Beauty and the Mustache (42 page)

The car swerved to keep
from hitting me, and it missed by itches. It was a police cruiser,
and sitting inside was Jackson James. He was staring at me like I’d
beamed down from space.

I ran to the driver’s side
door and nearly tackled him when he opened it.

“
Jackson, I need your
help, I need your help.”

“
Ashley, slow down, slow
down. What happened to your face?”

“
Forget about my face, you
need to come with me.” I tugged on his sleeve, trying to get him to
move to where Darrell and his biker buddies were doing God knows
what to my brother.

Jackson dug in his heels
and placed gentle hands on my shoulders. “Calm down, I know you
just came from the funeral and you got to be real upset, but you
shouldn’t just run in front of cars—”

I growled, “To hell with
this!” and reached for his sidearm.

That’s right, I took his
gun.

That must’ve shocked the
poo out of him because I was already around the hood of his car and
beyond the bush when I heard him shout, “Ashley Winston! Did you
just take my gun?!”

I had no idea if he followed.

I jogged back to where
Billy’s car was parked and found the two bikers loading my brother
into his trunk; my daddy was leaning against the side of the car
holding his nose, his head tipped back.

I flicked off the safety
and pointed the gun at the bikers. “Do not touch him,” I said with
steel in my voice.

The bikers, who looked
like any of the other bikers I’d ever seen growing up—old, dirty,
sweaty, unshaven but without a beard, big belly, covered in
leather—stilled, their widened eyes moving between me and the gun I
held.

At the sound of my voice,
my father glanced up. Peripherally I saw him hold one hand out to
me, palm up, as though beseeching me.

“
Now, Ashley, baby girl,
you need to give me that gun.”

The bikers hadn’t moved
from where they stood on either side of the trunk, Billy’s
incapacitated form half in, half out of the car. They were staring
at me and seemed to be sizing me up.

My father moved like he
was going to take a step in my direction. On instinct, I lowered
the gun to the tallest biker’s knee, aimed, and fired.

He fell to the ground,
clutching his thigh. I’d aimed too high.

At the very least, I hoped
the gunshot would get someone’s attention. We were in the parking
lot of a library, for hootenanny’s sake! Shouldn’t someone have
come around by now? Didn’t people read books? And where was
everyone from the burial site? The parking lot was basically filled
with cars. Wasn’t anyone done checking out his books and heading to
the parking lot by now?

“
Holy shit!” The shorter
of the bikers exclaimed. To shut him up, I lifted the gun and
pointed it at him.

“
You will step away from
my brother or I will make you a eunuch.”

He nodded, his hands held
up in surrender. “Sure thing, sweetie.”

“
Don’t call me
sweetie!”

“
Fine, fine. Just let me
get my brother here and we’ll get out of your way.” The shorter
biker shuffled to his fallen compatriot, who was cussing and
hollering on the ground.

I watched them both with narrowed eyes,
looking for any sudden movements.

“
What the hell is going
on?” I heard Jackson’s exclamation paired with the pounding of his
footsteps on the pavement. Obviously, he hadn’t come after me until
he heard the gunshot. He was maybe the worst police officer in the
history of ever.

I didn’t take my eyes off
the bikers. “Jackson, you remember my father, Darrell? Well, he and
his friends just jumped Billy and me, and as you can see, they’ve
loaded Billy into the trunk of his car, and I think they were
trying to make off with both of us.”

My father’s ability to
speak smoothly was inhibited by his broken nose. “Now, that’s not
true. I came by to pay my respects, and Billy, he….”

“
Billy knocked himself out
and landed in the trunk?” Jackson asked, his voice laced with
sarcasm. Jackson might have been a terribly derelict police
officer, but he did know my family history. He used the radio on
his shoulder to call for backup, and I could feel his eyes on me. I
found it curious that he hadn’t yet tried to take the gun out of my
hands.

When he finished calling
in the situation on his radio, he took a pair of handcuffs from his
belt and said, “Cover me,” as he walked by.

He then walked straight to
my father and began reading him his rights. The shorter biker was
next, then the taller one. Of the three, Darrell complained the
loudest and barked something about police brutality.

Jackson was slapping cuffs
on the man I’d shot when I heard the sounds of people approaching
by foot. My eyes flickered to the side and I did a double take,
almost dropping the gun. Relief flowed through me quick and
warm.

Jethro was at the front and broke into a run
when he saw me. Drew, Quinn, and Duane were close behind.

“
Ashley, what’s going on?
What are you doing?” Jethro slowed as he neared, his eyes bouncing
around the scene like a Ping-Pong ball.

Quinn withdrew a gun from the back of his
suit pants, nodded to me, and announced his presence to
Jackson.

Drew, however, walked
straight to me—never slowing, holding my eyes the entire time—and
slipped his hand over mine, fluidly taking the weapon from my grip.
He flicked the safety on with his thumb and wrapped an arm around
my waist.

“
Are you okay?” His free
hand moved over my body as though searching for injury.

I nodded, looking up at
him. “Yeah…I’m okay.”

He placed one hand on my
chin and turned my face, his eyes shooting fire, his jaw clenching
as he looked at my cheek and eye. “You’re going to have a black
eye.”

I blinked at him and
realized he was probably correct. My right eye must have been very
swollen, because I was already having trouble seeing out of
it.

“
We heard a gunshot,”
Quinn explained. “Who fired? Who was shot?”

Jackson spoke before I
could. “I fired. I shot this one,” he pointed to the biker with the
toe of his boot. “I handed the gun off to Ashley to provide cover
so I could get the three of them sorted.”

“
Which one of them hurt
you?” Drew asked through gritted teeth.

I studied him through my
one good eye. “Does it matter?”

“
It matters to
me.”

My next words echoed what
I’d been thinking all day and emerged from my mouth before I knew I
was going to say them. “Why? I’m not your problem
anymore.”

Drew flinched, his hand
falling from my face, and he leaned back as though I’d pushed him
away.

“
What’s wrong with Billy?”
Duane was at the trunk of the car, leaning over his
brother.

I stepped away from Drew
and immediately missed the brief oasis of comfort he’d offered,
comfort which I stupidly took even though he never needed or
expected anything from me in return. I crossed to Billy to see what
could be done for him before the ambulance arrived.

Jackson walked to Drew; in
my peripheral vision, I saw him hold his hand out as he said, “You
can give me my gun back now.”

“
Hey,” Duane was standing
next to me. “What happened to you?”

“
I got hurt.” My fingers
were on the back of Billy’s head, probing for signs of bleeding; I
responded without turning. “But, don’t worry, I’ll
recover.”

“
I have learned that to be with those I like is
enough.
”

―
Walt Whitman

Time heals all
wounds. Time is of the essence. Time is short.
Time is on my side.

Lies. All lies.

Time is the enemy. Time
was playing for the other team. Timed stretched like an endless
desert. The only thing time does is stagger along like a drunk
sailor and give you wrinkles. And syphilis.

Summer begot fall, fall
begot winter, and winter begot seven thousand feet of snow in
Chicago—give or take six thousand, nine hundred, and ninety feet.
And it was only the last week of November.

Luckily for me, it was my
turn to host knit night, and I had the next day off work. This
meant that once I arrived home, I didn’t have to venture out into
the howling wind and driving snow for thirty-six hours. I could get
dressed in my thermal PJs and get drunk.

But I wouldn’t get drunk.
I didn’t like how I felt when I got drunk, how I lost control when
I imbibed beyond reason. I’d done it once since returning from
Tennessee and had to be physically restrained from drunk-dialing
Drew.

It hadn’t been pretty.
While I was intoxicated, I spilled the entire story; my friends
provided seven shoulders to cry upon.

Sandra, Nico, and Fiona
were huge Drew advocates at first. They didn’t exactly pressure me,
but they did take every opportunity to subtly hint that I should
contact him and be honest about my feelings.

I couldn’t. I kept
picturing his face, gently letting me down. When I played the scene
in my head, I was that poor girl Jennifer I’d heard the women
murmuring about at the jam session, all gussied up in my yellow
dress and wielding a banana cake to a man who could probably
out-bake anyone he knew. He would tell me how beautiful I
was—pretty face, nice piece of ass, trashy accent—but that he
didn’t need anything from me.

He’d been honest from the
start about not needing me. I couldn’t fault him for
that.

Once the three of them
realized that the only thing accomplished by their subtle hints was
my silence and a growing rift between us, they stopped
pushing.

Now we—my knitting group
and I—collectively called him Dr. Ruinous. Note the addition of the
‘i’. Sandra thought of the nickname. I think it was her peace
offering, a way to show me that she was on my side.

Still, I rarely discussed
him. Instead, I marinated quietly in my hurt feelings. When my
friends brought up my unusual silence during our knit nights, I
attributed it to the lingering grief caused by my mother’s sickness
and death, which was true to a great extent.

I missed her every day,
and I didn’t know how to mourn openly and loudly.

Therefore, I escaped in
books, but I avoided reading romance novels. I didn’t need to read
any happily-ever-afters. Instead, I settled into the contentment of
just being with the people I liked.

When I arrived home from
work Tuesday night, Kat was already there. She’d never returned the
key to my apartment, and I’d never asked for it back.

“
Hey!” she called from the
kitchen. “I hope you don’t mind, I stopped off and picked up wonton
soup and eggrolls for the gang. I’m using your one pot to keep it
warm.”

I couldn’t help my smirk.
“I have more than one pot.”

“
No, you don’t. You
literally have one pot. By the way, I grabbed your mail. It’s on
the coffee table. You got a package.”

“
A package, eh?” I was
intrigued; my momma used to send me packages with some frequency
before her death. I had no second source of packages other than
Internet stores.

I stripped off my winter
gear—boots, hat, gloves, scarf, second scarf, outer jacket, inner
jacket, a third scarf, sweater—and strolled over to the coffee
table, leaving my wool socks on. The package was really a large,
padded envelope; it had no return address and the postmark
indicated that it had been sent from Franklin, North
Carolina.

I didn’t know anyone in
North Carolina. At least, I didn’t remember knowing anyone in
Franklin, North Carolina.

I gathered a deep breath
and set to opening the package, but was interrupted by the external
intercom. Tucking the envelope under my arm, I jogged to the
speaker and pressed the button.

“
Who is it?”

“
Let us in! We’re freezing
our tits off.” Sandra’s voice was distorted and clouded in
static.

“Okay, let me hit the
buzzer,” I replied. I pressed the button and added, “I’ll leave the
door unlocked so you can come on in when you get up
here.”

I walked into the kitchen
to check out the soup. Kat must’ve gone to General Tso’s. They put
baby bok choy in their wonton soup and use both shrimp and
pork.

“
Mmm, that smells
good.”

“
I know you like General
Tso’s soup.” She gave me a shy smile—most of Kat’s smiles were
shy—and pulled out a bottle of plum wine. “And I picked this
up.”

“
Oh, nice. I’ll open it.”
I placed the unopened package on the kitchen counter and searched
for the bottle opener.

Kat and I had been talking
recently about sharing an apartment to save on rent. After
Christmas, we planned to finalize the details. Originally, I’d
wanted to go to Tennessee for the holiday, but as the date
approached, I was seriously considering staying in town and picking
up extra shifts, which was typically very lucrative. Plus, I didn’t
particularly like the idea of being in my mother’s house without
her in it. As well, the Dr. Ruinous issue was an ever present dung
beetle in my pie.