Loved - A Novel (2 page)

It was my twentieth birthday. I was wearing my new red Betsey Johnson dress, my big blue eyes lined in black Kohl liner and an extra coat of mascara.  Nashville’s November was chilly but not the bone-crushing cold of Pennsylvania. I was sitting in an iron chair on the patio at Hamilton’s, sipping a French martini. All around me couples were talking and touching hands.  Groups of friends were laughing.  I was alone. 

              I swirled the pink liquid in the almost-empty glass.

              Time for a third
, I thought.

              Most of the people who had been my friends in my first two years at college were no longer my friends, by no fault of my own. Or was it?  Anyone who was still considered my friend was supposed to be at that table with me.

             
Where are they? 

              As I finished my drink, I considered all the places I could be instead of alone at my own birthday party and with too much time to think about the last two years. I could be at my apartment, fast asleep in bed but I never got any sleep anymore. I could be at Ethan’s, where there was sure to be more booze and who knew what else.

              “Another drink, beautiful?”  Joey always waited on me there, always called me “beautiful,” and always served me drinks underage.

              “Yes, please.” I smiled briefly before returning to my train of thought.

How did I end up here, alone on my birthday?

             
Twenty
, I thought. 
Only twenty years old.

I had already fallen so far.

             
June, 1999.

              “I knew you’d be out here all day so I brought you Wendy’s. And I have some good news!” 

              I had just parked my very first car in the driveway of my very first boyfriend’s house, where he and his stepdad were working to fix the car that his grandmother had given him. It was never running. He had to drive mine to prom a month earlier while his sat in my driveway, smoke billowing from the hood.

“Aw, thanks baby! We thought we had it fixed but then it wouldn’t start again. What’s the news?” He was tall but not strikingly so and strong, a soccer player, with dirty blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. He was handsome but mostly nondescript. I handed him the Wendy’s bag and he opened it and smelled the contents: double cheeseburger and large fries, his favorite.

“The owners of the Park gave me and Crystal a show!  We’re going to sing there this summer.”

              He threw his head back and laughed, and that’s when I saw it.  Clear as day, a round purple
mark on the side of his neck about halfway between his collarbone and his jaw. My face burned red hot and suddenly everything moved in slow motion.

              “What’s that?” I asked, my voice coming out weak and my pulse suddenly audible, like a drum signifying danger in a movie scene. I lifted his chin with my fingertips hesitantly as if touching him might melt my skin. His expression changed from one of youthful mischief to one of panic, like when something horrible happens that you should have, but didn’t, see coming.

              I surely didn’t see it coming.

              “It’s not what you think, Kim,” he started. It was odd to hear his voice without its usual hint of humor in his tone.  It took on a strange adultness.

              “It’s a hickey!  I...” I shook my head. The word sounded dirty, foreign. “I don’t even want to know. I’m...going.  I’m...done.” I turned and got in my car. He just stood there and watched me go, clutching the
greasy fast food bag in his hand.

              I cried for a week, couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat.  It was the first time in my life I had felt unwanted, rejected, knowing that someone had gotten to know me and then decided he didn’t want to know me anymore. A hole had been ripped open in my chest, but as they say, the younger you are the quicker you heal. 

              This was my first broken heart.

              I grew up in Westville, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town of dingy two-story buildings under a perpetually
gray sky. My parents left Pittsburgh after getting married to start a business in Kettle Lake,
near Westville, which, at the time, was a popular vacation spot for Pittsburghers. Many people owned cottages there
and spent the summers on the lake in their pontoon boats or riding the old wooden roller-coaster at Kettle Lake Park, the lakeside amusement park that opened in 1890 and hasn’t been updated since.

              My parents, both from large Catholic families, had grown up in small, crowded houses where they wore hand-me-down clothes and ate their toast even if it was burnt
as wasting wasn’t allowed. Although they raised me with similar values, they also wanted to create a life where their children had more than they did, and we were taught to believe that
we could accomplish anything and we could be anyone we wanted to be.

              We lived on nearly a hundred acres of land where I would read books in the fields or crawl out of
my window to lie in a nook in the roof and wonder at a sky full of stars.  Every week we attended Mass at St. Joseph’s Church. We prayed before meals. We didn’t use swear words. My brother and I went to a Catholic school through the eighth grade, where we walked from class to class in a line with each student holding the
door for the next. The same twenty-three kids were in my class for those nine years. My world was flipped when I enrolled in public high school, where throngs of strangers in their own choice of clothes rushed in all different directions between bells. Halfway through high school, I had almost but not quite figured out where I fit in.

              My best friend Crystal lived in the farmhouse on our land with her mom and her mom’s boyfriend.  We were very different. She rode barrel horses and spit in the grass. She wore shirts short enough to show her tanned boyish belly, knew how to pluck her eyebrows and ran her fingers casually
through her thick blonde hair. She said whatever she wanted to say and did pretty much
whatever she wanted to do.
 
Before I knew her she lived in Ohio, where she drank Jack Daniels and slept with cowboys.

              It was our love of country music that tied us together.  We spent most of our time hanging out in her room talking about boys and listening to Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, and LeAnn Rimes.  To be honest, it was probably our love of boys and country music that tied us together, though so far I had only had the one boyfriend. 

              Crystal got a summer job working at the karaoke stand on the midway at Kettle Lake Park. I would go hang out, sing with her and help get people excited to pay to sing karaoke. Mostly, people would stop to watch us sing and then move on to play skee-ball or ride the coaster or walk down to the little beach. The owners of the park were impressed with the crowds that would gather and we were thrilled when they asked us to perform a show a few times a week. We were singing along to tracks, but we loved it. We signed autographs for people who brought the clippings of our picture from the Westville Times, people who thought we were somebody. We hoped we would be someday. I didn’t let it discourage me that some of the Westville kids were spreading rumors that we got our own show because we gave the park owners sexual favors. I hated to think anyone believed something about me that was so far from the truth. But for the first time in my life people were talking about me and I liked it.

              I ran into my first ex-boyfriend once at the park with the girl who had given him the hickey. I heard they met in the Wal-Mart parking lot. I consoled myself by daydreaming that one day my CD would be on the shelves at Wal-Mart and he would be innocently walking past the music section and see my face.  He would stop, his eyes would get huge as he picked it up off the display and he would then fall to his knees and cry.

              Crystal and I went to see a big country music festival in Pittsburgh. It was a sweaty hot summer day with no clouds to provide relief from the sun. In short shorts and little tank tops we ran all over the festival, our faces reddening and our
shoulders tanning, with
stars in our eyes.  Kenny Chesney, the Dixie Chicks and Tim McGraw were on the main stage but our attention was on a band of six brothers on a small side stage. They all played their own instruments—from
dobro to mandolin—and
they were all around our age.  We watched their set until Crystal,
with her full lips and big smiles and
a mischievous look sparkling in her green eyes, caught one of the guys’ attention and got us invited into the roped off area behind the stage.

              While Crystal flirted with some of the band members, playing her giggle like a practiced instrument, I asked a million questions about touring and the music industry:
Music Row, record labels, life on the road, no detail bored me. I couldn’t wait to go on tour. Not as a singer, necessarily, but as a manager or something else exciting.

              Eventually the guys said they had to go perform a song on the big stage and we should come with them.

“Put these on and you can come with us,” one of them handed us stickers for our shirts. 

“Oh, cool,” Crystal said. 

I added, “Thanks!”

Backstage passes! As we headed inside the stadium and past the security guards, we were both giddy but tried our best to act like this was something we did all the time:
Oh yeah, that’s Tim McGraw singing “Don’t Take the Girl” and here I am watching from the wings of the stage just like any day.
Inside, I couldn’t believe I was twenty feet away from him as he performed the first country song I ever liked for a stadium full of people. I couldn’t believe Faith Hill was to my right, holding her little girl and looking gorgeous in a leopard dress. And past her, the Dixie Chicks were waiting to go on stage. 
Just like any day.  In a dream! 

Crystal and I exchanged an
Oh my gosh!
glance.

              I wasn’t just any lucky fan backstage that day. This was like a field trip to me, like an independent study
of music. I knew every country record that had come out in the last three years and the names of every writer and producer in Nashville. That day I started to think that maybe I had a chance to meet the right people, and I don’t mean just the stars. I knew that the artists couldn’t start my career in country music. It was the managers, record labels, production companies and so forth who I ought to be meeting. I also knew instinctively not to act like a fan. I didn’t ask for autographs. I was very careful not to overstep my boundaries as far as getting phone numbers or hanging out too long after shows. I made an effort to come off as mature, interesting, and most importantly, professional.

              I watched Crystal use that special magic she had to get whatever she wanted. I studied her too: the way she pulled the audience in when we performed, the confidence she showed in the tilt of her head, the sway of her hips, how she made unbreakable eye contact with a guy when she was flirting with him—that dangerous spark growing brighter and brighter.               

              As summer heated up, I found that Crystal and I weren’t always where we told my parents we were or doing what we were supposed to be doing. Her mother wasn’t around much so if we were home, we were at her house listening to music, watching movies I wasn’t allowed to watch, or trying on the clothes that I had to sneak out of my house because I wasn’t allowed to lend them to her. I liked to wear her clothes too.

              One night Crystal and I were hanging out by the tent that we had strategically placed so my parents couldn’t see extra cars when she had guys come visit us at all hours of the night. Crystal was wearing sporty pants made of a cheap shiny lilac material and a very small white tank top. You could see her belly ring, one of her many piercings not put there by a professional, but by me and a sterilized safety pin.  She had cut her long blonde hair into a pixie cut which she decorated with glittery bobby pins she stole from Wal-Mart.