Nowhere but Home (5 page)

“Is he older?”

“No, he's a freshman just like me. He doesn't even want it. He's a great wide receiver.” Cal's confidence is unnerving, yet familiar. Sounds like me talking about cooking.

“Okay, here y'all go—one coffee and one water. What else can I get you this morning?” Peggy says, setting down our beverages, her pencil at the ready.

“I'll have the number two with my eggs over medium, wheat toast, and the house potatoes,” I say, craning past Peggy to get a look at the menu on the wall.

“Cal, honey, what are you having?”

“I'll have the country breakfast with everything,” he says, not having to look at the menu at all. I just shake my head and laugh.

“Gotta keep fueled up, I guess!” Peggy says, her laughter now more nervous. She smiles and retreats back behind the counter.

“She hasn't changed a bit. You know her own friends gave her that name—Piggy Peggy. I can't believe she's here and still just as obsequious as ever. Don't let her fool you, my boy—she'll no sooner give you an ingratiating smile than start a rumor that you started your period on the bus coming back from a field trip to the Texas Ranger museum in Waco,” I say, pouring cream into my coffee.

“Hypothetically speaking?” Cal asks.

“I wish,” I say, reliving every horrific moment.

“Cal Wake,” a man strides over to our booth and extends his hand.

“Mr. Coburn.” Cal scoots out of the booth and stands to shake the man's hand. My stomach drops as I look up at him. Everett Coburn. In North Star there are three families who are set apart from the rest, however unfairly. Well, four if you count the Wakes and you're talking about the low bar. But if you're talking about the gold standard of North Star, then it's the Ackermans, the McKays, and the Coburns. They're the closest things to royalty North Star's got. Just ask them . . . they'll be sure to tell you.

“You looked good out there this morning, son,” Everett says, his hand firmly placed on Cal's throwing arm.

“Thank you, sir,” Cal says. The man looks from Cal to me and I see the realization settle on his face. I set my jaw and stare right back at him.

“Everett,” I say with a curt nod.

“You know my aunt—,” Cal begins.

“Of course, son. Queenie, nice to see you again, ” Everett says, his entire face lined with contained disbelief.

“I see you're just as quick with a lie as you always were,” I say with a smile.

“A delight, as usual. Well, good luck out there, Cal. Queenie, welcome home,” Everett says.

“Temporarily,” I say.

“As always,” Everett says, a polite nod to me while he disentangles himself from our booth as quickly as he appeared. Cal slides back in the booth.

“You know Mr. Coburn?” Cal asks as Peggy brings over our breakfasts.

“Yeah. I knew him,” I say as he digs in.

Everett Coburn is the man I've been in love with my entire life.

5

Butterscotch hard candy

I need to cook something. I need to lose myself in something else besides the fractured light of my own memory. I'll cook a big supper as a thank-you for being so welcoming. I'll cook. And not think about crying at cemeteries, principals walking down hallways with squeaky shoes, and, most of all, about Everett Coburn—with his light brown hair that gets the tiniest flecks of blond just at his temples as the summer goes on. I'll cook and really not think about his powerful hand resting on Cal's throwing arm, the muscles threading up his arm like piano wire. I'll cook so I won't have to think about those green eyes pinwheeled in brown and yellow playing against his olive skin. The same green eyes that implored me to understand that he was marrying that girl anyway—even as we lay in my bed. No. I'll cook. It'll be fine. I've been not thinking about Everett Coburn for going on twenty years.

I walk into Merry Carole's salon with my plan. I open up the front door to the salon, and am met with country music, the hum of hair dryers, and gossip. As I'm pulling a butterscotch hard candy from the decorative bowl, it all screeches to a halt.

“QUEEN ELIZABETH!” Fawn yells, coming around the front desk and diving into me with a hug. She has always been a big woman; her ability to take up space astounded me. Fawn's ever changing hair color is now an orangey shade of red and cut in a diagonal razored style that should be reserved for teenagers. Her trendy clothes always one size too small and, as always, some version of a rhinestone cowboy boot on her feet. She hasn't changed a bit. She pulls away from me and settles her eyes on mine.

“Good to see you again,” I say, smiling.

“Oh, she is thin, Merry Carole. Just a slip of herself. You said you been feeding her?” Fawn talks as if I'm not there.

“We had a proper Sunday supper,” Merry Carole says, focusing on the hair she's cutting.

“You'd think after working in all those fancy kitchens you would have bothered to eat some of it,” Fawn says, anxiously swiping my lifeless bangs out of my face.

“I was working in all those fancy kitchens making food for other people,” I say.

“Look at you,” Fawn says, her voice breathy.

Fawn is my mother's age and would like to think of herself as a maternal figure in our lives. But she's too much like our mother to be anything close to maternal. Merry Carole and I play our parts anyway. While Fawn and my mother trolled the bar scene back in the day, like two peas in a pod, Yvonne Chapman was the happily married friend who finished out their tight trio. Momma and Fawn would lament their love lives while Yvonne endlessly doled out relationship advice to the hapless duo, trotting out her happy marriage like a prize pig. When Mom stayed away for days at a time, Fawn and Yvonne would always come by with a couple of Happy Meals, an apology, and the assurance that Mom was doing the best that she could . . . she really was. We took the food, but could never quite swallow the excuses. I don't begrudge Fawn any of it. She wasn't our mother. She chose not to have kids and is now happily married to a roughneck named Pete who works the oil rigs on the Coburn back forty. And Yvonne? Well, she made her bed.

“I want to cook supper for you guys tonight if you can make it. All of you,” I say, hoping that the customers don't think I mean them.

“We'd love that,” Merry Carole says, brushing the freshly cut hair from her customer's shoulders.

“Pete and I are definitely in,” Fawn says.

“Is Dee working today?” I ask, scanning the salon. Dee Finkel is my oldest friend in North Star. When I left I remember thinking how small her dreams were—she wanted to get married, have some kids, and work in a hair salon.
I
was going to set the world on fire. No, you go ahead and cut some old lady's hair in some backwater in Texas Hill Country. What an epic jerk I was.

“She's back in the shampoo room.” Merry Carole nods toward the back of the salon.

“Six? Tonight?” Fawn says, trying to hammer out the details.

“Sounds perfect. Don't bring a thing,” I say, walking toward the shampoo room.

“I can't wait!” Fawn says before launching into a diatribe about how worried she is about me.

I walk into the shampoo room and see Dee pouring big gallons of shampoo into smaller bottles of shampoo that are next to the washing stations. She looks exactly the same.

“Dee Finkel, is that you?!” I say, walking toward her.

“Dee Finkel?” Dee asks, still focused on the shampoo. I stumble a bit, thinking she would welcome me with open arms.

“It's Queenie. Queenie Wake?” I ask, my voice half of what it was.

“Oh my God, you're so funny! I haven't been Dee Finkel in years,” she says, setting the gallon of shampoo down and wiping her hands on her apron. We hug for an awkward amount of time and I find myself patting her back to break free.

“It's so good to see you,” I say, backing away from her. Of course she wouldn't be super glad to see me. I was a heinous bitch the last time we saw each other.

“How long are you back for?” Dee asks, her arms folded across her chest. She looks like an adult. A grown-up I'd see in public and think would certainly have nothing whatsoever in common with me. She looks healthy and vomit-inducingly happy. Her dark hair is more styled than it used to be. That's probably because she's the lowest stylist on the totem pole here and everyone's experimental head of hair. She's wearing flowery capri pants and a light pink sleeveless blouse to go with her usual (not today apparently) sunny outlook.

“Oh, I don't know,” I say, my smile quickly fading.

“But not long though, right? You're already planning to go to some other big city, right?”

“I don't know.”

“Okay, well . . .” Dee's face is tight. She starts to move for the shampoo again.

“If you're not Dee Finkel anymore, who are you then?” I ask, trying.

“I'm sorry?” Dee asks.

“If you're not Dee Finkel anymore, who are you?”

“I married Shawn Richter almost six years ago. You remember Shawn? He was a defensive lineman?”

“Sure . . . sure. I didn't even know you guys were dating?” I ask, glad that she's no longer trying to escape to the shampoo rather than talk to me.

“Yeah, we started dating a little after you left. His mom comes in here to get her hair done, so . . .”

“Sure . . . sure . . .”

“We have three little boys. I still want that little girl,” Dee says, pointing to an array of framed photos at one of the stylist stations out in the salon.

“So you're trying to say that while I have come back to town low down and broken down, you—the former Ms. Dee Finkel—have gotten everything you ever dreamed of,” I say, nodding and trying to smile.

“You could say that, yes,” Dee says, her face flushing.

“I'm so happy for you,” I say.

We are quiet. Terribly awkward and quiet.

“I'm so sorry for being rude before, but I just couldn't stand getting all friendly with you if you're just passing through. You and this town are like outta sight, outta mind. I guess I just miss you, is all,” Dee says, speaking quickly, her face growing blotchier and blotchier as she speaks. Dee was always way too nice to be friends with me.

“You weren't rude, seriously. I don't know why I expect people to forget that I was terrible when I left here,” I say, breathing a bit easier.

“You weren't terrible,” Dee says.

“You're just too nice to say I was, but . . . I definitely was.” We fall silent again. I hear cackling laughter from the front of the salon. Fawn. I'd know that laugh anywhere.

“I'm glad you're back however long you're staying,” Dee says, her eyes darting around the room.

“You want to hug again, don't you?”

“You know me too well, Queenie Wake!” Dee pulls me in for a hug. A real one.

“I'm cooking tonight for everyone. I'd love it if you, Shawn, and the boys could come over,” I say, knowing Merry Carole is always comfortable with a thousand people in her house. The realization that she gets to actually put the leaves in her dining room table will be like Christmas come early.

“Oh, you're sweet, but I don't think you really want our entire brood in your house. I barely want them in mine,” Dee says.

“I certainly do. Six?”

“That sounds perfect. Means I don't have to figure out what to cook. That alone,” Dee says, exhaling. I notice the salon has gotten quiet; so does Dee. We both look into the front of the salon.

Laurel Coburn. Or as I like to call her, that bitch Everett married. I hate that she's perfect. Her lemon yellow sundress, her leather sandals and pedicured toes. Her sunflower hair exists in its own bubble. Apparently it's not a slave to the humidity as everyone else's is. She is everything I'm not.

The door to the salon opens and Whitney McKay bursts through. Short black hair and elegant in that kind of way others, myself among them, might describe as “icy.” Laurel Coburn and Whitney McKay, along with Piggy Peggy, are North Star's resident mean girls.

“So the rumors are true,” Laurel says, taking off her sunglasses and staring right at me.

“Did y'all have an appointment today?” Fawn asks from behind the front desk.

“Oh, no thank you. We just had to see it for ourselves,” Whitney says.

It.

Laurel and Whitney wait. I don't move. Merry Carole thanks her customer as she hurries out and then walks over to the women.

“I'm so glad you decided to pop in for a visit,” Merry Carole says, her voice forced and high.

“How's Cal? I heard he has quite the appetite,” Whitney asks.

“He's home napping, saving up his energy for the second practice,” Merry Carole says, puffing up.

“Coach says he looked tired today,” Whitney says, pulling her compact out of her purse.

“He certainly didn't say anything like that to me,” Merry Carole says.

“Probably just the heat,” Whitney says, touching up her face in the tiny mirror. I'm half surprised the mirror doesn't break from the pure evil staring into it.

Whitney used to be Whitney Ackerman before she married Wes McKay. Wes McKay is North Star's golden boy, former all-star quarterback and Cal's biological father. At seventeen, Merry Carole made the mistake of thinking Wes loved her. When she told him she was pregnant, he renounced her and the as yet unborn baby. Merry Carole was branded a gold-digging harlot, just like her mother, and Whitney took her rightful place as the long-suffering Lady of the McKay Manor. Merry Carole vowed never to make the mistake of trusting a man again.

“I hear West is doing well,” Merry Carole offers, her voice painfully anxious. I settle into my stance, waiting to hear what Whitney will say of her “little brother,” West Ackerman. West Ackerman was born just months after Cal. Coincidentally, West looks exactly like Whitney and Wes. Yet she's passed him off as her “little brother” for years. Whitney and her parents spent a year at her grandparents' house in Houston before West's birth. And oh, look at that, her postmenopausal mother brought back a little surprise! Even West's name is a blend of the two actual parents' names! But this is a lie North Star allows. The Ackermans are a respected family who wouldn't dare be deceitful, whereas the Wakes are just a bunch of slobbering animals.

“West is the pride of North Star and of the Ackerman family name. He's got quite an arm, and he can catch,” Whitney says, tucking her compact back into her purse. It dawns on me that West Ackerman is probably the kid Cal was talking about this morning. Of course he is. It makes sense that the powers that be in this town would want West to take over the quarterback position made famous by his father. Of course, Wes McKay is Cal's father, too. The citizens of North Star seem to keep conveniently forgetting that.

During Whitney and Merry Carole's little banter, everything comes rushing back. I can't believe I was so naive. There is no coming back to North Star on my own terms. I may be older and wiser, but we are still the villains. We are still the unwanted. We are still the ones parents point to and warn, “Don't brush your teeth and you'll end up like poor Merry Carole and Queenie Wake. Let a boy get to second base and you'll end up like poor Merry Carole and Queenie Wake. Cheat on that final and you'll end up like poor Merry Carole and Queenie Wake.” Being Brandi-Jaques Wake's daughters means being branded a pariah.

We are North Star's very own bogeymen.

I hate that Cal has been dragged into all this history. He seems unaffected by it. Although I know from personal experience that outward appearances can be deceiving. Take right now, for instance. I look as though I haven't a care in the world. My face wears a breezy smile. My entire body is a testament to the yogic pose mountain—balanced and rooted to the earth. I sigh and breathe as if I'm not about to explode across this room and rip Laurel's hair out while screaming, “YOU STOLE MY MAN, YOU SOULLESS BITCH!” at the top of my lungs. Nope. I am a practice in calm. I breathe in for the first time in minutes, hours maybe. I snap out of my trance. Laurel's eyes are still fixed on me. I love it. I love that I've always gotten under her perfectly moisturized alabaster skin. I steady my breathing—like a sniper focusing his target in the crosshairs.

“We'd better get going. I've got to get supper on the table for Wes and the kids,” Whitney says with a particularly giddy undertone.

“Great seeing you guys! See you at the Fourth of July festival!” Merry Carole calls out as they leave the salon.

The door closes. I begin to speak—

“Don't say a word, Queen Elizabeth. Not. One. Word,” Merry Carole says, retreating to the bathroom.

The bathroom door slams behind her.