Trying the Knot
Authors: Todd Erickson
Tags: #women, #smalltown life, #humorous fiction, #generation y, #generation x, #1990s, #michigan author, #twentysomethings, #lgbt characters, #1990s nostalgia, #twenty something years ago, #dysfunctional realtionships, #detroit michigan, #wedding fiction
by Todd Erickson
Copyright 2013 Todd Erickson
Smashwords Edition
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places
and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales
or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Electronic adaptation by
www.StunningBooks.com
The Eighties are dead! And maybe a bridesmaid too. At
the dawn of the Nineties, six recent college grads reunite for a
hometown wedding. On the eve of the ceremony, the bride's
stepsister sleeps with the groom and then overdoses on pills.
Getting hitched without a hitch? Not likely, for this crew.
Table of Contents
part i – stray
Labor Day Weekend, 1991
As the morning sun infiltrated the room, Nick
forged toward semi-consciousness. In his torn, grass-stained
underwear, he languished in the heat. Too exhausted to draw the
blinds, let alone crack a window, he shielded his eyes from the
sunlight with the crook of his one arm draped across his face. The
room reeked of stale beer and cigarette smoke. While growing up,
the air had been thick with the sweaty smell of rambunctious
adolescence, but now he was an invading stranger in this bedroom
that had incubated him into adulthood. The September air was as
stagnant and suffocating as a forgotten fallout shelter.
In the distance, a telephone blared
incessantly. Scratching his chest, he automatically reached to turn
off an alarm clock that was no longer there. He peeled open his
eyes, pried his tongue from the roof of his mouth and recoiled. It
was as if the sunrise had reversed the hands of time, and he was
back in high school; imagining his parents upstairs in their twin
beds mortified his newly minted adult sensibility.
Provoked beyond the threshold of his
hung-over patience, he rolled out of bed and searched for the
cordless phone that had disappeared into the cluttered recesses of
his past. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, he steadied himself using
an old desk where a few small game skulls had found their eternal
resting spot alongside the hunting knife he used to disembody them.
He had long ago abandoned these dusty mementos of his boyhood.
Positioned near the phone jack, he reeled in the cord as if it were
a fishing line. He used to employ this trick hourly during the
height of his teenage popularity. To his dismay, he retrieved only
half a phone.
“Damned cordless fucker,” Nick raged under
his breath. He kicked a suitcase full of soiled clothes across the
floor. To his pained surprise, his foot found the telephone. His
head throbbed and stomach churned as he hobbled around on one foot
trying not to put any pressure on his sore toe. He was so
dehydrated it was hard to breathe.
Attempting to grab the blaring phone, Nick
capsized in a dizzy whirl spin and landed near a broken stereo
topped with a few sticky cassette tapes. Although his shoulder felt
all one hundred eighty-five pounds of his hearty frame, he managed
a cordial, though albeit agitated, “Good morning.”
The line went dead.
He hurled the demonic instrument and winced
when it bounced off the knotty pine paneled wall. The impact caused
a rifle leaning forever in a corner to fall in his direction. Not
two minutes later, his muddled brain was once again besieged by
penetrating screeches. He scrunched his brow and crawled across the
hardwood floor, which felt like broken glass.
This awakening was more harrowing than when
his sister used to stumble home in the middle of the night and fart
in his slumbering face. Nanette was perhaps the most beautiful
female specimen Portnorth had ever produced, but she considered
small town beauty a curse. Her only compensation was indulging in
shockingly crude behavior generally overlooked by an adoring
public. Throughout their formative years at every twisted turn,
Nick’s easy-going nature was the perfect foil to thwart his
sister’s subversive disposition.
Elbows digging into his knees, he eased
himself onto the edge of the unmade bed and stroked his naked pecs,
which he often wore like an indelible fashion accessory. Defeated,
he ran a hand through his sandy brown hair and said amicably
defeated, “Again, good morning.”
“Oh, thank God,” she trailed off as her voice
wavered distressed. “Something awful has happened, Nick.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just terrible.” Kate’s sobs made it
impossible for her to continue.
Bracing himself, he wondered what mishap
could have rendered his bride-to-be so inconsolable on the eve of
their wedding day. Awaiting her to regain composure, he thought
maybe the DJ had backed out, or the caterers quit, or her dress was
ruined.
“It’s okay, Katie, honey, whatever it is, can
be fixed. We’ll just work around it,” he said as if their wedding
cake had merely slipped out of the hatch of her aunt’s station
wagon.
As if reading his thoughts, she replied, “No,
it’s nothing like that. This is serious. So very awful.”
“Well, what is it then?”
Something so awful she could not utter the
words. “I don’t understand why, why she would do a thing like
this.”
“Do what, who did what?”
“It’s so senseless.”
Growing alarmed, but also intrigued, he
inquired, “Honey, what’re you talking about? What’s going on?”
Her whimpers of distress digressed into
full-fledged sobs, and mounting dread seized his entire being.
While she attempted to speak, his mind raced over the events that
had transpired last night. Finally, he asked, “Where are you?”
“I-I’m, oh, God, at the hospital.”
“The where?”
“The hospital, Nick, we’re all at the
hospital.”
“Is my dad or mom working in the ER?”
Unable to form words, Kate passed the phone
to whomever she was with, and Nick hoped it was his father, or
mother.
“Nicholas, it’s me,” Chelsea said with curt
authority. “A bridesmaid has tried to kill herself.”
“What?”
“It’s Evangelica.”
“Huh?” he asked in disbelief.
“It’s Vange, she’s in a coma. Get ready,
because Benjamin and Thaddeus are on the way to pick you up.”
Thinking how obnoxious Chelsea was with her
way of calling everyone by their full names, he asked dumbfounded,
“Chels, why the hell –
Misinterpreting the direction of his inquiry,
she cut him off. “Because Katherine’s a total mess, near
hysterical. That’s why, Nicholas. Your dad wants her to take a
Valium, but she refuses.” Before slamming down the phone, she added
reluctantly, “We need your help, so get your ass here A-S-A-P.”
To the dead line, he muttered, “Uptight
bitch.”
Not exactly a pacifist, but in many ways a
human pacifier, Nick despised all forms of tension. Generally, his
mere presence was enough to quell even the most disharmonious
situations, but Chelsea was too wound up for him to work his
magic.
Sitting on the edge of his boyhood bed, he
shook his head unbelievingly. Feeling an upward surge in his gut,
he cradled his abdomen, which gurgled with the fermenting remnants
of last night’s party. He collapsed backward onto the down-filled
comforter and rubbed his hands over his face. Shutting his dry
eyes, he scratched his testicles with such intensity it seemed as
if he had discovered a new hangover cure.
Lying on his back in his underwear, his
stomach convulsed. He had inherited his nurse mother’s tendency to
put on weight while his sister was as reed thin as their doctor
father. When his midsection accrued unwanted flab, he merely jogged
the excess padding away unlike his mom, who packed on the pounds in
order to repel his fitness fanatic dad.
Before long, Nick found himself kneeling in
front of the toilet. He repeatedly heaved until his insides erupted
with such force the regurgitated booze and bile splashed back at
him. Shakily, he mopped the puke-polluted toilet water from his
face. He remained on his knees clad in his vomit-splattered,
grass-stained underwear, until well after the bile and booze was
expelled from his stomach.
What the hell was she thinking?
Nick assured himself Vange’s alleged suicide
attempt had nothing whatsoever to do with him, or with what
transpired between them last night. They had hooked-up for old
time’s sake. He and Vange had a twisted sort of relationship, they
were merely old friends who fooled around occasionally. Nothing
more needed to be said. Screwing outside the tavern was just as
natural an occurrence as all the other times when they had too much
to drink, run out of conversation, and found themselves
conveniently alone. There was no reason not to let it happen, he
rationalized; after all, he was not married yet. Hell, the ring
would not be on his finger until tomorrow.
“Damn her,” he muttered to the puke-filled
toilet.
It was positively creepy she would pull a
stunt like this on the day before his wedding to her own
stepsister. He had no inkling as to how she landed in a coma, but
last night he had intervened to prevent her from drinking herself
senseless. He surmised this alleged suicide attempt had to have
been an unfortunate accident. Just maybe, he thought, she
inadvertently wound up comatose when the alcohol flooding her
system collided with a miscalculated dose of sleeping pills. It
happened all the time; it even happened to his mother once. His dad
told him about it long after the fact, at about the same time they
were speculating whether or not she was a closeted lesbian.