Driving With the Top Down (20 page)

Surely that was all it was. And even if it wasn’t, there was no mention of Bitty having done anything illegal or being in any way dangerous—she’d just, basically, taken off. Big deal.

Who didn’t want to do that now and then?

Colleen accelerated down I-95 as the sun went down. Her playlist had reached its old-time music section at just the right moment, and Frank Sinatra was singing “Witchcraft” as the sun sank into the horizon under a scribble of lipstick pink sky.

Colleen glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Tamara mouthing the words. “You
know
this song?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“No … you’re just sixteen. Not a lot of sixteen-year-olds are familiar with Sinatra’s oeuvre.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I’m just surprised you know it, that’s all.”

“Okay, well, mostly I liked
American Horror Story,
and I heard this on it and Shazamed it, so don’t go freaking out that I’m in some sort of Satanic cult or something just because it’s about witches.”

Colleen laughed. “I wasn’t going there.”

“My dad would.” In the rearview mirror, Colleen saw Tamara roll her eyes, then turn her head to the scenery, jaw clenched. “He’s such an asshole sometimes.”

“Men, I’m telling you,” Bitty chirped.

“Stop,” Colleen said. “Not all men are bad. What”—she tested the waters carefully—“what made you so mad at Lew?”

“Who said I’m mad at Lew?”

“Basically everything you say about him or men sounds like you’re mad at Lew.”

“Who’s Lew?” Tamara asked from the back.

“Bitty’s husband.”

“Soon-to-be ex.”

Colleen turned to her. She was opening up. Good sign. “Really?”

Bitty nodded. Clearly she didn’t feel like elaborating.

That uncomfortable feeling churned in Colleen’s stomach again. “What happened?”

“Look, I know you didn’t like him. You don’t need to remind me of that.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Just drop it. It has been rough. He’s an asshole. I shouldn’t have married him. I don’t need it piled on that you told me so.”

Colleen didn’t want to argue with Bitty. Even though it was absolutely insane to act like she had been gearing up for an almost two-decades-delayed
I told you so
.

Even though … she had totally told her so.

“Tam.” Colleen glanced in the mirror. “I think we’re getting close to the B and B for tonight—can you check the map?”

“What’s the name? And”—she looked around—“where are we?”

“Almost in Savannah.”

“Okay.”

Tamara clicked around on her phone, and Bitty bit her lip, her elbow resting on the top of her car door. Colleen could tell from knowing her that she was seething. The kind of brokenhearted, angry Bitty that Colleen had seen only once before.

“I could just … I could just kill him.”

“Better him than you, huh?” Colleen joked.

Bitty didn’t laugh. “One of us, anyway.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Bitty

Dear Stranger,

Colleen is acting weird with me.

I feel her looking at me sidewise while we’re driving, like she’s suddenly assessing me. I wonder if she’s getting some sort of cabin fever or something, where she can’t stand having so many people around her.

I kind of am.

I mean, I’m grateful to her for including me, this has been a very interesting week so far, but there are three of us in this little car for hours every single day, and with all of us being women, I guess it’s natural for us to start to prickle around each other.

Plus, I don’t know about the other two, but I’m starting to feel distinctly premenstrual. They say women sync to each other’s cycles. I wonder how long it takes for that to happen. Probably more than a few days, even if some of those days
do
feel endless.

I also wonder, though I hate to say this, if she’s watching me judgmentally for eating so much. Not that I’m eating more than an average person, I think, but I probably look totally piggish to her. Particularly since I have never really indulged in food much in my life.

I started because I didn’t think I was going to live long enough for it to hit my hips anyway, but the funny thing is, I think it’s starting to make me feel a little better. Can food really be an antidepressant? I know there are a lot of books that make that claim, but could it be true?

Probably not. At least not peanut brittle. I guess it’s more likely that getting away from the tiny biosphere of Winnington alone—for the first time in decades—has lifted some of that black cloak of Camalier-ness from me.

I felt like I couldn’t make it without Lew when I was there. Without an identity as a wife. And everyone there backed me up on that, make no mistake. There was no question that I was valuable only when basking in the reflected glow of the Camalier name.

Candy Fitzgerald-Sonner—the new wife of an old bore, who clearly has her eye on taking over virtually all my social roles—might learn the same lesson. Or she might grace society with her unfunny bons mots until she’s an old woman, like Lew’s mother, and dies a glorified death and sinks into the legend of this place that feels so big when you’re in it but looks so small and even unreal when viewed from a seedy truck-stop diner in Nowhere, Georgia.

Winnington exists only unto itself. Almost no one in the outside world is aware of it at all.

Socrates’ cave allegory.

It was easy to suck me into that, of course, because that’s how it was for me growing up. My mother was the grande dame of Barlowe society and taught me everything I needed to know about getting a certain kind of man and keeping him, by starving and serving and bowing and scraping.

She’d never admit that, though. She’d say she simply taught me to “behave like a lady.”

Sometimes—okay, frequently—I wonder what would have happened if Blake hadn’t left. I know that’s silly, wondering “what if” about a boyfriend from what was practically childhood, but I really loved him. Even looking back now, with everything I know about life—which, arguably, isn’t much—everything I’ve endured, all the pain and the losses and the humiliations and, yes, the glories, I still wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t left.

I think we would have stayed together. After a year and seven months together, we weren’t losing interest. We rarely disagreed, never “fought,” and I always felt valued by him. Loved. Accepted for who I was.

Would you believe that when I got together with Lew, I stopped singing in the car with the radio? Small thing, I know, but I used to love that, rocking along with Mariah Carey or whoever, I listened to everything and loved to get in the car and belt it out with them. Blake used to just laugh and shake his head indulgently. It charmed him, I think.

But Lew always asked me to turn down the radio, not to sing, because he had a headache. He had more headaches than the proverbial disinterested wife! And with that simple dis, he practically took away my voice.

When I cooked for Lew—not too often, since he didn’t like my cooking—I’d turn off the radio the minute he came in. Then I’d work in silence. Or several yards away from where he sat, watching the hushed weirdness of golf on TV. Or
Golden Girls
reruns.
That
was discordant, but did I ever say, “Hey, what’s with you and
The Golden Girls
? Am I just too young? Is that why we never make love?” No. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings or insult him.

In fact, I
never
mentioned the complete lack of sex in any way other than what I thought was a seductive come-on. I’d say stuff like “I want you so bad,” because I did—I craved touch and affection, but I never asked why he wasn’t interested, why he couldn’t get it up for me, why so often, even in our dating time, he wasn’t able to
keep
it up. I just treated him like he was a king.

I had no idea he was a queen.

Foolish me.

Sad thing is, to me he
was
a king, for far too long. As long as I could keep Blake out of my head, I was able to see Lew as the be-all and end-all. I was
proud
of him when we went out to events. I was
proud
to be Mrs. Lew Camalier.

I wasted too many years doing that.

The New Age people are always talking about taking care of yourself, loving yourself first, and so on. I used to think that was nonsense. Silly. I thought I was taking care of myself by taking care of my husband. I thought pleasing him gave me more pleasure than anything else could.

But you know what I’ve found out?

Despite the occasional tense moment/hour, I have felt more …
freedom,
riding in this convertible through the South, the wind blowing, the sun shining, surrounded by people I’ll never know or see again, in cars I’ll never remember, than I have ever felt in my life.

And freedom feels good.

I wonder what I’d be like if I’d never gotten married.

Probably lonely. I think I know myself well enough to know I need a companion. I need to feel
needed
. Of course,
wanted
would be awesome as well, but beggars can’t be choosers. I was just never one who wanted to strike out on my own and subscribe to
Working Woman
magazine. I wanted to be … Well, I wanted to be exactly what I became.

Be careful what you wish for.

Once upon a time, I loved another man. Looking back, I guess I should characterize a twenty-year-old as more of a “boy” but at the time, I thought he was my forever. Good guy, solid, salt of the earth. Not moneyed or cultured, my mother never would have approved. But I didn’t care about that. I’m not heading toward some
Romeo and Juliet
b.s., I loved him and wanted to be with him forever.

He left me.

He had to, it was a family thing, not worth boring you with it now, but the thing is, of all the possible Other Life scenarios I think of, that’s the one that I have the most questions about. What could have been? We’ve passed hundreds of palm readers and neon psychic signs outside of ramshackle huts on this drive, and every time I see one, I think I’d like to go in and ask about my fate.

At this point, though, not only am I afraid to hear what my past could have been, but I’m
really
afraid to hear about my future.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Colleen and Bitty, the past

Bitty sat on the rickety back bumper of Colleen’s car, hyperventilating into a paper bag.

Colleen was silent, one hand on Bitty’s shoulder, the other anxiously grabbing her own thigh. She had known this was coming, and she didn’t tell Bitty. Didn’t prepare her for it. But she hadn’t known what to say. What was she
supposed
to say? It was between Bitty and Blake; it was really none of Colleen’s business. Plus, she had known for only a few days.

Bitty took in a deep shuddering breath. It was the first time she stopped wheezing since Blake had driven away. She had screamed at him to go. Yelled at him and thrown her soda at him.

That’s when Colleen arrived.

He clearly hadn’t wanted to leave. He said he had wanted to explain more, but she hadn’t wanted to hear it. Privately, Colleen wondered if he was going to ask Bitty to go with him, or if he might have given her some promise to return, maybe even proposed. People had separations all the time because of extenuating circumstances—that didn’t mean they had to be apart forever.

But there was no telling Bitty that. She was in full hysteria mode. It seemed like she was physically unable to calm down.

She sat up and shook her head at Colleen. “How is this ha-happening?”

“I know, sweetie—”

“No, seriously.” She swatted Colleen’s hand away and stood to pace in the dirt in front of them. Her emotions were made worse by the shots they’d had before the night went sour. “How is it possible that the
first
time I ever feel anything real for someone, it’s just being”—she gestured wildly—“taken away? How is it fair?”

“It’s not.”

“It’s not. Exactly. I have never felt like that. At all. I love—” Her voice was swallowed by tense tears in her throat.

“I know,” Colleen said, because there was nothing else to say.

“All my life,” Bitty said, “I’ve thought of duty before happiness. I never dreamed I could actually fall in love and be so”—she shuddered—“so
blissfully
happy. But I was, you know?”

“I know.”

“We got along just
so well
. We agreed on everything. Everything except whether there should be strawberry milk.” She gave a feeble laugh. “He only hated it because it was pink and he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to think he was a sissy.”

“I don’t think anyone would ever take Blake for a sissy.”

“Right?” Bitty looked at her with eyes so red and bleary, it burned just to look at them. “That was another thing I loved about him. He’s so protective of me, and I always feel—I always
felt—
so safe with him. I never realized how much I prized masculinity until I was in his arms.” She started crying again, shuddering sobs that racked her thin body. “And now I’ll never be in those arms again. It’s all just over.”

“Did he
say
that?”

Bitty splayed her arms. “Do you see him? He’s burning down 95 as we speak, headed to Bumfuck, Georgia, to some dinky town where he’ll undoubtedly get back with his high school girlfriend and they’ll get married and live next door to his parents so they can babysit when he and she want to go out for bowling night dates, and he’ll forget all about me.”

Colleen gave her a squeeze. “You’re really buying yourself pain here unnecessarily. You’re making up stories that make this hurt even more than it has to.”

“It couldn’t hurt more.”

“Bitty, he could be back.”

“Here?” She shook her head. “He’s not coming back here. He’s leaving school in his senior year. By the time he got back, if he ever even tried, everyone he knows would be gone. He’ll be older than everyone. It would be like Rip Van Winkle going back to elementary school.”

“So you’re making this impossible for him in your mind, even while that’s the most hurtful thing you can do to yourself,” Colleen pointed out. “Can you see that? I’m surprised you haven’t decided he’s going to have a car accident on the way down.” The minute she said it, she regretted it. All she needed was to add that worry for Bitty.