Don’t Blame Me I’m a Martian-6

Chapter 6

Okay she might look different somehow but yeah, that was just completely Amy.

“Uhm Yeah…It’s kind of a long story. Are you okay?”

She blinks still staring at my chest. “Yeah…I’m good…” She’s still staring.

“Uhm…Amy, I’m up here.” I can’t believe I actually had to say that.

She yanks her head up and looks at me and gives me this sheepish grin and moves some of her hair out of her face. “Whoa, sorry Dylan, their nice?”

I color intensely as I’ve never been this embarrassed in my life. “What happened? Where were you?”

Her mood shifts and I can see this hurt, this deep in there something wrong. I step up and hug her. I ask again softly this time. “Aimes, C’mon it’s me Dylan what happened?”

She sniffles a bit and leans on my pressing tight to me. “The cops came the day after the night we partied and took me and mom into protective custody.”

“Shit, why?”

“Dad got out of prison. They cut him loose over some over crowding bullshit.”

“Aimes, you don’t got anything to do with his bullshit.”

“Yeah Dylan everyone keeps telling me that but it don’t really help. He raped my mom and he went to jail for it. And I’m the result…no wonder I’m so fucked up huh?”

“He was a fucking sperm donor Amy, that’s it you’re nothing like him.”

“Yeah…” she sounded really low. I hug her again and see some guy come out of the gas station suit and tie and looking official but not like police official, I think I’ve seen mom talk to the guy before or something. “Amy.” He says.

She lowers her head. “I’m sorry but I’ve gotta go Dylan.’

“Go? Go where?”

“My Great Aunt’s place upstate. It’s the only family I’ve got and well, well mom took off after what happened and left me by myself. I guess I ruined her life enough.” She’s wiping at the tears that are starting to run down her face. I lean over and give her a kiss. “Hey, I had to with you leaving all of a sudden. You’ve got a pen?”

“Yeah.” Sniffle.

“When things decided to get all funky with me body and stuff I caught a lot of flak and stuff and dropped most of my connections but I’ve got all new stuff now and You Will call me and stuff once you get settled and everything right?”

“Yeah…and Dylan?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for being a friend, for being that guy.” She smiles at me and kisses me again.

“What guy?”

“That guy, the one that even twenty years later and a bunch of kids you look back about and sigh.” She leans on me pretty hard like she’s trying to memorize what I feel like. “Dylan you never judged me, you’d just come back into town every summer and we’d just pick up were we left off. It never mattered who I’d been with or how much I screwed up or how badly stoned or drunk I got you, you were always there.”

“Uhm duh, of course I’d be there Aimes. You love someone you love someone and half measures just don’t cut it. Right?”

I’m looking at her as intensely as I can but I’m getting really close to bawling. Damned hormones instead of being all guy embarrassed and stuff about what she said to me it kind of makes my heart roll over and ache. It’s a good ache though? How can it hurt in a good way?

The guy pulls up in the sedan he’s driving and I walk her over to the car and open the door for her. She leans against it and pulls me into this really deep long super slow and sensual kiss. I’ve never had a kiss like that in my life and a kiss has never really felt as...as…tangible, I mean before kissing was like just good, I mean it was really good but this…this is like… okay before kissing it was like nice like ice cream, this…this was creame brule…this was…tira misu.

Then her hands slide up my shirt and even under my bra and rub and cup my starter boobs until I’m moaning into her kiss and pressing a boner into her I could have closed the car door with. You know what made it perfect, it made even the bullshit going on with me perfect and that’s that spark of life that’s just Amy lighting back up in her eyes and feeling her lips curl into a smile her smile as she breaks the kiss. Rolls my nipples, squeezes just…right.

“Right, and I love you too Dylan.” She slips her hands away with that smile on her face and gets into the car. “Hey, I had too right?” I sort of dumbly nod. She closes the door and he pulls away slowly and she waves to me as long as she can before they leave pulling out onto the street I hear because he’s got his window down. “Hey I just got to second base.”

I was in a crouch on the pavement sort of hugging myself and crying when Hillary came out and found me after paying for the gas. She was worried at first and then after explaining things with Amy and how I was feeling both happy because she doesn’t hate me and we’re good, sad because she’s leaving, happy because of the things she said about me and I was crying until we got to the four way stop and she had to drop me and my bike off and head to her own job.

“You going to be alright Dylan?”

“Yeah, I’m just really just kind of worn out, cried out in a good way? I feel like there’s stuff I didn’t even know that got flushed out of me or something? I’m not sure I can explain it but it’s just…I’m literally feeling stuff differently and I’m still trying to process it? I’ll be okay though.”

We even hugged before she had to go or she'd be late. I wave her off and I hop on my bike and pedal to the old guys place to see what kind of stuff he’s got lined up for me to do. The bike ride helps me get calm and focused and I push myself a bit working myself into that rush of endorphins to combat the stuff going on in my head and with my hormones. It actually does seem to help but when I end up driving down the lane I’m like holy shit…

Between the house and the barns and the garages and the crap that’s in his yard and on the beach it looks like the 50’s through to the 80’s left all it’s marine crap here. The tsunami wave that hit Thailand left behind less junk. And I see why I got hired a county clean up notice. Yeah right on the shore I bet the tourists really like going past this place on vacation. I’m getting paid to do this stuff because if he doesn’t they’ll clean it up for him and bill him for it. That’s municipal wages, I’m not sure what they are but it’s going to be a whole lot less than what I’m getting.

I first find the house. Honestly I’m not kidding you couldn’t tell it from some of his other shacks and I knock on the door to hear this barking horking up a lung cough as this old guy shuffles to the screen door.

Gawd he looks like Nick Nolte had a love child with Chris Kristofferson. Long hair, and beard all scraggly and stuff with it all white with just hints of grays in it and a face that’d make a bulldog flinch. A dirty stained wife beater on and old jeans with bare feet showing me his feet with yellowing nails in bad need of clipping. A serial killer, he looks like a seventy five year old serial killer.

“Hello, are you Mr. Seager?”

“Yeah, wadda want kid.” He smells like pipe smoke old French fry grease and booze whiskey for sure because it’s almost getting me hammered off his breath.

“My grandfather said you needed some work done around here? I’m Dylan.”

He looks me up and down. “Hrmph, in my day that was a boy’s name.”

Oh….I could say so much right now but…I need the work. “It’s both I guess nowadays.”

“Yeah well nowadays sucks young’in. C’mon I’ll show you where to start. Now you actually gotta work here, just cause yer a girl I ain’t gonna be easy on ya.”

I swear I can actually taste blood I’m biting my tongue so much. He steps out and shows me where to start and he’s grumbling and mumbling to himself and farting just to add another sound I think.

He points stuff out and how he wants it and keeps going on from that point through the place occasionally to stop and pull a partially drank bottle from some nook somewhere like he’s got bottles all over the place. It takes an hour just to go over the basics of the place.

“You’re going to need a dumpster or several of them because they won’t haul this stuff away.”

“Fuck that I got my truck. He points out this five ton heavy old farming truck that looks like it’s from the fifties.”

“Okay.”

He goes off to drink or whatever he does and I start in on getting to work. It’s the old lobster traps first. Yes I know everyone thinks Maine and stuff like that but they fish them down here too and lots of other stuff. But these are the old type made of cheap wood and netting, broken and stinking to high heaven. They pretty much all use the metal ones now. There was bait left in these things and it soaked into the wood and there’s fishing nets the same way in the pile and a couple of some things have nested and died in the pile for a couple of generations.

I find four flats (24’s) of beer bottles just tossed in there alone. I box them up as best as I can and set those aside in what’s going to be my bottle exchange pile. That takes me until lunch and I end up burning the traps junk in a pit and that brought the sheriff around to check out if the place was burning down and there’s not a problem burning it as he’s outside or town limits. The old guy doesn’t come out of his place and the sheriff had to go inside. I’m not sure what happened or what was said but he left shaking his head.

I take a break about lunch time when Hill calls me and I take my phone and go down and sit by the water and we talk awhile about this mornings run in with Amy and her moving and everything she said and how it’s making me feel.
It’s a bit hard and I cry to her about how unfair it is. Mostly that she’s a really decent girl that really got dealt a raw deal and no one really cut her that much slack because of her mom and the crowd her mom kept running with and how it just usually got to that point of if you can’t beat them join them.

Hill says she proud of me for seeing past the bullshit in her life. It’s only a twenty minute call but it’s the first time she’s ever just actually sort of just called me. We even told each other that we loved each other.

It made the afternoon a lot more palatable. The entire day was just separating, boxing, bagging and burning some trash. I’m still at it and nowhere near done even that much when Jax pulls in.

“Yo, Dylan? You here?”

I step out from a pile of junk appliances that I had been lining up. Who the hell tosses lamps and toasters out into the lawn? I mean…WTF?

“Yeah I’m here.” I walk over to him. He’s looking around.

“Dude, what a dump.”

“Oh yeah… what’s up?”

“Its seven thirty guy, we were worried that you got lost or jumped……Anyway you missed supper.”

“No, but I totally lost track of time. Let me let him know that I’m going and I’ll grab my things.”

“Lemme help.”

“Sure.”

We walk up to the old guy’s house/hovel and he’s outside. And he’s taking a leak as we come around the side of the house and there’s this burning greasy smell. I see plugged into an extension cord a toaster sitting on a picnic table and it’s got sputtering flames and smoke coming out of it and there’s burger buns and mustard out on the table. The thing pops and two “toasted” thick cut slices of baloney pop up just this side of darkly cooked and he look at us and stuffs his junk (Penis...eeew) away in his pants and scratches for good measure I guess. Then pours whatever the hell he’s drinking over his hands and then wipes them off on his jeans…Ick…Ick, ick, ick.

Then he makes a baloney burger and takes a bite.

“Yeah, you done fer the day?”

“Uhm….yeah….”

He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a wad of cash and peels off four twenties. “You gonna be here tomorrow?”

“Yessir.” Heck yes even with the squick factor he’s just paid me like close to eight bucks an hour. Try making that at fifteen anywhere else without the government taking a chunk of it.

“Good, don’t wake me up.”

“Okay, what about some of the stuff to haul away. I was wondering if I can have any of it.”

“Whatever kid, don’t care.”

“Cool, bye Mr. Seager.”

“Yeah whatever.” He takes another bite of the whatever the hell it is and another drink of beer before we end up leaving.

Jax and I end up doing the shiver shakes over the whole thing and laughing but we load all the empties into his car leaving my bike there. “I’ll drive you in tomorrow. You need a serious shower dude.”

“Yeah, I’m afraid of what’s in some of those buildings not to mention the house.”

I go and stow my bike and chain it up. Then make sure that the fire is good and out. I’ve got a few ideas of things I’m going to need from home and will help me get things done too. I’ll take it with me when Jax drops me off tomorrow.

We drop off the empties at the bottle exchange/glass recycling place and they end up giving me close to forty six bucks between the beer and the hard liquor bottles. I get him to stop at Primos Pizza over on the boardwalk and get two eighteen inch cheese pizzas for the crowd we have and veggie white in the same size. I know I know no meat but I really like their veggie white plus it’s late and after watching the old guy meat’s not on the menu tonight it pretty much kills the cash from the empties and while the pizza’s are cooking I go down to the corner store and get two gallons of milk and two loaves of bread for the house and five of those frozen minute maid juice things.

The foods partly for me but you kinda suck if you don’t share if you can. The groceries are kind of the same way. In my family at least; if you’re making money then you should, you don’t have to but you should just be a bit of an adult and chip in. It sucks for the parents too when they see money that just maybe…they might like to spend on themselves at some point once in awhile. Okay I spent a lot tonight already all the bottle cash but that’s supper and a bunch of goodwill, the groceries killed a twenty and some change. And I give ten out of my second twenty to Jax. “Here for gas.”

“Dylan, I haven’t burned that much driving you around.”

“Yeah you have, and if not recently then before. Call it I owe you gas money. I’m not the little sister that you’ve got to spoil Jax, I’m still me.”

“Yeah, Okay wow….I guess there is a genetic thing about some of what you’re going through.”

“Huh? What, why?” I’m totally lost because that’s not really what I meant.

“Yeah, I think your Nagging drive just kicked in.”

(Insert swearing.) And just for that I hit him like seven times in the leg hard just before we pull into the cottage compound. I get out and grab all the stuff and laugh at him as he’s (Insert Jax’s swears.) at me while limping over to the main house with a really good dead-leg. (Insert evil chuckling.)

It’s just after eight and the cheese pizzas are inhaled by the mob and there lots of food muffled thanks and it’s worth it to see the smiles on the faces of Mom and Dad plus the grandparents and the rest of the adult crowd. I even get some kisses and hugs from my Mom and my Grandma for the groceries and Dad gives me that, proud of me for doing that look.

With the way that I’m all messed up and the stuff they’ve had to go through on account of me I’ll tell you it feels damned good.

I get Hill a slice of pizza and set it aside for her because she’s out on a date. The rest of the night I spend getting a shower, and doing my laundry and talking to Dad and Grandpa about the Seager place while playing horse shoes with them and losing to Grandpa badly.

There a bonfire, there usually is but I’m beat and after getting things ready with my clothes and stuff tomorrow and stuff I’m already yawning when Kaylee texts me.

I tell her about seeing Amy right off the get go and she’s actually pretty cool about all of it and just like everyone else she didn’t really get just how bad her home life had always been.

Kaylee does get a good laugh about her feeling me up and then it’s all about telling her about work and old man Seager including the toaster and the taking a leak and all of that completely getting her to freak out in a funny way.

I sign off wishing her sweet dreams and “Hey Can I take you out Friday night?”

“Sure, doing what?”
“Movie, supper, hit the boardwalk?”

“Sure sounds good, how we going?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“Okay. G’nite Dylan.”

“G’nite Kaylee.”

Hill stops into my trailer knocking lightly and I open the door and let her in. she looks at me. “Thanks for the pizza Dylan; Walter wasn’t exactly generous about taking a girl out for a bite tonight.”

“Hey, no problem. So you’re... are you going to see Walter again?”

I ask her then and pour some bottled water into my electric kettle and turn it on. Then start taking my clean bed stuff and start making the bed. I’m doing it differently now, before I didn’t care but now. I kind of got to. I layer my sleeping bag and actually fill it with four of those scratchy blankets. Like a second fluffy mattress pad, then I cover it with two of these nice soft but old quilts tucking them nice and secure and then I add my sheets and my pillows.

Hillary eats but launches into a play by play of her date and how generous he was to buy her a whole thing of popcorn at the show and that was supper and he didn’t open her car door for her or help her out of the car because she was wearing her short red skirt and it would have been the classy thing to do. The entire time she’s actually folding my laundry and I’m taking notes as I make us hot chocolate and kind of picking up other things like these things aren’t about as being spoiled by a guy as I thought they were but a lot of it’s her wanting, needing to feel special like that.

It’s weird I can really tell there’s this lonely little ache of wanting to feel special coming off of her, she wanted this; this year because… “You didn’t dump Paul did you he dumped you…no…he was sleeping around on you.”

Hillary looks at me and her eyes go big and she then I feel the dam break and she starts to cry. She starts to cry really hard sobbing it out after trying to seem like the cool college girl home from her first year. Instead she came home nursing her aching heart and hoping for a summer romance or something to wipe away the stains Paul left on her heart.

He was her last high-school boyfriend and they had been together for two years and had been true-blue in love then he went and did that to her. It goes on for a long while and I text Mom. “Hill’s in a bad way, Paul’s a cheating dick, bring chocolate and tissues.”

Okay I was going to go to bed at around ten. But Mom and Aunt Kathy and Aunt Marie show up with a laptop and chocolate and chips and it goes from this crying mourning of her and Paul’s relationship to finding out that not just him but the vast majority of the guys at college aren’t looking for a steady girl just to fool around half the time and that the dating scene kind of sucks because of the party girls there that just kind of give it up and most of the guys really go for them and that the ones that don’t are taken and half of the ones that are taken will cheat too.

Oddly I’m not drowning in estrogen here or freaking out but wow, I’m so getting things in this gut twisting aching needing for something…something special in their lives thing that these women all seem to have. Even mom and our aunts give it up that they’re scared sometimes of something younger and better coming along because at some point things just went wrong.

And that gets me crying and going off again about this morning with Amy and what she’d been through, what her and my relationship had been like and that how many people can you go without seeing for most of the year and then when you show up it’s just like you never left or been apart. I cry over the stuff she said about me and okay maybe the estrogen was hitting me causing me to feel that wide open.

We watched the movie “Dear John.” On the laptop and Hill fell asleep on us just worn out. I’m not sure how he knew but Dad showed up and kissed Mom then said.

“There’s a pitcher of Margaritas over on the deck for you ladies. If you’ll excuse me.”

He slipped in and he picked Hillary up like she was still five years old to him and carried her out and to her trailer. I heard him say. “C’mon bunny, let your dad tuck you into bed okay.”

I saw the look in my Mom’s eyes and the wistfulness in my Aunt’s and felt it, felt all of it that there’s tears again. About how much he loved being able to do this, for them, for Hill and how much it meant/means to him to be “That guy.” Like what Amy called me… the feeling of my mom and that swell of him being “That guy.” husband and father and her rock and then some.

She hugs me and asks. “Are you going to be alright honey?” she means it in a hundred complex ways.

“Yeah, More than Mom, thanks for the back up and the talking and everything…God dad’s really more than cool isn’t he?”

She sighs and there’s this feeling, this spark there in her that I want too, I want to feel that way about someone sometime and I want someone to feel that way about me too.

I finally get to sleep about quarter after one all cried out and hugged out and totally out of hot chocolate and my stash of chips. But it was worth it. It happened again, I got this connection tonight with my family that was just so intense and so new to me it really does feel like I’m catching up one stuff that the other half of me that might have been my twin had missed out on. I’ve gotten so close to my sister in ways that I never thought was possible and even really closer to my mom and my aunts who hadn’t ever really seemed like people before to me? I mean they were family and nice and I loved them but now…now there’s history between all of us.

I kind of get why there are such powerful connections between women especially family.

I drift off dreaming of tonight and Amy and can’t help but smile as I see in a nice room, big at least as the living room of the trailer she lived in with her mom. There’s a soft look to her as she runs her hands over a nice bedspread before crawling under the covers and snuggling into bed taking a pillow and hugging it tight.