Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (13 page)

Not in my trailer park, of course. Hell, a “nice” yard was one that didn’t have garbage or old tires in it. My sense of “nice” and Joe and Trevor’s sense of the same word were worlds away.

And that was increasingly a problem.

When I’d moved out here I knew we’d have a class divide. That was kind of a
duh
. As I became more educated, taking more classes at Harvard and working on the business end of the band, I came to see that money sure don’t equal class. There’s a shifting set of standards that each class puts out there for its members, and if you want to move up or down, you not only need to master the core set of basics, but you need to be ever watchful. Ever vigilant. One misstep and you stand out.

Standing out makes you a target.

Herd mentality is what it is, and you find it among the richie-riches on Beacon Hill or in Weston and Sudborough, and among the poorest folks in Fitchburg, Springfield and Lowell. The only way to really get along in life is to get along. Don’t make waves. Ripples are okay, and even entertaining in a group.

Waves make everyone move.

And that is unacceptable to some people who are only comfortable in one place. They’re fine with sweating a bit and watching other people move, but by God you make them nudge an inch and they howl.

Fingers pointed directly at you.

And they’ll do whatever it takes to stop you.

I saw this back in Ohio. It’s why I admired Josie so much. She wasn’t supposed to go off to college after she plowed through her associate’s degree in nursing. That alone made ripples; uprooting her entire life to go off and get a bachelor’s degree was an affront to a lot of people in Peters. People can be threatened by someone with ambition, no matter how low the stakes or how small the rewards.

And while lots of people will plant a smile on their face and say they’re pleased, behind closed doors the whispers form a kind of toxic cloud of gas that goes out on the wind and finds you eventually.

My conversation with Trevor the other night haunted me. I told him the Old Doc story because I meant it. No one wants to have a secret inside them so big it finally blows spectacularly, like a pressure cooker full of chili that busts a seam.

On the other hand, if it does blow, everything fades over time. Calms down. Blows over.

That doesn’t mean you don’t leave chili stains forever on the ceiling, though.

I wasn’t bothered by telling the story, nor by Trevor’s reaction.

I was bothered by my own hypocrisy. Because Old Doc ain’t Trevor.

Old Doc is
me
. Minus the cock, of course.

Notice how I berated Trevor and Joe all the time for not being open about me? But you probably also see that I wasn’t exactly forthcoming with Mama about my relationship with them.

And I still hadn’t told them about Mama’s wedding, which was coming up in two weeks. They’d finish their final papers and we’d go on tour this fall if Trevor got his head out of his ass, but I still hadn’t come clean with Mama.

I was naked in the closet humping a Jimmy Choo. In the dark.

And here I am, at the address Trevor gave me. Nice house. Big colonial with the giant picture window over the garage. Trevor calls that a “bonus” room. How big does a house have to be before you start calling rooms a “bonus”? In my world, your bonus room is that
yay—
you have a room. Period. I turned a potting shed into my purple passion place, just to have two minutes of peace to myself.

And now Trevor’s childhood home has a bonus room bigger than my entire trailer in Ohio.

I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. The cold leather felt weird, sending a piercing pain between my eyes.

Maybe this was all a big mistake. I shouldn’t be here. If anyone should be here, it should be Joe
and
me, if the goal here was for Trevor’s parents to get to know his romantic interest.

That was not allowed.

I inhaled deeply and opened the car door, ready to lie.

So far, it had all been lies of omission.

Time for lies of commission.

Crocuses dotted the long sidewalk to their front door, the yellow hard not to smile at. We were getting on toward that second half of spring, where everything lights up with joy at the prospect of the long, cold Massachusetts winter dissolving. The twilight made everything look a little sharper, a little more worthy of measure and appreciation as I reached for the doorbell and pressed with a shaking finger.

It’ll be okay
, I told myself. They’re just people. Just like me. I looked down at myself. Pearl earrings, shoes with a slight heel, and a wrap skirt. I was trying to fit in and look the part.  

The door opened and it was like something out of a movie. Susan Connor wore a sweater set and pearls, with matching earrings. She could have just gotten back from a fancy luncheon, while Doug Connor looked like he’d stepped off a golf course, wearing a striped polo shirt and tan khakis.

I wanted to flee. These were not my people.

Like a mute, I just held out the dish of ambrosia salad I brought. Trevor had told me I didn’t need to bring anything, but where I’m from, you show up with something. Anything. It’s rude not to. He suggested wine but what if I brought the wrong kind? Besides, I imagined these people didn’t drink the three dollar cheapo stuff like me and Josie.

“What’s this?” his mom asked, eyes lighting up as she took the glass bowl.

“Ambrosia salad,” I said, my throat dry. “It’s for dessert.”

She turned and looked at the mini marshmallows and mandarin orange slices, then back and me. “Thank you! This is wonderful!” His mom took it, disappeared, and came right back. As she stepped aside, Mr. Connor put out his hand for me to shake. “Come on in! Trevor isn’t here yet, but we can sit and talk.”

Or shove bamboo under my fingernails.

Same difference.

Where the fuck was Trevor? It was bad enough I had to pretend to be only his girlfriend, but to leave me hanging and sitting in the God-damned twenty-first century version of a parlor with his parents, who eyed me like they were trying to decide whether I’d make good grandbabies for their son, was over the top.

And then my salvation walked down the hallway and gave me the hugest bear hug ever.

“Rick!” I said, bursting as my lungs lost every ounce of air. Trevor’s older brother was a good two inches taller than Trev and about fifty pounds heavier, most of it fat. He looked like a blonde bear. He couldn’t speak, but he made happy grunting sounds and put me down, finally, with a big, loopy grin.

Trevor’s mom and dad shared a look of shock.

“You know each other?” his mom asked, eyes on Rick, who was beaming.

“I go with Trevor to visit Rick most weeks. We play piano.”

Rick started his hand flapping, which he did when he was happy, and he turned and walked to the piano, opened it, and played the first lines of “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer.” 

His mom gave me a shiny smile, eyes lit up by suppressed tears. “You and Trevor taught him that?”

I shook my head and grinned as Rick played the entire song, turning it into a classical music piece. “Mostly Trevor, but yeah. Someday,” I whispered, “we’d love to have him on stage.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said quickly. “He’s too...”

I reached out and touched her arm. She flinched. I pulled back. “I understand,” I said tightly, nineteen different emotions filling me at once. “The rages.”

She nodded mutely, her face going blank on purpose.

Maybe she was controlling too many emotions, too.

Both of his parents had a different feel about them, Trevor’s dad putting his hand on my shoulder and guiding me into the living room, gesturing for me to have a seat. I guess finding out I was part of helping with Rick made them change their opinion of me. Or something. Who knew? Right now my hands and feet felt like bricks and my heart was about to defect from my chest.

But when I watched Rick play I calmed down.

Just as we were sitting, the doorbell rang. Ah, Trevor.

Uh, nope.

A teeny tiny woman, so small I could stuff her into a large Vera Bradley purse if I wanted to, and an enormous man entered, Trevor’s mom planting air kisses on the woman and Trevor’s dad doing the lumberjack handshake with the guy. They looked familiar, both with dark hair, olive skin and—

“Darla! I’d like to introduce you to Herb and Joanne Ross. Joe’s parents.”

Rick stopped the piano playing dramatically, cut off like he’d been shot. Like in the movies.

Like my heart.

“Joe’s parents?” I croaked out.

“Yes.” The woman had enormous brown eyes, the irises impossibly big, and she looked at me with no expression, but her lips were tight. Bright red lipstick covered what looked like a cat’s butthole.

I stood there, awkward and feeling like my hand should know what to do next. I was still reeling from how nice the house was, with big, fancy striped cloth on the couches that didn’t have stains. The seats didn’t sag, and there were so many pillows in every color you could imagine. The sheer panels of the curtains were different, rotating colors that matched up perfectly to the stripes in the couch cloth.

People in the Boston area have a thing about hardwood floors, which confuses the fuck out of me. Where I’m from, the pinnacle of success is being able to afford the really nice, plush wall-to-wall carpeting. Companies have payment plans and everything. You rent a carpet steamer once a year from the grocery store and clean the shit out of your carpets.

Here? If you had carpet it was low class.

I couldn’t win.

“Nice to meet you,” I finally said, offering my hand to Herb Ross. He gave me that fake woman’s hand shake where his fingers landed on either side of my middle finger’s knuckles. Creepy. And he looked at a spot just over my head, never actually meeting my eyes. 

Mrs. Ross was giving me the once over like I was an immigrant domestic worker being considered to clean her toilets and found wanting.

“And you,” I said to her, finally getting my bearings and squaring my shoulders, realizing that with a woman like this you had to kill her with kindness. Or a well-timed poison, but matters hadn’t come to that.

Yet.

She ignored decorum. Left me hanging with my hand outstretched and a smile plastered on my face like decoupage glaze.

“You’re Darla. The Darla that my Joe talks about once in a while.”

Once in a fucking while?

My smile faltered. Her eyes gleamed, the change so slight it wouldn’t be caught by most people.

I’m not most people.

“You manage the band.” She said “band” like trash.

“I do,” I said, upping my perky notch by a factor of two. Again, with people who use their assholery as leverage to gain control, the best approach is to pretend it doesn’t get to you.

I was dying inside, but fuck all if I’d ever let her see that.

Yet she did. This one was a Jedi master of assholery. The Bitch of all Bitches. I may have met my match. But hell if I was backing down easy.

“And you do this professionally?”

“For now, yes, but it doesn’t pay well.”

She snorted. “Of course it doesn’t.”

I was about to mention the national tour when a ruckus at the door drew our attention. Rick began to play the song “Random Acts of Crazy” slowly, the one Trevor wrote for me, just as my sun god walked in, a carefully neutral half smile on his face.

His eyes met mine.

They screamed, “What the hell are Joe’s parents doing here?”

Mine screamed back, “PLEASE HIT ME WITH THE FIREPLACE POKER AND PUT ME OUT OF MY MISERY.”

He approached me, slid a calming arm around my waist, and gave me a chaste peck on the cheek. Then he turned to the grown ups in the room (we didn’t count) and said, “Hi, everyone.”

His dad said, “We invited Herb and Joanne because we haven’t seen them for so long.”

Joanne snorted. “Because you haven’t invited us, Doug!”

Trevor’s mom maintained her mask, the fake smile immutable, but her eyebrow twitched.

This was going to be a very long night. I wished for some of them concentrates Joe offered freely the other day.

And a capsule of cyanide. Just in case.  

Trevor unwound his arm from my waist, the lack of skin making me feel abandoned, and he walked over to Rick, murmuring something in his ear. Rick nodded, then changed to a quiet Bach, the sound a bit disturbing and soothing at the same time.

I only knew it was Bach because Joe insisted I learn the name of composers when we listened to classical music in the car.

I heard a soft chirping sound and looked down to the left of the piano. A tiny little gerbil sat in a bunch of paper shavings. Ah. Rick’s gerbil. Mr. Fluffer (don’t blame me...I didn’t pick the name). It went with Rick everywhere. The music seemed to soothe the little beast. Too bad it didn’t have that effect on the adults.

You ever feel like two distinct people at the same time, and like one of them is screaming at you nonstop while the other one keeps going about your life like everything’s perfectly normal? It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s likely to drive you mad. I don’t mean like you’re hearing voices the way schizophrenics do, or like some neurotic thing where you loop through layers of anxiety over and over again.

I mean the kind of perfectly understandable split in your brain when something’s just not right.

And yet you’re expected to pretend it is.

We don’t have these fucked up games back in Ohio. You don’t like someone? You just say it. Then again, we’re all from the same hometown and have known each other forever, so we get the fights out of the way by eighth grade or so. If you’re gonna be enemies with someone, it’s likely because they bullied you in fifth grade or stole your boyfriend in ninth.

Not because you drive the wrong car or don’t have the right degree from a good Ivy League school.

Joe’s mom had a way of putting a wall around herself and walling in the throne she clearly thought she lived on, the weight of her crown freezing her eyebrows in place. And good for her. If that was important to her, then she could feed off that all she wanted.