Christopher Rice - The Vines

“You see ’em?” Kyle asks. His finger is hovering several inches from the spot where what looks like a swarm of moths are dancing in and out of the streetlight’s exaggerated green glow around one corner of the second-floor solarium.

“Fuckin’ bugs, I don’t know,” Scott says. “What are we? Her exterminator?”

But Scott lifts the prepaid cell phone Mike bought for them earlier that night to his ear and repeats the question. He listens for a few seconds, then says, “He’s gone. Says he didn’t see any bugs. Can we stay focused on what’s important?”

“OK,” Kyle says, holding back his anger. “Tell me again… what’s important?”

Instead of answering—your wife, my line of health clubs, my endless succession of well-muscled girlfriends—Scott pads across the expansive apartment toward the bottle of Grey Goose sitting on the kitchen counter.

Nova’s battered Honda Civic is parked outside of the Waffle House between two pickup trucks. The car’s back window is a bubbled mess of lamination film, and the LSU bumper sticker is mud-lashed and frayed at the edges.

Before he passes through the front door, Blake spots her sitting at the counter alone, slumped over a spread of papers and file folders. The portly waitress refilling her iced-tea glass has wide eyes and pencil-thin eyebrows that give her an expression of restrained panic even as she greets Blake with a casual nod.

When Nova looks up at his approach, Blake sees the tense set to her mouth, the way her right hand has curled into a claw atop the papers she was just reading. He wonders if she was willing to make the forty-minute drive here from Baton Rouge because she doesn’t expect to sleep anytime soon.

For a while they just sit next to each other on their respective stools as trucks lumber by outside, bound for the I-10 on-ramp. Blake wonders if moving to one of the empty booths nearby would strike Nova as too intimate, too forced.

“I know why you hate her,” he finally says.

“Caitlin?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t hate her.”

Nova is collecting the pages in front of her, arranging them in a neat pile as if she planned to shove them into the purple backpack at her feet but then remembered they were part of the information-sharing deal she made with Blake earlier that night.

“Fine. I know why you’re mad at her.”

She gives him a blank stare, as if there’s nothing she likes less than having her mind read by white boys.

“I remember… It was last year, right after her parents were killed. Your dad said something to me about how he was putting the money together for his own landscaping business… ” Nova looks away suddenly. He’s scored a direct hit. “He said he and his brother were going to team up, maybe try for a bank loan. Then I never heard anything about it again. Caitlin… She killed it, didn’t she?”

“She offered him the house.”

“So… kind of a fair trade.”

“A trade? How? He lives there, but he doesn’t own it. And she pays him less now ’cause of it. He’s got no insurance, and now has to ask her every time he goes to see a doctor. It embarrasses him. He won’t let her see it, of course, but it does. He… he could have started something of his own, you know? Something with his name on it. But the minute she gets wind of it, she starts screaming and crying like she’s about to lose her parents all over again. Like he’s her daddy and not…” Mine. The word, unsaid, hangs in the air between them like a cloud of cigarette smoke. “All so she didn’t have to hire a new yardman.”

“He’s more than a yardman.”

“In your eyes, maybe. But he doesn’t get paid more than one.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. And you’re wrong. We’re not her family. We never have been. We’ve worked every party she’s had. We’ve never been guests. Not once.”

She has spoken a truth about their position at Spring House that he acknowledged silently to himself a long time ago, and then rationalized away with glib self-assurances that Willie and Nova felt included and somehow affirmed by the company of wealthy white people.

It also dawns on him that, despite their pact in the gazebo as children, he isn’t necessarily family either. Caitlin’s slap earlier that night was proof of that. Maybe if he’d accepted Alexander Chaisson’s insane offer when he was fourteen, they would all be better off. Maybe he and Caitlin would be trapped in a loveless marriage defined by self-loathing and deceit, or maybe not. Maybe they would have worked out some mutually beneficial arrangement. Maybe he never would have fallen in love with John Fuller ,and Caitlin never would have been betrayed by Troy. Or maybe his thoughts are now as crazy as Caitlin’s recent behavior, and he should consume something that isn’t mostly sugar or caffeine.

“Are you all right?” Nova asks.

The effort it’s taken not to laugh at his inane speculation has left a strained half smile on his face that probably makes him look drunk, which is exactly what he’d like to be. “Booth?” Blake asks.

Nova nods, collects the papers in one hand, then hooks the strap of her book bag with the other. They cross the tiny restaurant together, heads bowed and brows furrowed, as if they’re doing so at the order of a demanding school teacher.

Once they’re sitting across from one another, he can see what her profile didn’t reveal: eagerness, anxiety, a desperate need to have her fears confirmed. After all, she was the one who gave him the order to infiltrate Caitlin’s home in search of some impossible blossom. The flower he tried to grab didn’t quite fit Nova’s description, but Caitlin’s behavior was stranger than any otherworldly plant.

When Nova senses his hesitation, she says, “I’m sorry about what I said… about John.”

Blake is startled into silence by her use of John’s first name. As far as he knows, Nova never met or laid eyes on John Fuller. She was just a girl when he was murdered, and his relationship with Blake—their secret trysts and desperate make-out sessions; those late nights when John would call Blake and not say anything, just play that new Faith Hill song everyone was so crazy about into the phone; their fumbling sexual experimentation in the shadows of the Lake Pontchartrain levee just a few blocks from Blake’s home—had no public face until after John’s murder.

“What did you say?” he asks.

“The thing about losing the man you loved. It was… it was probably more than I should have…”

“It’s just the way you said his name. It kind of caught me off guard is all,” he whispers.

“We went to the funeral. I remember, ’cause Daddy took me out of school.”

Blake is sidelined by this, more so than by Caitlin’s precise slap. He tries to recall the rows of mourners packed inside the Unitarian church John’s mother had been forced to pick for the service. While there was a good chance her parish church would have overlooked the facts of the case and given her son a proper Catholic burial, by then Deborah Fuller had become an unlikely and hastily assembled gay rights activist whose every public move was scrutinized by a variety of national media outlets. She and Blake were clinging to each other for support every time the cameras swung in their direction, each shot giving credence to the illusion that Blake had been a son-in-law and not a secret.

Now Blake scans the rows of mourners in his memory, searching for a younger, leaner Willie, clean-shaven and muscled as he was in those days, and his bright-eyed young daughter, her hair fastened in two matching braids. Perhaps they were jammed in the back somewhere, or perhaps his memory isn’t what it used to be, because he doesn’t see them. And he can’t recall the funeral with the same clarity with which he sometimes dreams it. All he sees are the stunned faces of his fellow students… and Vernon Fuller—John’s father, Coach Fuller, as he was known to all of their classmates—practically curling into a ball, reeking of bourbon, retreating silently yet entirely from the media spotlight and its incessant demand that he publicly accept his son’s secret life with as much chin-up determination as his wife.