“I didn’t…” I stopped myself immediately as soon as the guy snapped his head up from where he’d been opening the door. “I’m sorry. Of course, I will appear in court to address the matter.”
I needed to shut my mouth, call George to come get me, then find a way to explain this to Ash.
Did she go to the prom? Maybe find someone there who she could hang out and dance with? See, this was the problem, this was why I never should have said yes in the first place. I wasn’t supposed to drop everything and coming running for a stupid high school dance. She was supposed to find someone in her class who would take her and do it up right.
Flowers, a corsage, pictures. All that bullshit.
Instead, she wanted me. Irascible, moody me. Who she probably thought stood her up on purpose just to be that asshole guy who would use yet another tool to hurt her.
The dickhead officer, who I thought had been unnecessarily rough, which prompted me to throw him off as he tried to handcuff me, which resulted in my resisting-arrest charge, opened the cell door and let me out.
I kept my head down, said nothing, and collected my phone which had died on me, much like the car had. Of course. So I hadn’t even been able to let Ash know what was happening. I asked the woman handling the front desk if she had an extra charger. She took pity on me, plugged my phone in with her charger, and twenty minutes later I had enough juice to call George.
I saw the text indicator, the missed call indicator, but I didn’t have time to deal with that now.
George picked up on the first ring and I had to get through the you sonofabitch, do you know how fucking disappointed I am in you right now? How could you do something like that, to her of all people? before cutting him off with the news I was in jail.
At least that stopped the diatribe.
“Just come get me,” I said, weary now from a night of not sleeping. “I’m at the Harborview Police Station. I’ll explain everything when you get here. My phone’s about to die again so there’s no point in trying to talk to Ash now. I’ll talk to her as soon as I get there, and apologize.”
“I’ll be there. But this sucks, Marc.”
George hung up and I nodded in total agreement. This did suck.
Twenty minutes later, George pulled up in front of the police station where I’d been waiting outside, despite it being a relatively hot and muggy day in June. I didn’t want to look at the cops, talk to the cops. Hell, I didn’t even want to smell the cops.
It was cops who had come to pull me out of my mom’s apartment. Cops who had arrested her and sent me to CPS. Cops who all thought they’d been doing the right thing by me when I’d been sure, if I had some more time, I could have convinced my mom to get clean.
I pushed them out of my head, as well as the fact I had to go to court to address the resisting arrest charge, which would most likely result in a pretty hefty fine along with community service.
“What happened?” George asked wearily.
I glanced at him and saw he looked as tired as I felt. I’d joked about his birthday with Ash, but the truth was, he was still doing a lot of manual labor for a man his age. My window to graduate from Princeton, get a job at a bank or brokerage firm, start making serious money so I could take care of him, was tight. I would do it, though. Nothing was going to stop that future.
“I decided to not trust the trains and borrow a friend’s car instead. You know how the trains can run unpredictably. Mistake number one. No, check that. Mistake number one was agreeing to do this in the first place.”
“Marc, I love you like a son, but sometimes you can be a real asshole when it comes to Ashleigh. Just finish the story.”
It wasn’t lost on me it was a common theme in my life. Most people didn’t call me an asshole, most people only called me an asshole when it came to Ashleigh.
“I borrowed a buddy’s car, which apparently has a faulty gas gauge, because even though it said the tank was half full, the car ran out of gas. My phone, I realized, was also out of juice. I was smack in the middle of nowhere on that stretch of 295 just before you get to town, so I figured my chances were better waiting for a cop to spot my hazards rather than trying to walk. It worked, except I only had my license, and no registration for the car. The cop was a dick…”
“You’ve got to fix that attitude when it comes to police officers.”
George knew how I felt about the police in general. “Anyway, I started barking at him a little. Then he got hot and said he was going to arrest me for car theft. At which point I told him to go to hell and I might have pushed him off me.”
“Holy shit, Marc. That’s…”
“I know,” I said bitterly. “Resisting arrest. I spent the night in the cage while they got ahold of my friend who confirmed he’d lent me the car. Now I have a court date in a couple months to deal with the resisting arrest charge. The other cop at the station, who wasn’t quite as dickish, said it would most likely be a fine and some community service. Nothing I can’t handle.”
Silence descended then. In the history of excuses for a why a guy stood up his prom date, that one had to go down in the top ten. I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to feel any worse than I already did. But I couldn’t stop myself.
“Have you seen her?”
He glanced over at me quickly, then went back to watching the road. “No. She called over to the carriage house a few times to see if you’d gotten home. That stopped around eight. She must have assumed by that time you weren’t coming.”
I put my hands over my face. “Fuck! She’s going to be so pissed.”
“She’s not and you know it. She was hurt last night. Today she’ll listen to what happened, and she’ll forgive you. It’s what she does.”
I looked at him then. “You sound like you disapprove.”
“You ruined something significantly important to her.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” I shouted. “The cop was a total asshole!”
“Maybe. Or maybe you could have thought about her instead. Knowing you were dealing with a hotheaded cop. Playing it that much cooler as a result, instead of getting into it with him. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The night is over, and she’ll forgive you.”
A ball of something, probably guilt, twisted in my gut.
“Things…haven’t been exactly normal at the house,” George added. “Maybe you should know that, too.”
“Describe not normal,” I said.
“Mr. Landen’s behavior has changed over the past year. He’s more absent than present at the house. He always makes sure the privacy panel is up whenever I drive him. There are times he’s called me to pick him up from wherever he’s been, and he’s almost always drunk.”
“Landen is a drunk?” I asked, stunned. “The dude who never has a shirt untucked, a hair out of place? Who still makes Ash wear dresses to dinner? That guy is suddenly boozing it?”
George sighed. “I know. It’s very out of character.”
“Hell yeah, it is. You don’t become a multi-million-dollar hedge fund manager drinking your way to the top. If he’s boozing it up now, it’s because something is bothering him. You think it’s Ash? Maybe it’s messing with his head she’s leaving for school next year. Some empty-nest shit.”