Here I Go Page 17

  “Aria, come on.”

  He sounded tired enough that I did look up at him. I’d hidden my hair under my old UTC Mocs hat, the school where my Uncle Jed had played football.

  “Is Demetra gone?” I asked, and hit send on my screen.

  “Yes, she is. There are leftovers if you want something for dinner.”

  No, I wasn’t going to be eating her leftovers. Bad enough that I had married them!

  “What are you doing?” he asked, and sat on my bed uninvited. It was his, anyway.

  “I applied for a bunch of jobs. I hope I’ll get something soon.”

  “You could use my computer instead of your phone, if you wanted,” he offered.

  “Sure. Thanks,” I had to add, because I couldn’t keep acting so rude and sassy, not right to his face. Even if I wasn’t meeting his eyes.

  “If you’re trying to get a job, does that mean you’re still planning to stay here?”

  “What?” Now I did stare at him. “Did you think I was leaving because you insulted my new hair?”

  Cain leaned and took the baseball cap off my head. “I didn’t insult it. You looked so different. It’s so straight. And…small? Is that the word?” He waved a hand around his own head. “It used to be larger.”

  “‘Straight’ is fine. Just leave it at that,” I told him.

  “It’s so different. I like it,” he said, stressing the words, “but I liked it before, too. I think I hurt your feelings again, and I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry for all the names I called you,” I answered. His eyebrows went up, so I had to explain, “I never said them out loud, but they were really mean.”

  That made him laugh, which broke even more of the tension between us. “Come here,” he offered, and opened his arms. I hesitated, but then scooted over into them.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured against my new hair. “I didn’t invite Demetra here. She told me she had dinner and was on her way. I just didn’t say no.”

  “Or tell me,” I pointed out. “I’m not trying to prevent you from having people over in your own house. It was just a surprise.”

  “A bad surprise,” he added and I didn’t disagree.

  “What are you doing back here so early?” I asked him.

  “I thought we’d eat together tonight. Me and you.” His arms tightened, just a little.

  And I’d missed that to spend hours in the cold, unfriendly beauty salon? I had the one chance, and I’d been sitting in the chair getting my hair washed again and again with the water that was freezing but I’d been too intimidated to speak up. “I’m sorry that I made a scene in front of her. Did she say anything about it?” I tilted my head to look at his face and saw that he was frowning again.

  “She says all kinds of stupid stuff,” he told me. His arms dropped away.

  “I could come downstairs and we could watch a really bad show that’s on tonight with celebrities wearing awful disguises and trying to do normal jobs,” I suggested. “Last week, they had the singer with all the cheek piercings working a drive-through and she hit a guy through the window when he said she hadn’t given him the right change. I think everyone knew who she was, though, because they didn’t do a great job covering the eyeball tattoo she has on the end of her nose.”

  “That sounds terrible. The tattoo and the show, both of them.”

  “It’s not going to improve your mind. It’s not important art or anything.” Oh, that made me remember Sebastián and his offer to paint me nude.

  “I don’t need art. I don’t need to think.” Cain tilted his head back and yawned. “What about we watch a basketball game instead?”

  “Men attempting to throw an inflated, orange globe through a hoop?” I quoted. “That’s how Blayden explained to me. He told me it was simplistic.”

  “Yeah, it is. Too bad he can’t ever throw it through there himself.”

  I laughed and Cain offered me his palm. “We can watch basketball,” I said. “I bet they know how to play better than Blayden.”

  “I don’t know, watching a girl deck someone over a hamburger sounds fun, too.” He held up my hand as we went down the stairs and made it into a fist. “Here’s how you want to do hit. Tight, like this, and try to impact with these two knuckles.”

  I didn’t want to think about how he knew how to hit someone, about him getting into fights. “I’m not going to deck anyone through a drive-through window.”

  We got to the bottom of the stairs. “Your fist is small compared to mine.” He held our knuckles together. “I don’t know how much damage you could do with this anyway.”

  “Cain?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you really think that I was going to pack up and leave because we got into an argument? I won’t,” I said. “I’m your wife.” Mostly.

  His answer was to reach out and pull me to him again, and to keep his arm around me as we walked to the slippery, cold sofa in front of the artwork which rolled up to display a TV. I sent pictures of the change in my hair to Kayleigh and Cass, and told my mama to stay out of Bree and Mory’s latest argument over their daughters’ tumbling class. They had managed not to fight for three days, which was long for them.

  But mostly, I was interested in Cain’s arm over my shoulders, his hip against mine. He didn’t mind, either, when I lay my head down against his chest and snuggled even more. And I absolutely loved it.

  ∞

  I checked the dress one more time, and it was perfect. Perfect for someone else, maybe, because it was nothing like anything I’d ever had on my body before, but also perfect for this night, when I needed to show everyone that I was just as boring as they were. I ran my hand through the air over the fabric, not wanting to touch it and mess it up, before I went back into the bathroom to reexamine my makeup.

  “You’ll see a lot of people in amazing fashion creations at the gala,” Sebastián had told me the day before. He’d stopped by unexpectedly, just as I’d gotten home from a run, so he could see what he called my “hair transformation.” He’d wanted to wait in my room while I got dressed, too, but I’d made him stay downstairs. While I was in the shower, he inspected almost every single thing in the house, opening cupboards and drawers to take out Cain’s dishes and silverware, turning over vases and lamps to look for labels and signatures and then checking the value of everything on his phone. When I came down, he told me what he’d been doing like it was fine, and also mentioned that the whole house screamed “Demetra Diamandis.” He admitted that it was painful for him to see that Cain had nice art.

  Then he’d walked around me and looked at my hair and, I thought, my butt. “Really nice,” he said, but his eyes were on my breasts.

  “Sebastián!”

  He’d helped himself to a drink from the fridge. “About the gala,” he continued. “You’ll see women getting their pictures taken because they’re wearing those beautiful, interesting things, getting attention because they’ve made such a statement with their fashion. And they’re not you,” he said pointedly. “You’re fitting in, not standing out. You have a long way to go before you can stand out for the right reasons.”

  “I guess you’ll be doing that.” He wasn’t wearing shoes, which had been a problem for him when he’d had to run down the block to get away from that stray dog barking at him.

  “Of course I’ll stand out in the right way. But you know who won’t be? The Furies. They’ll be trying to fit in just as much as you are. Trying to hide their Ohio roots.” He grinned at me and I’d smiled back, feeling better that I wasn’t the only one pretending to be someone I really wasn’t.

  But now that I was alone and getting dressed for the gala, I was having doubts. Was this going to be all right, even though I’d only lost three more pounds and not the seven I’d been hoping for, even after I’d gone through four bottles of sriracha? Was my hair straight enough or did it look more red? Was my makeup neutral and blah or did I still look cheap? I’d been working on my accent, too, but trying to talk Califo
rnia somehow reminded me of one of my memaw’s old records being played at the wrong speed.

  “I’m Aria,” I tried again, twisting my mouth and tongue to make the words come out flat and the vowels funny. “Aria Miller.” Now it sounded like I’d just been to the dentist and had a major procedure done.

  I shook my head at myself and picked up my phone. “I hope you can get here soon,” I wrote to Cain. “I may need help wedging myself into the dress!”

  That was a joke, but only kind of. It had taken two salespeople to help me put it on! I remembered how my mama, Amory, three other bridesmaids, and I had helped my oldest sister into her wedding dress. She’d had to stand on a chair and we lifted her into it, then Mory and I had fought that zipper all the way up her back.

  It had been awful—even though Bree didn’t weigh very much, we’d almost dropped her—and I didn’t want a repeat of it tonight, so I’d figured out a way that I could lay the dress on the bed and wiggle my way down until I had it on, without causing crazy wrinkles. The zipper, though, was something I couldn’t deal with on my own. I checked my phone to see if Cain had answered about when he was coming, but there was nothing new from him, not since he’d said that he was having issues at the office and would be busy today. Too busy to talk much.

  I wasn’t worried, though, because he’d promised that he would be here so we could go together. It was such a good sign for our future! We were going to start off the next year together as a couple, dressed to the nines and having fun. I smiled and the face in the mirror, one I could hardly recognize with the new hair, makeup, and eyebrows, smiled back at me. I tilted my chin back and forth, and I thought I might look thinner in my cheeks. This was going to be a great night, I told myself again.

  “Aria Miller,” I repeated in the California style. The new me. I went into the bedroom to slither into my dress and then, with the zipper still down so that it flapped open in the back, I walked carefully to the kitchen to wait for Cain.

  “I’m running late,” my phone suddenly told me. “I’m going to have to meet you there. I had a car sent over to the house.” My heart sank, but even at that moment, the doorbell rang.

  “Be careful, there’s a dog loose,” a man warned me from outside. “Get back!” he yelled. I heard barking fade away as I pulled open the door. The poor stray sounded very angry, even though I’d tried to help it by leaving out food and clean water. I saw a sleek, black car at the curb, and its lights showed a brown dog running down the block, the sad, scared thing.

  “Aria McCourt?” the driver asked me.

  “I am,” I said, and my heart sank further. “Cain’s really not here?”

  “Cain?” he repeated.

  “Come on in, but I need just a second,” I told him, and backed up so that he couldn’t see that my dress was still unzipped and open. “Are you sure?” I texted Cain. He had brought his tux with him to work so that he could change there after the gym, but he was supposed to come back to get me. We were supposed to go together. “I can wait for you here.”

  “I don’t have time. I have to be at the museum exactly at 8 to open the doors for some damn ceremony and I can’t get stuck in traffic. I’ll meet you.”

  Ok. It was ok, I told myself. I took a coat from his closet and pulled it over my shoulders so that the gaping back of the dress didn’t show and I walked out to the car with the driver.

  “Miss? Do you want me to circle again?” he asked me forty minutes later. We’d been going slowly around the block, fighting traffic and gawkers and other party guests, but Cain wasn’t answering my texts to come out and meet me. To come out and fix my dress, too.

  “Just one more time, please.” Then I’d have to get out because I was getting terrible wrinkles no matter that I was almost lying across the back seat to keep the fabric taut and flat. “And I’m sorry, but I think I’m going to need your help. My dress isn’t zipped up and I can’t do it myself. Cain—my husband was supposed to come home and he was going to do it, but he…forgot.”

  “Uh, ok,” the driver answered, very doubtful, and we went partway around the block again. He double-parked and I got out, and embarrassed enough that I wanted to die, I turned around and dropped the coat so that this stranger could finish dressing me. “Can you hold your breath or something?” he asked. I sucked it in as much as I could, but then, with the dress zipped and hooked, I couldn’t get back in the car. It was too low—I couldn’t bend enough and I couldn’t breathe if I was in a seated position, anyway.

  “I’ll just walk to the museum from here. It’s not that far. Thank you for your help,” I told the driver, not meeting his eyes in my shame. I put the coat back over myself, and taking tiny steps due to the width of my skirt, I started walking toward the natural history museum where the gala was taking place. As we’d pulled up, I’d seen Cain through the car window as he, Demetra, Blayden, and another woman untied a big pink bow and threw open the doors at the top of the white steps, all of them smiling and then posing for pictures together. I’d called out to him, too, but a police officer had told the driver of my car to keep going, and we’d had to go around the block again. Each one of those turns took at least twenty—

  My phone rang and I quickly hit the button and pressed it to my ear. “Hello? Cain?”

  “Aria, it’s your mother.”

  “Oh, sorry, Mama! I’m on my way to meet—”

  “I have bad news to tell you,” she cut in. “Your Uncle Terrance has passed. It was probably his heart or maybe a stroke. Something like that, without a doubt.”

  I stopped the tiny steps. “What? He died?”

  “I’m sorry, but yes. We’re not sure exactly what happened but it was certainly natural causes,” she said again, stressing the two last words. “Harlene is crushed, of course. They were best friends for forty years, more like brother and sister.” She went on about what a good man he’d been, a deacon at our church! A youth group leader, a camp counselor, a school volunteer when he didn’t even have children of his own! I put my hand over my stomach as it started to turn over.

  “Anyway, the funeral will be next week,” she finished. “Let me know what day you’ll be coming in and Jed can meet you at the airport to pick you up and bring you home.”

  “I’m not coming to his funeral!” The voice hadn’t even sounded like mine—not my usual speech or the terrible imitation California accent I’d been doing. It was angry and harsh, like the barking of that stray dog on Cain’s street.

  “What do you mean, you’re not coming?” Mama demanded. “Are you forgetting your family, Aria Louise? Don’t you remember the help he gave us when your father passed? He was at our house all the time! He used to take you for ice cream, and to the playground—”

  “I have to go,” I said in that same, strange voice. “I have to go.” I hung up on her, which I would never, ever hear the end of. I started the small steps again, one after the other, until I got to the bottom of the stairs that led up to the gala.

  “Name, please?” a woman asked me. She wore a headset and a pin that told me she was “Event Staff.”

  “Aria Miller.” I didn’t bother to try to fix my accent.

  “Miller,” she repeated, looking at her tablet. She studied it for a long time and then shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t see you here.”

  “What?” I stared but then understood. “Oh, could you look under my husband, then? Cain Miller.”

  She did, but shook her head again. “No. I mean, I see him, but there’s no other guest associated with his name.”

  “Is it under Aria McCourt?” I suggested, and she scrolled, but I could tell that I was trying her patience. “I have to be there. I got this dress. I got all the way over here in these shoes!” I said. The words shook.

  “Miss, I’m sorry. Only invited guests are allowed into the gala, no matter what you’re wearing.”

  I checked my phone. “I’m outside and they won’t let me in,” I wrote to Cain, and then I called him, and heard his voicemail pick up. “Ple
ase, can you check one more time?” I asked the woman.

  She looked over at one of the police officers and he stepped closer.

  “I’m not making a scene,” I told them. “I’m not trying to make your jobs harder. I swear, my husband is one of the co-chairs of this event. We had to come separately but I should be—I don’t know why my name isn’t anywhere, but it should be. Could I go inside to look for him? Just for a minute?”

  They stared at me.

  “Or if someone could get him and tell him that I’m out here?” Other people in their fancy clothes also turned to stare. “I need some help,” I said to the woman.

  She turned to the officer and nodded.

  “No, I don’t need the police! I have to find Cain,” I told them, but all the words got lost in my Tennessee accent and my tears.

  “Miss…”

  Before it got any worse, I turned and walked back in the direction I’d come from, which was not going to get me anywhere close to home.

  Chapter 10

  He was sorry. Cain was very, very sorry.

  “I don’t understand how that happened. I told them, I told the security people and the party planner—your name should have been on their list. You shouldn’t have been kept out,” he said to me again as he poured a cup of coffee. He’d been telling me the same thing since he got home, and every once in a while he’d also add that he was going to call this person or that person and get it straightened out. It was much too late to straighten anything.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, as I’d also been saying since the night before. “It was a mistake.”

  “I put my phone down somewhere and Blayden had picked it up. I had no idea that you’d been trying to get in touch with me so many times.”

  Cain had called me back from someone else’s phone, eventually, but I’d already gotten to his house and turned mine off. “It doesn’t matter,” I told him again, then looked at the clock. “Why are you here right now? Aren’t you going to work?”