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

by Selena Laurence

  He laughs. "All right. I’ll relay your stipulations to the other party."

  "And the second thing?" I ask. "You said there were a couple of other things."

  He scratches his head and looks uncomfortable. "Yeah, maybe I should just forget about the second thing. I’m probably not the dude to talk about it with you, all things considered."

  I know immediately what it must be about. "Tammy," I say flatly.

  "No, really. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—"

  "But you did already, so just go for it. What have you got to lose?"

  He looks at me with that serious mature-Joss look that he gets. It still reminds me of the little boy on the playground all those years ago.

  "You," he says quietly. "I’ve got you to lose—again."

  I swallow, emotion taking a stranglehold on my vocal chords for a moment. "It’s okay, man. Really. Somehow I don’t think that’s on the agenda."

  He takes a deep breath and charges on in. "Mel told me about Tam deciding it’s really over. That she intends to make the break permanent."

  I sigh and lean back against his rental car, my hands in my front pockets, that feeling of nausea coming over me again.

  "I just…" He scratches his head more, visibly searching for the right words. "I know you love each other. And I know you’re right for each other. The same way I know Mel and I are. Life screws with us, and circumstances pull on us, and the road can be really fucking rocky, but I know love when I see it. She’s yours, Walsh, and you’re hers. Always have been, since day one. Just…think long and hard before you let her make this choice. Go after her. Fight for her. Fight for yourself, ‘cause I’m not sure you’re Walsh without Tammy."

  "Jesus, you sound like a fucking Hallmark commercial, man."

  "Yeah, I know." He grins then. "I better hit the road before I say something that makes me a girl in your eyes forever. But I’ll be in touch. About the show this summer, yeah?"

  "Yeah. It sounds like a plan. Thanks. For the pep talk. And the wedding invite. It means a lot."

  We shake hands, and then he’s on his way. I stand in the parking lot of the diner and watch his taillights disappear into the distance.

  TEN DAYS after Joss leaves, I come home from work to find a special delivery waiting for me at Mrs. Stallworth’s. I pull it from the plain brown envelope and see letterhead from the offices of Lush’s attorneys. I read through the document that places investments and cash equaling seventeen million dollars into my name. Once I dig through the legalese, I discover that the seventeen million was originally fifteen million, but when Tammy got the cash, she put it in the markets and increased it by a couple of million over the last eight months. That’s my girl.

  The package also contains a quitclaim deed to the Portland mansion, and it makes my stomach churn. I don’t want that fucking house. I want her to have it. Why the hell she can’t just keep it is beyond me. How often do you get offered a free house for Christ’s sake? The irritation causes that aching spot in the center of my chest to throb, and I briefly wonder if that nagging pain will be there for the rest of my life.

  I throw the papers down on my dresser and go have a session on my drums to try to dispel the anger. I’m banging away like a man possessed when Colin comes in. He doesn’t say a word, just picks up his bass, plugs in, and starts thrumming along with me. Before we know it, we’ve been at it for nearly two hours and we’re both covered in sweat but smiling too.

  I grab a couple of bottles of water out of the mini fridge Mrs. S. put down here and toss one to Colin.

  "You going to tell me what got you hitting the skins so hard?" he asks as he chugs half the bottle in one go.

  "You going to tell me why you quit getting high?" I answer, finally broaching the subject no one’s had the guts to touch.

  "Don’t beat around the bush, dude," he answers tersely.

  "Hey, this is your alcoholic friend asking why you don’t smoke weed every day anymore. It’s sort of a subject I’m well-versed in."

  He sighs and takes the last swallow of water before he launches the bottle at the trash can across the room. "I just woke up one day and I couldn’t."

  "Couldn’t what?"

  "Couldn’t get high."

  "What do you mean you couldn’t?"

  "Just what I said. I woke up, reached for my pipe, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There wasn’t any big epiphany. I hadn’t been thinking about quitting. Nothing. I just couldn’t force myself to light up, and it’s been that way every day since then. I can’t do it. I don’t know why. I figure the universe will show me why eventually, and until then, I just won’t be getting high."

  "Well, your lungs thank you, anyway. I have to say that’s a pretty strange story though. Freud would have had a field day with that one."

  "No shit," he grouses.

  "You know how lucky you are?" I ask. "I mean, I go to meetings almost daily, talk to my sponsor, write in a journal, practice my drums, and work like a fucking dog all day six days a week and I still want to drink. All the fucking time, man. You know what I’d give to just wake up one day and have that go away?"

  "Probably the same thing you’d give to wake up one morning and not want Tammy anymore?"

  "Fuck you, Colin." I snap.

  "No, fuck you, dude," he shoots back. I’m wondering where the hell this came from. "You want to dig around in my crap, but no one’s allowed to look at yours?"

  "It’s not the same thing," I mumble.

  Colin snorts and just sits there looking at me.

  Until I break.

  "Fine. What do you want to know?"

  "Why you’re not back in Portland fixing things?"

  "There’s nothing to fix. She got sick of my crap and left. I don’t blame her. I’m sick of my crap too."

  "And that’s it?"

  "Yeah, man. That’s it. She’s done, and I let her go."

  "Why?"

  "What do you mean why?"

  "Why’d you let her go, asshole? I know you love her, and I know you’d rather be with her than anywhere else, so why’d you stand by and watch her walk?"

  I pick at the label on my water bottle. Colin has the ability to reduce things to their most basic form. It’s a simple question, but I don’t have an answer.

  "I don’t know."

  "You need to figure that out, Walsh. Before it’s too late," he says softly.

  "Yeah, I think you’re right."

  Tammy

  IT’S BEEN two weeks since I left Texas. My days have been filled with packing and planning, my nights with longing and yearning, and my mornings… Well, my mornings have been spent vomiting in the master bathroom of the enormous house Walsh gave me. Today is day eleven of losing what little breakfast I’ve tried to eat. It’s time to admit that I might have a serious problem on my hands.

  I finally finish the dry heaving that’s left after the remains of the breakfast and stand up. I look at myself in the mirror. My hair is a tangled mess, I have circles under my eyes, and my skin is a little green. It’s not a good look I’ve got going on, but it pretty much sums up my state of being at the moment. However, I’m still a woman of action, so I brush my teeth, splash some water on my face, and shuffle to the bedroom to get dressed. I keep moving, one foot in front of the other. I keep doing, one task after the other. I keep ahead of all of it because that’s who I am, Tammy DiLorenzo, and with or without Walsh Clark, that’s who I’m going to stay. But I was right. He’s inside of me—just like DNA.

  Forty-five minutes later, I’m back home with the test. A little plastic stick that will confirm what I already know deep in my heart. I pee on that chunk of plastic and wait. Ten minutes and three sticks later, I slide down the wall of the bathroom and sit on the cold tile floor. Head in my hands, I finally break down and just sob. My stomach is roiling, my heart hurts like it’s been beaten on with a bat, and now my eyes are swollen and burning. And I thought 2013 was a bad year.

  IT TAKES me nearly twenty-four hours b
efore I get up the guts to tell Mel. We’re in the private sitting room of a bridal boutique while she waits for the attendant to bring in some more gowns.

  "I need to talk to you about something," I tell her.

  "Okay. What is it?"

  "I haven’t been feeling well lately, you know?"

  "Of course you haven’t. You’ve been through hell in the last few months, Tam." She reaches over and pats my hand. "It’s going to get better, I promise. Now that you’ve finally made a decision, things will settle down. I know it’s hard, but God, you’re beautiful and smart and young. You’ve got this fantastic future ahead of you. There’s someone out there waiting for you, Tammy. You’ll find him."

  I sniff as tears spring to my eyes. Fucking hormones. "I think he might have found me already. Or she might have."

  "What?"

  "I’m pregnant, Mel." I watch her, waiting for her reaction. Terrified of what she—the very first person I’ve told—is going to say.

  "You’re… Oh my God. Is it? I mean, there hasn’t been anyone else, has there?"

  "It’s Walsh’s of course," I reply.

  "When? You never told me!" She’s stunned to say the least.

  "One time. We’re both so used to me being on the pill that we didn’t think of it. I probably would have remembered the next day, but that was the morning we found him passed out in the park. He’d gotten drunk, then he left me, and I was so torn up, I went to Austin and started working on Jenny’s tour. I just completely forgot that we hadn’t used birth control. God, I’m such an idiot."

  Mel’s eyes are big and surprised. Her skin has gone a little pale as well. "What are you going to do?"

  "I’m going to go to Texas and tell him. Then I’m going to come home and figure out how to be a mom."

  She scoots closer to me on the loveseat and throws her arms around me. "I’m here," she whispers against my ear. "I’m here for you. Always."

  Walsh

  IT’S DAY fourteen since Tammy left, and I wake up for no reason at five a.m. Something is different. I don’t know what yet, but something’s going on. That feeling of the seismic shift I got the night Tammy told me we were done is back. I sit up in my bed, alert, listening to every little sound. The birds are doing their early morning thing outside, and I can hear the heavy clicking of the big grandfather clock that sits right above my bedroom. Colin is snoring from his room next door, and somewhere downtown, a truck accelerates.

  I’ve never been particularly spiritual or religious, but since starting AA, I’ve learned to trust that there’s something bigger than we are out there. Something that exists in a never-ending swirl with us. We influence it and it influences us, and round and round we all go. Joss spent a bunch of time working with an energy therapist while he and Mel were split up, and he said that the universe is full of energy—we give it and receive it. When you hold on to negative energy, it affects everything—your body, your mind, your life.

  My anger at Tammy and Joss was definitely negative energy impacting my life, and I’m surprised to find, as I think about it at five a.m. on a May morning, that I’m not angry anymore. I spent time with Joss. He’s not the same guy I grew up with—none of us are the same—but he’s still, at the core, my best friend. That probably won’t ever change. Even if we never saw each other again in this life, Joss Jamison would still be my best friend.

  I also admit to myself that I haven’t been mad at Tammy for a long time, maybe even since before she came to Texas. I love her so much that it takes a lot of negative energy to be mad at her. But I’ve been mad about her—about the fact that we split up, about what I drove her to do, about losing faith in her, in our relationship. And mad about loving her—that I can’t seem to get over her, to let her go like I should. It’s infuriating to be so trapped in another person that you can’t see a life beyond them.

  And here I am at five a.m., two weeks after Tammy left me, and I’m waiting. Waiting for something to happen, because the energy or whatever it is out there in the world is humming like a giant machine of change, and it’s coming for me. I can feel it.

  I SPEND most of the early morning driving around the far east acreage, checking on how many cattle are still unbranded. Branding is a huge operation in the spring, and we spend several weeks checking and rechecking to make sure we’ve caught every new calf so that we’ll know how many head we have for auction when the time comes.

  I’ve taken the quad so I can get to places that the trucks can’t. I’m heading back in right before lunch when my phone in my pocket vibrates. I pull the four-wheeler to a stop and take the phone out. It’s a Portland number, but not one I’m familiar with, so I take a deep breath and answer.

  "Hello?"

  "Is this Mr. DiLorenzo?"

  "Uh…yeah." I don’t know who the hell this is, but if it’s going to get me more information to be Mr. DiLorenzo, then I will.

  "This is Charlie at Rose City Movers. We just wanted to confirm that we’re doing the pickup this afternoon? One truck to storage and one truck to Austin, Texas?"

  Holy fuck. A moving truck? She said she was going to move out of the house, but I didn’t think she was serious about doing it this fast.

  "Yeah, man. What time did you say you’ll be there?"

  "Four o’clock. 2733 Windcove Drive, right?"

  "Yep, that’s right. And uh, how did you guys get this number?"

  "It was the one in our records from your last move. Did you want us to change it to something else?"

  I smile grimly, my mind coming to life in a way it hasn’t in months. "No, this is the number you need. Call here if there’s anything else."

  "All right, Mr. DiLorenzo. We’ll see you this afternoon."

  "Yes, Charlie, you will," I promise as I disconnect.

  I look at the time, and then I thank God for the West Coast being two hours earlier. I’ve got about six hours. I start the quad back up and literally fly across the grazing land back to the ranch house.

  "I need a few days off," I huff out as I find Ronny in the chicken coop, where he’s adding new nesting boxes.

  He doesn’t even look up. "What’s going on?" he asks while he keeps stretching wire and tapping it down with small nails.

  "I’ve got to go stop Tammy from making a huge mistake."

  He finally quits hammering and turns to me. If I were to describe his expression, I’d say that it’s bemused. "You finally going to get her?"

  I can’t help but grin. "Yeah, man. I’m going to go get my girl."

  He goes back to hammering. "Good. See you when you get back."

  WHEN I bought the house in Portland for Tammy, I told myself that it was all about her. I wanted to know that she had a roof over her head. It made me feel like the bigger person because, even though she had cheated on me, I cared enough to take care of her. It helped me plant myself in the martyr seat I’d built for Walsh the Betrayed. That house, even more than the money, made me feel better about myself, helped me think that I’d had nothing to do with the destruction of my relationship with Tammy even though I’ve always known deep down that it takes two to ruin any good relationship.

  But when I got that call from the movers, it all became clear to me. I didn’t buy that house for Tammy—I bought it for us. I bought that house because I wanted Tammy to be there in it waiting for me when I was ready to come back. Only Tammy being Tammy, she changed the game on me by showing up in Texas then losing patience with my fucked-up ass when I couldn’t man up on her timetable. She’s always been impatient as hell, and I’ve always been a drifter, slow to come to decisions, willing to accept the status quo.

  But I don’t have the luxury of time anymore, and it’s imperative that Tammy doesn’t move out of that house—our house—because I’m coming home.

  I PULL up to the place at three fifty-five p.m. No moving truck is in the large circular front drive, and neither is Tammy’s Mercedes SUV, which I bought her for her twenty-seventh birthday. I leave the rental car on the far edge of the
drive and jog up to the front door. I ring the bell and wait. Nothing happens, so I pull out the keychain I haven’t used in nearly a year and slide it into the lock. It still fits, and my heart beats out a little dance of thanks.

  I walk quietly into the foyer, the black-and-white-checked marble on the floor gleaming in the late afternoon sun. I shut the door behind me and call out, "Tammy? You home? It’s me."

  After a couple of minutes of no response, I take a moment to look around. The place is full of boxes. They’re stacked in the corners of the foyer, the hallway beyond, and the slice of living room I can see from here. Most are labeled "storage," but I see a stack in the hall that reads "Austin." I go to that batch and tap the lids. The sound is muffled, dense. I lift the top box and am surprised to find that it’s very light. Clothes. The Austin boxes are clothes. Everything else is going to storage.

  I barely have a moment to process this when the doorbell rings. I swing it open and find myself faced with two guys in Bayside Movers shirts.

  "Hi," the first one says, holding out a clipboard and a pencil. "You ready for us to start loading up the batch for storage?"

  "Actually," I say, my smile growing wider, "there’s been a mistake. We won’t be needing your services after all."

  "You sure?" He looks at me skeptically.

  "Yeah, but I really appreciate you coming over." I take a hundred dollars out of my wallet. "Here. For your time. Maybe you guys can go grab a beer or something?"

  "Right on. Thanks a lot," he says, grinning.

  "Sure thing."

  The guys go back to their truck and start it up. I close the door and stand there wondering where the hell Tammy is and what I’m going to say to her when she turns up.

  It’s only a few moments before I hear the door in the kitchen shut and footsteps coming in my direction. She walks into the hallway and starts setting down her keys and purse. I watch her, not saying a word. She’s wearing a sundress with little straps and a skirt that hits her a few inches above her knees. It molds to her gorgeous breasts in just the right way and flows around her legs, skimming over that golden skin like a whisper.