Family Affair (5 page)

I was ridiculously proud of myself for somehow managing not to reply with “Hell, yeah.” But the truth is, that breakup had nothing to do with the lack of oral. It was the lack of something else. Something I didn’t even know existed in the world until I met Layla.

But, yeah, oral would have been cool.

We started out as a group: me; my buddy Doug (who was always too much of a clown to have a girlfriend back then—now he’s in IT, which I always joke is equally attractive to women, though he just got married); Steve; Steve’s girlfriend, Michelle; and Layla. The five of us would hang out during lunch and every day after school. Weekends were ours to tear up the town—which mostly meant Doug, Steve, and me playing video games, Layla and Michelle making fun of us, and then all of us dropping by the multiplex to see whatever new movies had been released. Eventually, Steve and Michelle broke up, Doug moved away, and our party of five became a table for two.

Layla was the first person ever able to make me behave. And I don’t mean by scolding me or laying down any kind of law. She was the first person who inspired me to not be a dick. I actually cared what she thought of me, and wanted to do things that would make sure she
kept
liking me.

Apparently, it worked, because we got married about five minutes after we finished college. I’m not sure it was the wisest move, since neither of us had ever been with anyone else, but at least I
knew I’d never suffer by comparison. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. It’s never been a secret that I’m not the poster child for impulse control. So, sure, we may have been a little young and may not have put in the right amount of forethought, but luckily for me it worked out. I took no small amount of ribbing from my buddies over getting hitched so soon and so young, but I knew that there wasn’t a single guy among them who hadn’t been secretly in love with Layla since she burst onto our scene, so I took every crack with a grain of salt.

I knew I loved her the first time she called me an asshole. Romantic, huh? Sad but true. She was the only person to call me on my shit, and she wasn’t bitchy or controlling. Just honest. And usually right—though I rarely admitted it.

I like to say I grew up with Layla, but I bet Layla would insist she’s still waiting for me to grow up.

All of our friends started to get married about five or six years after Layla and I did, and about twelve years after we started dating. But there was something intrinsically different about those relationships. Maybe because they hadn’t been there for every first, good or bad. Maybe because they were based on a more adult foundation. Either way, watching my buddies and their wives, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something missing from my own marriage. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Don’t get me wrong—I love her. I know she’s the best thing I ever found. She’s solid. She’s every guy’s perfect girl. She’s definitely, one hundred percent without a doubt the girl I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life with.

I think.

She really should have stayed for the whole game.

Brett comes home and the roles are once again reversed. This time he’s ignoring me. Although not in the usual way. He’s not playing deaf—he’s pissed. He stalks around the apartment and everything he does is punctuated with a loud bang. He tosses off his shoes—
bang
. He hangs his jacket up and slams the closet door. He goes into the bathroom and slams that one, too.

“Great game,” I say, when he finally comes out.

“Yeah? What was the final score?”

“Thirty-seven to fifteen?” I say, my pitch just slightly raised, which might suggest I wasn’t positive, but I did check before I got home. Still, the way he hurled the question at me, I feel panicky and wonder if there was an extra field goal or something.

“You don’t have to come to the games if you don’t want to,” he says.

Instantly I feel like crap. I
do
want to go to the games. I want to support him, at least. I’ve always supported him. It just didn’t feel like he cared either way anymore. But apparently he does.

“I’m so sorry, babe,” I say, and mean it with all my heart. “Brooke was itching to take off and I didn’t think you’d notice
and I haven’t seen her in a while and we wanted to catch up and—”

“It’s okay,” he says, taking in how awful I feel. “It just bummed me out.”

“I’m sorry,” I reply, and then smile as I walk to him. “How can I possibly make it up to you?”

He meets me halfway, and I know I’m forgiven. Sure, we may have hit a rocky patch lately, but when we do connect—when we’re on the same page—it’s paradise. We both know that.

I knew I loved Brett the first time he took me to my dad’s grave. I didn’t know where we were going when he kidnapped me after school that rainy Friday, and I wasn’t in the mood to go anywhere, let alone somewhere against my will and with no clue as to where we’d end up. We were too young for him to be proposing but not too young for him to try his hand at romance in an outdoor, public (albeit remote) place. This was before my mom passed away, so when we got to the graveyard I was certain he’d taken his quest to obtain my virginity to a whole new level.

“A graveyard? Seriously?” I spouted, hand on one hip, mouth pursed in a smirk, one eyebrow cocked.

Brett reached his hand out and softly touched my sure-of-itself eyebrow with a finger, guiding it back down to its natural position. “Yes, a graveyard,” he said, and he kicked dirt from the front of a worn-away headstone.

“Not on your twisted life, pal,” I said, but before I could get the words out I noticed something in his face. He was serious, and we weren’t there to have sex. He held his hand out for me to take, which I did.

Brett inhaled a deep breath and then nodded toward the headstone. “Layla, I’d like you to meet the deceased Nick Brennan. Er, Foxx.”

I stood there for a moment in shock. The back of my throat started to feel like it was coated with a layer of cotton candy. I
swallowed a few times to make it go away, but each time it became more difficult. Had my father died? Nobody had told me? It would be fitting, since he’d left me out of the loop on everything else that had happened since 1988 when I’d last seen him.

“I don’t understand,” I said, as I started to tremble.

“No, no …” Brett rushed reassuringly, taking me in his arms and holding me close. “He’s not
really
dead.”

My wayward eyebrow poked back up. “Brett, what in the name of …?”

“Your dad’s a shit. I say we bury him.”

Nine words. Uttered as though he were telling me what time it was. That’s all he said. But what I heard was this:

“That poor excuse for a father has caused you so much pain, it’s criminal—whether you want to admit it or not. I know you go to the mailbox every time your birthday nears, or during Christmas or Easter or any other time a father should acknowledge his only daughter, and I watch you flip the mailbox open and shut it just as fast. You always get this little smile when it’s empty. Every time, you shrug and get this smile on your face that I imagine is you saying,
Oh, well … maybe next year
, but that smile breaks my fucking heart. Because I know what’s underneath. And I wish I could make a card appear in the mailbox, or a heart appear where that gaping hole is in your father’s chest. But I can’t … and it doesn’t. So I say we
bury
the fucker. I say we pronounce him dead, and from this day forward he is. A dead father has got to be less painful than one who’s alive and doesn’t appreciate or even recognize that he has a daughter.”

They say women develop faster than men. So do our interpersonal skills. Mostly. So you might guess I was reading into it. But I don’t think so. Those nine words meant the world to me.

I wept. It was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. I wept over the loss of my father—probably for the first time—and I simultaneously shed happy tears over finding someone who cared enough about me to do such a thing. Brett had found a
headstone that was so weatherworn it had no legible name, and he’d claimed it for me, for my life ahead. He encouraged me to talk to my father—or to the stone, at least—and to tell him how I felt. Then, once every year on the same day, he promised to bring me back to visit and “catch my father up” on what he’d missed.

Brett was a winner. He was the real deal. And it was that first visit to my father’s “grave” when the little cartoon birds swooped off the Disney celluloid, singing, chirping, and stitching my damaged heart back together with multicolored ribbons borne in their beaks. I never looked at another boy through high school.

After that, it was off to college together—to a school I wouldn’t even have put on my list had it not been his first choice (I figured I’d go to veterinary school right after, so where I did my under-grad wasn’t really all that important)—and a lifelong commitment to the eternal goof that he would quickly become (still somehow managing to be a successful goof). I haven’t ever regretted it, really, though he’s given me reasons to a few times.

I’ll never forget his twenty-first birthday. He drank too much—and by “too much,” I mean it was a miracle he wasn’t hospitalized with alcohol poisoning in addition to severe lacerations. He’d attempted to open a beer bottle with his eye socket: a neat bar trick, except in this case the bottle cap proved more resilient than the skin protecting his orbital bone. Particularly funny, though he’d never admit it, the cap had been a twist-off. In fact, the entire incident was transformed in the retelling into a bar fight. No word as to whether the bottle also sought first aid.

The kicker was that Brett’s two roommates heard me screaming, thought we were arguing, didn’t want to get involved, and stayed out the whole night at a friend’s. Brett and I stumbled back into his place at about seven forty-five a.m., while Matt and Corey, aka Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, staggered in at eight. I was starving after staying up the whole night in the ER, so before I’d even changed my blood-splattered shirt I made myself a bowl of cereal and wound up dozing off, still seated upright with
the spoon in my hand. When Matt walked into the kitchen and saw me—eyes closed, blood everywhere—he assumed that Brett had
stabbed
me, and immediately started hatching an escape plan. He sprinted out the front door, stole a ladder from the next house over, and climbed up to Brett’s bedroom window, shouting at the top of his lungs for Brett to “Grab the necessities and get the fuck out before someone calls the fuzz!”

Without addressing what he apparently thought of me, leaving me for dead as he did, Matt’s use of the word “fuzz” should tell you just all you need to know about Brett’s choice of friends. I woke up to the commotion, went to see what was going on, and saw Brett—half out the window, panicked, not even knowing why—with Matt screaming for him to hurry because I was awake (and apparently alive), and Corey blurting something about having a cousin in Mexico.

Yes, I married him nonetheless. We don’t talk to Matt much anymore, though.

They say you should never be in business with family—too close, too much history, too much potential for bloodshed. “They” never met Layla. True, we’ve had our shouting matches, but invariably it ends with me crying and apologizing, admitting I was wrong. It takes a very special person to get Trish Foster to admit she’s wrong—let alone to admit she’s ever cried.

Layla’s my sister-in-law. And my business partner. She came into our lives through Brett, but ask most Fosters and they’ll tell you that if she hadn’t, we’d have gone out and tracked her down. She’s that much a part of our tapestry.

For as long as I’ve known Layla, she’s always had a camera with her, sometimes to my annoyance. But that kind of tenacity pays off. She’s a phenomenal photographer, which anyone can see from her pictures. So my decision to join forces with her was a no-brainer. Her love of capturing memories through eternal images is matched only by her love of animals. She’s great with them—much better than I am. Not that I’m not a total animal lover, because I am (I’m the overly proud mother of a two-year-old dachshund), but she’s the one who wanted to be a vet, spent six years volunteering at the ASPCA, and went through a bit of
formal training. Okay, apparently it was just one night, and she’s no Cesar Millan, but she knows her way around a mutt. Just don’t let the mutt get hurt. She tends to be a little too empathetic.

Funny, then, that I’m the one playing with the dogs. I’m what you’d call a dog wrangler—or an animal wrangler, really. I’m the one making funny faces and strange noises, and often dangling a piece of meat over Layla’s head to get the beast’s attention. She never knows what I’m doing, because her face is attached to the camera, but I’m sure she can feel me moving all around her (and smell the piece of Swiss cheese perched beside her left ear) and one of these days I’m going to get someone to photograph us while we’re photographing the pets, because I have a feeling it’s quite a sight.

Speaking of sights, Layla’s on the phone right now, and she’s got this crazed expression that I’m not sure how to read exactly. The only other times I’ve seen it is when she’s telling a joke and waiting for the right moment to deliver the punch line, or when she’s messing with a telemarketer. She does that last thing quite a bit, actually. She likes to ask them to wait and then puts the phone in a drawer and walks away. Or if it’s a woman, she’ll make her voice all husky and ask, “So, what are you wearing?” When they get all bent out of shape and tell her she’s being inappropriate, she’ll say,
“You
called me. The only people who call me
want
to talk dirty.”

I love that girl.

Wow. I was thinking about Brett’s game that I have to go to tonight, not wanting to repeat last week’s debacle, when the call came. Now I’m standing here, stunned and grinning, still clutching the phone after the guy has hung up. Trish swipes the phone from my hand and cradles it to her ear.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” she asks the dead air, and then hangs up and turns to me. “What was that? Why are you standing there with that creepy smile on your face?”