The Fable of Us (25 page)

“Not exactly fond of me?” I twisted in my seat and peaked an eyebrow. “Boone, she would have flipped the switch on the electric chair if I was strapped into it. With a smile on her face.”

His eyes reached me. “Yeah, well, along with that smile, now she’d dance a jig and throw an after party for the entire state. You should stay here.” He shoved away from the truck and lifted an outstretched palm in my direction. “She doesn’t know you’re back. She doesn’t know we’re together. ‘Together,’” he clarified, making air quotes. “With her so drunk Hank’s threatening to call the cops, I don’t want to add you into the mix when I go in there. That’s like masterminding some perfect storm.”

I reached for the door handle. “You used to be able to tell me what to do and I’d listen. Not so much anymore.”

His hands settled onto his hips as he angled away from me. “I don’t want you to see this, Clara. I don’t want you to have to see this ever again. It’s humiliating. For my mom. For me. Please,” he said, still facing the bar more than he was facing me, “please stay.”

My hand stayed on the handle, wanting to push it open. “Are you asking or telling?”

He looked at me over his shoulder. “Asking. Always asking.”

My hand fell from the handle to wave him on. “Go get her. I’ll stay here. Wishing I’d packed my full body armor, which I would have, had I known I’d be coming face-to-face with Dolly tonight.”

Boone’s chuckle was barely detectable, but I didn’t miss it. “Don’t worry. I’ve got your back. Anyone takes a swing at you, my mom included, they’ll have to get through me first.”

I lifted my fist and circled it a few times. “Who says I haven’t been taking kickboxing, jiu jitsu, and tae kwon do classes the past seven years?”

“Please, with those skinny little arms?” Boone shook his head. “No way.”

“Little arms?” I lifted my arm and inspected it. “You might be the only person in Charleston who would call these arms little. My mom will have you chained to a stake and burned for heresy if you repeat that in her presence.”

Boone rolled his eyes. “Just because your mom says your arms aren’t little doesn’t mean they’re not. And just because your family tries to make you feel little doesn’t mean you are. People will always want to tell us what we are and who we are, but no one can tell you who you are. That’s your job.”

I watched him for a moment. I stared at him for a few more moments. “When did you go and get so smart, Boone Cavanaugh?”

He held out his arms, backing away. “When I stopped being a dumbass.”

Giving a wave, he lunged up to the bar’s entrance and paused just outside the door, looking like he was working up his courage, before shoving inside.

He’d left the truck running, and after a minute, I thought about turning it off. That was when he came out, Dolly hanging over his shoulder and looking so limp I guessed she was passed out. That solved the problem of facial recognition and explaining why I was here with Boone.

As Boone moved through the door, a chorus of cheers and shouts followed him. Clapping exploded through the bar. They were applauding. The patrons of the bar were glad she was gone. Or they were goading him. Or they were being their typical brand of prick and sticking it to someone else instead of focusing on their own pathetic little lives.

Boone left the bar the same way I remembered him leaving it when we’d been teenagers: head high, eyes cast down. My eyes burned as I watched the man before me shift into the boy I’d once loved. He’d changed some, I’d changed some, but some things never would.

Dragging Dolly out of a bar late on a weeknight never would change. The way doing so made him feel probably never would either. The way I felt watching him do it apparently never would as well. It was a strange mix, a potent blend of sympathy and intense pride as I watched him carry his mom, time and time again, out of the place she’d chosen to work out her issues. Some chose therapy, others elected for repression—Dolly Cavanaugh turned to a cheap bottle of whiskey.

When he was halfway to the truck, I shoved open the door and held it open while he came around the front bumper. Before, I’d just sat sandwiched between Boone and Dolly on the bench, sometimes with her drooling into my hair and sometimes with her trying to rip out my hair. This time though, I didn’t want to be pressed so tightly against Boone. Not with the swirl of confusion I felt around him when it came to certain feelings trying to resurrect themselves.

I was just stepping aside, about to climb into the bed of the truck, when the very passed out Dolly came to life. No kidding, it was like she’d just been struck by lightning and zapped to life Frankenstein-style. Her head jerked up, her eyes latched onto me, and if I’d seen hate before, it was redefined right in that moment.

“What in the hell is that uppity hussy bitch doing standing in front of me, Boone?” Dolly shouted, her words more slurred than said. “I might be buzzed, but I’m not so buzzed to be imagining things.”

“You were buzzed ten shots ago, Ma,” Boone said, keeping his tone even and calm. I remembered that too, his steadfastness in the face of a storm. The louder she got, the calmer he became. “Right now you’re drunk enough I’m worried if we don’t get some fluid down you other than the eighty-proof kind, you’re going to get alcohol poisoning.”

Without him asking or even glancing my way, I snagged one of the plastic bottles of water from the case he had stuffed in the bed. When I twisted the bottle open and held it out for Dolly, she took it.

And she threw it in my face. “You better not try to give me anything again with that judgmental look on your face. I didn’t tolerate it when you were a bratty teenager, and I sure ain’t going to tolerate it now with you being a bitch of a woman.”

I wiped my face, sweeping the water away.

“Shit, Ma, you’re just begging for the cops to come haul you away tonight aren’t you?” Boone backed up from me a few strides before lowering her from his shoulder. “I told you the last time I bailed you out that was the very last time. You go in again, and you’re going to be sitting in that cell for a while.”

Dolly patted Boone’s cheek, staggering enough he had to reach out to keep her from falling. “You’ve been saying that for years, sweetheart. You’re too good of a boy to leave your mama to rot. I raised you right. Unlike the other folks in this town I’m not going to name.”

“Can I do anything to help?” I asked Boone, Dolly’s back to me as she continued to sway in place.

“You can turn around, put one foot in front of the other, and don’t stop until you fall off into the face of the ocean,” Dolly snapped at me, looking ready to spit in my face. “That’s what you can do to help this family out.”

I took another step back. “Hi, Dolly. How’s it going? Nice to see you too.”

I waved at her before stepping up onto the back wheel of the truck and climbing into the bed. I didn’t want to be so close to Boone, but I didn’t want to be anywhere close to Dolly. With the way she was wound up, she might turn her murderous dreams into reality.

“You can just fuck off now, Clara Belle Abbott, and fuck off tomorrow, and fuck yourself off into eternity. That’s how it’s going.”

“Ma, enough,” Boone said, checking to make sure I was in the bed before clamping his hands on Dolly’s shoulders and guiding her toward the cab. Apparently he was of a like mind when it came to keeping us as far apart as possible.

“Don’t expect me to pretend to be civil, Boone. Don’t ask me to play nice with the girl who took a sledgehammer to your heart.” Dolly stumbled forward, guided by Boone’s steady grip. “You’re a good boy, the best kind out there, and you didn’t deserve to be treated like trash. Not with everything you did for her.”

I should have bit my tongue. I should have tried to bite it harder. “And treating him like trash doesn’t include having him haul your ass out of the same dive bar every week while the crowd jeers at you both like you’re a couple of clowns?”

Boone’s face pulled into a wince, but he was anticipating Dolly hurling herself my direction. His hold tightened on her shoulders right as she threw herself toward the bed, looking ready to leap inside headfirst if that was the fastest way to get to me.

“Goddammit, enough!” Boone shouted, pulling her back and twisting her body around until she was facing the cab again. “Get in now, or I’m leaving and the cops can deal with you.”

Dolly looked at her son, her eyes unable to focus on him thanks to the alcohol, and she patted his cheek gently. Almost affectionately, though Dolly was about as affectionate as a rabid wolverine. Over her shoulder, she said to me, “You better not compare what you did to my son to what I’ve done to him. We all have our faults, but at the end of the day, I love my son.”

My fingers curled into my palms. Dolly Cavanaugh had always had a way of getting under my skin. Not just because she was the mother of my once-upon-a-time boyfriend, but because she used love as an excuse for everything she did.

“I loved him too!” I shouted as Boone lifted her into the cab. “But at least I didn’t keep making the same mistake over and over, excusing it with love. The same mistake every other happy hour.”

From the looks of it, Dolly put up a bit of a fight to get out of the truck to come at me, but her strength was waning. She’d likely gotten a punch of adrenaline after seeing me, and now that that had tapered off, she was probably only a few seconds away from passing out into a whiskey coma.

Boone shot me a look as he held his mom, keeping her where she was. His look was more pleading than stern, one that said he already had to deal with one person he could barely handle and he really didn’t need another one. I sealed my lips for him, then I turned around and threw my back against the back window of the truck. It was a little easier to ignore Dolly when I wasn’t looking at her and she was more snoring than spewing.

Dolly Cavanaugh had been a five-foot-two tornado with fiery red hair for most of her life. From the sounds of it, she’d come into life making a ruckus, and I knew from experience she was likely to leave the world the same way. A person couldn’t miss her walking around town. She might have been petite, but she had a way of holding herself that made her seem half a foot taller. Plus she was top heavy and all legs, and she knew how to dress to further showcase her genetic advantages. She’d never been shy with her affections for men, just as they’d never been shy in return.

That was probably why there’d been a long-standing rumor circling the community that Boone and Wren came from different dads. To look at them, a person could easily be convinced, but the rumors had never gotten to Boone. Wren was his sister, and no one could try to tell him otherwise.

When Boone came around to the driver’s side after buckling his mom in and getting her door shut behind her, he paused. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” I nestled a bit lower into the bed to get comfortable. The drive from here to Dolly’s place wasn’t far, but riding in the back of an old truck while bouncing down washboard roads that hadn’t been repaved in over a decade wasn’t the definition of comfortable.

“You don’t look okay.”

“Gee, thanks. I guess I probably don’t.” I glanced at him from the corners of my eyes. He’d moved close to the bed, draping his long arms into it as he watched me. “But when I woke up this morning, I wasn’t anticipating getting called an uppity bitch before half a bottle of water was launched into my face.” I could still feel the water on my hairline and the neckline of my dress, but I wasn’t really upset over that. “I guess I’m just a little surprised. For your mom to have gone from hating me to loathing me with every fiber of her being, you must have told her what happened between us . . . even though you promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.” I had to shift my position in the bed. There was nothing comfortable about this.

“I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, Clara, and I didn’t.” Boone’s voice was so low it was almost a whisper. “But instead of telling her how things really went down, I told her you left me—that it was you who ultimately walked away.”

My forehead folded into creases. “Why would you tell anyone that?”

“Do you really think anyone would believe that I was the one who’d walked away from you?” He let that hang between us in the muggy Charleston night. “Do you really think anyone in this town would have bought that Boone Cavanaugh broke up with Clara Belle Abbott?” He shook his head. “No one would have believed that, and those who did would have figured out real fast there must have been one hell of reason for me to do so. I didn’t want anyone to do too much digging to get to that hell of a reason . . . so I told everyone what they’d all been anticipating since the day we walked through the county fair the summer we were sixteen, holding hands—you got your slumming out of your system and were moving on to bigger and better things.”

My head shot in his direction. “I
never
once treated you like you were trash, Boone, so don’t try to staple your insecurities to me. Where you came from and who you came from didn’t matter to me. All I cared about was where you were going and who you’d become.”

Boone hung his head between his arms, kicking at one of the tires absently. “Yeah, well, no matter what you thought of me, I was well aware what the rest of this town thought, and the easiest way to explain what happened between us was to tell everyone what they’d been waiting to hear. It was simpler that way. Less explaining involved.”

I curled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “So you never told anyone? About what really happened?”

Boone didn’t reply right away. Just when I thought he was going to climb into the truck and pretend the question had never been posed, his head lifted, his eyes landing on me. “I made you a promise, Clara. I never told anyone, and I never will.”

I rolled my head to the side to look at him. Where had we gone wrong? Where had all of that love gone? I knew about the mistakes we’d made, sure, but how had we let them tear us apart? Why had we let them break us? Fast forward seven years to us living separate lives on opposite sides of the country, and I still felt like every part of me was being pulled in his direction, not so much by choice but by something that ran deeper, something between instinct and destiny.