Page 5 of My Favorite Lost Cause
“Charlie, I’m so sorry,” I begin again. “I…I’m…I hadn’t even heard.”
Charlie pulls his cup from the Keurig and dumps some cream in it. “No one’s heard. I haven’t told anyone, not even my dad.”
I blink. Obviously, Charlie’s parents are no longer together, but surely when your child loses his mother, someone gives you a heads-up?
“Why haven’t you told anyone?”
He scowls in the direction of the half-eaten muffins and coffee cups still sitting on the table. “Maybe because I didn’t want someone over here plying the women I bring home with muffins and suggesting that I’m lying when I try to usher them out.”
I wonder if he’s cried about this even once. I wonder if every single time he gets choked up, he decides he’d better take a drink or have a threesome.
As if on cue, he sets his coffee down, crosses the room, and grabs a bottle of Jack.
“Don’t give me that look,” he says, screwing off the top. “Hair of the dog. And we had an agreement. I told you, now you leave.”
I bury my head in my hands. I told him I’d go…but I can’t leave him like this. “Do you…need to go to Panama?”
“Already went,” he replies, taking a quick swig before he recaps it. “Two weeks ago. She apparently had cancer. She knew it for a year and never said anything, not to me, anyway, and now there’s nothing there to even say goodbye to.” He sinks into his big leather chair, and I follow, taking a seat on the ottoman directly in front of him.
“What are you going to do?”
“About the house? Nothing. I can’t move to South Carolina and refurbish the whole place by hand. And stop looking at me like I’m a tired toddler who needs to go to bed.”
He’sactinglike a tired toddler who needs to go to bed. Maybe that’s why I have this desperate urge to take care of him when he’s being a total prick.
I reach out and let my hand rest on his knee. It jumps, as if he’s reflexively repulsed by my touch, but I don’t pull it back and he doesn’t insist.
“Charlie, you’ve apparently been drinking yourself into a stupor for weeks and living as if you’re on borrowed time. Don’t you think it might have something to do with the fact that you’re conflicted?”
“Conflicted?” he groans, uncapping the whiskey again. “Unless you’ve built some sort of portal to the past where I can go say goodbye to my mother, there is nothing to be conflicted about.”
“It was your mother’s dying wish that you go fix that house, and I think what’s happening here is you feel guilty not doing it.”
He sets the bottle on the table beside him and pushes it away. “Why the fuck would I feel guilty? It was an insane request on her part. A developer has already offered me millions, every building on the land is a wreck, and clearly, we aren’t discussing a woman who had her head in the right place if she’d choose to die without even saying goodbye.”
He’s furious, and beneath that, he’s hurt. That’s why Charlie has always been able to tug at my heartstrings like a master violinist. Because under every snide, shitty thing he says to me, I’ve always sensed something sweet but broken. Which makes sense: he lost his little sister, but in some ways, he lost his mom, too, when she left.
I slide my hand into his. His remains limp, not returning my grasp. “I’m not saying that youshouldfeel guilty. I’m saying that you already do, and maybe it’s better to face that than it is to bury your head in the sand, or in your case, bury your head in a bottle of whiskey and multiple vaginas.”
“I think that I could continue burying my head in bottles of whiskey and multiple vaginas pretty successfully. I doubt that you have done either, but both are a delightful way to spend an evening.”
A strange, unexpected heat flashes through me, one I don’t want to consider too hard. I know for a fact that I am not interested in burying my face in a vagina, but the fact that Charlieis…well, yeah, I’m not going to think about it.
“There will be plenty of future opportunities to indulge in both those hobbies,” I tell him. “But this sort of feels like the moment in a movie when a character can go really wrong or can turn shit around, and I’m pretty sure whiskey and drunk threesomes are not in the turning-things-around plotline.”
“Maybe you and I watch different movies,” he says. “Let me get my laptop. I’ll show you some favorites.”
I laugh, even though I shouldn’t. Two seconds from now he’ll hurt my feelings, and before I’ve recovered, he’ll make my heart break for him. Some guys are a comedy, some are tearjerkers, and some snidely condemn everything about you. If Charlie were a movie, he’d be all three.
“Look,” he admits, “I know I’ve got to slow down. I mean, Jesus…I don’t even remember last night or the night before. The worst could have happened.”
“Having one of them murder you in your sleep?”
He frowns. “No, that’s like number three on the list.”
“What could possibly be worse?”
He holds up a hand. “Number two, getting someone pregnant. Number one, getting someone pregnant with twins. Can you imagine me as a father?”
