The reception was a blast. The beer flowed freely, copious amounts of pizza were consumed, and with all the balloons floating about the room, there was more than enough helium to go around. Love, laughter and chipmunk voices overflowed from the party room of the Pizza Hut, until one of the kids pulled the fire alarm and set off the automatic sprinklers.
They burst out of the restaurant in a dripping, drunken mob with the desire to party harder and nowhere to go. When Kenny suggested Kitty’s, Olivia was all aboard—until she actually set foot inside the bar and she caught sight of George.
His eyes locked with hers from across the room. So many emotions slammed into her chest with so much intensity she panicked and took flight.
“Liv!” Izzie chased after Olivia as she flew out of the bar.
“I can’t do this!” Olivia cried.
“Do what?”
Olivia paced the sidewalk and tried to calm the seizures of pain and heartache quaking through every molecule of her body. “I can’t look at George and pretend everything’s ok between us knowing he’s with Yvette.”
“Why?” Izzie asked as she tried to calm Olivia’s violent trembling. “What the hell happened between you two?”
“Nothing! Absolutely nothing happened between us because he told me he was gay! And I believed him! And now he’s sleeping with Yvette. He lied to me to push me away and now he’s rubbing my face in it with her!”
“Olivia,” George warned in a low tone inches behind her ear.
Olivia jumped out of her skin at the sound of his voice. In her panic to escape, she ran straight into traffic. Car horns blared and tires screeched as cars swerved to miss the hysterical Olivia. She dodged left and dodged right and slipped in her heels and fell in the street right in the path of an oncoming semi. Two muscular arms lifted her up and out of the way seconds before the bumper met her forehead.
George dumped her onto the sidewalk in a heap. “Are you insane?” He glared at her with his hands on his hips and his feet spread shoulder-width apart.
Olivia opened her mouth, but no words came out. Her heart had wedged itself tight in her throat, partly from the fright of almost dying, but mostly from the sight of seeing him again after so incredibly long.
Tears came to her eyes as she swallowed hard and nodded weakly. Yes, she was indeed insane, or at least pretty damn close to becoming insane. God, she loved him, so much so it physically hurt to look at him and not be able to reach out and touch him.
He threw his hands to the sky, cursed and screamed at her for being so stupid and stubborn, then stormed back into the bar.
Izzie crouched at her side and fussed over her skinned knees, scraped palms, and torn dress, asking her again and again what she meant about George being gay. Olivia stared at the door to the bar, silently praying for George to come back outside and take her in his arms again, to kiss her in the backroom, and dance with her until dawn. To hold her, and touch her, and love her, and make her feel alive again…
But he didn’t come out. And Olivia couldn’t bring herself to go in.
In the end, she limped home, threw her ruined dress in the trash, and spent her wedding night polishing off a bag of Cheez Doodles and a six-pack of Bud while watching Two Mules for Sister Sarah with Eugene. So much for the honeymoon.
Chapter Six
Izzie became obsessed with the possibility of George being gay. Since Olivia refused to talk about it, Izzie set out on her own to get to the bottom of things. Every night at Garretson, she grilled Yvette on George’s comings and goings, who his friends were, what kind of music he liked, how he held his fork when he cut his steak, how often he showered, whether he wore boxers or briefs, and a million other topics she believed would reveal George’s true sexual orientation without being obvious.
When Izzie crossed the line and asked if George had an obsession with any particular farm animal, Yvette went to Sam and complained.
Sam stuck his head out of his office. “Isabel Bergman! Get in here—now!”
Izzie skittered in with her head low and her face flushed.
When she came back out, she was an even deeper shade of red. From that moment on, she kept a fifteen-foot radius from Yvette at all times. She let the George issue drop, at least at work, and went back to talking only about her unsuccessful attempts at getting pregnant.
The rest of May and all of June became a blur as one mandatory-Saturday merged into the next. Olivia’s life revolved around working and sleeping and pretty much nothing else. She barely had the energy to shower every day, but she managed it. Sundays were spent slumped on the sofa watching mind-numbing programming on HGTV and the Food Network in preparation for the day she finally grew up and became somebody, until one fateful Sunday when she was flipping channels during commercials and happened across the end of Boogie Nights.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” she uttered in awe and sat up a little straighter.
She hit the rewind button on her DVR so she could watch the frame again. And then she hit pause and just stared. Holy fuck! From that moment on, Olivia was absolutely, positively, one-hundred-percent head-over-heels in love with Mark Wahlberg.
Her new obsession was born.
Sunday nights became “Olivia and Mark’s Date Night.” At seven o’clock, on the dot, she showered and fussed over her hair, put on a little makeup and selected a nice dress or a flirty skirt to wear for Mark. Sometimes she wore underwear, sometimes she didn’t, depending on her mood, but she always wore perfume.
Once she was ready to go, she’d call and order take-out from Tomas Juan’s, pick up a bottle of Barefoot Moscato from the liquor store on Greeley Street, and then swing down to Movie Mania to make a selection from Mr. Wahlberg’s fine array of cinema classics. On her way home, she’d sneak over to Carla’s house and snip one single rose off the massive rosebushes in front of her house. She’d stick the rose into a jelly jar full of water, sit on the floor behind the coffee table, and settle in for a night of dinner and wine with her sweetheart.
One night, toward the end of June, Olivia was feeling particularly frisky. It was a pantiless night, and she had ordered a chili relleno to go with her usual enchilada, beans and rice. The food smelled marvelous and sat waiting for her in her Buick while she ran into the liquor store for her bottle of Moscato. She couldn’t stop thinking about her cutie-patootie Markie-Mark, and couldn’t stop smiling as she set the bottle of wine on the counter.
The girl working the register asked, “Have you seen your boyfriend’s new movie yet?”
Olivia’s eyes widened in surprise. “No!”
“It’s called The Happening. My sister saw it last night and said it’s really good. Weird, but good.”
“Huh.” She and Mark had been seeing each other exclusively for three weeks, and he hadn’t bothered to mention it. Naughty boy.
“They’re showing it at the theater in the mall,” she said as she rang up Olivia’s purchase. “I think the next showing starts at eight.”
Olivia searched for a clock. “What time is it now?”
“Seven-forty-five.”
Olivia threw her money on the counter, grabbed her wine and made a beeline for her car. She flew across town as fast as she could—running a few red lights in the process—and shoved her dinner and her wine into the backpack she kept buried in the backseat for just such emergencies.
With ticket stub in hand, she made her way to the center of the theater as the lights were going down. She found a seat between a fat man sucking on an Icee and a young couple with their heads resting together, and settled in. She waited until the upcoming movie previews were over before unscrewing her wine and pulling out her dinner.
If Mark was beautiful on her thirty-two-inch television, he was nothing less than sheer perfection on the big screen. He was so real she could almost reach out and touch him. She lost herself in his voice, drowned in his eyes, and lusted after his body. She was so wrapped up in the wine and the food and Mark’s delectably-hot bod she wasn’t paying mu
ch attention to the movie itself—until the people fell off the roof.
“What the…?”
She watched the rest of the movie wide-eyed and terrified. Her wine forgotten, her food a distant memory, every ounce of her being was consumed by the horror on the big screen. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t scream or run away. She was totally and completely, one-hundred-percent glued to her seat in fright. She saw things no human being should ever be forced to see—and she had to pay to witness such atrocities.
The couple next to her started making out, but she didn’t notice. The fat man farted and gassed out half of the theater, but she couldn’t smell it. A baby cried in the back row, but she didn’t hear it. All she knew was dead bodies everywhere, and her man running for his life.
“Run, baby! Run!” she whispered in vain. There was nothing she could do to save him. Mark Walberg was a goner.
Desperate to pluck him out of the horror of his nightmare and into the safety of her arms, she slid forward in her seat and reached for him. As she did, the bottle of wine slipped off her lap. It exploded when it hit the concrete floor, shattering into a million pieces. The people next to her screamed from the noise and she screamed from their screaming and once she started screaming she couldn’t stop.
People started yelling at her to shut up. They threw popcorn and candy and other not-so-blunt objects at her, and her screams turned into cries. Her throat and her lungs started to burn as she scrambled to collect her bag and her wits, but she was a basket-case, disoriented in the dark. If not for the two ushers who half-dragged, half-carried her out of the theater by her arms and legs, she would probably still be sitting there today, crying for her baby, popcorn and Jujubes stuck in her hair.
The ushers not only threw her out of the theater, they threw her out of the mall completely, and into a thunderstorm that had blown in while she was lost in the nightmare world directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The lightning flashed, the thunder cracked, and the rain came down in sheets as Olivia cowered on a bench outside the entrance to the mall.
Her car was parked what felt like miles away, and she knew for certain there was something in it that would bring about her untimely death. She didn’t dare run for it. There was something in the air and something in the rain and something crawling on her skin. She tried to brush it off, but she couldn’t. She jumped from the bench, slapping wildly at her arms and face, working herself up into full-blown panic mode, when a voice from behind sent her blood into a deep, paralyzing freeze.
“Hello, Olivia.”
Olivia slowly turned and came face-to-face with Mitch. She opened her mouth to scream, but she was all screamed out.
“How are you?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at her feet.
“Go-o-od?” she stuttered out on her last, little breath of terror.
Mitch nodded and continued looking at her feet.
“How are you?” she asked cautiously while staring wide-eyed at him.
“I’m good,” he said with another little nod.
Time stretched and neither one of them said anything. As Olivia’s emotions bounced around, she opened and closed her mouth a few times attempting to continue the conversation, but she had nothing to say to him. Or maybe there was nothing she wanted to say to him. She wasn’t sure which. The pain he had inflicted was gone but not healed, and certainly not forgotten, but the love she felt for him was still real, still fresh, and still oh-so-confusing. She wanted to tell him off, to give him hell, to reduce him to rubble with her verbal assault, but really, what was the point? He knew what he did. No point in beating a dead horse.
Mitch continued to stand there, staring at her feet without saying a word. Olivia unfroze with a sigh of distain and started for the parking lot.
“Olivia! Wait!” Mitch rushed into the pouring rain after her.
She stopped, and he stopped. They looked at each other as the rain came down upon them. She was soaked in an instant with her hair matted to her face and her dress clinging to her body. Her high heels filled with rain and her mascara ran down her cheeks in black rivers.
“What, Mitch?” she demanded. “What could you possibly want to say to me that I don’t already know?”
“I love you, Olivia,” he said, his face pained as he blinked rain-filled eyelashes. “I just want you to know that I love you.”
“I know you do. And I love you, too. But what good does it do either of us?”
He had no answer for her. She left him standing there in the rain and walked to her car without looking back.
* * *
“Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but George lied to you. There’s no way he’s gay,” Izzie said with a sad shake of her head. She leaned over the bathroom counter, into the mirror, and plucked at a few stray eyebrow hairs with a pair of neon-purple tweezers that matched her neon-pink eyelash curler. “I have proof if you want to see it.”
Olivia pulled the shower curtain closed and sank further into the tub. Izzie’s announcement did nothing to improve her crappy mood. But, really, why would it? How could it possibly improve your mood to find out for certain that one of your dearest friends in the world lied to you about being gay in order to keep you at arm’s length when you were so obviously in love with them? Especially when everything else in your life was crappy?
Well, not everything.
Mandatory-Saturdays were over. That was good. And they ended in time for Juliette’s week-long Fourth of July celebrations, which Izzie was presently primping for. If she didn’t hurry up they wouldn’t get a good spot for their lawn chairs. They’d be stuck watching the fireworks from behind a tree or around a grain bin.
Everyone knew you had to get your chair on the lawn of Riverwalk Park before ten in the morning three days before the actual night of the fireworks if you wanted the best view. And the best view was exactly three-hundred paces north-northwest of the teeter-totter with the chairs placed at an exact forty-seven degree angle off a line between the little oak near the dock and the second cottonwood from the men’s cinderblock outhouse. It was one of the few things Eugene had ever taught Olivia that actually stuck, and it was a secret he guarded with his life. Why he had even told Olivia was a mystery to her.
The only other person who knew about the perfect spot was Alma Yetter, Juliette’s only known prostitute. She had also learned it from Eugene. Olivia was not exactly sure what compromising position Alma had put Eugene in to garner that particular bit of information, but Olivia was certain it wasn’t anything sexual. Eugene was the most asexual person in the world. He’s what God imagined when he came up with the idea of priests. Eugene would have made a good one, if not for the fact that he was an atheist. Eugene was so asexual it was a miracle Olivia was even alive. She was probably the nasty side-effect of the only ejaculation Eugene had ever experienced—and probably the reason he never felt the desire to experience another one.
Alma only did her prostitute gig at night. During the day, she was the drive-thru teller at Juliette Federal Credit Union. She went on her morning break at exactly nine-forty-five, which meant if Izzie didn’t hurry her ass up, Alma’s lawn chair would be in Eugene’s spot at exactly nine-fifty-two. Which would mean Eugene would skip the fireworks entirely because he refused to watch them from any other location. And if there was one thing in the world that Eugene loved more than his three C’s, it was fireworks. The only time Olivia ever got to see Eugene smile was when his face was lit by the chemical explosions in the sky, and she’d be damned if she would miss out on that rarity because of Alma’s insensitivity or Izzie’s vanity.
“What’s your proof?” Olivia pulled the tub stopper closed with her toes and then opened it again. Then closed it and opened it.
“Hang on, I’ll go get it.”
“No!” Olivia ripped the curtain open. “Hurry your ass up and let’s get going before Alma parks her fat ass in Eugene’s spot.”
“Ok, ok.” Izzie sighed and looked her face over one more t
ime. She smoothed her hair with her hands. “Do I look ok?”
“Perfect,” Olivia assured her and hopped out of the tub.
“Are you sure?”
Olivia smoothed her hands over Izzie’s hair, retracing the exact path Izzie’s hands had just taken, and rested her forehead against Izzie’s. “Perfect.”
They stayed like that, staring at each other in silence, while Izzie built up her nerve. Finally, she picked up the little stick on the counter. She stared at it for a few, short seconds, and then closed her eyes, her lips pursed together as she worked through her disappointment. Every month it was getting harder and harder for Izzie to see the negative results on the EPT test, but she had yet to cry. Crying would mean there was no hope.
Words meant shit in situations like this, but Olivia tried anyway. “Next month for sure.”
Izzie nodded.
“Maybe you should listen to the doctor and do what he says,” Olivia said. She took the stick out of Izzie’s hand and tossed it into the trash.
“The guy got his license out of a Cracker Jack box,” Izzie dismissed with a disgusted wave of her hand. She swept out of the bathroom and continued through the house, headed toward the garage, and Olivia had to rush to keep up.
“What he says kinda makes sense though, if you think about it.”
“How can not having sex make a baby? That’s just stupid.”
“He didn’t say not to have sex. He said not to have so much sex,” Olivia said. “You’re over-working John’s sperm factory.”
“Whatever.”
Olivia rolled her eyes then helped Izzie load the folding lawn chairs into the trunk of Izzie’s car. Over the course of the past few months, Izzie and John had gone from having sex twice a day to having sex pretty much twenty-four-hours a day. They were always getting busy, to the point where it had turned into a chore. Get the mail, wash the dishes, have sex. Do the laundry, make the beds, have sex. Mow the lawn, etc, etc. They had sex in the morning, sex in the afternoon, and sex at night. Olivia didn’t say anything, but it’s no wonder they weren’t successful at baby-making. Who would want to be conceived under those circumstances?
Olivia Page 10
