Page 84 of Smith

I was so sick and fucking tired of the same bullshit platitude.

“How do you know? Were you there?”

“Nope. And I didn’t need to be there to know you did everything you could to stop that woman from going back.”

Just like Jonas, Cash was dead-ass wrong.

I gave up.

Quit.

When shit got real, I didn’t do everything I could to keep Rie with me.

I’d had enough.

Years and fucking years of the same argument. The fight was always the same, too. Hours spent trying to talk her around, make her see reason. It would last a month, two, then her mom would call with the same sad song and dance, and beg her daughter to come home. Not because she loved and missed her. Hell no, the only thing that woman missed was her shield. If Rie wasn’t there to be used as a punching bag, her mom caught the brunt of it. Until what she caught was her husband’s boot to her back and a fall down the stairs. Her death was deemed an accident and it was deemed so because Rie’s piece-of-shit brother reported he saw his mother trip and take a tumble down the stairs. The asshole also claimed his father wasn’thome at the time of the accident, just him. And when the police and paramedics arrived, Rie’s father had already made his way across town. But rest assured, after getting a call from the police, that motherfucker hightailed his asshole back to play the part of grieving husband.

So, no, I didn’t try my best to stop her from going home. Her mother was dead. Her brother was putting the pressure on and she was out of her mind with grief. And in her grief, she broke down and told me all the ways her mother’s death was my fault. The fuck of it was, she was right.

Then Rie bought it at the hand of her father and that was my fault, too.

My selfishness led to two women dying. One of them beaten down by life and an abusive husband. One sweet, beautiful, sensitive girl who didn’t live long enough to put the abuse behind her and live the life she should’ve had.

“Your silence says I’m?—”

“My silence says nothing more than me sitting here doing my best to remember you’re a man I respect and friend I value. Do not mistake it for more than that. This is bullshit, Cash, and you know it. You wanna conduct some fucked-up therapy session on the way to visit Rice, fine. Let’s talk about you being twenty and shopping urologists to give you a vasectomy. None of them willing to give a twenty-year-old with no kids a surgery that would permanently kill his shot at a family. Let’s talk aboutyouat twenty years old, who was so fucking desperate he took unapproved leave and drove down to Goddamn Mexico to some quack doctor. You’re lucky your dick stillfunctionsat all. Further from that, let’s talk about why you were so desperate. No, wait, you don’t talk about Debbie and the pregnancy scare. You keep that shit buried and I respect you enough not to bring it up to you or give you my opinion.”

“I don’t regret what I did or why I did it. I didn’t want kids then and I sure as fuck don’t want them now.”

I had to hand it to Cash—he was far better at controlling his temper than I was. The way he rapped that shit out was almost convincing.

“Regret has nothing to do with your reasoning. You don’t want kids, great, some people don’t. But I was there, brother. You were in full-on crisis mode.”

“Fuck yeah I was in crisis. We’d just earned our Tridents. I didn’t want to be a dad, ever. I certainly didn’t want a kid with some Frog Hog I’d picked up in a bar. But you bring up a good point. You were there, you saw how freaked out I was. Well, two years later I was there to witness the devastation that bitch Valerie wrought. I was there for the aftermath. She laid the heavy on you and you just took it. A few months later she was dead and so were you.”

I kept my focus out the window. Nothing but trees and farm fields, a far cry from Detroit. Growing up, the closest thing I’d seen to a green space was the football field behind my shitty high school. Sometimes I wondered how different my life would’ve turned out if I hadn’t met Rie—the pretty, sweet girl from the affluent Grosse Pointe Shores neighborhood with the graceful mansion on Lake Shore Drive with the bird’s eye view of Lake St Clair. Then there was me, the kid from the Von Steuben neighborhood with our cracked streets and graffiti-covered buildings, crime, and the junk collector on the corner.

Nine miles separated our neighborhoods but it might as well have been nine-thousand.

I wasn’t the boy from the wrong side of the tracks—I was the boy who was from a different universe. Our lives were opposite in every way. Yet I was drawn to her. At sixteen she was already broken. At seventeen I already had a God complex and thought I could fix what her father had broken.

I’d been wrong.

So very fucking wrong I often wondered where she’d be, what kind of life she’d be living if I hadn’t had to drive my mom to St. John’s Hospital and saw the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen sitting in the cafeteria eating alone. As soon as she told me she was there waiting for her father, a cardiologist, I should’ve walked away.

I didn’t. And because I sat across from her waiting for my mother to be seen in the ER, I’d altered the course of her life.

“You need to start living,” Cash declared, yanking me from my musings.

“We’re done talking abouther.”

“Agreed. Now, we’re talking about Aria.”

“No—”

“Heard all about her from Jonas,” Cash talked over me. “Heard all about how funny the woman is, how gorgeous, how perfect she is for you, how her dad’s Navy so she gets shit civvies don’t, how she shovels shit at you and how you eat that shit up and beg for more. Heard about it. Thought Jonas was being Jonas, all optimist and shit. Then I saw it with my own eyes and I have to tell you, it took me less than a minute to see. That woman doesn’t have you begging for it, she’s got you gagging for it. Time to buck up, brother, put all that shit Valerie put you though in your rearview, and hold on to what you got in Aria.”

I didn’t have anything with Aria beyond a good time. I’d made sure of that and set boundaries, ones she’d assured me she wanted. After last night and this morning, I’d taken away the one thing we did have. She hadn’t questioned it or fought it. And the one thing I knew about Aria that was ironclad—she spoke her mind. If she’d had an issue with me pulling away she would’ve said so.

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