Falling Stars (8 page)

This was uncomfortable, in particular because I didn’t want Barry beating up Crank, and there was no doubt in my mind that he would do so if sufficiently provoked.

I heard tense voices out in the hall and froze. Crank’s voice. Carrie. Sean. Barry.
 
All of them were out there, I wasn’t there to keep the peace, and I might have caused the problem in the first place. I needed to get my ass out of bed and make sure Crank was okay.
 

I threw the sheet back and stumbled out of the bed way too suddenly, my head pounding and my body moving in a hundred directions at once. The first thing that happened was I left the bed. The second thing that happened was my head hit the bedroom door with a loud crack. I fell down to my knees, and I would have been fine from there, but apparently everyone in the hall heard my head hit the door, because a herd of feet moved down the hall like a pack of elephants on a rampage and then the door was pushed open by Carrie too quickly and too hard. The door flung open and smacked me right in the face.

“Ow!” I cried out.

“Julia!” Carrie shouted.
 
She looked concerned. Dea, standing next to her, raised a hand to her mouth. Crank’s mouth dropped open. Sean and Barry both blushed deep red and turned away, and that’s when I realized that not only could I feel a nosebleed coming on, but that I also had on neither shirt nor bra.

“Shoo!” Dea commanded.
 

Barry and Sean immediately moved off, but Crank was stubborn.

“Julia? What—”

“Go!” Dea ordered, practically shoving him away from the door.
 

Carrie and Dea pushed into the room and closed the door.
 
The two of them helped me to my feet and Carrie hurriedly wrapped me in the sheet.

“Lean your head back,” Dea said, “and squeeze that nose. You’ve got a bleeder coming. You’re a disaster, girl.”

“I’m not a disaster,” I grumbled. But my nose
was
bleeding.
 

Carrie wrung her hands. “Julia, I’m so sorry! I didn’t…”

“Hush,” Dea said. “She knows you didn’t mean to hurt her.”

I shrugged and let Dea guide me to a seat.
 
Within a couple of minutes they had me sitting, head tilted back, a bag of ice on my nose. Which, by the way, hurt like hell.

“You want to talk about it?” Carrie asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Don’t do no good holding it all in,” Dea said.
 

“What did I say last night?” I groaned as I asked the question.

“You said plenty, young lady. You said you loved him. You said you needed to stop and ask him for forgiveness.”

“
What?”
She must be mistaken. She thought I’d said I needed to ask Crank for forgiveness, when actually he needed to ask for mine. “I can’t have said that.”

Dea raised an eyebrow and looked at me skeptically.

I sighed. “Okay. Maybe I could have said it, just a little.”

She shook her head, then sat down in the chair across from me.
 
“Julia, I’m going to give you a little unsolicited advice.”

This ought to be fun.

“What kind of advice?” I asked.

“The kind that might save you a lot of heartache. The way I see it, you haven’t really hurt each other yet. You’ve danced around it. You’ve played games. You’ve flirted with another guy, and now you know that will piss him off. Now he knows flirting with other women will piss
you
off. But am I right in saying you haven’t done nothing about it?”

I shrugged. “Of course not,” I said.

“He hasn’t either?”

It wasn’t really a question. Apparently my drunken self had covered all this territory already.

“All right, so, no harm done. Yet. But I guarantee you, if you keep this up, there will be harm. You’re all mad at him, and he’s all mad at you, and next thing you know, one or the other’s gonna say or do something unforgivable. And I don’t think you want that.”

The whole time she spoke, Carrie was nodding along. Like she knew anything about love and pain and loss.

That wasn’t fair. Carrie had taken care of all of us—me included—her whole life.

I sighed. “You’re right.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll talk to him.”

Dea gave me a no-nonsense look in the eyes and nodded shortly. “Keep that ice on there a little while longer and you should be fine. I’m gonna get back… I left breakfast going and poor Barry’s liable to burn the house down.”

Dea opened the door and slipped away faster than I could react, my mouth only opening as the door clicked softly closed.

Julia’s nose was swollen and red, but not broken. She avoided my eyes as she came to the breakfast table and didn’t participate at all in the conversation, which made things impossibly awkward for the rest of us, since she was the only person at the table who knew everyone.

Carrie and Sean filled in the gap with a raucous debate about the differences between Norway rats and roof rats, which type of rat was more common in Boston versus San Francisco, and the best ways of controlling them as pests without harming the environment. And no, I am not making this up. They were like old chums bullshitting at a barber shop about baseball stats. Except they weren’t talking frickin’ baseball, they were talking rats and mating patterns and ecological impact and shit.
 

What planet were they from?

I sat there, staring at them, and at one point Barry met my eyes and grinned, raising his eyebrows. I shrugged and grinned back, then ate my bacon. Because really, what can you do?

I sat in an uneasy silence all the while they talked, feeling like the hammer was going to fall. I knew she would explode like a bomb at any minute. She looked hung over, her hair a mess, eyes bloodshot, a deep furrow in her brow where her eyebrows kept pulling in close to each other. Normally Julia was utterly beautiful, and right now she was too, but the expression on her face made me think those were fucking poisonous caterpillars walking across her face, not eyebrows. And I didn’t want to get
anywhere
near her teeth, because her incisors looked deadly.

So Sean and Carrie yapped it up about… Well…now it sounded like they’d moved on to the fucking bubonic plague. Julia sat there looking miserable. I sat there feeling awkward. Dea rolled her eyes at Barry, so he got up and walked in the kitchen and came out bearing another bowl of bacon.

“Here,” he said, “eat up.”

“Barry,” Dea warned him with her voice and her glare.

He sighed and rolled his eyes, then turned to me. “Crank, man. Let me help you out loading the car.”

I blinked. Really, I didn’t need any help, because all we had were a couple of duffle bags, and everyone pretty much carried their own backpacks. I didn’t say anything, though, because it was obvious what he was after.

Julia saw it too, and said the first words she’d spoken during our breakfast. “Don’t worry, Barry, we’ve got it.”

He looked at her and shook his head. “We’re just gonna chat.”
 
He stood up and crooked a finger at me like I was an errant child.
 

I kept my face blank, my posture as stoic as possible, but inside I sighed like I was a teenage girl. Julia stirred, and for a second I thought she was going to get up and defend me or something. That would have been the last straw, so I followed Barry out like I was looking forward to the conversation.

I hadn’t realized just how hard the window units were working until we stepped outside into the blasting Texas summer heat. The sun hit me like a searchlight, the hot air scorching my throat and lungs like I’d stuck my head inside an oven.

Come to think of it, that might be a good comparison.

Barry looked around for a second and his hands flexed. What do you know? He didn’t have any bags to load in the car.

I wasn’t going to make this any easier for him.
 

Seriously, his whole purpose in this little talk was to basically lecture me about
my girlfriend
. To tell me I was screwing up, that I was somehow breaking her heart, etcetera. He was going to tell me he’d kill me if I ever hurt her.
 

Since we already had the script, it seemed like we could skip to the end where he threatened my life.

I looked down at the cinders and gravel of the driveway, then opened my mouth to preempt his attack with something sarcastic, but what came, unfiltered, out of my mouth was something entirely different than the cynical, defensive words I’d planned on saying.

“Barry, I’m losing her, and I don’t know how to get her back.” My voice choked up on the words
losing her.

He clenched his fists then said what apparently came unfiltered from
his
mouth. “That’s because you’re a fucking child, Crank.”

Well, that was more like it. I opened my mouth. Then closed it again. What he said next shook me to the core.

“She doesn’t remember what she told us last night. But she wept. She wept because you two aren’t talking to each other, because she let her guard down with you and now she’s scared shitless. She loves you, you little prick. If she didn’t, I’d have kicked your ass for hurting my little girl. As it is, you’re gonna fix it if it’s the last fucking thing you do.”

I swallowed. “How?”

He shook his head. “You fucking talk with her, you moron! You tell her how you feel. You don’t react to what
might
be a problem, you ask her about it. This fucking Preston guy… did she tell you he made her skin crawl? Did she tell you he was a complete dick and that she was lonely and needed you?”

My heart sank. “No,” I admitted. “She… She spent a ton of time with him on the tour.”

“Yeah, and from what she said, you went off and started behaving like a dick from day one. Like a jealous, insecure, child.”

I sighed, then sank back against the Mustang.
 
What he said was exactly right. I’d never given her a chance to talk about it, because I got pissed from day one, in the car on the way from the airport.

I failed her when she needed me the most.

“Look man,” he said, “this is your only chance, because she told me—”

He cut off instantly when the front door of the trailer opened. Julia stalked out, her backpack thrown over her shoulder, followed closely by Sean and Carrie.
 

“That’s enough talking about me, boys.”
 

Barry met my eyes, shrugging minutely, then turned toward Julia as she approached him.

“Barry… I feel awful our visit was so weird.”

He gave her a lopsided smile. “Baby girl, you’ve got a standing invitation. I know things are weird right now, but they’ll get better.”

That sentence was followed with the same death stare I was pretty sure he’d given Iraqi commandos before dispatching them. I just nodded back. I was determined not to lose her, I just didn’t know what that was going to take.

We hugged and shook hands goodbye all around, and then we all started to pile in the car. She walked around to the driver’s side—a very clear signal.
 

I handed her the keys.
 

She blinked, a little deflated because I think she’d been expecting a fight. Her shoulders lowered a little and she let out a breath. “You drive? I may nap a little.”

“Sure,” I replied.

She gave an infinitesimal smile and handed me back the keys then walked around to the passenger side.
 

What. The. Fuck?

Whatever. Maybe I should give in more often.
 
We all got in the car and I cranked it up. We waved goodbye to the Lewises as we got the hell out of there.

As I finally reached the end of the driveway, I looked over at her and asked, “Top down?”

“Why are you asking me? Why don’t you ask them?”

Christ on a crutch. Was all that necessary? I swallowed and looked over my shoulder. Carrie and Sean looked at me with blank faces. No help at all. I raised my eyebrows and stuck my arms out.
Well?

“Sure, Crank, why don’t you put the top down?” Carrie said.

“Awesome, thanks.”

I reached for the catches on the edge of the windshield; Julia muttered something and crossed her arms over her chest.
 
I sighed and took a breath. I mean, seriously, what had I done? What was so offensive about
asking her
whether she wanted the top down or not?

“Is everything okay?” I asked as I pressed the button and the top began folding back.

Julia rolled her eyes.

“Please,” I said quietly, attempting to preserve the illusion that Sean and Carrie weren’t hearing every word. Both of them had their noses buried in books they weren’t reading. “Julia… I don’t know what I did wrong. If you don’t want the top down, it doesn’t have to be down.”

“What does it
matter?
I don’t care if you have the top up or down. Seriously, Crank. You’re going to do what you’re going to do anyway. Why bother asking me what I want?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I muttered.
 

The top was down all the way and Carrie and Sean buttoned the cover down without being asked. I took a right and began driving. In a few minutes we’d be back out on the two-lane blacktop which would lead to a divided highway which would lead to the interstate and our route home. And the sooner we were moving quickly, the sooner it would be too loud in the car to hear her talk.

With that thought, I slowed down a little. Okay. It was uncomfortable. It was stressful.
 
I felt like she was judging me and not giving me a chance, but the fact was, I’d screwed up. So I said words that were difficult for me. Sometimes really difficult. But they were necessary.

“I’m sorry.”

Silence reigned in the car for the next forty-five years or so, because she didn’t answer. I reached the divided highway and turned right, headed back south on US 385, a barren, empty stretch of divided highway that led over the horizon toward Odessa. I quickly got up to speed, the hot air blasting into the car not really cooling us at all. In the rearview mirror, Carrie’s hair flew all over the place, and she ducked down behind the seat to try and get it tied under a bandana.