Eighteen months ago
Iwas amess. A wreck of epic proportions. The crown princess of Barely Keeping It Together.
I wanted to shatter everything I could get my hands on and scream until the rage I felt was purged from my blood.
I wanted to get weepy, messy drunk and clutch my mother’s handkerchiefs—the ones my father ripped out of my hands not six months after her death, right along with everything else she’d ever touched—to my chest until the pieces of her that I’d lost started coming back to me.
I wanted to fall apart—crawl into bed, hide under the covers, and sob until my body ran out of tears—but falling apart wasn’t in the cards this weekend. I’d enjoy that luxury, along with plenty of crying, drinking, and screaming, when the happy couple was well on their way to Switzerland next week.
“Hey.” Lauren curled up next to me on the patio loveseat and dropped her head to my shoulder. “Let’s walk and talk. Okay?”
She steered me toward the string of gray-shingled cottages at the north side of the inn while I rattled off the schedule of events for her big day. It was more for my benefit than hers: she was going to do whatever she wanted tomorrow—Lauren only pretended she liked order and structure—and I needed to stay busy to prevent myself from drowning in a bottle of whiskey.
“You are in beast mode, my friend. Don’t worry about anything. Tomorrow is going to be perfect,” she said as she flopped onto my bed. “And you know what will make it perfect? Me marrying Matthew. I don’t need anything else.”
“I still think the catering manager is underestimating the amount of appetizers necessary for cocktail hour,” I said, dropping beside Lauren. “And I know he’s not going to have enough of your signature drinks ready.”
She rolled to her side and squinted at me. “I have a signature drink?”
“You havetwosignature drinks. Watermelon bellinis,” I said, “and blueberry martinis. Actually, I’ve been calling them blue ball martinis and pussy pink bellinis in my head.”
“Wemustcall them that tomorrow.” Lauren shook her head and laughed. “When did you pick those?”
Lauren and Matt selected the date (late May), the location (the far end of Cape Cod), and the vows (still under wraps). I took care of most everything else, and I treasured every minute of it. This was my family’s first wedding, and I wanted to guarantee they had the celebration they deserved.
“Last month when I came down here to meet with the flower people,” I said, yawning.
Exhaustingdidn’t even begin to describe this week, and it was only Friday night. We were doing construction on the office, Patrick was being a moody bitch, I had to let a bookkeeping assistant go, and I was up all last night threading ribbons through wedding programs. That one was a bad idea; I was talented in neither arts nor crafts.
“Well I hope those balls and pussies taste good,” she said. We looked at each other and immediately burst out laughing.
“Lauren, you should know by now…balls never taste good,” I said with tears sliding down my cheeks while I hugged my sides.
“Apparently you would know,” she gasped between giggles. “But I guess my bigger concern is someone choking on the balls. No one ever chokes on pussy.”
“And why would they?” I asked, shifting to lean against the headboard. “Pussy is pretty. Pussy is manageable. Balls are just awkward. They’re hairy and wrinkly, and frankly, I do not know what to do with them. I’m sorry, but when it comes to cock and balls, they are separate and unequal. I feel as though balls hang there, judging me for not even attempting to meet their needs.”
“Well…” Lauren’s brows furrowed and she gestured toward me. “You could try—”
“Nope. Nope, not even a little bit. We are not talking about how you handle Matt’s balls.”
She laughed and ran her hands through her shoulder-length honey blonde hair. I’d always wanted hair like that. Yeah, every stylist who ever touched my hair told me how much people paid to get my precise shade of roasted carrot but that never stopped me from occasionally craving something new. I also coveted Lauren’s skin. The girl could blink at the sun and have a deep, golden tan.
I, on the other hand, blinked at the sun and turned into a crispy, blistered beet.
Even though I lusted after Lauren’s beachy blondeness, my fair skin and red hair were the only tangible pieces of my mother that I carried with me, even after all this time. We shared everything, right down to the way our hair got lighter as it lengthened, as if the fire started at the roots and cooled as it moved down our shoulders.
I wished I could say I recalled that about her, that I had a store of beautifully articulate memories and moments with my mother, but I didn’t. I had the misshapen, inconsistent recollection from my nine-year-old self and one photograph.
But now I knew that my father—we didn’t bother calling him Dad; it was either Angus or Miserable Bastard—went to his grave without revealing he’d never actually destroyed any of my mother’s things, and if it was possible, I hated him more than I had when he took it all away. He’d rounded up her possessions while we cried and screamed and begged him to stop, but it wasn’t enough to rid the house of her clothes, perfume, and journals. It wasn’t enough to make us watch while he threw an armload of her summer dresses in the fireplace and let them burn until nothing remained. And it wasn’t enough to scrub her spirit from the house, right down to the sad little rock collection she brought with her when emigrating from Ireland.
If we hadn’t found the secret passage he built at our childhood home where it was all hidden…No. I couldn’t let myself think about that.
There were times when I knew he wanted to destroy me too.
He started coming into my bedroom a few months after she died. I was shattered then, still a sharp, uneven fragment of something that was once whole. It was always after a long night of drinking—then again, every night was a drinking night for Angus—and he’d sit at the foot of my bed. Sometimes it started with him crying quietly while I pretended to be asleep or his hand wrapped around my leg over the blankets. Other times he tore the blankets up over my face and stole every innocent piece of me.
For years—decades—I believed that I deserved it. I was the one who decided we were spending the whole day down the street at the McLaughlin’s pool, and I was the one who didn’t think it was necessary to check on our pregnant mother when she was obviously unwell that morning, and I was the one who was too terrified to do anything but fucking watch when Patrick and Matt found her drowning in her own blood.
