“My bags are packed, I’m ready to go,” he sang.
I smiled at him, squinting into the morning sun behind his head.
“Isn’t this kind of early for you to be up?”
He laughed. “Oh, Amelia. Always with the jokes.”
I used to say that Mason and I were technically still together. We’d never actually broken up, after all. We had been dating, if you could even call it that. It was more like, we’d hung out mostly with other friends and by ourselves a few times.
When he had his accident, though, it was like he just disappeared. No call. No letter. No explanation. Romantic comedy over. I spent more time than I’d like to admit wondering what could have been between us. What if he’d accepted that his baseball dream was over, gone to college, gotten a job? For months, I expected him to just show back up in Cape Carolina, kiss me passionately, thank me for waiting for him. But that was all very, very long ago.
“What’s up with you and my brother?”
“You jealous?” I retorted, winking at him.
“Hell yeah, I am.”
“I’m a little old for you,” I said as he lifted the other suitcase into the back of the car. The entire town marveled at Mason’s ability to continuously date twenty-year-olds, but I didn’t think it was a mystery. They were the only ones who didn’t know better.
“You gonna just keep pretending that you don’t know my brother’s in love with you?”
I smirked at him and leaned against the car, crossing my arms. He took a final drag of his cigarette and stomped it out.
“Parker’s heart will always belong to Greer.” I shrugged. “I’m not trying to spend my life in the shadow of a dead woman. There are plenty of living women whose shadows I can be in.”
Mason scoffed and squinted at me. “Parker has always had the hots for you.”
I eyed him curiously.
He eyed me back and sort of half chuckled. “Oh my God. You don’t know.”
“Know what?” I wasn’t just playing coy. I really didn’t know. And I was morbidly interested to find out.
“The fight.”
Those two words took me back to the smoky Tackle Box. We were all underage, but no one cared. Mason was royalty. I was the royal girlfriend—or well, the royal girl of the week, at least. Parker was the royal brother. All the other people in town were subjects. I remember thinking that Parker, Watson, and Spence were a little too fired up that night, a little too rowdy, more than a little too drunk. But Mason had just pitched his last game at Cape Carolina High, a complete shutout. I had been the girl who had run out on the field to congratulate him, the one he looked for, the one whose lips he kissed for the whole town to see. I was the one whose ear he’d whispered into, as we walked off the field, “This is howit’s always going to be, babe. Big wins. You and me.” The glare of stardom will blind a girl, especially a seventeen-year-old one.
I never really knew what happened, only that one minute I was dancing barefoot by the bar with my girlfriends, basking in Mason’s victory as if it were my own, and the next minute, Watson, Spence, and Parker were in a pile on top of Mason, and he was screaming in a way that made the ambulance, the arm broken in three places, and the surgery less of a surprise. But, still, what happened was unthinkable.
And then everything was over for Mason. His career. Our relationship. It was worse for him than for me, of course, but to just be abandoned like that… The way he threw me out of his life without a single word changed me. I longed for him the way only a teenaged girl truly can, spent nights crying myself to sleep and days moping around. I promised that I would never mourn for a man like that again. I sulked for a couple months of my senior year. Then I went to college. And, well, in the fun and the freedom and the buffet of boys, I forgot about Mason. I realized that we didn’t really know each other, that we had nothing in common, and that what we’d had wasn’t real. I’d never looked back. And I’d never let a man do that to me again. Not even Thad.
But I also couldn’t help but wonder if maybe refusing to truly let yourself fall in love all the way wasn’t really a way to live.
“I said that maybe now that I was graduating I could finally nail you,” Mason said, breaking me out of my thoughts after lighting another cigarette. “Then I’d throw you back intoDogwood and move on to all the hot chicks on the road.” He visibly winced as he said it. Then he whispered, “Sorry. I was a stupid kid.”
That night was almost half my life ago, but even still, it stung. But his contrition helped ease the sting a little. Maybe, somewhere, way deep down, Mason had felt something for me, something that was creating a small bit of remorse now.
“Lovely,” I said. But I still wasn’t sure where he was going with this.
“Parker got up in my face and said, ‘If you ever say something like that about her again, I will end you.’?” He shrugged and looked down at the ground. “I wasn’t worried about it; I didn’t care. My punk-ass little brother wasn’t going to take me down. After that no-hitter, I was flying as high as I had ever flown in my life. I shouldn’t have kept at it. I honestly don’t even remember what I said. But it was about you—and it set him off.” Then Mason looked back up at me, the pain in his eyes so sharp and prescient that I had to look away. “And he did. He ended me. For you.” He took a drag of his cigarette and half smiled.
I felt sick all over. My stomach, my head. Mason’s life had been ruined because of me. Parker had ended his brother’s career to defend my honor. That broken arm had changed his life. I wanted to say something to make it better, but there wasn’t anything to say. Yeah, he’d been an ass, but even an ass doesn’t deserve to have his life ruined because of a stupid insult.
“Look,” he continued. “I know he didn’t mean it. We wereall drunk, and when I took that swing at him, all those boys just came at me. I shouldn’t have said it.” He paused. “And I shouldn’t have disappeared on you. It just seemed easier.”
Mortifyingly, his words put back together something that had been broken inside for nearly half my life. But I just shrugged.
“At the time it didn’t seem to matter much what I did,” he said. “But now I’ve had a couple decades to think about it, and I’ve realized that the way we treat people is really all we have. Either way, yeah, my brother ruined my life. But his got ruined worse in the end. He was defending you with his life even way back then.” He smiled cockily. “And I do mean his life. Because I could easily have killed him with my bare hands. I just thought you should know he always thought you were the one for him.”
