Shade of Avocado - Part 34
Road Rash (Piper)
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Avery had already reached the van as I hung up with Kelly. He was poking around again in the fuse box.
As I approached him, I asked what he was doing now.
“Seeing if I can at least get the battery linked up to the power outlets,” he said.
“Do you know how to do that?”
“Well, I don’t know. I want to see if there’s a way.”
“Just don’t make it worse than it already is.” My throat was getting tense.
“How much worse can it be than it already is? Everything’s dead. I only want to find out if we can get one thing working again.”
I went around to the other side of the van to go inside and out of the sun. It was late in the afternoon, and it was still getting hotter by the minute. I looked down at my shirt which was getting sweat stains in several embarrassing places. I pulled it off and put on a clean one.
Avery came inside as well. He opened the refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of water and handed me one. I was hesitant to ask if he figured anything out. At the same time, why shouldn't I show an interest?
“Could you make anything work, Avery?”
“No. I have no clue what the hell I was doing. And the diagram and the manual are completely unhelpful.”
“Sorry. Thanks for trying.”
Avery shrugged as he glugged down about half the bottle of water and moved toward the back to sit on the dining bench. I was sitting in the front passenger seat, and for whatever reason, I looked down at the dashboard where my phone charger cord was still plugged into the USB outlet. I spontaneously took the end of it, extracted my phone from my pocket, and plugged in the cord.
The sound effect from my phone echoed through the van.
“Piper! What the…what did you do?”
“I tried it for the hell of it. It’s charging.”
Avery put his head down on the table, covering his face with his forearms. I heard some muttering, ending with what I thought was the word, “unbelievable.”
“Why don’t you see if yours works on that one?” I suggested, pointing to the wall outlet next to the dining area.
Avery located his own cord and made the connection between the wall outlet and the phone. It didn’t work. There was a second USB slot on the dashboard that worked. At least we could keep the phones charged now.
Avery was clearly bothered that he couldn’t figure out why. And the more I reiterated it didn’t matter, the more bothered he got. We checked around the inside of the van to see if anything else was getting power, but the refrigerator was not working. It was still cold inside, but we knew we shouldn’t open it a lot. For one thing, the air in the van was hot. Both of us were worn out from everything involved in the breakdown. I realized we hadn’t eaten any lunch, and it was getting closer to dinner time.
We didn’t have a lot to create a substantial meal figuring we would be eating dinner at a restaurant in Holbrook. I worried a bit as to the kinds of wildlife we might encounter when darkness came.
I don’t know which of us set it off, but a full-blown argument broke out between us in the very close, sweltering quarters of the van.
Avery huffed. “I can’t believe you expected to survive a cross-country trip in remote areas without being prepared for basic emergencies.”
“If you're such an expert,” I answered, “why didn’t you at least talk to me about what preparations you felt were so lacking? Isn’t that your job?”
“My job?? What makes it my job?”
“Well, you’re the man! You must know better than I do!”
“You don’t have to sound so bitchy.”
“Now, you’re calling me a bitch? What a dickhead!”
“I did not call you a bitch, Piper. I used an adjective to describe the way you were yelling at me! It means ‘bitch-like’, not that you’re a bitch.”
“Don’t lecture me on the semantic connection of adjectives and nouns! You are misrepresenting the function of an adjective by conflating it with an adverb. ‘Bitch-like’ describes the adverb ‘bitchily.’ As in, ‘Piper yelled bitchily,’ if you meant to modify my speech tone. But ‘Piper is bitchy’ is modifying Piper into a bitch.”
Avery rolled his eyes at me, which is a look I love so much. “You are misrepresenting my meaning. Not to mention, you came right out and called me a dickhead. Trust me, if I wanted to call you a bitch, I would have called you a bitch! But I didn’t!”
Now it was my turn to contribute an eyeroll. “Trust you?! You say there were things you could have done better than me to be prepared for this problem. But you didn’t! And how could you have lost my address, Avery? We missed out on almost twenty years because you lost my address?”
“That was all my responsibility? You stopped writing back, so I could have gotten your return address off your envelope!”
“Hey, I was busy raising two babies and working full time! I didn’t have much good news to write about either! You had to keep checking my envelopes for the return address? I’m pretty sure I had your address committed to memory, Avery! You’re careless, Avery, just like the rest of them!”
“The rest of who?”
“It’s whom! Men, and their relationships!” I crossed my arms. “My ex-husband, my father! And now, you’re being a dickhead, too!”
Avery shrugged his shoulders and turned his palms upward. “Okay, you still haven’t explained what you mean by calling me a dickhead! Is that the best pejorative term you can come up with when you lose your temper?”
“I mean men think with it. They all want to screw you, figuratively and literally.”
“Hey, Piper. I have been completely respectful of the boundaries we’ve agreed to for our sexual activities. You still want to lump me in with the men you couldn’t trust?”
“Are you saying you haven’t wanted to have sex with me? You haven’t even been tempted to cross a line?
“I…and my dickhead…have been perfect gentlemen. IF I think at all with that head, it has been trained to keep boundaries. After Miranda slammed the door on it a few times, it learned not to cross lines until it was granted permission!”
“You know how frustrating it is sleeping in the same bed as you?”
“Oh, you think you’re frustrated? You’re as horny as I am!”
“You’re being really shitty, Avery!”
“I’m incredibly impressed by your expanding vocabulary!” Avery barked.
I answered back. “You don’t hang around high school students for a quarter century without picking up a few useful synonyms for butt faces!”
Avery paused again before responding. When he spoke, his tone sounded was softer, more hurt than angry. “I can’t believe you’d look at me the same way as the ones you couldn’t trust. I didn’t think I gave you any reason, Piper.”
I started crying. “I was in a crappy marriage with a crappy husband who couldn’t deal with all the crap!” Right then, my tears disintegrated me into hot, body-wracking sobs. Avery was quiet for a minute. Then I noticed him approaching closer. His expression had softened. He put out his arms to hug me.
“NO!” I snapped. “I don’t want a hug! I don’t want you touching me!”
Avery groaned. Then he stepped back and turned toward the van door.
“Where…are…you…going?” I choked out.
“I need some effin air!”
As he opened the door, my anger turned bright red. “Don’t use your euphemism on me. I can tell what the eff that means!”
Avery slammed the door closed and I cried harder than I was before. I dove into the bedroom nook and shoved my face into a pillow. I didn’t want him to hear how I was crying. I certainly didn’t want him to have a change of heart and try to come back in here to hug me. I wrapped my arms around my pillow and embraced it tight to my body.
I suppose this constituted our first real argument since we were kids, which then would have been over something idiotic. While my mind worked on a rational explanation of how we got here, my feelings went on sobbing.
I realized I was crying because I was afraid that Avery will do what my ex-husband did to me. I kept on crying, imagining how I would feel if Avery left, if Avery didn’t want to be with me anymore. It seemed like everything was going so well.
WE SAID WE LOVED EACH OTHER!
Now here we were, in the middle of an awful difficulty, and we’re not handling it well. The first sign of trouble, they want to run away. Avery wouldn’t do that, would he? This can’t come close to the worst things he’s gone through in the past several years. He isn’t going to break up with me over this, is he? God, I don’t want to break up with him either. Yes, he’s being a dickhead. But he is my dickhead. My tears turned into sad giggles.
A few minutes later, I got up from the bed and summoned the courage to look outside again. Avery was sitting on the ground cross-legged, stewing and steaming.
I opened the door to go out and I was relieved enough that he stuck around the area. Not that he really had anywhere to go.
“I’m sorry I was yelling at you, Avery. I think we didn’t deal well with the heat and stuff.”
He looked up at me. “I don’t know why I started screaming either. I might have been upset with myself, like I wasn’t doing a good job taking care of you.”
“You did hand me your phone and that got us through to the auto club.”
He snorted a laugh. “Yeah, I suppose I did. But I was so excited to go on this trip with you that I didn’t take the time to think through what we’d need if everything didn’t go right. Then it didn’t go right. I realized I didn’t bring any condoms.”
I masked my surprise at that. “If we needed them, we probably could have found a place to buy some. Look, I don’t think I was getting mad at you, Avery. When we started arguing my mind went to what happened to my marriage. When you left the van, I got so frightened.”
Avery got offended. “Piper, how could you think for a second that I would abandon you! I’m hurt that you wouldn’t trust me that much.”
“Avery, that’s what I’m trying to tell you!” I didn’t quite understand why I had to raise my voice to tell him. I moderated myself. “You’re different and I do believe I can trust you. That was my issue, and I was wrong to make you fit into playing a role in my screwed-up story.”
“Fine,” Avery said. “We have baggage we didn’t realize we packed. Or maybe it’s my brain lesions that got out of control.”
“I doubt it’s your brain lesions. Look, let’s go back inside before it gets too dark, and the hyenas come out.”
“I don’t think we'll be attacked by hyenas.”
“I don’t want to find out what will attack us. Can we go inside?” I put out my hand to help him to his feet. It’s hard to describe the sensation when he took my hand. It was the first time we touched each other since we started yelling.
The touch was great, but it did not resolve everything. It was now warmer inside the van than outdoors. Both of us were exhausted and nerves were raw. We were sharing a cramped space.
“Look, Avery, we didn’t even have lunch. It’s way past dinnertime now. I know how hungry I am. It can’t be helping our mood.”
We scrounged and found some shelf-stable packets of tuna. The fish had assumed room temperature, which in the Arizona wilderness was around 100 degrees. Eating it almost reminded me of tuna casserole, if it had mushroom soup, shredded cheese, and egg noodles mixed into it.
We attempted to talk out our disagreement some more, but that was a bad idea. Avery may have had some insight on the source of my mistrust of him, but perhaps this wasn’t the best time to bring it up.
“Did you notice you had a text message?” Piper asked. “It was from Brooke.”
“When?”
“While I was using your phone to call the auto club.”
“What did it say?”
“Jeez, Avery, I didn’t read it. I wouldn’t invade your privacy. She looked pretty cute in that contact picture, though.”
“Are you having trouble trusting me because of Brooke?”
I tilted my head up at Avery. “So, how much exactly did you try? I mean how involved did you have to be to find out you couldn’t have a romantic relationship with her?”
“Piper, I wouldn’t lie to you. Brooke and I got intimate enough, but we never got to…to put it in literary terms, Act Three.”
“You’re saying you didn’t have…intercourse with her?”
“Okay, to put it in literal terms, then, correct. We didn’t have intercourse. The situation got weird before we got that far. When we talked about what we’d do about it afterwards, we just knew we couldn’t commit to each other as a couple. We assured each other we’d always stay friends and any romance we had would remain part of our past. Not our future.”
I reduced my tone to a calmer level. “I have no right to judge you, Avery. I didn't tell you what I was hoping to happen yet. You didn’t find out I was coming here until a few weeks ago. I shouldn’t have any reason to feel you did anything wrong, or that you needed to explain this to me. I guess I’m grateful you did explain it.”
“Piper, Brooke even told me I should talk to you about how you felt toward me, how we feel toward each other. She didn’t want me to miss finding someone who might end up being the right person. That’s the kind of friend she’s been to me.”
I reflected for a moment. “That seems rather selfless. I can’t be too jealous if she considered your happiness to that extent. After my ex left our family behind, I never wanted him back, but I’m also sure I would have never encouraged him to find the girl who would make him happy.”
“I doubt there is another person in the world better at keeping boundaries than Brooke. She became friends with Miranda. When we cut short our romantic attempts at the class reunion, it was because it was too close after losing Miranda and my mother. When she came to visit me, at first, neither of us had an intention a romantic relationship. I know when I tell her that you and I are involved romantically now, she will keep this boundary.”
“You haven’t told her about us yet?”
“When have I had the opportunity, Piper? She’s not the first person I would think to tell.”
“Maybe you should tell her, don’t you think? Then it’s not hanging out there anymore.”
Avery looked at me the way I would have looked at him if he’d made the same suggestion to me. I immediately regretted saying it. “I’m acting like a petty teenager. My emotions are getting the best of me.”
“We should just get to bed,” Avery said. “We’ll probably talk better in the morning.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “Good idea. Let’s go to bed.”
I took a step toward the bedroom doorway as Avery took a step toward the bathroom. The two of us wound up with our fronts pushed together, our faces closely positioned. Blood rushed from my head to one or three other places in my body. The light was dim by now, but Avery had a fiery glint in his eyes. I had never been more attracted to him. My passionate anger from before returned as passion with a vengeance.
Avery was gazing into my eyes, and I heard him breathing much faster. It occurred to me that I had not breathed since the two of us squeezed together in the confined space. I inhaled the first time with a wheezing squeak, as though I’d been startled. Perhaps I had been. At that moment I did not know what I wanted to do. I was not sure the man I pressed against knew what he wanted to do. The seconds we remained so went by interminably.
Both of us drew a deep breath, almost simultaneously. It was as though we decided by telepathy that neither of us wanted our first time to be angry sex.
“Um, I was going to head into the bathroom, Piper,” he explained.
“Yeah, sure. I was just going to…change my clothes...in the bedroom.”
We slid apart to reach our respective destinations in an orderly fashion.
When I came back out of the bedroom in my nightwear, Avery was reconfiguring the dining table and bench into the poor excuse for a bed.
“Why are you doing that, Avery? Don’t you want to be in the comfortable bed with me?”
“It’s not that I don’t…it’s hot. It might be too hot for both of us, Piper. I don’t want to make you…either of us…uncomfortable. Because of the…heat.”
I could not argue with him about the heat. It was still getting hotter by the minute.
“Oh, okay, Avery. Only if you’re sure, because I don’t mind…um…I hope it isn't like sleeping on a park bench.”
“Don’t worry, Piper. I can survive one night.”
“See you in the morning, Avery.”