Test (A Gentry Generations Story)

by Cora Brent

  I might have dozed off for a little while and then awoke with a jolt, my heart pounding. For a few seconds I forgot where I was. Then I heard Kel roll over and mutter the words ‘ass parade’ in his sleep. I didn’t want to know what ‘ass parade’ meant but I knew we were in Paige Morrissey’s house. I sat up and listened. There was no sound except the ticking of the wall clock over the door. I couldn’t remember what I’d been dreaming about but I recognized the craving in my gut.

  I wanted a fucking drink.

  Ever since the world went nuts last night in the Super Q I hadn’t thought about taking a drink. I was thinking about it now. Maybe I didn’t need to really take a drink. Just having the option nearby would be enough.

  Like a goddamn eighty proof security blanket.

  “Fuck,” I whispered, easing my legs over the side of the bed. I hadn’t removed my clothes so I didn’t need to hunt around for them on the floor. I fucking hated feeling this way, hated my own weakness. If I woke Kellan up he’d be glad to hang out and talk until the worst of the urge faded for now.

  No. I couldn’t do that to him forever. I was the big brother and yet I was becoming a yoke around his neck. I’d go downstairs and get a glass of water, maybe a snack. If that didn’t help then I’d think about calling my sponsor. Her name was Emily Datsun. She had four kids and was a colleague and longtime friend of my father’s. She always said there was no hour too late to call and she was one of the few people whose messages I’d answered today.

  Creeping down the stairs in the middle of the night at Paige Morrissey’s house, I felt guilty as fuck. There no light shining in the bedroom Paige had pointed to as hers so she must be asleep. I told myself I wasn’t planning on doing anything wrong but just the fact that I was thinking about how I could get my hands on a bottle made me feel like a piece of shit.

  I stopped cold at the bottom of the stairs. There was music. I listened and determined it was coming from a long hallway that stretched on the opposite side of the living room. It was faint so whoever was playing it wasn’t trying to rock the house awake. Since Paige had been adamant that she lived alone she must be the one responsible.

  I followed the sound of the music, pausing to glance at the family photos on the walls. There were pictures of Paige as a little kid, one of a young couple and another of the same couple obviously taken decades later. There were photos of a boy who grew up and then posed for a photo with his own family, and one of a teenage girl who resembled Paige but wasn’t quite as pretty. She had to be Paige’s mother, who Paige had talked about with so much pain in her voice before she ran into the bathroom and puked her guts out. I hoped she didn’t realize that I was able to hear her from where I waited in my parents’ living room.

  The music was coming from a room at the end of a narrow hallway. I passed a laundry room, a bathroom and finally came to a door that was three quarters of the way shut. I pushed it open and found a room that looked like it had been frozen in time for at least twenty years. I also found Paige. She sat cross-legged on a bed that was covered with a yellow and blue flowered quilt and she was sorting through a pile of old cassette tapes, the kind you might come across in thrift stores and nowhere else. She was wearing same blue dress/nightgown thing she’d been wearing when she found me at her door this afternoon. She looked even better in it now.

  “Derek,” she said, obviously surprised to see me standing in the doorway. Maybe she’d forgotten I was in her house. She sat up straighter and put a hand to her lower back with a wince, like she’d been hunched over in the same position for a while.

  I stepped into the room. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  She shook her head. “No, you could never scare me.”

  And then we just stared at each other for an awkward moment, as if we were both clueless about what was supposed to happen next.

  Chapter Nine

  Paige

  I thought I’d be able to sleep better, knowing Derek and his brother were just down the hall. For crying out loud there was nothing to be afraid of even if they weren’t just down the hall. I was in my own house and behaving like a five year old who believed there were monsters in her closet. I didn’t think too hard about why the Gentry brothers took me up on my offer to stay here tonight. It was just nice having some company in the house.

  But I still couldn’t sleep. I turned on my meditation music. I sprinkled essential oils on my pillow. Nothing helped. Tonight there was more than the malevolent Candy Man in my head. There was something worse. There was my mother.

  “Mommy, you’ll take me to the mall to go see Santa before Christmas, won’t you?”

  She was trying to French braid my hair. She was bad at it and tended to tug too hard but I was glad to have her attention so I sat still with my legs in criss cross applesauce style and didn’t complain.

  “Of course I’ll do that,” she said but she always said things she didn’t mean. She let my braids fall out of her hands and cuddled me in her lap with sudden intensity. “I love you, Paige. You’re my princess. You know I love you, right? Right?”

  I couldn’t remember if she took me to go see Santa that year. Probably not. I thought that might have been the year my grandparents gave me a pink battery operated sports car to ride all over the neighborhood. They tried so hard. They wanted to make up for the fact that my mother rarely kept her promises. They wanted me to be happy. Probably almost as much as they wanted their daughter to stop slowly killing herself.

  When I finally gave up and went downstairs I tiptoed past the room where Derek and Kellan were sleeping. I thought I heard light snoring.

  Even though Derek assured me he had double checked all the doors I checked them again. I tried to curl up in the armchair where I’d fallen asleep so many times before but had no better luck than I had this afternoon so I went to the room that had once belonged to my mother and turned on some music. The room was just the same as it had always been. My grandmother refused to consider changing a thing, as if Sara might be coming home any minute.

  I was sorting through ancient cassette tapes when Derek appeared. He was almost bashful as he apologized because he thought he might have scared me.

  “No,” I told him with surprise. “You could never scare me.”

  Derek stared at me for what seemed like a long time while I remembered I was wearing the same thing I’d been wearing this afternoon when I blushed and covered myself with an antique blanket. I didn’t bother to cover myself up now. In the space of one evening I felt a lot more connected to him than I ever expected to.

  “What are you listening to?” he asked, pulling a desk chair close to the bed and inspecting my pile of vintage music.

  “Pearl Jam.” I pointed to the old silver and black stereo with the conspicuous speakers. “It plays records, CDs and cassettes. Between my grandparents and my mother there’s quite a collection.”

  Derek searched through the music. “Aerosmith. Metallica. Guns N Roses.”

  “Mom had good taste.”

  He looked up. His eyes were blue, a kind of deep ethereal blue that a girl could get lost in. If she wanted to, that is.

  “You don’t think she’s alive?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I know my grandfather hired a detective to try and find her. He had no luck. She was in Los Angeles for a while and then she just kind of disappeared.” I tried to force a laugh. “Who knows, maybe she started over and is living in a mini mansion somewhere with her husband and four kids.”

  He was still looking at me. “You believe that?”

  I recalled the ruined person who would sell her body and probably her soul for a fix. “No, I don’t. I wish I knew what happened to her though. Not knowing is worse than anything. My grandparents died without knowing.”

  “Maybe you could try again,” he said. “To find out what happened to her I mean.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I cleared my throat and changed the subject. “How’s your arm?”

  He held it up. “Still attach
ed.”

  “I’m glad. It’ll probably come in handy.”

  “Probably.”

  “For the next time you encounter a nutty meth head with a knife and an appetite for candy.”

  He nodded. “Let’s hope there’s not a next time.”

  “Thank you for catching me when I fell,” I said.

  Derek didn’t accept gratitude easily. He looked down and started sorting through the pile of cassettes again. “You already thanked me.”

  “For coming to my rescue. But not for catching me afterwards.” I remembered the way my legs gave out, the way I felt like I couldn’t breathe. “I was about to lose it, either pass out or just start screaming. But you caught me and held me in your arms and I don’t know, I just felt better.”

  I heard my words and felt myself blushing. Derek seemed to bring out my talkative side. I didn’t even know I had one. The things that were going on in my head just came pouring out of me.

  Well, not all of the things.

  Otherwise I would have told him I didn’t fully appreciate how ripped and sexy he was until we were sitting a few feet away from each other in the middle of the night.

  “How do you feel now?” he asked me.

  The cassette tapes were all over the bed. I started stacking them up. I wasn’t sure how to answer the question without sounding pathetic so I didn’t answer it at all.

  “There wasn’t really a party next to your apartment tonight, was there?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “There might have been a party. Someone’s always having a party over there. College crowd and all.”

  “Are you one of them?” I asked. “The college crowd?”

  “No. I used to be.” He paused. “Not everyone’s cut out for college. I’m happier working at my uncles’ garage.”

  “But Kellan goes to ASU?”

  “Yeah. Guy’s smart as shit so college is where he should be.”

  I thought about Derek’s wiseass yet endearing brother and smiled. “Look, I know what he did for me tonight. He’s a really nice guy.”

  “He is a nice guy,” Derek agreed. “Sometimes it just takes a few minutes to shine through.”

  I bit my lip. “You’re a nice guy too.”

  “Me?” He looked confused, as if out of all the adjectives he could find to describe himself, ‘nice’ couldn’t possibly be among them.

  I nodded, still trying to reconcile the notorious reputation of Derek Gentry with the guy I was getting to know. “You’re different from how I thought you’d be.”

  He cracked a wicked grin. “So you’ve been thinking a lot about me?”

  “Oh shush.”

  “How long have you been thinking about me, Paige?”

  “I’m going to throw a pillow at your face.”

  He wasn’t impressed. “I’ve had worse things thrown at my face. We didn’t ever meet in high school, did we?”

  “No. But I knew who you were. Everyone did. Everyone knew you, every girl wanted you.”

  “Every girl?” he asked, his voice deepening an octave and making me feel a little lightheaded. So I made good on my threat and threw a pillow at him.

  Derek grabbed the pillow and tossed it back on the bed. His smile had fallen away. He drummed his fingertips on a cassette case and looked troubled.

  “So you knew exactly who I was,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t flinch from his next question. “Did you know I was in prison?”

  I swallowed. “I’d heard that. It was drunk driving, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. I was drunk. I drove. When I crashed I killed a man. His name was Hale Tremaine.” Derek hesitated and it seemed like saying these words was physically painful. Some words had that kind of power.

  “We’d both been at the same wedding,” he explained. “My cousin was marrying his brother. He was drunk too and on a motorcycle with no helmet. He never had a chance when I hit him. I got off easy, serving only five months at a minimum security facility. But I still have a habit I can’t quite shake.”

  “A habit?” I didn’t want to be intrusive but I also wanted to know. If Derek didn’t want to tell me he didn’t have to.

  “An addiction,” he clarified. “Last night I was shopping at Super Q because I wanted a drink. And I was wandering around your house just now because I still wanted a drink.”

  So that was it. Derek was an alcoholic. Sometimes just admitting that our inner demons lived was the biggest challenge of all. I had to give him credit for his honesty.

  “Do you still want a drink?” I asked out of curiosity.

  “Fuck yeah.” He took a deep breath. “But I’ve been sober for sixty one days and I’m not going to have one. At least for tonight.”

  I touched his hand, just a brief pat. It wasn’t a sexual thing. Just one damaged person reaching out to another. “I guess that’s all you can do, Derek. At least for tonight,” I added.

  Derek cocked his head and examined me. “Can I ask you a question, Paige?”

  “Sure,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask if I’d stuck my finger down my throat in his parents’ bathroom.

  “Do you still feel better?” he asked.

  I must have looked confused because he reminded me of what I’d said a few minutes ago.

  “You mentioned that last night when I held you that I made you feel better.”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “You did.”

  “And now?”

  I wavered, unsure if I should admit the truth. But Derek had given me brutal honesty so I could swallow my pride and do the same. “I’ve been thinking about that moment all day, Derek. I played it over and over again in my mind, not because I’m expecting something else to happen. It’s because just then I needed so badly for someone to be there for me exactly the way you were.” I flushed and tried to choke out a laugh. “It’s funny how I can’t seem to stop embarrassing myself in front of you.”

  Derek shook his head like he thought I was being ridiculous. “Stop being embarrassed.”

  He started moving the piles of cassettes over to the desk and then switched off the power button on the stereo. I had no idea why. Maybe he was just trying to help clean up. Then he got on the bed beside me, stretched out and extended his arm.

  “Come here,” he whispered.

  I obeyed. Slowly, because I wasn’t sure what he had in mind.

  But Derek wasn’t after sex. He didn’t touch me while I got comfortable. Settling against his strong body seemed like the most natural act in the world. It didn’t feel dirty or even erotic. He switched off the bedside lamp, wrapped his arms around me and let me fall asleep with my cheek next to his beating heart.

  And there I slept all night, more soundly than I thought possible.

  Chapter Ten

  Derek

  Kellan didn’t have a clue. If he knew I was with Paige all night instead of snoring in the frilly bedroom beside him he would never have stopped hassling me. But he was sound asleep when I jerked him awake at dawn because I had to go home. I needed to shower and change before going to work at the garage.

  Paige offered no hint that anything unusual had happened between us and Kel was half asleep anyway so he probably wouldn’t have picked up on it. She thanked us for being excellent houseguests and we traded cell phone numbers. Then came a moment when she was standing in the doorway and I turned back to look at her. There was that smile again and it hit me as if I’d just stared straight into the sun. In that moment I didn’t want to leave her. I wished the sky was still dark and she was still beside me.

  Kel was grumbling that I ought to buy him breakfast so we stopped at a McDonald’s drive thru. I tried to remember the last time I’d done what I did last night, slept with a girl in my arms. Conveniently passing out next to someone you just fucked didn’t count. No, I couldn’t recall another time I’d held someone that way, feeling her skin and the heat of her body and not taking more. All while being completely sober. I had no such recollection because it had never happen
ed before.

  We gobbled up our Egg McMuffins in the car before we got back to the apartment and then Kel staggered to his room in search of more sleep while I swallowed some antibiotics and got ready for work.

  Work was the one thing in my life that I really managed to do right. The Brothers Gentry garage had three locations now and they even ran local commercials on the radio. When I strolled in ten minutes before the place was set to open I was still thinking about Paige and the way she’d whimpered in her sleep once but quieted when I tightened my arms around her. The Super Q incident wasn’t on my mind at all.

  The boys at the garage weren’t going to let me off easy though. Some joker had taken a still shot from the surveillance video that had gone viral, blown it up to life size proportions and taped it to the door that led to the small lobby.

  “Woohoo!” hooted Bertie, one of the other mechanics.

  Everyone else who’d already arrived broke into applause.

  “Take a bow!” insisted Gina, the lady who dealt with the reception area.

  I didn’t take a bow. I managed to hold up a hand in acknowledgement and tried to go about my business while fending off questions about being slashed with a dirty knife.

  Ricardo, another mechanic who boxed in his spare time, thumped me on the back and whooped, “You kicked his motherfucking ass.”

  It didn’t take long for Stone Gentry to emerge from the boss’s office and discover what all the fuss was about. He cracked a huge grin when he saw me and asked how my injury was healing but he didn’t launch into a cross examination. He just announced that everyone could grab a donut from the box he’d deposited in the break room before we started tackling all the jobs in the pipeline today. Stone was cool like that.

  He sidled up to me while the rest of the staff streamed into the break room to fight over the Boston crèmes. “Lunch today?” he suggested.

  I grabbed my favorite toolbox off the shelf with a grunt. “Yeah, that sounds good.”