with people who take care of my shit for me.

  I hooked up with Joss when I was about seven. He was this quiet, thoughtful kid standing around on the playground, watching everyone else. I asked him to play a game of baseball and introduced him to some other guys, and we were inseparable after that. By the time we were twelve, he was orchestrating most things in my life, and I was happy to have him do it. He’d keep track of what homework I had, remind me which days I was supposed to ride the bus or get picked up from school, and help me talk to my parents when we wanted to do something we knew they weren’t going to allow.

  At fourteen, I met Tammy. Somehow this synergy developed between Joss, Tammy, and me. Joss moved into handling those parts of my life that Tammy couldn’t, she took care of the rest, and my job was to be happy and fun. Tammy’s gorgeous and smart as hell, but she comes on pretty strong with most people. I’m one of the few who get to see her softer side. Joss is deep and broody. The two of them struggle to connect with people. They were usually pissing someone off or putting someone off. I was the point man, the easygoing guy who could get the three of us to fit in anywhere. In return, I got out of all responsibilities in life. I operated like a goddamned child, and they helped me live that way.

  The problem came when I didn’t feel so easygoing and happy anymore, when I started to have days where I was tired of being the social butterfly or didn’t find it so easy to fit in everywhere. When I had feelings I didn’t know how to deal with. It became exhausting stuffing everything down all the time, continuing the happy-go-lucky façade I’d promised everyone.

  That’s when I began to rely on the alcohol to help me fulfill my part of the unspoken bargain the three of us had. It took four months in rehab to sort some of the shit out, and Tammy and Joss went to some of those therapy sessions with me. The dysfunction of the three of us together was startling to learn, and it still sends waves of pain through my heart to this day.

  Now, as I stand here in the bunkhouse of the Double A Ranch, Mike sitting on the small desk we share, watching me as I sift through socks and underwear in search of the list I need, I know that this new twist—the return of Tammy—is yet another challenge I’m going to have to take on myself. I finally get the piece of paper I need and turn to Mike.

  "I gotta go see Ronny," I tell him.

  "He’s in the barn waiting for you," he answers.

  I scowl at him because he’s obviously already told Ronny what’s going on, helping me out when he shouldn’t.

  "He ran into me after lunch and asked where you were, man. Honest. I didn’t hunt him down," Mike says, reading my mind.

  I sigh. "Fine. Where are you off to?"

  "The far north acreage to refill some water troughs and bring back a couple of calves the guys are going to vaccinate."

  "All right. Maybe I’ll see you out there."

  Mike stands up and gives me a handclasp. "Take care, brotha’."

  I nod and head toward the barn.

  AS I walk across the central parking area to the barn, I try not to think about Tammy’s rental car still parked here. What the fuck is she doing? Tammy’s not the type to go buddying up with other women, so I find it hard to imagine that she’s crying on Leanne’s shoulder. But then again, I haven’t seen Tammy in six months, so who the hell knows what she might do these days? What I do know is that having her so close is like my own personal siren song It’s all I can do not to head into the house just to get a glimpse of her, smell her, watch her. I scrub my hand across the back of my neck. I’m not sure at this point which of my two loves I’m longing for more—Tammy or booze.

  I find Ronny in the barn, combing out a horse’s mane and singing some song in Spanish. He looks up as I walk in, and in his usual Ronny way, he tips his chin at me while continuing to work on the horse. He once told me that horses make him feel calm. Whenever he’s facing something stressful, he comes out to the barn so he can think while he deals with the horses.

  I like the horses fine, but they’re fucking huge and, between the teeth and the hooves, not really my cup of tea. I sit on a bale of hay, and soon J.B. is rubbing up against my leg. I think she’s more my speed. I scratch her back as Ronny starts to talk.

  "So she found you?"

  "Yeah."

  "You knew it’d happen sooner or later, right?"

  "Yeah, I guess. It took so long I was starting to pretend it wasn’t going to though."

  "What do you want to tell me about it?"

  "I don’t want to tell you anything about it," I bitch. "I don’t want to talk about it at all."

  I see the corner of Ronny’s lips turn up, and he glances at me sideways. "Yet here you are."

  I sigh. I seem to be doing that a lot today. "Yeah. Here I am."

  No one says anything for a couple of minutes as Ronny moves from the mane to the tail and murmurs sweet nothings to the horse, who looks like she’s in heaven with the attention.

  I finally give in and tell Ronny what I have to. "She wanted to talk about everything that happened. Then she wanted to know if I still love her."

  "And what did you tell her?" he asks.

  "That it’s not worth talking because we hurt each other too much and it’s better to stay away from one another. I also told her that, as much as I hate it, I’ll always love her."

  "So what’s next?"

  This is the part of having Ronny for a sponsor that’s fucking tough. He asks lots of questions and provides very few answers. When I moved here to the ranch, I had to switch from my sponsor in Portland to Ronny, and I was thrown at first by his style, but I can see that it’s probably the best thing for me. He makes me talk to him and he doesn’t give me answers—exactly what I hate.

  I pull the paper that was in my dresser out of my back pocket. "I think it’s time for step eight," I say, peering at the sheet.

  Ronny nods. "Tell me about step eight."

  I scratch my head. "I will ‘make a list of all persons I’ve harmed and be willing to make amends to them.’ I think I need to do that."

  "You think?"

  "I need to do that."

  "Good. Who will be on that list?" He finally finishes with the horse and leads it back to its stall.

  As he clucks to it and gets it settled inside, I think. When he comes back out, he stands in front of me, arms crossed as he looks down at me.

  Quietly, he repeats, "Who’s on that list, Walsh?"

  I stand up and start to pace, the paper in my hand like some sort of weight I can’t unload.

  "Tammy."

  "Go on."

  Fuck, I hate this. "Joss," I growl.

  "Who else?"

  "My parents, Mike, Colin."

  "Keep going," he instructs as I walk back and forth, my skin itching like I’ve got some sort of rash.

  "Tammy’s parents and her sister, Mel. My sister, Annette, and her husband… Also, all the crew who worked for the band. And Dave, our manager."

  "Okay. That sounds like a good start—"

  "A start?!" I yelp. "It’ll take me the fucking rest of my life to track down all those people and apologize. Jesus, how could one person do that much damage?"

  Right now I hate myself more than I normally do, and I feel defeated, utterly defeated. I sit back down on the bale of hay, my hea
d in my hands.

  Ronny squats on the ground in front of me. "Hey," he says, his deep voice vibrating through the still air of the barn. "You’re a human being. We all do damage every day we exist on this earth. We also all do good every day. It’s part of what being human means. We’re not pure, Walsh. Every one of us is a mixture of good and bad, selfish and selfless, and that’s why it comes down to the choices we make. When you chose alcohol, you chose poorly, and now you need to make amends for that, but you’re no better or worse than any other being on this planet."

  I look up at him, seeing the calm that lies like a blanket over his features. It’s so hard for me to imagine that Ronny was once the kind of guy who’d go out and get blasted to the point where he’d wake up on a sidewalk somewhere twelve or fifteen hours later having screwed a random woman, gotten in a fistfight with her boyfriend, been tossed out of a bar at four a.m., and then passed out cold on the pavement.

  I try to stop my knee that’s jiggling, and I clench my jaw to keep from grinding my teeth. This stuff is so fucking hard. I feel like I’m going to crawl out of my skin sometimes.

  "You’re no better and no worse, Walsh," Ronny repeats.

  "Okay," I nod, letting it settle into my mind, hoping it’ll take root eventually.

  "You’ve got a list. Now you need to decide how you’re going to start on step nine—making amends. And I think you know who you should start with."

  "Yeah. I know," I mutter like a kid who’s pouting.

  "Even though you just tried to avoid it," he adds, grinning.

  "Okay, I get it."

  He stands, brushing off his hands. "Good. You feel like drinking?"

  I stand too, watching the driveway outside, where Tammy’s car still waits. "I’d kill for drink right now, man."

  "You know the drill," he answers as he hands me a shovel, a mallet, and then a handful of wooden stakes from the utility closet nearby.

  I feel my back seize up at just the thought of what I have to spend the next several hours doing. "Damn, you’re an asshole sometimes," I tell him.

  "Yep.” He seems completely unperturbed by my calling him names. "And tonight when you’re so exhausted you can’t even think about getting a drink much less actually drive into town and have one, you’ll thank me."

  I scowl at him and stomp off to dig graves. Yes, graves—for animals who die on the ranch and aren’t useful in other ways. It’s the crappiest, hardest manual-labor job in the whole place, and when you’re really jonesing, it’s where Ronny sends you. You work until you’re so physically exhausted you can barely crawl to your bunk. And then, guess what?

  You’ve made it another day without alcohol.

  Tammy

  LEANNE SILVA might be my new best friend. Usually that’s a spot reserved for my sister, Mel, and once, a long time ago, for Joss Jamison, but right now, here in the wilds of Texas, I’ve decided Leanne gets the job. Within a few minutes of hearing that I intend to stay, she’s hopped on the phone, found me a room at the little boarding house in town—there are apparently no hotels in the town itself—and hired me to help serve the guys lunch and dinner every day.

  "I’m happy to come help out. You really don’t need to pay me."

  "Sure I do, hon. I was going to hire one of the high school girls to work at dinner anyway. I’ve needed extra hands in the kitchen for months now. Your timing was perfect."

  I just smile and thank her. She probably assumes that it’s a hardship for me to be here without a job for what could be a while, given Walsh’s reaction to me. But for better or worse, money is the least of my problems. Still, I don’t need to tell her that right now.

  After giving me the directions to the place in town where I’ll be staying, she says, "Now, I don’t want to see you around here tonight—unless it’s to visit your guy. You just go get settled in your new place and come back tomorrow at eleven. I’ll show you how we set up lunch and get you started then."

  After I thank her for the millionth time, then go out to the red Mustang I rented in Dallas. It’s a little flashy, but what the hell. I know Walsh loves them, so I wanted to show up in something that would grab his attention. I look around as I walk between the house and the car, hoping for a glimpse of him, but the place is empty, all the men out working somewhere in the vast, empty acres that roll out from the ranch house for as far as the eye can see.

  I take a moment when I get in the car to text Mel.

  Me: Made it to the Double A Ranch. Saw Walsh. Got a place to stay. TTYL. <3 U!

  I left Portland without telling Mel beforehand because I was afraid she’d try to stop me. It’s not something I want to admit, but I wasn’t myself after Walsh left. I was already in the hospital when he found out about Joss and me, and that explosion didn’t hasten my recovery any. I shiver at the memory. The doctors said that I’d had a nervous breakdown, and they told me I would need to be in therapy and on medication for a long time.

  Luckily for me, my little sister—who I realized at that point wasn’t so little anymore—was with me when all of it happened, and she took me home to Portland and has been staying with me ever since. It was a long time—weeks—in therapy and on anti-depressants before I could grasp the reality of what Joss and I had done while Walsh was in rehab and that I might have to live my life without Walsh because of it. I spent the months before my breakdown trying to deny it to myself, hiding it from everyone else, and irrationally blaming it all on Joss.

  Once I came to grips with the fact that I had made the life-altering choice to cheat on Walsh, it felt like an essential piece of me had been stripped away. Sort of like the core of me was missing, and what was left was wrapped around an empty center. With nothing there in the middle, collapse is always imminent.

  The therapist doesn’t understand me when I say that. I can tell she’s never really been in love. Or else she’s only had a different kind of love. I’m sure you can fall deeply in love with someone when you’re an adult. People do it all the time. I watched my sister and Joss do it right beneath my nose. But I don’t think it’s the same as falling in love when you’re still a child. I was just beginning to figure out who I was when I met Walsh. He became imprinted into the fabric of me. So far inside me that I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got a strand of DNA labeled "Walsh Clark."

  DNA’s not something you can live without. You can’t excise it like a tumor or amputate it like a diseased limb. It literally is the material of which you’re made. That’s what Walsh is to me. If I don’t have him, I don’t have me. I loved me. I loved my life and who I was for a lot of years.

  When Walsh became an alcoholic, all of that came crashing down. Suddenly, we were apart for the first time in our lives. He was in rehab, living through things I couldn’t help with or experience with him, and it was the most fucking frightened I’ve ever been in my life. I truly thought he was going to die or disappear somehow—become someone I didn’t know anymore. I just couldn’t handle it. Every night, when I tried to go to sleep, I’d close my eyes and see him in that gas station bathroom, in the hospital beds, looking desolate as I walked away from him at rehab the first time. When the night finally came that I turned to Joss and slept with him, I did it out of my deep and abiding fear that I’d already lost Walsh.

  My phone vibrates with a return text from Mel, jarring me out of my memories.

  Mel: Please promise you’ll check in every day, and keep following your diet and taking your meds. <3 U back!

  I smile. She’s become such a mother hen. I’m so damn proud of her that I can’t believe it some days.

  Me: I promise. And you promise me you’ll think about yourself for a while now. I’m going to be ok.

  I put the phone away, get my game face on, and start up the car.

  THE ROAD from the ranch house to the main road into town winds through about two miles of grazing land. The early spring sun is bright, and it’s already hot here. I can only imagine what it must be like at the height of summer. I’m watching the patchy gr
een acreage with its clumps of scrubby trees when I see a figure about one hundred yards from the road.

  He’s working without a shirt on, digging out in the hot sun, and my eyes are instantly glued to him. His back and shoulders ripple with the efforts of lifting huge shovels full of soil and tossing them into a quickly increasing pile to his left. I look at the dark patch on the back of his right shoulder, and though I can’t see the details from here, I know exactly what it is—a large heart bisected by a pair of drumsticks.

  Above the heart is the word Love. Below it is the word Lush. Each of the guys in the band has one of his own—Mike’s has a guitar in place of the drumsticks, Joss’s a microphone, Collin’s a bass. They got them when they signed their first recording contract. Walsh wouldn’t let me come when he got his, and I couldn’t understand why since I’d already known what it was going to look like—I’d helped the guys design them—and I’ve never been squeamish around needles. But he was insistent.

  When he came home afterwards, Mike and Joss unloaded him on the front porch of the little duplex Walsh and I were renting in a really seedy area of Portland. He was drunk, which wasn’t the norm yet then, and the guys said that his tattoo had taken longer than anyone else’s. He’d kept drinking through the whole thing—not because it hurt, but because he’d been scared of what I was going to say when he got home. I couldn’t understand what they were talking about until I got him inside and he collapsed face-first on our bed, his shirt hitching up above his waist. There on his left hip was a picture—of me—and below it were the words My Heart. My World.

  Now, I can see that second tattoo peeking out above the top of the dusty jeans that mold to him like a well-worn second skin. I finally realize I’ve stopped driving, so I turn off the engine. If Walsh can hear the car from where he is, he doesn’t give any indication of it as he continues digging. Thrust, pause, lift, dump, repeat. I quietly get out of the car and walk around to the passenger’s side, where I lean against the door and watch him, mesmerized by his movements, his damp skin, the way the sun hits his hair and gleams off the red highlights.