I'll Be Your Everything Page 28

  My best friend is me, and I am my best friend.

  Um, thank You, God.

  I wince. Yeah, about last night, God. I sigh. Sorry, but we had to, okay? Don’t be mad. We’ll make it right, I promise. We’re meant to be, right? We just, um, jumped the gun a little. Um, amen.

  I fling myself onto the bed again. It’s so quiet here. I won’t be able to sleep. Where are the airplanes? Maybe they pay extra to live in Great Neck so the planes don’t roar overhead. Where are the sirens? Where are the horns, the bus brakes screeching, the people screaming at each other? I listen for a minute.

  I may go crazy here. It’s too quiet. I’ll just have to scream a lot.

  I slide off the bed and root around in his dresser drawers. Lots of silky black dress socks. They could make nice blindfolds. Hmm. Him or me? Or both of us? Later maybe. I pull out an XXL Cal sweatshirt and hold it up to my body. It hits me at the thighs. Might be sexy. I strip off my shirt and bra and put it on. I’m wearing a sweatshirt dress. It’s all the rage. I drop my jeans, feel the cold hit my thighs, and slide my jeans back on. I’d rather be warm and sexy than freezing and sexy any day.

  When I return to the studio, I look up at two of the flat screens. I see frozen, black-and-white, antique-y views of lower Manhattan.

  “Good timing,” Tom says, his hand on a mouse. “The one on the left is number four. The one on the right is number eight.” He turns and looks at me. “Nice dress.”

  I model it for him. “It’s what every future ad executive is wearing these days.” And if you would turn up the freaking heat, you’d see a lot more of me sprouting from this dress.

  “We could wear it together,” he says.

  I like Tom. He has so many interesting ideas.

  I rest in his lap as he runs both commercials simultaneously, rewinds, runs again, rewinds ... It makes me dizzy.

  “They’re both great,” I say.

  “I like eight better,” he says. “I get to see your sexy hands more.”

  I put my sexy hands on his face and kiss him. “You are a genius.”

  “I know what I like.” He kisses my nose. “You’re so easy to work with. Now for Yankee Stadium.” He double-clicks on an icon. “This is number twenty-four.”

  At first Tom is just a speck, and then he’s a full-grown man racing toward me, hitting the brakes, and skidding, dust flying in the air.

  “That dust is fabulous, darling,” I say. “Can you have the graphics appear out of the dust?”

  “Good idea.”

  “And airbrush out the signs on the left field wall,” I say. “I don’t think Canon and MasterCard would like us too much because we used a Panasonic camera and your Visa card.”

  “Kid stuff. I’ll do it later. Now we need the voices.” He tickles my stomach. “You ready to do some yelling?”

  “I thought you were the one yelling ‘safe,’ and I was the one saying ‘drive one home.’”

  He rolls us to a microphone and shouts “safe” twenty times with pauses in between.

  And despite the noise, it’s how I feel. I feel so safe that I’m weightless.

  When it’s my turn, I say “drive one home” twenty times. At first, I whisper it, showing Tom a little stomach. Then I say it as sexily as I can, showing Tom my bare sexy back. Eventually, though, I get silly and sound more like a cartoon character than a grown woman.

  He cues each up, and we choose a manly “Safe!” and a sexy “Drive one home.”

  I start chewing on his ear.

  “Not yet.”

  I pout.

  He offers me his other ear.

  I chew on it a while, and he gives my neck several trillion goose bumps with his tongue.

  “Okay,” I say. “Quit wasting time, Tom. Let’s get to work.”

  We listen to thirty seconds of sound with all the speakers in the room cranked up. I hear birds, leaves, my giggle, and wheels flying in the wind.

  “I like the giggle the best,” he says.

  “It’s incredible,” I say. “You have to do the voice-over. You have more of a radio voice than I do.”

  “Okay.” We slide back to the microphone, and he starts recording, saying, “No matter where you ride, you’re home. Peterson Bicycles. Made in America since 1969.”

  “You added the date.”

  He nods. “Hits up the nostalgia angle. ‘Made in America for over forty years’ doesn’t have the right punch.”

  “What’s next?” I ask. I am so eager today.

  “Let’s see, we need to fine-tune the spots to the millisecond, lay down the voice-over tracks, tinker with and add the graphics. . . make copies. We will always have backups.”

  “Always.” I love it when he’s serious.

  He rolls his neck in circles. “It might take a few hours.” He kisses my cheeks just under my eyes. “You need a nap.”

  I could use one. “Because you kept me up all night, man. Aren’t you tired?”

  “Some. I’ll manage.”

  The man never sleeps. “I could be working on the actual presentation.”

  “Or you could be working on a nap,” he says. “I think these sell themselves. Just cue ’em up and let ’em go. If Mr. Peterson has any questions for why we did it this way, I’m sure you’ll nail it.”

  So am I. “I’ll write one up just in case. Always have a backup.”

  He rolls his eyes. “You could also be creating the false information for Corrine.”

  “I could, but ...” I look at all the cool machines. “I want you to teach me everything you’re about to do. I’ll have to learn eventually, right?”

  He smiles. “I like you.”

  “I’m likable.”

  Because I am a slow learner, for the next four hours we make those spots sing, shout, and do lap dances while I do a sultry lap dance on Tom. The final products are everything as professional and slick as what you’d see on TV. Tom is so patient with me, especially when I keep asking the same stupid question: “What’s that button for again?”

  I rub his shoulders, he rubs mine, and we drink tea. I have to brew a family-sized tea bag in a saucepan because the man doesn’t even have a teakettle. We eat a few stale barbecue potato chips, a few bites of some frozen turkey dinners that taste like fish and freezer burn, and a pint of slightly crystallized mint chocolate-chip ice cream.

  After taking a long walk outside to wake up, we use his empty living room floor to lay out the sixteen billboards, rearranging them until we like the order. We organize the fifty landmark photos in the same way. And then I use the computer images of the photographs to make two PowerPoint presentations—one for our friends on the bike, the other for the landmarks.

  “You’re good at this,” he says.

  “Corrine never complained,” I say. “And we’ll use the landmark PowerPoint as a backup.”

  Tom grudgingly agrees. He’s just mad he had to pay Carl a mint for something we might never use.

  Then Tom suggests we add some country instrumentals while our friends ride the bike. “A little ‘Dueling Banjos.’”

  Um, no. “Isn’t that the song from Deliverance?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Not the message we want to send.” He’s so slow sometimes. “Tom, these are all shots of New York! Sinatra, baby. ‘New York, New York.’ We were just singing it with Carl.” Duh.

  “But what if Mr. Peterson doesn’t like Sinatra?”

  Tom is tripping. “Who doesn’t like Sinatra?”

  “Mr. Peterson is from Georgia. He’s not a New York boy.”

  True. Hmm. “Well, Ray Charles and ‘Georgia’ wouldn’t match the pictures. Why not something from Broadway?”

  He nods. “A little Gershwin. ‘Summertime.’”

  I think the song will work until I run the lyrics in my head. “No fish jumping. Cotton? Also not the right message. And we took all the pictures in the fall, not the summertime.”

  He stares at the ceiling. “‘Rhapsody in Blue,’” he says.

  I sta
re at the ceiling. So that’s where he gets some of his ideas. I look him in the eye. “Woody Allen used that song already for Manhattan.”

  “It’s a signature New York song, Shari.”

  “I don’t want to bite off anyone, especially Woody Allen. Why not something by the Allman Brothers?” And I don’t know any of their songs.

  He looks at the floor this time. “‘Ramblin’ Man’ might work. You ever hear it before?”

  I shake my head. I was never into music made by guys who borrowed food from soul food restaurants in Macon, Georgia.

  Tom goes to another computer, finds the song after scrolling through his iTunes list, and cues it up.

  I won’t ask him why he has that particular song in his library.

  As we listen, I wince. It’s a bit too rowdy, though the instrumentals are excellent. “Tom, I don’t think the being born in the backseat of a bus part is going to help us here. It also references several other southern states. Can you see Carl’s picture while that song is playing?”

  “No.” He scrolls to another song, and we listen to Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” We decide that, while the song is an all-time classic, it’s too moody and mentions San Francisco, not New York.

  “This is so silly,” I say, wishing I had left on my bra. Is there no insulation in this house? “I mean, we’re stressing over music that won’t be part of the campaign.”

  “Details, my dear, are very important,” Tom says too seriously. “How food is presented often makes it taste better.”

  I want to mock him so badly, but he’s right. The presentation is the key.

  “How about ... I don’t know.” He sighs and scratches his head. “We need something that lasts about three minutes and twelve seconds, roughly twelve seconds per slide.”

  I won’t ask him how he arrived at twelve seconds. It’s probably a Harrison Hersey and Boulder thing I wouldn’t understand.

  “Let’s just run the show silently until something pops in our heads,” I suggest.

  He agrees. And it’s not just because he likes me. I saw the suggestion on the ceiling. He must have seen it, too.

  I watch our sixteen new friends, and I see them as survivors, every last one of them. Some of them survived World War II as children, and all of them lived through Vietnam, disco, bell-bottoms, hippies, the Reagan years, and 9-11. They deserve the greatest respect. And despite their struggles, they can smile while riding a bike on a fall day in Brooklyn. I always get goose bumps when I see the last slide of Carl. And he just wanted to stand beside the bike. “No,” he said. “I will just stand here, and you will take the picture.”

  Taking a stand.

  “ ‘Stand Tall,’ by Burton Cummings?” Tom says. “No. That song has something about falling.”

  Hush. I’m thinking. And stop thinking along the same lines as me!

  “ ‘Can You Stand the Rain,’ by Boyz II Men?” he says.

  “It wasn’t raining, Tom.” Now, hush!

  “I got it! ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John.”

  He waits for my approval.

  He doesn’t get it.

  And then it hits me. Night. Darkness. No fear. “‘Stand by Me’ by Ben E. King,” I say. “Please say you have that.”

  “That’s it!” He hugs me. “And I do.”

  He finds the song and plays it “live” while the PowerPoint runs. I sing along, Tom joins in, and when the last slide of Carl fades, the song fades out.

  I swallow. “That’s perfect.” That nice slow, uplifting song, those happy old people on bikes, every one of them someone’s “darlin’,” the black-and-white pictures—it’s freaking perfect.

  Tom looks at me, and I look at him.

  “Wow,” he says. “If that isn’t sonic branding, I don’t know what is. Mr. Peterson needs to get exclusive rights to that song.”

  And that would cost a mint! “We do good work here at Methuselah’s Breezy Hiccup.” I stretch, yearning for a pillow. “We’re the junk.”

  “And that can be our slogan. Methuselah’s Breezy Hiccup—We’re the junk.”

  I laugh, resting my head on Tom’s shoulder. “Man, it’s getting dark out.” We’ve been working for nearly eight hours, and I never even considered it to be work at all. Mrs. Collier was right. Working with the one you love is the absolute best. “What time is it?”

  He looks at his watch. “A little after six.” He sighs. “I’ll bet Bryan’s standing outside your door by now.”

  Not this again. “No, he isn’t.”

  “You don’t sound too sure.”

  And I don’t. “He isn’t coming.”

  “Why don’t you call him and find out for sure?” He picks me up, stands, turns, and sets me gently into the chair. “I’ll want your undivided attention later.” He kisses me. “I’ll give you your privacy.”

  And then he leaves the room! The nerve!

  “I don’t want to call him, Tom!” I call out.

  Tom comes into the room with my cell phone, turns it on, hands it to me, and leaves again, shutting the door behind him.

  “I’m not calling him,” I whisper.

  But he could be out there right now looking for you, Shari.

  All right, all right.

  I dial Bryan’s cell.

  Chapter 29

  “Hello?”

  Now I’m nervous. He answered on the first ring. “Hi, Bryan. How are you?”

  “How do you think I am?”

  I don’t want to ask the next question. “Where are you?”

  Silence.

  Oh no. “You didn’t come up to Brooklyn, did you?”

  More silence.

  “Bryan, are you in New York? Are you at the airport?”

  Silence.

  “Bryan, answer me. Are you at my apartment?”

  Even more silence.

  “Bryan, I’m ... I’m at his place right now, and it’s twenty miles from my apartment. Where exactly are you?”

  “Where I’m supposed to be, Share. Back home in Virginia, where we drink lots of beer before going to high school football games and, how’d you say it? Oh yeah. Reliving our glory days.”

  “Oh.” Where’s the relief I should be feeling? “Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “I was finishing my beer. State semifinals tonight. We’re gonna win state again.”

  At least he’s going on with his normal routine. “What did you do with the plane ticket?”

  “I gave it to my sister. She’ll be shopping tomorrow up there or something. Maybe you’ll see her.”

  Not a chance.

  “So you’re at his place,” he says.

  I just want this phone call to end. “Yes.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Um, Bryan, I’m sure you have to be getting ready to go to the game, so I won’t keep you any longer.” And I don’t want to torture him anymore.

  “What’s it like? I’m your friend. You’re supposed to tell friends stuff.”

  He’s pretty drunk already. Geez. “How drunk are you, Bryan?”

  “Pretty stinking drunk. So what, does he live in a mansion?”

  Not drunk enough to forget his question. “No. It’s a house.”

  “Big?”

  The man, his package, his potential, or his house? “Not particularly.” For Great Neck.

  “What’s he drive?”

  Bryan is a car jock’s jock. He fixed my car for free so many times. “A Mustang. A sixty-five. A classic.”

  “Good car, great car.”

  I have to steer him back to something safe. “Are you at home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s driving you to the game?” This is crucial. Salem cops don’t play.

  “Nobody.”

  Oh man. “Bryan, please don’t drive. Call Tony or Rich to come get you.”

  “Who said I was driving? Might not even make it out the door. Think it’s in that direction.”

  He always was a funny drunk. “Just
promise me you won’t drive.”

  “All right, I promise.”

  Silence.

  “Bryan?”

  Silence.

  “Bryan?”

  “Yep. Just killed another one.”

  He was always a thirsty drunk, too. “Please go on with your life.”

  “I plan to. Gonna find me a honey tonight.”

  I blame rap music for his transformation from a quiet, ordinary white kid to a tattooed homeboy with an earring. “I hope you do. I know you will. You ... you deserve someone special.”

  “Thought I had someone special.”

  Here we go again. “I’m not that special, Bryan. You deserve someone better than me.”

  “What’s he got that I don’t got, Share? Huh?”

  A future ... and I’m an integral part of that future.

  “Money? He got money?”

  When drunk Bryan gets going, there’s no stopping him. I’ve learned it’s best just to let him rant.

  “House, great ass car, money. He as good-looking as me?”

  I have to step in here. “No one is as good-looking as you are, Bryan.” And he was pretty cute, especially when he grew his moustache.

  “That’s right. I’m a certified honey heartbreaker. You said so yourself.”

  Once. “You’re right. I bet you find a hot, horny honey tonight.” I’m hoping he’ll laugh.

  He doesn’t laugh. “Won’t be you.”

  Ouch. “I know.”

  “Won’t be the same.”

  More ouch. “I know that, too.”

  “Well, I gotta go.” He sighs heavily. “Sorry, Share.”

  Most ouch. “You have nothing to be sorry about, Bryan.”

  “Yeah, I do. I’m just ... sorry. I should have followed your dreams.”

  Click.

  I turn off my phone.

  I feel like crap.

  But what if Bryan had followed me up here five years ago? Would I be as happy as I am now? Would I even be trying to do what I’m trying to do? I guess I’ll never know.

  And that’s kind of what hurts.

  I wander to the bedroom. No Tom. I check the workout room. I go downstairs and don’t find him anywhere. I hear a car start up. He’s leaving?

  I run into the garage and see him revving the engine with the hood up, and for an instant, I see Bryan doing the same thing with my car. I was just a passenger in Bryan’s car.