Brandon is due to arrive in less than twenty-four hours, and Josia is working late tonight on a set of outer doors for a chichi new restaurant in Prince George’s County.
I was really looking forward to the nightly cup of tea, having worked so hard in the garden earlier—some weeds, stalky and woody, required more exertion than I prefer. Pulling with my back, my legs, my stomach—now that’s what a workout should be. The Farm Workout. I could make a million getting rich people to work a farm, the produce of which I could sell for profit. What an idea!
Josia, had he been around, would have appreciated my efforts, and he would have listened to me dream a little about what that newly cleared patch of ground might become with a little forethought, love, and time.
The earth smelled so good. Clean and new and yet so ancient at the same time. How can that even be?
I wanted to tell Josia about it. And even more so, I wanted to tell him about my father. He would have some good advice. He would probably tell me to be open and honest with Brandon because that’s Josia’s way. But I won’t let my father think I’ve frittered away my earnings when part of my reason for filing was the supposed mismanagement on the part of my parents’ financial manager. Yes, Brandon, I did a bang-up job on my own, as you can see by my crumbling yet genteel home and my daily trips to Subway.
No, thanks. I don’t want to touch the money I’ve saved for the New Big Reveal. I’ll have to take care of some things on my own. Take a little sashay down to the pharmacy and buy a little something to perk up my hair.
So I call Jack because he can give Josia a run for his money when it comes to calming down a case of the nerves. I’ve never initiated us getting together, and apparently that was the right instinct. When his phone goes to voice mail after only the second ring, sadness envelops me. Why did he have to confess the way he felt? That ruins everything.
That he chose to love me when I gave him no reason to think our arrangement was anything other than business doesn’t make me feel any better for having, what amounts to, broken his heart.
In any case, none of the men in my life are available right now.
I wonder if Big Mike makes house calls.
A composition book in my lap and a glass of chocolate milk beside me, I sit outside in the backyard, ready to tackle another flower bed. But first—a plan. A visit from Brandon is huge. Until now, I’ve always remained firm about parental visits. This feels different, though. I write at the top of a sheet in bold letters:
How to Look Like You’re Doing Well Financially on a Shoestring When You Aren’t, by Fia Hume
Okay.
1. Drag out the expensive clothing.
2. Act confident.
3. By all means do whatever you must do to keep your father away from your dilapidated and obviously neglected city mansion that eats away your money day by day.
4. Lip gloss, lip gloss, lip gloss.
He’ll expect to come over right after he lands, so I’ll thwart that by meeting him at his hotel for a late dinner, and then the benefit luncheon the next day, and hopefully that will just be that and back to Idaho with you, padre! It’s not like he was asking me to hang with him the entire time he’s in town.
But for now, the garden calls me back.
A brick wall surrounds the rectangular garden, square stone posts breaking up the space every twelve feet, those closest to the porch supporting pineapple finials.
A week ago I started removing the dead cherry tree in the middle by sawing off branches, and now it stands, a trunk with its upper, vertical branches pointing skyward like a drummer’s snare brush. It will just have to stay that way for the present.
Today I’m determining which shrubs to save and which to keep. Someone loved azaleas, that much can be determined, and as the blooms are now fading and wilting around the edges, I can still decide which colors to keep. I’m going with the bright pink and the red.
I finish my milk and enter the outside door of the basement, crawl over the last year or two’s worth of supplies toward the spot where some old rakes and shovels lean up against a side wall. I grab a shovel and, stepping over a box of gears from some mysterious machine, a tine from a rusted rake digs its jagged finger through my pajama bottoms and down the flesh of my outer thigh.
I drop the shovel immediately, my right hand grabbing the offending implement and pushing it away as the fire of jagged pain flows down the wound and blood begins to flow.
Gush, actually.
The quickness of the crimson flow shocks me as much as the handle of the rake as it bounces against the hot water heater, sending it back in my direction. Thankfully, my left hand, now streaked in blood, springs up to block my face.
A rusted rake! Why did it have to be rusted? But then, how could it not be? Everything about my life has oxidized.
I scramble slowly over the basement’s junk offerings, doing my best to hold my thigh and stanch the flow at the same time. Never has all this stuff looked so worthless. And not just worthless, but decidedly a deficit. Worse than worthless. In my way. In my way. It’s all in my way.
I stumble over boxes and around at least fifteen straight-back chairs. Then coatracks, a couple of steel desks, and more boxes. Boxes and boxes. There’s even a box of boxes.
Somebody please get me out of here!
Finally, I hobble up the basement steps until, in the kitchen, having left heavy drops of scarlet in a line down the hallway, I run cold water and nab the roll of paper towels on the counter. I begin to dab at the gash. But despite my flimsy attempt at first aid, the blood continues to soak through the paper towels at a rate that frightens me. It’s going to need stitches. Hopefully before a transfusion is necessary.
There’s nobody else to call but Jack. This time, when his voice mail picks up, I leave a message.
“Jack, I know you’re probably off in Dubai or Tahiti or Alaska or something, and I know you’re upset and want nothing to do with me anymore, but I need your help. I just had a stupid run-in with a rusty rake. I need stitches I think, and I don’t want to ride my bike over to the emergency room. So if you could call me back if you get this right away, I’d appreciate it. Thanks. I’m sorry.”
I end the call and suddenly the bright idea to call a cab lights up the darkness of “I’m-thirty-two-years-old-and-clueless,” and I can only hope the sight of my own blood veiled the obvious solution to my problem because right now I feel more stupid than that rake.
And there it sits, Big Mike’s card, where I left it by the coffeemaker on kitchen table number one. Every once in a while my cluttered ways help me out.
Don’t take a chance, the card says. Any time, any day, any way.
“I’m ten minutes away,” he says after I’ve spilled out the story. “Can you hang on?”
“I’ll be out front.”
“Hang in there, baby. Hang tight.”
I love him.
I love Big Mike.
In the ten minutes it takes for him to arrive, I bind a towel around my thigh, relieved the pressure is working to keep the wound from soaking the terrycloth completely. I tape it in place with duct tape from a roll I keep atop kitchen table number two. Before I can hurry upstairs to put on a decent skirt or dress, Big Mike arrives, honking furiously. He jumps out and runs up the walk.
Wait till he gets an eyeful of me in dusty-pink pajama bottoms with a bloody tear at the left leg, my beastly black sweater, and, jamming my feet inside them, a pair of green Wellingtons so old the rubber has begun to dry rot.
Beautiful.
“University okay?” he asks, helping me into the backseat of his clean cab.
“Okay. Whatever you think.”
He slides into his seat. “Folks seem to have the best response when I pick them up there.” He pulls out with that cabdriver ease, that slouchy curve, quick yet smooth, and the picture of steady nonchalance. “I do this all day every day,” it says. I need that kind of calm right now.
He heads up Howard toward Green Street and a hospital so large my stitches will seem like a breather compared to all the victims carted in by Medevac.
Big Mike turns off the talk-radio heads on WBAL and the local diatribe against our mayor and the governor. Politics. Even messier than my basement. Brandon always says when asked about politics in interviews, “A sector of society that’s even more in need of a good spanking than Hollywood.”
I have to stifle a laugh. Maxim first recorded the quote and I don’t think a single American citizen disagreed.
“Let me put on some soothing music,” Big Mike says, switching to FM and a classical station.
What am I going to do? This will eat up the rest of my afternoon and I’ll have no time to get ready for Brandon’s arrival. I may not have a stylist anymore, but I remember how to present myself as a star. Still, I need a good three to four hours to do it. So much of it is about the hair.
After gardening, I planned to head over to Rite Aid, purchase a color rinse and some hot rollers because, in all my supply purchases, I never brought home beauty equipment. I wanted to stay as far away from artifice as possible.
And hair spray. Gotta have hair spray.
But now I’ll be lucky if I can scrape this mousy gerbil nest into a proper bun.
It’s not that I care what those who read the Hollywood gossip blogs or the entertainment rags actually think; I’d simply rather forgo the maelstrom of negativity. A good presentation before disappearing once again prior to the interview will be a lot smoother. The public will write me off as “living a quiet life and doing well,” thereby allowing me to circumvent a feeding frenzy.
Because despite what people might think of such scrutiny, assigning it as merely something that “comes with the territory” of wealth and fame, it’s painful nonetheless, and it’s an exquisite pain because no matter how much you tell yourself not to take it personally, and how lame you feel for having done so, you can’t help but do so.
Big Mike checks on me every couple of minutes until he breaks for good by the emergency room entrance. I pay him with the last twenty in my wallet, and when he gives me the change he says, “You keep me posted if you have the time, all right? And you’ll be fine. I’ve taken a lot worse here. I could tell you some stories!”
“I’ll bet.” I can’t help but laugh.
“You’ll be all right!” he calls as I hobble inside to a full waiting room, one seat left.
That qualifies as a miracle if you ask me, not because it actually is a miracle, but because I want it to be.
After registering at the desk and inwardly thanking the Screen Actors Guild for my health coverage, I sit down, nursing my thigh, encircling it with my hands.
I look right at home with so many of the other inhabitants of the room. In fact, it looks pretty much like every emergency room scene you’ve ever seen in a movie. The same ragtag patients and their tagalong attendants. The smelly, the scared, the annoying, the quiet, the inappropriately loud, the cell phone talker and the pacer, those who are alone and those who wish they were, all present and accounted for.
When a woman about my age wearing powder-blue sweats and an Ocean City T-shirt snaps my picture with her smart phone, I realize it’s all over.
All the plans to beat Jessica to the punch, to plan a “free and fashionable” comeback, to travel to New York City and stay at the St. Regis, unravel like an unfettered braid. I’m still just Fiona Hume, fallen bad girl and general screwup. That’s what they’ll say.
And maybe they’re right.
Tempting though it is, I don’t ask her to refrain from sending it off to that monkey-faced lard-ass Perez Hilton or whatever acid-penning blogger she’s dispatching it to right now with a smug, superior grin stretching her closed red lips.
What would be the point?
If not her, someone else. I learned that lesson young.
My father will be snapped at the Baltimore-Washington Airport, various assumptions will be made and repeated as cosmic truth, and I’ll retreat once again into the noise and clutter that dangles and flutters in the place of my own making.
Ninety minutes later, still in the waiting room, a text from Jack lights up my screen.
Where are you, Fi?
University.
I’m on my way. Don’t leave yet!
I look down at my leg and my grimy pj’s.
Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.