I Call Him Brady (15 page)

             
May sighed loudly and I imagined her twirling her hair and making that ‘you’re being a fucking moron’ face. “He doesn’t feel responsible for you, asshole. He’s in love with you. People who are in love tend to want to do nice things for one another. It’s stupid, but entirely normal. You ought to know. Look at the dumbass thing you did for him, trying to save his career from the wrath of Austin. A less mature person might feel compelled to point out that it could just as easily be suggested that you were taking responsibility for something of his that was never yours to take on.” There was a break as she switched ears with the phone. “Thankfully, I am not that juvenile.”

             
“Yeah, thankfully.”

             
“So, what are you going to do?” It was a loaded question. But the answer was simple.

             
“Nothing.” I couldn’t do anything even if I wanted to. Not after deleting any and all contact info I had for him. He was now and would forever be, out of my reach. Just as he had been before that fateful day in the elevator.

             
We ended our conversation shortly after. May knew there was no point in arguing the matter. The only card she still had left to play was sitting in his deck and he didn’t even know it. I did though. If he ever called her phone looking for me, all bets would be off. She’d disregard everything I told her and tell him whatever she deemed appropriate at the time. Part of me was still holding out hope for exactly that.

I
was finally in New York. Getting back to work and drowning myself in someone else’s story was better than any other distraction my buddies had been able to conjure up for me back home. As an added bonus, I was starting to do many of my own stunts, in spite of my agent’s repeated requests I refrain from doing so.

Tired of constantly being tempted to call Embers, I ordered a second phone. It arrived in New York two days after I got there.

Crisco and I were sitting in my trailer while I was busy getting acclimated with my newest electronic toy.

“You know what else might have worked?” Cris pointed out in between bites of his hot dog. “Just deleting this chick’s number from your old phone.”

“Can’t do that.” I swiped my finger across the screen activating the new lock on it. “What if something comes up and I need to call her?”

“Why would you need to call her?” Cris picked up a napkin to wipe some mustard from his chin before realizing that it had already moved on to his shirt.

“I don’t know.”

He pointed his scrunched up napkin at me accusingly. “Because you wouldn’t! You are never going to have another need to call this girl, number one reason being, she doesn’t want you to.”

He didn’t get it. I didn’t expect him to. “I’m not deleting her number.”

“Fine. Don’t delete it.” Cris took a long thoughtful slurp through his straw. “You know what another simpler and more convenient course of action might have been?”

I didn’t really give a shit. I took a deep breath and counted to ten, reminding myself that he was my friend and was trying to look out for me in his own ‘live by the bro code’ sort of way. “What would have been simpler and more convenient?”

“Just changing your number,” he declared triumphantly.

“Nope. Can’t do that either.” I took my old phone and placed it carefully beside my lap top on the small desk along the wall.

“Why the hell not?”

“Because, Crisco that number is the only way Embers has to get to me. What if she decides six months from now that pushing me away was a mistake? Huh? Think she can just look me up in the phonebook? Friend me on Facebook? No. She can’t. All she has is this number and as long as there’s a chance she might use it, I’m not getting rid of it.”

He peered down at me over the rest of his hot dog with total disgust. “You’re pathetic. Seriously dude. What the hell happened to you? It’s like she put some fucking spell on you. You’ve totally changed.”

“I love her Cris. That’s all. I love her. And I get that you don’t get that, but for now, you just need to be my friend and accept it. I don’t care if you think it’s pathetic. Truth is, loving her has made me the least pathetic I’ve ever been.” I laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh, or even a ‘that’s funny’ laugh. It was a ‘how sad is that’, sort of laugh. And instantly I missed Embers more, because I knew she would have been the first one to laugh with me.

Another week had passed and with the end of the school year nearing and summer vacation right around the corner, I decided it was high time I find a replacement for May on the truck. Having no desire whatsoever to engage in any tedious interview sessions, I started by scrolling through my friends list on Facebook. At least seventy-five percent of the people on
there stemmed from a variety of restaurant jobs I had had in the past prior to starting up my own business. I knew any one of them would be up to the task. The question was, who would want it?

             
The first viable option I stumbled on was this kid Chase. I loved that guy and he would be worth having on the bus for sheer laughs alone. Not to mention the fact he was better with customers than anyone else I knew. The more I thought about it, the harder I found it to believe that May and I hadn’t hired him to begin with. I was about to message him with a job offer when I remembered the reason. Chase was a raging pothead who was baked twenty-four/seven. This was likely in part responsible for the laid-back demeanor and perma-grin most people found so endearing about him. It was also the reason he was always late, required frequent breaks and had a slight issue with short term memory loss. Not an ideal trait in the guy who is supposed to be taking food orders.

             
So, I bypassed Chase and kept moving until I hit the L’s. There she was, smiling back at me from her profile picture with her pixie hair-do and big brown eyes. Leo. Well, Leona really, but no one ever called her that. Not anyone I knew anyway.

             
I scrapped the idea of emailing her and went straight for my phone.

             
“Hello?”

             
It took me a second to realize she didn’t recognize the number. If you knew Leo, you’d know she rarely wasted time with formalities. Leo had three kids, a husband and her mother coming at her twenty-four hours a day. She didn’t have time to loosely throw around things like ‘hi’ and ‘how have you been?’. Leo was all about diving in head first and jumping out just as rapidly when the conversation came to an end. I always dug that about her.

             
“It’s Embers.”

             
“New number? Well, obviously,” she answered for herself. “This explains why you haven’t called me back.”

             
“You’ve been calling me? Sorry, May and I switched phones. I’m guessing she’s not taking any calls meant for me.” Not that I was surprised. May never took any of her own calls either. You had to send up a smoke signal if you wanted to get ahold of her. Or text.

             
“No worries. Just had a feeling something was up with you.” Leo had a freakish way of picking up on things. We could go for months without talking and then out of the blue I’d get a call and she’d be like, ‘What’s wrong?’ and there was always something. I didn’t know how she did it, but I’d learned to just accept it; and to frequently apologize for burdening her with my drama even if it was unintentional.

             
“Oh, that. Yeah. Um…”

             
“That bad huh?” I could hear her fidgeting with something in the background. She was always on the move, picking up or cleaning one thing or another. “So if you’re not ready to talk, why are you calling?”

             
I had almost forgotten. “Right. I called you. Listen, I’m down a person on the truck and I need someone who can just jump in and go with the flow. It’d be nights, you could have everyone tucked in and sent off to dreamland before we even get started. I pay a weekly salary, plus we split tips. You interested?”

             
“Hell yeah!”

             
I knew she would be. Up until the day she got pregnant, Leo had been a workaholic if there ever was one. She and I had both been working at the same sports bar at the time and I’m pretty sure most months she had seen me more than she’d seen her husband. Then came babies one through three and she had channeled all of that same work ethic into motherhood. Nearly six years later, I had a feeling she was itching to let loose and find her groove in the working world again.

             
“Awesome! You totally saved me. You have no idea.” I was quite literally dancing around my living room at this point, waving my free hand back and forth above my head.

             
“Honey, if you had spent the last three years trying to potty train two boys, you’d know you were the one doing the saving right now,” she laughed. “So, when do I start? Please say tonight.”

             
“Tonight it is. I’ll swing by in the truck at 9:30 to pick you up.”

             
“Cool.” Click. Leo was on to something else already.

             
I continued dancing triumphantly for a minute, phone still in hand. Then I remembered Leo saying she had tried to call me. Which naturally made me wonder if anyone else had attempted to contact me and failed.

             
Bouncing around to the rhythm of my own joy came to a halt abruptly as a swarm of butterflies came surging through the pit of my stomach before landing there like a solid brick. Nerves were wreaking havoc on my body just at the mere thought of checking my old voicemail. Not that I really expected to hear his voice there. In fact, I wasn’t really sure which I would find more devastating. Finding a message from Brady or not finding one.

             
As the weight of my feet seemed to increase, I dragged myself back over to the desk and sat down. With sweaty palms, I held my phone and began to dial my old number.

             
“What?” It was May.

             
“What the hell? Since when do you answer your phone in the middle of the day? It’s clearly not an emergency!”

             
“Excuse the fuck out of me. Why are you calling if you don’t want to talk to me? It’s not like you’re going to leave me a voicemail.” Because I knew she’d never bother listening to it anyway.

             
“I’m trying to check my messages. It occurred to me that people may be trying to get in touch with me,” I grumbled.

             
Silence.

             
“You won’t find any messages from him, Em. Trust me, if he had called, I would have answered it.” She sounded concerned and I instantly felt like a fool. May had seen right through me. I mean, of course she had. But still, she could have at least pretended not to.

             
I squeezed my eyes shut, a futile effort to hold back the waterworks. Those fucking things were really getting old.

             
“Can I please just check my messages?” I struggled to get the words out.

             
“Yeah. Call me back after.” I knew she could tell I was trying not to cry, which only made me want to cry some more.

             
The line went dead. I pressed my lips together, determined to see this through, and hit call once more.

             
When I heard my own voice answer, I quickly entered my code to bypass it. I had recorded it seven times and still hadn’t managed to deliver anything that wasn’t cringe worthy.

             
“You have twenty-seven messages.” Holy shit. This was going to take a while.

             
Almost half an hour later and I had listened to and deleted twenty-five messages. Most of them had been from Grilla and most of those had been from before I gave away my phone. I made a habit of ignoring his messages since they usually came in after I deliberately ignored his call to avoid another lecture regarding my lack of punctuality. I had now severely suffered through the consequences of my actions and was just about ready to simply hang up and forget about the last two voicemails still chilling in my inbox. Then I heard a voice I didn’t recognize.

             
“Hi. This message is for Embers Fillios. My name is Sharon Stewart and I’m calling from the Mercado Galleria of Art and Photography. We have a check here for you from the show you did back in April. If you could give us a call back, we’d be happy to update your contact info and mail it to you. Otherwise, our office hours are Monday through Friday, 11AM to 3PM if you would like to pick it up in person. Thank you.”