The next three days were filled with aborted attempts to tell Meg my feelings for her. It seemed she was never alone, or I would wimp out at the last moment, or she wouldn’t listen. This is it. I resolved as I marched up to her door and knocked resolutely. I didn’t just enter the house as I normally would, because I wanted to distance myself from the position of lifelong friend.
There would be no distractions this afternoon, I would tell Meg everything, even if all of her siblings were around and her niece and nephew demanded her attention, even if the damn Minerva Town Band marched through playing Louie, Louie.
Brian answered the door and smirked at the expression on my face. “Do not. Say. Anything,” I ordered him. He pressed his lips together, fixed a serious expression on his face, even as his eyes danced.
“Who was going to say anything? Meg’s in the parlor, by the way. She’s in a really good mood, too. We had a karaoke party this morning, and Patrick and Carmen both showed up on the same day, can you imagine?” he told me.
I wasn’t even listening to him any more, but stepping around him and toward the parlor. Brian shoved his hands in his pockets and shuffled behind me.
Meg sat on one of the leather couches, her legs curled up comfortably beside her. She was listening to the cell phone pressed against her ear. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a ponytail and didn’t show any signs that she’d been yanking on it. Her restless hands were still. I could do this. “Meg...” I began.
She looked up, and I saw that although her face was carefully blank, there was a dark glint in her eyes. Uh-oh. “Hi, Matteo,” she spoke briefly. Then, turning her attention back to the phone, “Are you absolutely sure?” She let out a sigh and then conceded, “I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Actually, Meg, I need to talk to you...” I mumbled. She studied me for a minute in concern, then her face cleared.
“Good news?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I hope it’s good news.”
“Okay. Can you talk on the fly, though? That was one of Tim’s knucklehead friends. He got trashed again, and I have to go get him before he does something stupid and gets Dad’s feathers all ruffled,” Meg elaborated.
Brian stepped forward. “I’ll go with you,” he declared, concerned.
“No. Matteo’s more than enough company when Tim’s in one of his dickish moods,” Meg decided. When Brian didn’t smile at Meg’s colorful made up adjective, I knew something was up. “Besides, I might need you to play good cop with him later, and you can’t if he’s mad at you. I can handle it,” Meg added tiredly.
Brian didn’t look assured, so I stepped forward, took Meg’s hand in a sign of solidarity. “I’ll make sure she’s okay, Bri,” I promised.
Meg yanked open the door of her station wagon and climbed inside. “I can drive if you don’t feel up to it,” I offered.
She shut the door with a bad tempered snap and waited until I climbed in the passenger’s side. “I prefer to drive myself, actually,” she responded. Of course she did. It occurred to me that every time I got into a car with Meg, she sat in the driver’s seat. The only people she ever allowed to take the wheel with her were Bri and Sonia.
I stared out of the window, watching as trees glazed with ice and snow whipped by. I bit my tongue before I could tell her to slow down and unintentionally taunt her to speed any more. She made a sound of frustration in her throat. “God, he’s so, ARGHH!” she shouted, and then began rapidly cursing at her brother in sign language. I caught her pressing her four fingers to the front of her forehead and off again. Bastard. She was signing too rapidly for me to translate with my limited capacity more than a few signs. Her fingers closed in a fist, bounced lightly off the right side of her head. Stupid.
“Meg.”
She stopped the sign tirade for a brief moment, but because she was in the mindset, she signed, rather than said, What?
Just do it, just spit it out! I yelled at myself. She would appreciate something like that. Straightforward and simple. “I love you, Meg,” I choked out, in less of a leading man kind of voice than I’d intended. I’d been reaching for Rob Lowe and sounded more like Anthony Michael Hall. Lame. Still, I cued the romantic music in my head. Brian had been sure she felt the same way about me, and no one knew her better. It was only a formality, this saying it aloud.
“I love you too, Matteo,” she answered, distracted, and I knew it hadn’t computed in her brain that I meant I loved her, not in the same way as I cared about her siblings or she cared about mine. The romantic music screeched to a halt in my head, even as the car screeched to a halt by one of Tim’s favorite hang outs, Pub Dionysus.
I was about to correct her assumption when she slammed out of the door and stalked into Pub Dionysus, her ponytail slapping angrily against her back. I jumped out of the car and scurried after her.
I reached the bar just in time to see Meg standing toe to toe with her brother, two pairs of furious green eyes glaring at each other. Tim’s friends had wisely backed away from the scene. “It’s none of your damn business if I want to get drunk!” Tim raged.
Meg didn’t even flinch. “It is very well my business if my stupid brother decides to go get smashed and then drive. You aren’t leaving here unless you get in the wagon,” she asserted to him. She was swearing at him in sign again with her left hand, but she kept it by her side.
“Do you think I don’t know you’re swearing at me? I can still see straight for Christ’s sake. At least have the guts to do it outloud.” Tim’s voice slurred and that had Meg flinching. Yelling she could handle, but I had a feeling she’d prefer a solid punch in the gut to seeing her brother fall apart in front of her.
As the ultimate straight-edge, Meg had been disturbed and nearly had a panic attack when Sonia had had her first sip of wine coolers, and Tim’s current drinking was a lot worse than that. But even more so than the drinking that she despised, I knew it cut at her to see her brother so unhappy that he felt drinking was his only escape.
“Fine! You’re being a total asshole! A stupid bastard who isn’t thinking of his family at all. This is the third time I’ve had to pick you up this week, and I hate it. You don’t even drink. Didn’t even drink. What the hell is Casey doing to you?” she asked.
“We’re not having this conversation,” Tim declared, and to prove his point he threw on his coat. Shutting down was his typical reaction to discussions on his girlfriend, and her need to cut him off from his family. I suspected that part of the reason that Tim clung so tightly to Casey, even after she’d tried to change him and had left him, cheated on him, and lied to him numerous times, was that his family ordered him not to be with her. There were few ways to get under the skin of an O’Fallon faster than saying that they were wrong about something.
“Fine. But you aren’t driving.” Meg was firm on this. Her eyes had gone flat, and she no longer signed along to her words. Her shoulders slumped as though carrying a huge weight. I knew if Tim saw, really saw, what his problem was doing to her, he’d stop. But I also knew he didn’t see anything these days but Casey and all of the miseries she was causing in his life.
“Yes, I am. You can’t tell me what to do, Megan Elizabeth O’Fallon. You’ll have to wrestle me for the keys, and we both know you’d lose,” Tim told her in a clipped tone.
“I probably wouldn’t since you’re in this state. Give me the keys, Tim,” she spoke softly. He shook his head stubbornly. She wrestled with him a moment for the keys, but he just dragged her along with him toward the door. Setting her jaw and rolling her eyes, she punched him in the face and bracing, took his weight as he passed out.
“Damn it. Damn it. ” She pried the keys out of his hand. “Help me, Matteo, will you? He’s heavy.”
“You punched him,” I whispered when we’d settled Tim in the backseat of her car.
“Yeah. He’s right. He could’ve overpowered me. If he’d seen the punch coming, he’d have dodged it and pinned me. I can’t let him drive like this,” Meg stated. Then she turned to look at me, and to my surprise, her eyes were bright with tears. She pressed her keys into my palm. “Do you think you could drive us back to my house? I don’t think I can drive like this, either.”
“Sure. Meg...I’m not arguing that he should be driving. I mean to say, I’m not arguing with the problem, but maybe I’m a little baffled by how you handled it.” Strapping on my seatbelt as she got in the passenger side of the car, I adjusted the seat and mirrors so I could see what I was doing. “I’ve just never seen any of you get physical with each other. Not since...Jeez, I don’t think I can remember you fighting that way. Ever,” I remarked.
She pulled her legs up onto the seat and clasped her arms around them, rocked as though to ward off a chill. I turned the heat up. “No, we never fight,” she admitted. “Not for years, and never seriously. We were always better at uniting against outside forces than infighting.” She glanced back at her brother.
Then she got an introspective look on her face. “It’s always been just us. Our mother died so long ago, and even before that she was sick. Dad’s always been a workaholic. We were latchkey kids. A lot of people wouldn’t have seen that,” she said. We both knew that I already knew this, even though the O’Fallons didn’t share that information with too many outsiders. Meg’s mind tended to skip out of sequence, from thought to thought, without any seeming logical progression. I knew that when she was consciously trying to explain her thoughts to someone, she went through each step of her thought process, even things that were obvious to both parties, just to make sure that she covered all of her bases.
“We don’t resent our parents, but the fact is, we don’t rely on them either. It’s always only been each other we could count on...” Her voice hitched and unconsciously I reached out, took her hand.
“That’s not true, Meg. You all have your friends. You, especially, have me,” I reminded her. She smiled mistily at me.
“Thank God for that. But sometimes...I don’t know if other people can understand. The only ones who could really understand what we went through with our parents are the others. We raised each other, stood by each other. It doesn’t make sense to fight with the only people you can depend on, so we don’t. But now...I don’t know what to do about Tim. We’re losing him,” she whispered.
“Maybe it’s just a natural part of growing up, growing apart.” I suggested.
She shook her head, turned to watch the snow coated streets, the bustle of downtown. She turned the music on. Musicals. I thought she wouldn’t talk any more, but after a few minutes she spoke again, in a distracted tone, still staring out the window, “If it was just that he’s involved with Casey, I could get over it. You know, Carm doesn’t spend as much time with us since Jeremy and the kids, but it’s different. She’s still with us. Tim is so unhappy, and I can’t help him. I can’t reach him.” Her hands balled into fists again.
“He’ll come to you when he’s ready,” I told her.
Her hands relaxed and she moved over on the seat, rested her head against my shoulder, which nearly had me jerking the wheel. “You’re right. You’re always right. I should’ve known I’d feel better talking to you about it.” ... TBC
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