fic: [weeds] confessions of a man insane enough to live with beasts {andy/nancy}
Title: Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts
Fandom: Weeds
Characters/Pairings: Andy/Nancy.
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Word Count: 3,144
Author's Note: Takes place between 6x08 "Gentle Puppies" and 6x09 "To Moscow and Quickly". If you're looking for sexytimes, you're about to be disappointed since this falls in with canon more than it doesn't. Also, this is a sort of half-assed attempt at answering falseeeyelashes prompt from months ago; the only part that remains of that prompt is the Fourth of July setting. And on that note, if this show has a timeline I can't figure it out, so pretend it's July. Finally, title stolen from Bukowski.
Summary: They can't hold this together much longer.
They’re on the road for Fourth of July weekend.
Which is why Andy bounces out of bed that morning (read: crawls, slowly, towards his bong) and declares it the Great American Road Trip. That just sounds better than ‘the road trip we took because one particular son killed one particular woman and now we’re all going to end up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean if we’re not mutilated and fed to the dogs (not that Esteban has dogs, but Ignacio seems like he would have a few vicious pitbulls, or they could just bring some in, celebratory ‘hey, i just killed my wife and her entire family, please eat the evidence’ dogs)’.
It probably sounds better in Danish.
-
“No.”
“It’s - “
“Andy, I already have three children to deal with, I don’t need a fourth, so if you could just - “
This is the part where he pulls the RV off the road, a less than graceful swerve, and Shane shouts what the fuck from the back loud enough to wake Stevie. There is a wail. Nancy’s foot hits the dashboard in violent outburst number one for the day, and Andy doesn’t even look at her again until he’s sure the time for any and all rage blackouts has passed.
“Okay, so that may have been a dramatic overreaction,” he admits.
“Well it certainly didn’t do much to convince me I was wrong.”
He’ll give her that.
But, then, he’ll give her a lot of things.
-
They’re in Wyoming.
Which is to say, they’re not in California with all of its safe and sane restrictions. There are no laws - not that the word illegal has ever given anyone in this family pause - and, yeah, he’s a boy and he wants to blow shit up.
“You burnt down a house,” he says.
She looks away, back out the window, squints in the too bright light, absent her sunglasses. Silas and Doug are playing cards in the back and Andy’s pretty sure Doug’s high - when isn’t he - and losing badly, but he’s also pretty sure that Silas’ delayed reaction to all of Doug’s intimidation tactics is due to the fact that the kid’s too busy keeping tabs on what him and Nancy are saying to completely follow the conversation.
He drops his voice accordingly. “I’m just saying.”
“And here I thought we were done with this conversation twenty minutes ago.”
“Alright, fine,” he concedes, “but you can’t tell me those pyromaniacal urges came out of nowhere.”
“I’m going to go check on Stevie,” she says, and brushes past him when she gets up, one hand on his shoulder as she leaves. Consolation. The lines of his mouth fight between a frown and a smile but don’t quite make it to either one, stuck in neutral and going nowhere fast.
Silas tells Doug go fish in the middle of a game of gin rummy.
Doug doesn’t notice.
-
Nancy’s taken up smoking again - cigarettes, not joints - and it’s become enough of a thing that she takes a smoke break outside the RV while the boys wander around in the convenience store they stop at in Worland.
“You know, those things will kill you,” he says, and he’s not even close to serious because so will pissing off Mexican drug lords and standing in the sun for too long - they’re all fucked, might as well embrace it - but she glares at him all the same, stubbing out the cigarette with the toe of her boot and crossing her arms. One strap of her shirt falls down her shoulder with the movement and his eyes follow.
“You should stretch your legs,” she tells him. “It’s a long drive.”
Andy gives a snort of derision because, hey, he’s already waded into the shit, might as well start swimming. “Yeah, to where?”
“Wherever.”
He drums out a rhythm on the steering wheel and lets them lapse into silence.
-
This is all stemming from a fight they only almost had because full-on blowouts require you to be able to actually hear the words the other person is saying and not just get annoyed at their general tone and the holier-than-thou bullshit they always pull and you just expect, now.
Basically, they talked over each other. Loudly. Until Silas opened the door to the back bedroom with an are you fucking kidding me expression that he definitely got from his mother.
He may have called her a home-wrecker. May have as in he did, in fact, call her a home-wrecker but he didn’t do it to her face. His back was to her. So.
“And here we go - “
“And if it’s not that it’s some guy you marry or don’t marry and have a kid with so that he won’t kill us, even if he won’t sign the birth certificate until its convenient for him - “
“Let’s go through an entire laundry list of things I’ve done wrong so that we can avoid talking about all of the things you’ve done wrong, like fucking my sister or registering the van in Shane’s name which is, by the way, the reason we had to leave, not because of me - “
“ - and then eventually do marry, because maybe the third time’s the charm, even though trying to have you killed is pretty much a sign that it won’t be - “
“ - as you like to say it is because it’s so much easier to blame me instead of admitting that you were getting into trouble all by yourself long before you showed up at my door - “
“ - not to mention how your greatest business deal ended in an entire town being burned to the ground because gangsters don’t happen to understand the art of subtlety - “
Silas throws the door open.
They don’t speak to each other again for another hour.
-
“There’s an Independence, Wyoming.”
Shane’s got a map and Nancy’s got a headache, a bottle half full of aspirin stashed in the cupholder on her side. The remnants of her iced coffee exists as half melted ice at the bottom of a plastic cup, straw chewed all to hell, that sits in the holder on his side, switched out for the aspirin right around the time she gave up on quizzing Shane on state capitals or birds or something equally pedantic. Homeschooling at its worst.
Then Shane found Independence, Missouri (capital, Jefferson City; bird, who the fuck cares; unofficial nickname, the show-me state, as in show me your -- Andy starts and this is where Nancy simultaneously glares at him and starts reaching for the pills) and noticed that were half a dozen cities with that name on this map alone. Which is how they got back to the Great American Road Trip.
And this.
“It’s a rock,” Andy tells him. “Independence Rock. They probably left that part out, understandably.”
“Why would they put a rock on the map?”
“Because it’s an 130 foot historic landmark, so named because the emigrants traveling on the Oregon and California trails tried to reach it by July fourth in order to make sure they’d get where they wanted to go before the first snowstorm knocked them out of the game.” He pauses. “And also because Wyoming doesn’t have a whole lot else going on, once you get past Yellowstone, so it’s all mountain ranges and parks and enormous rocks.”
Nancy toys with her sunglasses, letting them slip just far enough down her nose that he can glimpse surprise there. “Was history the only class you weren’t high in during high school?”
“College, not high school. Harvard. A history major named Lisa. Used to wear a lot of short skirts which certainly made that American History class a hell of a lot more interesting.” She rolls her eyes, mutters jesus under her breath as she turns her attention back out the window, but she doesn’t hit him this time which is a nice change of pace. Still doesn’t seem as impressed as she was half a second ago. “And for the record, I liked school just fine, it was school that didn’t like me.”
“Right,” she says.
“There’s an Independence, Pennsylvania too,” Shane feels the need to inform them. “Right outside of Pittsburgh.”
Nancy wastes no time at all in prying the map from his hands after that. “Okay, class dismissed.”
-
She’s sleeping in the middle of the bed - of course she is - when he decides to call it a night. Slides a hand under her hip, and she leans into his touch before consciousness takes over, a harsh groan of displeasure as she scoots back over onto her side. He scrambles in after her, kicking the comforter off his side entirely and tugging at the sheet, both of which she’s laying on, not under, therefore impeding both movements.
Andy has this tendency to feel like he’s trapped about seventy percent of the time now, if he’s being generous. This is one of those times.
He huffs a sigh and settles, only to have her roll to face him, eyes still closed and a hand falling haphazardly on his arm. “Why are we moving?”
“Silas needs to see a man about some magic beans and he’s taking us along for the ride,” he replies.
“Magic beans?”
“Cause what do we need a horse for?”
That might’ve been a laugh he just heard, buried in the pillow. One corner of his mouth twitches upwards. “Who does he even know in Wyoming?”
“I think it’s one of Doug’s corrupt CPA buddies. You know how those guys are,” he says, though, truth be told, even he doesn’t know how they are. Doug’s the only one he’s ever met. But it’s been upwards of twelve hours on the road, and he’s been awake far longer than that, so he’s too tired to make sense. Half asleep, liquid and mostly unguarded, she doesn’t seem to mind. “Anyways, I didn’t ask and he didn’t tell.”
“Keeps you from having to be the responsible adult.”
“It does.”
“Goodnight, Andy,” she says, pats him on the arm like a beloved dog as she turns over, and the built up resistance he has to her forces him to play the role of the platonic brother-in-law and keeps his hands from chasing her body back across the mattress.
Doesn’t keep them from wanting to.
-
They wake up in Casper.
Not the friendly ghost (it’s not a joke he makes, it’s a joke he thinks; there’s a difference).
Silas has magically acquired a fuck ton of product overnight, not counting the hash they’ve already got, and he says it like this isn’t something that’s going to bankrupt them or come back to bite them in the ass, so Nancy lets it slide. There’s some big fireworks display tonight in downtown Cheyenne, and him and Silas have both apparently arrived at the same conclusion that their customer base will be huge because, hey, what’s better than getting completely fucked up and then watching shit explode.
Nancy just mutters boys while Andy gives her a significant look that no one misses.
He’s pretty sure Silas tells them to get a room at some point while he’s heading into the back bedroom to sleep off his nighttime fun adventures. Doug is passed out dead already, half on the floor, half on the couch that Silas has taken to calling his bed, so there’s not really any telling when they decided to call it a night and parked in a campground right next to, you guessed, another park and another set of mountains.
There’s a mutual, unspoken decision not to deal with the implications of that phrase being applied to them.
-
Some asshole in a sedan tailgates him for almost an hour down I-25.
Traffic is ridiculous.
“Why do you do that?”
Nancy’s teeth play at the straw of her iced coffee, wet pink lips, and he’s decided her mouth is a driving hazard. “Do what? Drink coffee?”
“No,” the SUV in front of him moves six inches and he eases his foot onto the gas. “Bring up your sister.”
She shrugs, bare shoulder jutting out towards him as she does. “I don’t know, Andy. It was a heat of the moment -- thing.”
“You’re jealous.”
“If that helps you sleep at night, then - “
“You are.”
“I’m really not,” she replies. “And while we’re at it, you don’t think this is a wildly hypocritical conversation for you to be having right now?”
“I never said I wasn’t jealous.”
Her expression sours, not the answer she was hoping for, even if it’s far from surprising. She’s never been the biggest fan of the truth; lies and deception give her something to fight, to fight about, and Nancy’s always been at her strongest brimming with anger and burning bright.
-
The main festivities in Cheyenne take place at and around an old railroad station.
They get there three hours before dusk and Silas says they break even before the sky shades in purple and orange, forever the entrepreneurial son. Doug looks vaguely smug and Shane looks bored and Nancy doesn’t look like anything because he loses her somewhere between the thirtysomething who looks more like she’s wearing a flag draped over her body than an actual dress, loose and baggy in all the wrong places - Andy’s never really understood the insane lengths people will go to be patriotic for one day out of the year - and the guy with the aquamarine hair that drops a couple hundred and overuses the word dude.
Stevie’s little hands tug at his earlobes and Andy hitches him a little higher and tells him that women are the root of all evil and these are things he really needs to learn while he’s young.
He only sort of means it.
-
He starts to worry after dark.
Her cell phone goes straight to voicemail and he tells the boys Code Orange --
(“You realize you just made that up,” Silas says and, yeah, he has a point but there really should be a scale of some sort.
“Should we be armed?” Is what Shane asks and the answer to that will always and forever be no, fuck no, because he doesn’t even know whether or not he should trust Shane with a steak knife these days.)
-- but lets them wander off into the crowd anyways, unwilling to deprive them of any small sense of normalcy, and so it’s just him, and Stevie down for the night, soft cooing noises that he lets devolve into silence before he steps outside. Settles into the grass near where they’ve parked, baby monitor in one hand and phone in the other. His fingers ghost over her number on speed dial for the eightieth time in several hours but he gives up, pockets it before he can get any further.
“Finally decided I’m not worth it?”
Andy can hear the sad smile that accompanies her words before he can see it and he hates himself a little for the way his chest tightens. She steps into view and he has to look up at her, has to lean back on his hands and it makes him feel stupid for worrying and even stupider for caring. In that moment, he hates her more than he hates himself and in a sick way that’s progress.
He doesn’t answer her.
“Find another bar?” It’s only half sarcasm and she hits him in the arm with her purse as she drops into place beside him.
“Ha, ha, ha. You’ve had your fun. Time to let it go.” She liberates the baby monitor from him, laughs when there’s nothing but silence and the occasional faint burst of static, but there’s no malice there. “Where are Silas and Shane?”
“Getting drunk and scamming on chicks.” She narrows her eyes. “Their phones are on and they actually answer when I call. Usually. They’re teenagers, Nance. Teenagers who sell drugs, granted, but - actually, that’s not so abnormal.”
He expects a fight there. He expects to hear all about how irresponsible he is and he’s got the word hypocrite on his tongue, remembers the state fair in Big Sky and how he said go and she said stop.
They can’t just agree, even if it means a complete role reversal, and maybe that’s balance for them, maybe that’s how they’ve held together this long, maybe without the constant push and pull they would all be dead by now, but he thinks there has to be a better way, has to be a middle ground, and if there isn’t then what the fuck is even the point because he’s miserable more than he used to be and she’s anxious all of the time and they can’t go on like this, they can’t stay bitter and completely directionless, chipping away at each other in their dwindling spare time, without the whole operation caving in on itself.
They can’t afford to do this but that’s never stopped them before, so he expects a fight he doesn’t get because any alternative is quickly approaching on completely foreign to him.
What he does get is her head in his lap and her body sprawled out in the grass. What he does get is eyes that stay shut tight and the rough sound of her exhale as her chest deflates and the hand she touches to her forehead, scrubs over her face, falls to his and takes hold. Tangles her fingers with his, and the ring that’s twisted around her third finger bites into his skin.
“Judah would hate me if he was here,” she says.
“Judah wouldn’t recognize you if he was here,” he counters, and her shaky breath turns to a shallow burst of laughter that has nothing to do with amusement.
“Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“No.”
This time, when she opens her eyes, she’s the one looking up at him.
“He wouldn’t recognize me either.”
“He wouldn’t,” she echoes, teeth against her bottom lip, and there’s a long moment where her grip slackens and her hand raises, stops just short of running along the curve of his jaw. One long moment where the weight of her on his legs feels less like it’s trapping him and more like it’s grounding him. Her hand drops but her gaze doesn’t break. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe not.”
The pop-snap of fireworks in the distance colors the sky red and gritty with smoke; it’s a macabre display, when combined with the pungent smell of gunpowder, and he’s not high enough for this but he’s here all the same.
-
“Colorado?”
“Looks like,” she says.
In the back, the boys sleep and Doug snores. She folds into the passenger seat and they move on.
-
fin.
Fandom: Weeds
Characters/Pairings: Andy/Nancy.
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Word Count: 3,144
Author's Note: Takes place between 6x08 "Gentle Puppies" and 6x09 "To Moscow and Quickly". If you're looking for sexytimes, you're about to be disappointed since this falls in with canon more than it doesn't. Also, this is a sort of half-assed attempt at answering falseeeyelashes prompt from months ago; the only part that remains of that prompt is the Fourth of July setting. And on that note, if this show has a timeline I can't figure it out, so pretend it's July. Finally, title stolen from Bukowski.
Summary: They can't hold this together much longer.
They’re on the road for Fourth of July weekend.
Which is why Andy bounces out of bed that morning (read: crawls, slowly, towards his bong) and declares it the Great American Road Trip. That just sounds better than ‘the road trip we took because one particular son killed one particular woman and now we’re all going to end up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean if we’re not mutilated and fed to the dogs (not that Esteban has dogs, but Ignacio seems like he would have a few vicious pitbulls, or they could just bring some in, celebratory ‘hey, i just killed my wife and her entire family, please eat the evidence’ dogs)’.
It probably sounds better in Danish.
-
“No.”
“It’s - “
“Andy, I already have three children to deal with, I don’t need a fourth, so if you could just - “
This is the part where he pulls the RV off the road, a less than graceful swerve, and Shane shouts what the fuck from the back loud enough to wake Stevie. There is a wail. Nancy’s foot hits the dashboard in violent outburst number one for the day, and Andy doesn’t even look at her again until he’s sure the time for any and all rage blackouts has passed.
“Okay, so that may have been a dramatic overreaction,” he admits.
“Well it certainly didn’t do much to convince me I was wrong.”
He’ll give her that.
But, then, he’ll give her a lot of things.
-
They’re in Wyoming.
Which is to say, they’re not in California with all of its safe and sane restrictions. There are no laws - not that the word illegal has ever given anyone in this family pause - and, yeah, he’s a boy and he wants to blow shit up.
“You burnt down a house,” he says.
She looks away, back out the window, squints in the too bright light, absent her sunglasses. Silas and Doug are playing cards in the back and Andy’s pretty sure Doug’s high - when isn’t he - and losing badly, but he’s also pretty sure that Silas’ delayed reaction to all of Doug’s intimidation tactics is due to the fact that the kid’s too busy keeping tabs on what him and Nancy are saying to completely follow the conversation.
He drops his voice accordingly. “I’m just saying.”
“And here I thought we were done with this conversation twenty minutes ago.”
“Alright, fine,” he concedes, “but you can’t tell me those pyromaniacal urges came out of nowhere.”
“I’m going to go check on Stevie,” she says, and brushes past him when she gets up, one hand on his shoulder as she leaves. Consolation. The lines of his mouth fight between a frown and a smile but don’t quite make it to either one, stuck in neutral and going nowhere fast.
Silas tells Doug go fish in the middle of a game of gin rummy.
Doug doesn’t notice.
-
Nancy’s taken up smoking again - cigarettes, not joints - and it’s become enough of a thing that she takes a smoke break outside the RV while the boys wander around in the convenience store they stop at in Worland.
“You know, those things will kill you,” he says, and he’s not even close to serious because so will pissing off Mexican drug lords and standing in the sun for too long - they’re all fucked, might as well embrace it - but she glares at him all the same, stubbing out the cigarette with the toe of her boot and crossing her arms. One strap of her shirt falls down her shoulder with the movement and his eyes follow.
“You should stretch your legs,” she tells him. “It’s a long drive.”
Andy gives a snort of derision because, hey, he’s already waded into the shit, might as well start swimming. “Yeah, to where?”
“Wherever.”
He drums out a rhythm on the steering wheel and lets them lapse into silence.
-
This is all stemming from a fight they only almost had because full-on blowouts require you to be able to actually hear the words the other person is saying and not just get annoyed at their general tone and the holier-than-thou bullshit they always pull and you just expect, now.
Basically, they talked over each other. Loudly. Until Silas opened the door to the back bedroom with an are you fucking kidding me expression that he definitely got from his mother.
He may have called her a home-wrecker. May have as in he did, in fact, call her a home-wrecker but he didn’t do it to her face. His back was to her. So.
“And here we go - “
“And if it’s not that it’s some guy you marry or don’t marry and have a kid with so that he won’t kill us, even if he won’t sign the birth certificate until its convenient for him - “
“Let’s go through an entire laundry list of things I’ve done wrong so that we can avoid talking about all of the things you’ve done wrong, like fucking my sister or registering the van in Shane’s name which is, by the way, the reason we had to leave, not because of me - “
“ - and then eventually do marry, because maybe the third time’s the charm, even though trying to have you killed is pretty much a sign that it won’t be - “
“ - as you like to say it is because it’s so much easier to blame me instead of admitting that you were getting into trouble all by yourself long before you showed up at my door - “
“ - not to mention how your greatest business deal ended in an entire town being burned to the ground because gangsters don’t happen to understand the art of subtlety - “
Silas throws the door open.
They don’t speak to each other again for another hour.
-
“There’s an Independence, Wyoming.”
Shane’s got a map and Nancy’s got a headache, a bottle half full of aspirin stashed in the cupholder on her side. The remnants of her iced coffee exists as half melted ice at the bottom of a plastic cup, straw chewed all to hell, that sits in the holder on his side, switched out for the aspirin right around the time she gave up on quizzing Shane on state capitals or birds or something equally pedantic. Homeschooling at its worst.
Then Shane found Independence, Missouri (capital, Jefferson City; bird, who the fuck cares; unofficial nickname, the show-me state, as in show me your -- Andy starts and this is where Nancy simultaneously glares at him and starts reaching for the pills) and noticed that were half a dozen cities with that name on this map alone. Which is how they got back to the Great American Road Trip.
And this.
“It’s a rock,” Andy tells him. “Independence Rock. They probably left that part out, understandably.”
“Why would they put a rock on the map?”
“Because it’s an 130 foot historic landmark, so named because the emigrants traveling on the Oregon and California trails tried to reach it by July fourth in order to make sure they’d get where they wanted to go before the first snowstorm knocked them out of the game.” He pauses. “And also because Wyoming doesn’t have a whole lot else going on, once you get past Yellowstone, so it’s all mountain ranges and parks and enormous rocks.”
Nancy toys with her sunglasses, letting them slip just far enough down her nose that he can glimpse surprise there. “Was history the only class you weren’t high in during high school?”
“College, not high school. Harvard. A history major named Lisa. Used to wear a lot of short skirts which certainly made that American History class a hell of a lot more interesting.” She rolls her eyes, mutters jesus under her breath as she turns her attention back out the window, but she doesn’t hit him this time which is a nice change of pace. Still doesn’t seem as impressed as she was half a second ago. “And for the record, I liked school just fine, it was school that didn’t like me.”
“Right,” she says.
“There’s an Independence, Pennsylvania too,” Shane feels the need to inform them. “Right outside of Pittsburgh.”
Nancy wastes no time at all in prying the map from his hands after that. “Okay, class dismissed.”
-
She’s sleeping in the middle of the bed - of course she is - when he decides to call it a night. Slides a hand under her hip, and she leans into his touch before consciousness takes over, a harsh groan of displeasure as she scoots back over onto her side. He scrambles in after her, kicking the comforter off his side entirely and tugging at the sheet, both of which she’s laying on, not under, therefore impeding both movements.
Andy has this tendency to feel like he’s trapped about seventy percent of the time now, if he’s being generous. This is one of those times.
He huffs a sigh and settles, only to have her roll to face him, eyes still closed and a hand falling haphazardly on his arm. “Why are we moving?”
“Silas needs to see a man about some magic beans and he’s taking us along for the ride,” he replies.
“Magic beans?”
“Cause what do we need a horse for?”
That might’ve been a laugh he just heard, buried in the pillow. One corner of his mouth twitches upwards. “Who does he even know in Wyoming?”
“I think it’s one of Doug’s corrupt CPA buddies. You know how those guys are,” he says, though, truth be told, even he doesn’t know how they are. Doug’s the only one he’s ever met. But it’s been upwards of twelve hours on the road, and he’s been awake far longer than that, so he’s too tired to make sense. Half asleep, liquid and mostly unguarded, she doesn’t seem to mind. “Anyways, I didn’t ask and he didn’t tell.”
“Keeps you from having to be the responsible adult.”
“It does.”
“Goodnight, Andy,” she says, pats him on the arm like a beloved dog as she turns over, and the built up resistance he has to her forces him to play the role of the platonic brother-in-law and keeps his hands from chasing her body back across the mattress.
Doesn’t keep them from wanting to.
-
They wake up in Casper.
Not the friendly ghost (it’s not a joke he makes, it’s a joke he thinks; there’s a difference).
Silas has magically acquired a fuck ton of product overnight, not counting the hash they’ve already got, and he says it like this isn’t something that’s going to bankrupt them or come back to bite them in the ass, so Nancy lets it slide. There’s some big fireworks display tonight in downtown Cheyenne, and him and Silas have both apparently arrived at the same conclusion that their customer base will be huge because, hey, what’s better than getting completely fucked up and then watching shit explode.
Nancy just mutters boys while Andy gives her a significant look that no one misses.
He’s pretty sure Silas tells them to get a room at some point while he’s heading into the back bedroom to sleep off his nighttime fun adventures. Doug is passed out dead already, half on the floor, half on the couch that Silas has taken to calling his bed, so there’s not really any telling when they decided to call it a night and parked in a campground right next to, you guessed, another park and another set of mountains.
There’s a mutual, unspoken decision not to deal with the implications of that phrase being applied to them.
-
Some asshole in a sedan tailgates him for almost an hour down I-25.
Traffic is ridiculous.
“Why do you do that?”
Nancy’s teeth play at the straw of her iced coffee, wet pink lips, and he’s decided her mouth is a driving hazard. “Do what? Drink coffee?”
“No,” the SUV in front of him moves six inches and he eases his foot onto the gas. “Bring up your sister.”
She shrugs, bare shoulder jutting out towards him as she does. “I don’t know, Andy. It was a heat of the moment -- thing.”
“You’re jealous.”
“If that helps you sleep at night, then - “
“You are.”
“I’m really not,” she replies. “And while we’re at it, you don’t think this is a wildly hypocritical conversation for you to be having right now?”
“I never said I wasn’t jealous.”
Her expression sours, not the answer she was hoping for, even if it’s far from surprising. She’s never been the biggest fan of the truth; lies and deception give her something to fight, to fight about, and Nancy’s always been at her strongest brimming with anger and burning bright.
-
The main festivities in Cheyenne take place at and around an old railroad station.
They get there three hours before dusk and Silas says they break even before the sky shades in purple and orange, forever the entrepreneurial son. Doug looks vaguely smug and Shane looks bored and Nancy doesn’t look like anything because he loses her somewhere between the thirtysomething who looks more like she’s wearing a flag draped over her body than an actual dress, loose and baggy in all the wrong places - Andy’s never really understood the insane lengths people will go to be patriotic for one day out of the year - and the guy with the aquamarine hair that drops a couple hundred and overuses the word dude.
Stevie’s little hands tug at his earlobes and Andy hitches him a little higher and tells him that women are the root of all evil and these are things he really needs to learn while he’s young.
He only sort of means it.
-
He starts to worry after dark.
Her cell phone goes straight to voicemail and he tells the boys Code Orange --
(“You realize you just made that up,” Silas says and, yeah, he has a point but there really should be a scale of some sort.
“Should we be armed?” Is what Shane asks and the answer to that will always and forever be no, fuck no, because he doesn’t even know whether or not he should trust Shane with a steak knife these days.)
-- but lets them wander off into the crowd anyways, unwilling to deprive them of any small sense of normalcy, and so it’s just him, and Stevie down for the night, soft cooing noises that he lets devolve into silence before he steps outside. Settles into the grass near where they’ve parked, baby monitor in one hand and phone in the other. His fingers ghost over her number on speed dial for the eightieth time in several hours but he gives up, pockets it before he can get any further.
“Finally decided I’m not worth it?”
Andy can hear the sad smile that accompanies her words before he can see it and he hates himself a little for the way his chest tightens. She steps into view and he has to look up at her, has to lean back on his hands and it makes him feel stupid for worrying and even stupider for caring. In that moment, he hates her more than he hates himself and in a sick way that’s progress.
He doesn’t answer her.
“Find another bar?” It’s only half sarcasm and she hits him in the arm with her purse as she drops into place beside him.
“Ha, ha, ha. You’ve had your fun. Time to let it go.” She liberates the baby monitor from him, laughs when there’s nothing but silence and the occasional faint burst of static, but there’s no malice there. “Where are Silas and Shane?”
“Getting drunk and scamming on chicks.” She narrows her eyes. “Their phones are on and they actually answer when I call. Usually. They’re teenagers, Nance. Teenagers who sell drugs, granted, but - actually, that’s not so abnormal.”
He expects a fight there. He expects to hear all about how irresponsible he is and he’s got the word hypocrite on his tongue, remembers the state fair in Big Sky and how he said go and she said stop.
They can’t just agree, even if it means a complete role reversal, and maybe that’s balance for them, maybe that’s how they’ve held together this long, maybe without the constant push and pull they would all be dead by now, but he thinks there has to be a better way, has to be a middle ground, and if there isn’t then what the fuck is even the point because he’s miserable more than he used to be and she’s anxious all of the time and they can’t go on like this, they can’t stay bitter and completely directionless, chipping away at each other in their dwindling spare time, without the whole operation caving in on itself.
They can’t afford to do this but that’s never stopped them before, so he expects a fight he doesn’t get because any alternative is quickly approaching on completely foreign to him.
What he does get is her head in his lap and her body sprawled out in the grass. What he does get is eyes that stay shut tight and the rough sound of her exhale as her chest deflates and the hand she touches to her forehead, scrubs over her face, falls to his and takes hold. Tangles her fingers with his, and the ring that’s twisted around her third finger bites into his skin.
“Judah would hate me if he was here,” she says.
“Judah wouldn’t recognize you if he was here,” he counters, and her shaky breath turns to a shallow burst of laughter that has nothing to do with amusement.
“Is that supposed to be comforting?”
“No.”
This time, when she opens her eyes, she’s the one looking up at him.
“He wouldn’t recognize me either.”
“He wouldn’t,” she echoes, teeth against her bottom lip, and there’s a long moment where her grip slackens and her hand raises, stops just short of running along the curve of his jaw. One long moment where the weight of her on his legs feels less like it’s trapping him and more like it’s grounding him. Her hand drops but her gaze doesn’t break. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe not.”
The pop-snap of fireworks in the distance colors the sky red and gritty with smoke; it’s a macabre display, when combined with the pungent smell of gunpowder, and he’s not high enough for this but he’s here all the same.
-
“Colorado?”
“Looks like,” she says.
In the back, the boys sleep and Doug snores. She folds into the passenger seat and they move on.
-
fin.