“Ok, Roy, thanks.” I tried to untie my apron with my now-bloody hand and he shook his head impatiently.
“Just go. Who’s going to walk her to her car?”
Hank got up. “I’ll take her,” he said heroically.
Car. I didn’t have a car. Tara had been planning on cutting out of work later to run me home.
Hank and I walked to the parking lot, me now clutching a paper napkin over my arm. “Which is yours?” he asked.
“I don’t have a car. I’m going to wait for a ride. Thanks for walking me, Hank.”
“I’ll drive you,” Annie Whitaker said. I looked at back her, standing in the doorway of Roy’s in her hoodie and sunglasses. “Come on,” she urged. I didn’t have a lot of choice.
We walked to her car, a BMW SUV. “I’ll get beer and blood all over your seat,” I told her.
She opened the door for me. “Please, just get in.”
Annie backed up out of the spot, running over a concrete parking block and winging a pickup. “Oops! I didn’t see that truck. I’m a little nervous,” she said in a wavering voice. “I’ve never been in a bar fight before.”
“It’s probably hard to drive at night in those sunglasses.” She reached up and took them off. “You shouldn’t have come to Roy’s.” My voice was so calm. I was proud of myself—I was handling this so well. I was as tough as nails.
“I had to come! Your phone doesn’t work, and I didn’t know how to reach you. I was sitting at dinner with Macdara and she said that Charlie hadn’t been at practice, and all of a sudden I remembered where you’d be at night so I came.” I refrained from saying the NGS or swim practice at her dad’s Athletic Complex during the day would have been a safer bet. She was vigorously shaking her head. “None of what you said about kicking Charlie off the team is true! Your name has never come up at any of our Board meetings. I didn’t know you were asking for a scholarship, but I should have thought of it. We should have offered it to you.” She looked over at me and ran onto the shoulder. “Oopsie!” She overcorrected into the oncoming lane then jerked back the other way, rocking the car. “I’ve got it now. I don’t drive at night very much. It’s hard to judge distances, isn’t it?”
My heart was pounding with the same fear I’d felt as a child in the back seat of the El D, tearing down the county roads. Annie didn’t drive fast like Nana, but she was absolutely appalling behind the wheel. “I don’t understand. Coach Sean pulled me aside at practice and told me…” I trailed off. I was so confused.
“I don’t know why he said those things to you, but I’ll find out. And Luke…I don’t know what you heard, but I’ll find that out too. He’s miserable. We thought that you were mad because I was talking to you about him getting together with your sister. I wasn’t very nice about her to you. But none of this made any sense to me!”
My head was starting to throb and my arm hurt a lot. I tried to peek under the napkin, then pressed it back down. Annie glanced over at me again. “You were really bleeding. Do you need stiches?”
“No,” I said shortly. I would clean it up when I got home, and I didn’t need another medical bill.
She made a funny little sound, almost a sob. “This has been the worst year of my life. I’m not doing anything right. Milos and I…we might split up.” This didn’t surprise me. “He’s being unfaithful,” she admitted, “with someone in Bloomfield Hills. He’s never here. I tell everyone that he’s in Chicago with his family or away on business, but it’s a lie. He doesn’t even have a job right now.” She wiped her eyes, veering briefly off the road but correcting before we ran down into the ditch. “My father keeps telling me to file. That Mackie and I can move back in with him, and the prenup will screw Milos out of everything. But I don’t believe in divorce! I want to work it out with him. I love him, and I don’t want to do that to Mackie.” As she talked, she stopped paying attention to the accelerator, and the car slowed down, until we were crawling along the highway, coming to a stop. “My parents got divorced and my mom moved back to France. Did you know that Luke and I are half-French? That’s why we have French names: Anaïs and Lucas.” She pronounced it “Lou-cah.” “Our family was destroyed. Our mother got remarried and we only saw her for summers, until I went to high school. She lives in a big chateau with her new husband.” The BMW ran off the road, but luckily we were going so slowly, we just rolled to a stop in the gravel.
I counted back the years in my head. While Annie had been sad, summering in a castle in France, it was right around the time I was hiding under the bed from my blotto mother and her latest lecherous boyfriend. Well, we all had our problems.
“I’m just rambling. I’m just trying to explain that I’m not at my best right now. I’m sorry.” She turned the wheels to get back on the road, and then remembered to accelerate, so the car sped back up. “I’m sorry. This has been the worst week ever.”
“Annie, I’m not really understanding all this. I’m a just little tired,” I told her. “Maybe we can talk more tomorrow.”
“Ok,” Annie answered, “as long as you’re not mad at me anymore. Our swim team Board is full of pretty reasonable people.” Coach Sean had said the same thing to me at one point. “They wouldn’t want to kick you when you’re so, so down! I mean, everyone in the world must know how bad things are for you and your family! It’s like, who’s that English guy who wrote the sad books?”
Sad books by an English guy. I focused. “Um, Thomas Hardy? Shakespeare? E.M. Forester? Charles Dickens?”
“Yes! You guys are like a Charles Dickens book!”
Annie dropped me off in the driveway of Nana’s house. She reached over the console hug me, crying again, and admonished me to make sure to use Neosporin on my arm. Then she backed out in slow-motion, narrowly missing a tree, and lurched off down the road on the left-hand side.
I searched in my bag with one arm for my keys, got the backdoor open, and walked slowly up the stairs, noting that my bedroom door was closed and locked again. Stupid Mike. In the bathroom I wiped at the congealing blood on my arm. The gash was still bloody and angry looking. I cleaned it gently, and pulled the edges together with some steri-strips. Then I got into the shower, trying to keep my wound dry as much as I could. I let the water run over me for a long time, washing my hair and rewashing it, running the soapy washcloth all over my body, again and again. Finally I thought about how much water I was wasting and got out. I stared at myself in the mirror. I felt a little funny. A little detached, or something. I snuck into Cassie’s room for some pjs, and found her phone to text Tara that I had gotten another ride. Then I went back downstairs to my bed for the night, the couch.
I sat very still, with that same disconnected feeling. Tomorrow I would get up, and it would be the same. Another day, just the same. How would I do it? I just had to get through, somehow.
I heard a car pull up in the driveway. That was strange. I didn’t move from the couch. Then there was someone pounding on the door. Hard. And yelling my name. Huh. I walked slowly to answer it.
“Emily!” It was Luke. “Annie called me—she said you were attacked in the bar.” He was running his hands up and down my body, checking me over. “What happened to your arm?” I just looked at him. I couldn’t seem to process that he was on Nana’s front porch. “Are you all right?” He pulled me into his arms, and I leaned against him, putting my head on his chest. He wrapped his arms around me. “Emily, sweetheart, are you all right?” Then I grabbed onto him, as tightly as I could, and started to cry.
∞
“Aunt Emmy.”
