Page 39 of Shopping for a CEO's Fiancee
I hang up on her.
And with that, I reach behind me and rip the seam.
“Thank God,” Amanda and I say in unison, for completely different reasons. The seam in the back was a long one, so the pants are completely useless. The cold feel of cheap vinyl is a relief as I peel the front panel of the breeches off me, wincing.
“It’s like you’re getting a free waxing,” Amanda marvels.
Dec won’t stop laughing.
Tap tap tap.
I look up and out my window to see a uniformed police officer looking right back at me.
Then at my hands in my undressed lap. I scurry to pull my shirttails over my open pants.
“This just gets better and better,” Declan gasps.
“Excuse me, sir? Please roll down the window slowly.” The cop is wearing a hat and I can’t see his eyes.
“Officer? Is there a problem?”
“Your junk is resting on my backseat, Andrew. Of course there’s a problem,” Declan hisses. “You’re paying to steam clean the car when this is over.”
“Shut up, Declan!”
“I need you to roll down the window, sir. We had a series of reports about a man and woman in period costume harassing people at Walden Pond, and you fit the description. Did you throw a rock at a red convertible on Route 126?”
“Oh, God.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car, sir.”
Amanda’s mouth is open, eyes the size of globes, and she lets out a shaky breath.
“Dec?” I ask, pinching the bridge of my nose as I prepare for the inevitable.
“Yeah?”
“Get Grace to call the family lawyer.”
“Will do.”
“Sir.” The cop’s voice has gone firm. “You need to step out here.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t?” I can hear the felony charge in his voice.
“I’m not wearing any pants.”
He frowns. “You realize I could charge you with public indecency if that’s true.”
Dec is holding back laughter so hard he’s crying.
“Technically, I have pants on. But I had to rip them off.”
“Rip them off?”
“I was losing circulation to my stones.” When confronted with possible arrest, my Scottish roots emerge.
“Stones?”
Amanda leans over my lap, looks up, and says, “Al?”
“Amanda?”
“You set this up?” I sit up in shock so fast my head bangs against the car ceiling.
“No! This is a true coincidence!” she says to me. “Hey, Al! Sorry to cause trouble. We were just doing a re-enactment of parts of Pride and Prejudice. You know, Jane Austen?”
“You two are into that?”
Amanda gives him a sweet smile that goes all the way to double dimples. “You know.”
His eyes go to my lap, then her face. “Right. But the pants...?”
“These old costumes.” She plants a possessive hand on my thigh, moving the cloth just enough that I really am in danger of public indecency. Her hand right there is like pouring Miracle-Gro on a tomato plant. “They tear. Andrew was in the middle of a sword battle when they split.”
“Sword battle!” Al’s estimation of me goes up while his eyes remain glued to her hand. “Good for you.”
“I learned from the best,” I say. “My brother’s really good at digging in the knife.”
Al slaps the car once. “Well, then, if it’s just you two playing around, you’re good to go. I’d recommend a spare set of pants, though, for you there, uh...”
“Andrew.”
“Right. Andrew.”
Dec turns on the car.
“Are we free to go?” Shannon asks nicely.
“Sure.”
Amanda waves to Al as Declan pulls back onto the road and follows the GPS.
“That did not happen,” I grunt. “You tell Dad, I will kill you.”
“I won’t tell Dad.”
“I mean it, Dec.”
“Jessica Coffin already has pictures of you two on her Twitter stream,” Shannon says sadly. She holds up her phone and hands it to Amanda.
“‘Andrew McCormick takes his zombies seriously,’” she reads. “What does that even mean?”
“See?” I grumble, holding my junk carefully. The shocks on this piece-of-shit car are terrible, and my boys are pretty blue. “She’s losing her touch.”
“Wait a minute,” Amanda says, tapping the screen. “Her account—just now! Where’d it go?”
“Where’d it go?” Shannon repeats. “What do you mean? It’s right there.”
“I hit refresh. It’s gone.”
“Gone?” Shannon’s face lifts with a triumphant smile. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
My project has been fulfilled. I just unplugged Jessica Coffin’s influence.
At least something went right today.
Chapter Nineteen
Saturdays like this are rare in Massachusetts. The wide, open sky is a shade of blue you only find in a jeweler’s shop, and the light wind is a relief from the sweltering late-summer air. After a string of muggy days where breathing feels like drowning, the change is welcome.
And today is a day for nothing but change.
The path away from the giant patch of grass where the town has carved out fifteen regulation-sized soccer fields is well marked, but my eyes can’t seem to find it. The sign is right there: “Honeysuckle Path,” with the piece of wood carved into the shape of an arrow, the words burned into the wood in a quaint, quasi-colonial font designed to add prestige to the town, one of the oldest in the state. I read the words, but my brain doesn’t process them, and then—like a bird of prey with telescopic sight—it all clicks.
I take my first step on the bare-dirt line in the center of wild weeds. This park land was set aside for families and school children to use as a nature preserve, for sports, for picnics and hikes.
And this is where my mother died.
Her grave is not here. Elena Montgomery McCormick’s final resting place is in a cemetery a few towns away. But this is where she took her last breath.
A breath I never saw.
I come here when I want to torture myself. Always at night, and always in the cooler seasons. Cross-country skiers burrow tracks in the winter and I follow them, head down, always pausing right by the bridge where she died.
Where I almost died.
Where, for years, I wished I’d died.
Declan’s never been back here, as far as I know, and I can’t blame him.
Knowing what I know now from Terry about Dad’s treatment of Declan, I need to come here. After she died, Grace set up therapists for Declan and me, but the sessions were short. We were fine. Trauma? What trauma? It was a freak accident.
I was the freak.
My skin itches, the bright sun pouring down on me, my body uncovered, a short-sleeved polo, shorts, and sneakers all I chose to wear. Vince is right: I take greater risks every day just driving to work.
But living a life hidden in darkness and cold was never about logical risk assessment and playing the odds.
I almost invited Amanda to join me here, today. Almost.
As I walk, I hear the rumble of car engines behind me, a flurry of activity, then shouts and screams of kids unbound. Music from an ice cream truck jingles in the background, blending with the muted cacophony of childhood fun. That day, thirteen years ago, when I was a forward on my team and taking a break between games to go for a hike with Dec and Mom, I remember Dec asking if we could grab an ice cream bar.
And I said, “Coach doesn’t want us loading our stomachs with junk.”
Those were some of the last words my mother ever heard from me.
What if I’d said yes? What if we’d gone to the parking lot instead and had Mom chide us for eating too much sugar, had Dec buy us each two chocolate-coated bars, had shoveled them in like the growing teens we were? What if I’d paused and what if, what if, what if?
Thirteen years of what ifs.
Except none of those comes even close to the what if Declan carries inside him.
It’s the question I can’t ask him.
It’s the question he asks himself every day.
As I reach the split in the path, another what if assaults me, the Y in the road a dimension splicer, my dead mother down one path, my living mother down the other. We picked the right-hand path out of sheer randomness, a decision that meant nothing in the moment, yet everything three minutes later.
When Amanda jumped in the water to rescue the animals at Dec and Shannon’s wedding, she made one of those instinctual decisions, the kind that makes sense at the time.
Everything makes sense at the time.
Until it doesn’t.
Fresh air assaults my lungs, the scent of freshly-mowed grass nauseating. It takes me back thirteen years ago, my legs shorter, tighter, body all elbows and knees, getting used to my newfound height. It was the very end of sophomore year and I just got my driver’s license. Mom let me drive. Declan mocked me endlessly from the backseat, calling me “Grandma” at every intersection.
But I drove, proudly.
I’m here as an exercise in futility, an attempt to inoculate myself against memories of evil in quarter-ounce doses. The dose makes the poison, right? That’s the saying.
What if Mom had only been stung once?
What if I’d been stung before and we’d known about my allergy?
What if. That’s what I want on my grave.
What if.
I don’t want to put Amanda through a life of what if. Our fight that day, two months ago, at the wedding fittings wasn’t about fear. Not the kind of fear everyone thinks.
