Luck on the Line (28 page)

“How did it happen?”

“It was ten years ago today. I guess we both lost a parent ten years ago… I wanted ice cream and my mother said no because it was late. My dad, he could never say no to me and he took me along for a ride. He really loved me. We’d drive everywhere just to listen to music and watch the trees go by. This time my mom stayed home to wait for us. On our way to the store we got in a car accident. I lived. He didn’t. My mom and I kept going. Now I’m here, with you.

“Listen to me James. You didn’t pull that trigger. I didn’t drive that car. We’re just the product of bad luck and tragedies.”

“When I was beating on that guy at the game,” he says, “it all just came back. I could see Kid’s face in his. I realized that anger isn’t gone completely. That’s why I’m no good for you.”

I sink into the pressure of his arm around me. I breathe in the smell of his hair and his sweat. “I’m not so sure I’m done running. That’s why I’m no good for
you
.”

“Wait a minute,” James says, sitting up straight. “Are you leaving after the opening?”

I open my mouth to say “yes.” The truth is, I don’t know. I thought I had a plan B. “My mom said that if I stayed for the opening she’d pay for school again, if I wanted to go back. That was our agreement.”

His hand on my back turns into a grip. He grabs my shirt in a fist and pulls me closer to him. It makes me gasp. I wrap my arms around his torso.

“Then what is this, Lucky? What, are you slumming with the chef before you get out of Dodge?”

He’s trying to be funny, but the hurt digs deep.

“How can you say that to me?” I ask.

“How can you just pick up and go?”

I pull out of his grip. My shoes are loud clicks in the quiet stairwell. I don’t want to think about this. It’s time for an ostrich move. He follows me willingly, finds my lips and kisses me with a fervor I’ve never felt before.

“I don’t know what this is,” I motion between him and me. “I don’t know what I want.”

He kisses my cheek, my jaw. He lets go and a chill replaces the warmth of his body. He heads to the door and pulls it back, letting in the scratchy techno beats. He looks at me over his shoulder, waiting for me to follow. But I’m frozen in place by the way he looks at me. “You know, you wouldn’t have to compromise yourself with me.”

That’s the thing. I already have.

It’s the day my mother and I are supposed to have our yearly rehash of feelings and memories of my father, and we’re at The Jet Longue, where a barrage of college Greeks mingles with young professionals and bachelorette parties. Nunzio gives me the thumbs up from where he’s sandwiched between beds of silicone. I lead James to our harem VIP alcove. When we walk past the black light, it highlights the stains on our clothes, and despite everything that’s happening, it brings a wicked smile to my lips.

Except when we get there, nothing is as I left it.

Someone bumps into me as we enter. Sky’s face is covered in tears. I grab her wrists to get her to stay, but she shakes her head.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I’m sorry for my mother, for Bradley, for everything because no one deserves to feel that way. She pulls out of my grip and I let her go.

James puts his hand on my lower back so we don’t get separated in the bacchanalia. When I pull back the curtain, I have to make sure I’m in the right alcove.

Felicity is sucking face with some guy whose muscles are bigger that James’s. Stella is standing on top of the small center table doing what is presumably the Charleston, and Bradley is dancing around her like she’s Aphrodite and he’s an unworthy commoner.

The bottle of champagne has been replaced with a bottle of vodka. How long were James and I gone? I check the time and it’s already midnight. It’s time to turn into a pumpkin and go home.

“Oh honey, you’re back!” Stella says to me. She hops off and I have to grab onto her so she doesn’t lose her balance. She kisses my cheeks. “You smell like a man!”

Then she sees James. “It’s my star Chef!”

James chuckles and pats my mom’s head as she wraps herself around him. Bradley grabs my mom’s arm and pulls her to his chest.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask Bradley. So much for pretending that I don’t know about them.

Bradley looks from me to James. “We’re dancing, baby.”

Bradley calling me baby makes my skin crawl more than any catcaller on the street. He knows how much I hate that.

“Luuuucky,” my mom says, pulling away from Bradley’s embrace and coming back to me. “Don’t you think we should do something like this in the restaurant?” She grabs hold of the silk drapery and tugs on it. She leans in too much and falls on the cushy couch, pulling me down with her.

“Okay, time to go,” I say.

She grabs my hand and yanks me back down. “But I’m having so much fun! I never get to have fun. It’s always this and that meeting and the filming and planning. I never get a chance just do
me,
you know? Even my own daughter doesn’t want to spend time with me.”

Stella looks down at the carpet. She’s slurring and unbalanced. I’ve seen my mother drunk, but never this unfocused. When she looks at my face her pupils are dilated. She runs her fingers through her hair and shimmies her body to the song. “Lucky, it’s like the music is right on my skin, you know. Bradley, give me another one.”

She holds out her open hand to Bradley, who’s dancing like a fool. Realization hits me over the head. I jolt up and push Bradley in the chest. “What did you give her?”

“Oh, come on, Luck,” Bradley says, trying to put his arm around me. “It’s not a big deal. We’re all adults.”

I’m so mad I’m shaking. I turn around to grab my mother when I feel a hand smack my ass hard. I spin around to kick him in the balls, but he’s just laughing like a kid. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the lights. James grabs him by the shirt and presses him against the wall.

“Don’t you ever touch her, you understand?”

My stomach fills with dread. The last time James defended me, he pummeled a guy in the face. It’s not that I don’t think Bradley deserves it. It’s that Bradley isn’t worth it. I put my hand on James’s shoulder and feel his body relax under my touch. His response to me moves me more than anything. Bradley scoffs at James and I can feel how hard it is for James to let go. Bradley pulls a little bag out of his pocket with fun colored little pills. Future doctor Bradley Thorston, happy-pill dispenser extraordinaire.

I watch in slow motion as my mother gets back up on the table, and I’m stuck in this bizarre freak show. She holds her hand out and Bradley starts handing her a pill. I’ve been around loads of people who party like it’s their last day on earth. I’ve tried drugs a couple of times, so I can’t be a hypocrite and tell my mother what to do. She’s a grown-ass woman capable of making her own choices.

Except, there’s something inside of her that’s broken. I refused to see it but it’s been in the back of my head since I got home. It’s in the way she drinks scotch at noon. In the way she runs away to New York when her restaurant is in the middle of opening. How she takes to fucking a guy half her age—and maybe if it wasn’t with Bradley, I’d feel better about it. It’s in the way she wants to bury herself from the world, to see all the shiny and pretty things because they’re beautiful, and that alone will make the day just a little bit better. More radiant.

I see the broken parts of my mother because they’re in me, too. Only I have the liberty to run away. She never did.

I grab the pill from Bradley’s hand. I throw it on the floor and crush it into tiny pieces.

“There’s more where that came from, Lucky,” Bradley laughs. He’s trying to be playful, but he’s just creepy. He’s the kind of guy I hate.

Stella laughs, and the disconnect in her laughter frightens me. I reach out and punch Bradley in the throat. I grab my mom’s hand. She fights me. The bottle of vodka smashes to the ground. A waitress walks in and gasps as the broken pieces clatter to the floor. Felicity breaks apart from her rendezvous and is startled by everything around her.

“We’re going!” I pull Stella’s hand.

She reaches out and smacks me across the face. Never, not even at my worst teenage tantrums has my mother hit me. Now, on the verge of 23, in front of strangers who peek into our VIP room, in front of Bradley, James, Felicity, she decides is a good time. My skin stings. I see the regret in her face right away. Surprisingly, I don’t feel angry. I’m overwhelmed with grief, with the need to fall down and cry, but then I realize that if I break into a bunch of tiny pieces, who will be there to pick her up?

“We’re
going
.” I say again.

Stella whimpers like a child. She jumps off the table. I see it happening, but my reflexes are too slow. The floor is slick and wet and covered in glass. Stella’s foot slides. I try to grab her, but I end up with air. The waitress screams. Bradley tries to climb over me to get to my mother. James pulls him up and holds him back.

Even under the loud pulse of the music, I can hear my mom’s head smack against the table.

My favorite memory of my mother comes a little bit after my father died. We were living with some relatives in Poughkeepsie, New York and neither of us had any appetite for anything unless it was covered in sugar. Cookies and black coffee for breakfast, frozen popsicles for lunch, apple pie and whipped cream for dinner.

On the first anniversary of his death, we took a pint of his favorite chocolate and cherries ice cream, sat at his gravesite, and ate the whole thing. I even took an extra spoon and set it on the tombstone.

We did that every year until we moved to Boston. I think one of the reasons I hated Boston so much was because we couldn’t do that ritual. We just settled for dinner at a “nice place.”

In the emergency room, a doctor shines a light in my mother’s eyes. She responds well, but it’s clear that she’s on drugs. They put her on IV fluids, and three bags later, she’s no longer dehydrated. There’s a bandage around her head where a gash has finally stopped bleeding. She has multiple cuts on her upper thighs from where she fell on the broken bottle. The worst part for her was asking for a female doctor, because she couldn’t stand the idea of the handsome male doctor turning her on her side and stitching up her ass. That’s my Mom.

James and Felicity are outside, waiting for us. My mom hasn’t said a single word. I don’t expect her to. I’m surprised she hasn’t asked for a private room. Instead, she lay back, sectioned off by curtains from all the other minor tragedies in the ER.

I have so many questions I want to ask her, but when I take a look at her swollen lips, the dark circle under her grey eyes, my heart breaks for her and I stay quiet. When the doctor releases us, and James drives us back to the apartment, we still don’t talk.

Felicity whimpers a cry. Truth, when my mother hit her head, I lost it. She didn’t move and every fear and regret in my body manifested inside of me like a demon. I turned around on Bradley and broke his nose with the palm of my hand. Security separated us and he got arrested for drug possession, but knowing his father’s connections, he won’t even get processed. Truthfully, I don’t want him to go to jail or ruin his life, but I don’t want him within yards of my family.

James helps me carry my mom up the steps and into her room. It’s the one part of the penthouse I haven’t been in. My heart stops a little when I see his face on the wall. It’s a photo of my dad, mom, and me on a camping trip. I had braces and was super dark from all the time under the sun. My mom was the only one who was sunburnt. Dad’s eye was swollen from a bee sting. Our hair covered in twigs and leaves, but we were at the edge of a cliff, the grand expanse of New York State behind our arms spread like eagles.

There’s a series of frames with my graduation pictures, each one surlier than the last. There was the one time my hair was green. I cringe. What was I thinking? I move along the walls. There’s even some of my dad’s stuff. His golfing trophy, his apron that says “Kiss the Chef.” There’s a picture of me at my first pageant, my mom using her spit-covered thumb to get a dirt smudge from my face, and me recoiling from her. I remember my dad laughing his ass off.

James kisses the top of my head and retreats without a word. When I turn around, my mom is watching me.

“This is where you keep all of it,” I say.

She cough-laughs. “Did you really think I didn’t have any picture of you two anywhere?”

I shake my head. Sit at the foot of the bed. “I don’t know what I think anymore.”

“Oh, honey… I’m so sorry.” She leans her head back. “I’ve been such a fool.”

I shrug, like it’s no big deal. But this isn’t something that I can shove my head into the sand from. I can’t keep avoiding this.

“Ma, Bradley?”

She half laughs, half groans. She takes on her dainty air once again. “Can I blame it on a mid-life crisis?”

“Well, if men get shiny cars and models half their age, I suppose why can’t women?” I try to laugh. “But why Bradley?”

She studies her fingernails. When she fell she broke off two. They’re wrapped up in bandages. “He made me feel beautiful again.”

“But you are beautiful.”

“Not the way I used to be. I feel like every man that’s ever loved me has been fat and sloppy and
old
. I even have a nice old wine maker trying to court me. He’s kind. He makes me laugh. So naturally I want nothing to do with him.”

Shame bubbles up in my chest because I know exactly how she feels.

“I know being with Bradley was wrong. But he took me to parties and we had stupid fun. Like you do.”

“Like
me
?” I jump up from the bed. “Mom, I don’t have stupid
fun
. I
work
. I work my ass off in shit bars and put up with assholes all the time. That’s not fun for me.”

She sighs. It’s almost like we can’t say anything to each other without pissing the other off. “Then why do you do it? Why don’t you just come home? Pick something that won’t have you living at the bottom of the barrel with god knows who.”

That makes my blood boil. “You mean the
top
of the barrel like you? Like Bradley? Bradley, Dr. Plymouth Rock, who gives his
sidepiece
ecstasy while cheating on his girlfriend in her face? Jeez, what has become of me that I align myself with lowly barmaids who put up with drunk business guys just to pay for their rent or support their kids or just make a living! Do you know how fucked up your life priorities are right now?”