Summer Sons(3)
“All right, fine. I’ll leave,” she said.
“Delia,” he murmured, closer to a concession.
“No, you said it yourself. Apparently it’s more important for you to follow his lead even when he’s gone than it is to be with your goddamn family, or your friends.”
“I wasn’t here with him,” he said. Nashville held the last of Eddie, the unseen weeks. Andrew willed her to understand, even though she hadn’t yet, not one time.
“And that’s the reason?” She tossed her words out with a skyward gesture, frustrated.
“It’s the reason I’ve got. I wasn’t here when he needed me to be.”
She shouted, “Because he left you behind with us! He didn’t deign to allow you to be with him. He let the rest of us watch you mope around and—”
“Stop! Just, stop.” The black car loomed, spiking longing through his chest. He said, “Let me be alone, Del. I didn’t ask for help, and I didn’t even ask for company.”
Del scrunched both hands into her hair, yanking the ponytail lopsidedly loose, a strangled shrieking sound tearing from her throat. No further emotion rose in him in response. He’d loved her once, or something close to it, years ago before the three of them had settled into their off-kilter unit. Now her paroxysm of grief and anger played out in front of him like a film, or the panic of a stranger, while he drifted in the void left where Eddie wasn’t. After the outburst, she dropped her arms limp.
“Fuck you,” she breathed out as she turned her back on him.
The sun-dappled straggle of her tawny hair bounced as she strode stiffly away without a final glance. An itch tickled the root of his tongue. He swallowed against it fruitlessly. Eddie had come to Nashville alone. He’d left in a box, a handful of weeks before Andrew was due to join him, without so much as a warning—leaving him a car, and a house, and a graduate program, and a fortune, but nothing that mattered as much as himself. Without Eddie, there was no point. He palmed the key fobs. Cicadas called as he crept the last few yards along the lot. The hulk of Eddie’s car grew to meet him as he approached.
Slickly grim in the gold afternoon light, the black chrome and black detailing and cherry-red rims struck him to the core. The morning Eddie’s trust fund spilled open, the pair of them had driven two hundred miles to pick up the absurd beast. More muscle than the Aventador went Eddie’s argument; Andrew responded and so American it hurts. But the Hellcat fit him, reckless and extravagant, made to measure straight off the line. The brash white of Eddie’s toothy smile and his muscled arm hanging out the window, gunning the brutal roar of the engine at the first stoplight they’d coasted up to together, had lit him on fire.
The car could not be his. It belonged to no one but Eddie, this machine that had extended his churning life-large hunger from palm on gearshift and foot on clutch, glorious and unapologetic. The small bristling wolf decal he’d stuck in the corner of the back driver’s side window flashed its teeth. Andrew pressed UNLOCK and crossed the distance in three stilted strides, jerking open the door to stand in the wash of magnified scent: cigarettes cheap deodorant sweat-musk pot. It lanced straight through his skull.
He laid his arm across the doorframe and his clammy forehead on top of it, breathing shallow. One scraping gasp hitched for a moment before gusting out in an agitated burst. He hadn’t cried for the last two weeks since he’d gotten the call from his own mother, Eddie’s listed next of kin. When he thought too long about the fact that Eddie’s big hand was never going to clap across the nape of his neck again, or that the brief, happenstance videos left on his phone had captured the final remnants of Eddie’s human voice for endless stale replay, a nothing-numbness severed him from himself at the root. Self-preservation, maybe.
Faced with the real process of inheritance, Eddie’s car reeking of summertime indiscretions, a terrible pressure constricted the soft muscle of his throat. Andrew clung to a thread of control as he collapsed into the grasp of the Challenger’s driver’s seat and pulled the door shut with a muffled slam.
One hundred thousand hours were packed on top of each other in Eddie’s lingering scent: eleven years old and pressing cut palms with tears in their eyes, swearing brotherhood; thirteen and boxing up his bedroom for their move to Columbus, Eddie shell-shocked and silent over the loss of his mother and father and home; fifteen and smoking cigarettes under the back porch with the spiders; seventeen and drunk, Del sandwiched half-nude between them in the back seat of a borrowed sedan under cold winter stars; nineteen and messaging each other across a classroom with grins tucked out of sight; twenty-one and putting in their applications for the same graduate program in the campus café. That’s where it broke, when Eddie surprised him with an earlier admission and a request that Andrew wait him out. Their first and last extended separation. Andrew had promised to follow behind, toes at Eddie’s heels.
He had, and he hadn’t. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.
On the passenger side, Eddie had left a wadded-up tank top, a sea-green flat bill hat, and a crumpled straw wrapper. Andrew adjusted the seat out of habit to accommodate his lesser height, then pushed the clutch down and jammed the starter button. His thumb left a trace of his own sweat over the print that had been smudged there. The rumbling snarl of the engine waking shook him. The clock read 6:52. A Misfits song punched abruptly through the speakers as the media system replaced an absent Bluetooth signal with radio; the horrible jolt had him slapping his hand down on the volume knob to shut it off on instinct.