Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (29 page)

“Sometimes,” Mama said after a long sigh, “I felt like I bore the burden of that night. Like if I’d have just insisted someone else drive...”

We all flinched. Just a little. She was saying what everyone had thought before. Uncle Jeff crashed the car ’cause he’d been drinking. That was fact. You can deny and argue but you can’t change reality.

No matter how hard so many folks try.

“I’m sorry,” Mama said, suddenly looking at Josie. She reached for her hand and grasped it like it was a life preserver. “I’m so sorry for what happened to Marlene. And your daddy.”

Josie collapsed into Mama’s arms, their hug so tight there wasn’t room for anything but grief and forgiveness. “Oh, Cathy, no. No apologies from you. I love you. It happened, and we all need to move on. I’ve never, ever blamed you.”

Her words came out in dripping sobs, half-formed and leaving an ache in my gut that made me need a hug, too.

But not from the two people in the room.

Would I ever stop missing Trevor and Joe?

Mama pulled back and sniffed, hard, patting Josie’s arm. “You’re such a good girl. You know that?”

Josie’s face fell apart, the tears coming in a new wave.

“No.”

“Well, you are. And don’t let no one tell you otherwise. Especially your mother.”

And, as if on cue, Josie’s phone rang. She laughed, that helpless, self-conscious sniffly laugh you do when a tender moment is over and you need to get back to attending to regular life.

“Josie?” I heard Alex’s voice crack out of the tiny phone speaker. “We need help. Joe and Trevor are barricaded in the men’s room and your mom is kind of on a tear.”

“Say what?” I shouted. “Did you just say
Joe and Trevor
?”

Tender moment
over
.

“Yes,” Alex replied. Josie put the phone on speaker. “They’re hiding.”

“From what?” Josie asked.

“From your mom.”

“My mom? What is my mom doing at Jerry’s bar?” Josie asked, incredulous.

Mama snorted. “The right question is, when is your mom
not
at Jerry’s?”

“Why are Trevor and Joe hiding in the men’s room?” I asked. “And what the ever-loving fuck are they doing here?”

“They’re hiding from Marlene,” Alex explained.

“What? Why?” I wailed. “You need to go back to square one and explain why my ex-boyfriends are here!” My heart sped up double time and a cold flush made me feel like a plucked chicken. 

Josie talked to Alex in a voice I had only ever heard
him
use with
her
. “Alex? Honey? Just slow down,” she said in a soothing tone. “Start from the beginning. Tell me what’s happening.”

“Your mom showed up right after Trevor and Joe arrived—”

I wasn’t hearing things. Trevor and Joe were here? Why?

“—and she, uh, told us she was the stripper for Calvin’s bachelor party. Said it was her wedding present to him and Cathy.”

“Oh, God,” me, Mama and Josie said in unison. We all wiped our eyes, and Mama started laughing, reaching for her e-cig. 

“She undressed and was wearing pasties and a leather-print thong—” 

“Give me a nail file. Please,” Josie whispered.

“This is not the time to be doing your nails!” I hissed.

“I need to pierce my eardrums,” she said.

“—and then she offered to marry Calvin, too, and said he could have sisterwives—”

Mama stood up suddenly. “That bitch!”

“—and she came on to Trevor and Joe, hands everywhere, like tentacles. Seriously, Josie, it was like she suddenly had six hands—”

“She what?” I screamed.

“—and then Trevor and Joe ran while I blocked for them. Josie, she did things to my crotch that a man can’t
unfeel
.” I could hear him wince.
Hear
him. Wince.  

“But why are Trevor and Joe barricaded in the bathroom?” Josie asked.

“Because she keeps insisting that if they can have a threesome with Darla, they can have one with her. Something about blood being thicker than water and it gets creepy and disjointed after that.” Alex sounded like he shuddered, his voice shimmery suddenly. “Please, Josie. Please get here now,” he begged. Damn. Never heard a grown man who topped out at six and a half feet with arms like a hockey player’s beg for his petite little hundred pound woman to come rescue him.

From her mama.

Cue the dueling banjoes.

“What the hell are Trevor and Joe doing in
Peters
?” I asked. 

“Please, Josie,” he pleaded. “She’s already pinched my ass so many times, I’m afraid the bruises are going to make me look like a Dalmatian.”

“On my way now. You stay put.” Josie got off the phone and looked at me. “You need to come with me.”

“Me?” I protested. “No fucking way. I don’t want to see Trevor and Joe!”

“We’re their only hope.”

Mama took a long drag off her e-cig and limped over to her purse.

“C’mon, girls.”

We stared at her, incredulous. “You’re coming with us?”

“Hell yeah, I am. I got to protect my man from my own sister at his bachelor party the night before marrying me.”

And that was the moment I felt like I was back home again and nothing had really changed.

C
HAPTER 11

Darla

By the time we got to Jerry’s, the parking lot was half full. I knew Calvin’s bachelor party wasn’t that big, so word must have gotten out that Marlene was stripping. Either that, or it was dollar beer night.

My bet was on dollar beer night.

We walked in, stepping over old Jack, who was on his belly and passed out just to the right of the sidewalk. Mama looked down and shook her head.

“Someone kind took his dentures and put them in his front shirt pocket,” she said. “Betcha it was Calvin.”

Remind me not to shake Calvin’s hand.

We walked in to find about twenty men, most of them about Mama’s age, standing in a huddle around what appeared to be Aunt Marlene doing a dance on a chair. As we opened the door, Josie pushed it all the way back and we heard a little “oof” sound.

She walked in, then closed the door to find Alex hiding in the dark corner.

“I’ve never been so happy to see you two,” he gushed.
Gushed
. Men don’t gush.

Alex did, though. His arms went around her and picked her up, crushing her.

“Put me down,” she squealed.

He complied, his eyes darting around the dim room. Some sort of stripper music played in the background, a soulful song I vaguely remembered from the radio. Marlene took a sloppy cocktail offered by what looked to be my friend Jane’s older brother and drank the whole thing down in two gulps.

We all just stared, gape-mouthed.

Then Josie turned to Alex and looked up, her face flexed with a kind of mixture of shame, fury, horror and fight. Her chin tightened and looked like a third fist.

“You said you wanted to get to know my family, Alex. You said that I was afraid of commitment and not wanting to bring you home to meet my mother was part of not trusting you or your love.” Her voice turned into a deep, feral growl. “Still feel that way?” 

Alex looked like she’d just whacked his face with the bottom of a cast iron pan.

“Josie, I—”

“Jesus H. Christ, Marlene, put those tits away. They’re hanging so low those pasties might as well be drill bits for installing baseboards around the edges of the bar floor.” Uncle Mike’s voice rang out, loud. “I go and try to pinch off a loaf and come out and this is what I get? Put something on.”

“I can’t!” Marlene screeched back. “My clothes are in the women’s room and them boys of Darla’s are hiding in there. Pussies!”

“Ain’t my boys no more!” I called out, hands curling into fists. I would never actually hit my aunt. Not unless she came at me first, that is.

“Darla!” Mike called out, throwing his arms open wide for me to climb into his embrace. He squooshed me and gave me a big kiss on the cheek. “You were next on my pit stops. I came straight here from the road.” Uncle Mike drove a semi more than he didn’t. “How the hell are you doin’?” 

Now, this is the part where a normal family would acknowledge that finally seeing long-distance relatives after a couple of years generally does not include a drunk, naked aunt doing a striptease for her future brother-in-law in front of her own brother, while harassing her niece’s ex-boyfriends.

Before I could open my mouth and point out any of those aforementioned oddities, something flashed in Uncle Mike’s boozy eyes.

“Wait. Boys. As in more than one?” Uncle Mike’s eyebrow went up in the air so high it scratched the ceiling. He began unbuttoning his flannel shirt, revealing a beer belly that looked like skin stretched over a keg with white cotton on top.

“Yes,” I said.

The room went dead quiet.

Aunt Marlene licked her lips. “Cathy, I think our girls were switched at birth.” She gave Josie a withering glance. “Mine’s about as big a prude as can be, while yours is out fucking two guys at the same time. High five, Darla!” She lifted her arm in the air and well, now. Wasn’t that cute.

Aunt Marlene had dyed her pit hair bright orange.

She looked at her own armpit, ’cause why not? Everyone else was. Or her boob. Some of the guys were definitely looking at her boob. Alex was looking away.

Uncle Mike barged over and threw the flannel shirt over her. It practically wrapped twice around her. How big old Mike and tiny little Marlene were genetically related was a mystery.

“Cover yourself, for Pete’s sake.”

“I don’t mind if she shows off her titties,” a guy named Pete said. I looked over. Oh, yeah. Pete Durand, the guy who sells auto parts at the little store attached to the gas station. “Don’t cover up the show on account of me.” 

Mike gave him a look that made Pete’s eyes go wide as he stumbled back a bit. You don’t fuck with Mike when it comes to his “girls.” Me, Mama, Josie, and Marlene had a one man protection army.

When Mike was around.

And especially now, with a lot of beer in him. The man was the size of a bear and itching for a fight.

“Mikey, cut it out!” Marlene said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Her mascara was smeared everywhere and whatever lipstick she might have been wearing earlier was long gone.

I noticed all these details in a strange sort of haze. Because somewhere back down the hall, Trevor and Joe were there. 

I hadn’t seen them in over a week. It felt like a year. And they were here. No text. No phone call. No warning.

“Darla,” Alex whispered to me, “I think Marlene’s distracted enough that you can go rescue Trevor and Joe.” 

“Rescue them! I don’t even want to see them!” I crossed my arms over my chest. “They got themselves into this mess. I’m not responsible for them any more. I broke up with them, remember?”

He looked confused. “Well, sure, but common decency—”

“Both of them?” Uncle Mike’s voice boomed in my ear, his hand wrapping around my upper arm even as I still crossed them. He pulled me away from Alex. “When I saw you three on the side of the road two years ago as I was hauling out of town, I thought that was some kind of joke,” he hissed. “But both of them? You’re with
both
of them?”

Five different emotions flashed through his unfocused eyes. Most of them involved beating the shit out of Trevor and Joe, I knew.

Mama was talking to Josie, right behind Mike. Calvin was next to her, rubbing her shoulder and drinking from a brown bottle. Alex stood, obviously uncomfortable, but a safe distance from flannel-wrapped Marlene, who somehow managed to light a cigarette and drink a cocktail while keeping her breasts covered.

Um, scratch that. There went the shirt.

“Darla! you answer me,” Mike growled, tightening his grip on my arm.

This was the moment, wasn’t it? The reckoning. My conversation with Mama had blown my mind, to realize she’d known all along. Obviously, Mama and Mike hadn’t talked about it. Just as well. Looked like Mike was about as capable of understanding this as Marlene was of not making passes at anything with a cock.

I’m not ashamed to say I froze. Just turned to stone. I knew which words to say. They were pretty easy in the grand scheme of things. “I was in a long-term, permanent threesome with them.” “I was their girlfriend and they shared me.”

None of those words came to mind in that moment, though.

Just one word.

Shame.

It radiated from my pores like a fever, like a sickness I’d come down with as Mike’s eyes sharpened and he huffed, clearly upset that I wasn’t correcting him. Wasn’t answering him.

Wasn’t denying anything or confirming it.

As long as I stayed balanced on that most dangerous ledge between saying it and not saying it, I could fool myself into believing that I didn’t have to deal with the consequences of my own internal truth.

I was hurting myself more than I could possibly hurt anyone else.

The truth shall set you free, but you better be ready to handle the consequences of that freedom.

Trevor

“This is the stupidest situation I have ever been in,” I declared, marching over to the door. “We need to leave.”

“Not with the fiftysomething Ohio version of Suzy out there, trying to turn herself into a Trevor and Joe sandwich,” Joe snapped, sitting on one of the toilets and scowling.

“We’re being total pussies in here.”

“It’s better than getting groped by Josie’s mom. She did...something to one of my balls. I didn’t know they were that flexible,” Joe complained.

I reached down and straightened myself out. She’d done the same to me. “They’re not,” I said through gritted teeth as a sharp pain shot through my nads.

“What are we doing here, Joe?” I asked, my voice filled with pain. 

“You’re the one who insisted we drive all the way out here in some desperate move to get Darla back.”

“You agreed!”

He slumped forward, head in hands, elbows on knees and heart practically in the toilet. “Yeah. I did. I miss her.” He looked up and around the tiny bathroom. “Now that we’re back in Peters, I kind of missed it, too.”