142Chapter 1: Rich, Bored Housewife Friends
Trey Davis didn't know Ashton Shay.
It stood to reason of course, they didn't live in the same town, didn't travel the same social circles, didn't share any common interests unless of course you counted their mutual interest in pretty girls with long hair and nice curves, but that was hardly something to base a friendship on. That was it, the entirety of what they had in common, and in fact Trey Davis doubted very much that Ashton Shay had ever even heard his name or anything of his reputation, which was certainly all he ever knew of the other man. In fact he really couldn't be sure that Ashton Shay was ever even aware of his existence. That was all well and good though, he had decided long ago based on hearsay alone that he didn't like the guy so he couldn't say that he particularly cared what Ashton Shay thought of him, if he had ever thought anything at all. It was just so difficult to believe that someone with whom Trey Davis had never once interacted could have had such a profound effect on his life, enough to change the course of it entirely.
From what Trey had heard Ashton Shay wasn't the sort of person who cared much for things or people that didn't benefit him. He was young, brilliant, talented, and very full of himself, supremely confident in both his abilities and what he believed was his natural destiny for success. What he didn't know, however, was that this overconfidence was the very thing that would lead to his downfall, or so Trey liked to think. Ashton Shay knew about making money. He knew about his art, knew the business side of it too. He knew how to light pretty actresses so that they looked even prettier, he knew how to use camera angles to create tension at important points during a story, he knew how to rig lights and run cables, in fact at age twenty-four he already knew both about working as a grip on massive Hollywood sets with budgets of over a hundred million dollars and about being the director of photography for a low-budget yet critically acclaimed independent film that went to the Sundance festival. Ashton Shay knew all of that and Trey could only assume based on his level of success that he knew it very well, but there were also a lot of things he didn't know.
Ashton Shay didn't know when he left the bar the night of January 22nd seven years ago that it was to be his last ride. He didn't know, perhaps, that he'd had a bit too much to drink, or maybe he did know and just didn't care, figuring he was invincible and had no reason to be concerned. He didn't know that somewhere between the time he entered the bar at 11:32 p.m. and left at 2:48 a.m. the wet surface of Christenbury Road had frozen over at this one particularly sharp curve. He didn't know, or maybe was just too stupid to believe, that even though his ridiculous, decked-out Hummer with the lift kit and custom rims and brush guard may have been virtually indestructible – and indeed it was because even after he ran it off the road and rolled three times it started right back up when the man from the towing company turned the key in the ignition – he himself wasn't. He didn't know that something as simple as just putting on his seatbelt could possibly have saved his life, prevented him from hitting the ceiling and breaking his neck, crushing his ribs and puncturing both his lungs, dying almost immediately. No, Ashton Shay didn't know any of that, and another thing he didn't know, something that perhaps might have made a difference if he had, was that three days before his death during an irresponsible, drunken tryst a tiny, microscopic cell carrying 23 of his chromosomes had fused with the nucleus of another, much larger cell, begun dividing rapidly, and then implanted itself in the uterus of his then twenty-year-old girlfriend Julie Newman.
That's one thing that Ashton Shay never, ever knew, and that's where Trey Davis came in.
Julie chose to keep the baby of course. She might not have had Ashton Shay still been alive, but with him gone and her heart seemingly broken it was only right that she allow herself something to remember him by, and Trey, being the kind soul that he was, wouldn't have had it any other way. Well, perhaps if he'd had the choice from the beginning he would have had her to himself all along. If it had been up to him she never would have approached Ashton Shay in the on-campus designated smoking area of the expensive arts conservatory they attended that Trey never could have afforded even if he had been in possession of any sort of talent. She never would have told him that she thought guys who smoked cigarettes and drank snobby, expensive beer were sexy, or gone out for a midnight ride with the arrogant prick and then snuck into his room and gone straight to bed with him barely three hours after meeting for the first time. Obviously Trey would have preferred that none of that happen, but he didn't know Julie then and probably couldn't have done anything to stop her if he had, and he was certain that she never would have given him a chance in the first place had she not possessed such a cold, determined sense of self-preservation that, in the wake of Ashton Shay's untimely death, sent her on a top-level mission to find some poor, pathetic sucker that could be placed in her dead boyfriend's shoes, constantly compared to him, and constantly resented for not ever living up to his predecessor.
And that, thought Trey gloomily, was how he ended up at age twenty-six already stuck in the most miserable marriage he could possibly imagine and raising another man's son.
Ashton Shay Davis, or Ash as Trey affectionately called him, was not the problem though, not even close. Trey loved him as deeply as he possibly could. He was his son after all, maybe not biologically but his name was on the birth certificate and that at least made it legal. At six years old he was charming and precocious, still possessing the adorable clumsiness of a young child but also displaying a remarkable sense of industry and a highly questioning attitude. He was full of reverence and admiration for Trey, who always seemed to have all the answers, but he was also still young enough to demonstrate those feelings with physical affection. Though it was a bit melodramatic and Trey often felt guilty for thinking it, Ash really was the one bright spot in a life that seemed to constantly get darker and darker.
First it had been Trey's parents, who he couldn't remember ever agreeing on anything since he was about five years old, that had finally let their intense resentment of each other go just long enough to tell him that he was making a huge mistake, that it was not a good idea to marry a girl who had only been sort of a casual acquaintance if that even – technically a friend of his roommate's crazy ex-girlfriend that sometimes came to parties at their house and laughed good-naturedly as Trey sang drunken slow jams to her, kneeling in front of her chair and holding her hand – just because she was pretty and had ended up in a tough situation. It was sad, yes, they agreed, but it wasn't his job to take care of her and it certainly wasn't his job to take care of her baby. He had been careful in his encounters with women – and he refrained from mentioning to his parents that it wasn't so much that he had been careful as it was that he just hadn't had very many encounters to speak of – and it was silly to throw away his youth and all the opportunities that came along with it to take on a huge responsibility that he understood exactly none of the implications of.
It was sound advice but, as most nineteen-year-olds tend to do when faced with worldly wisdom from people more than twice their age, Trey didn't listen. Why would he? He was young and reckless, Julie was absolutely beautiful, had been the object of his desires for as long as he had known her, and she seemed so genuinely lost. Trey saw what he was doing as very gallant and romantic. He was her knight in shining armor, appearing at exactly the right moment, sweeping her off her feet and promising to make everything okay again. Her gratitude was real, her grief for Ashton Shay was real, her love for her son and her desire to give him the best life she possibly could was real, but the thing that wasn't real was her love for Trey. That was completely and utterly fabricated all the way from the beginning, and like an idiot he fell for it so really he had no one to blame but himself. After all hadn't everyone, every single person that he told his intentions to, advised him not to do it?
It wouldn't be true to say he regretted it though. Despite the fact that as the years went on Julie saw it less and less necessary to keep up her act, despite the fact that he lost the respect of his parents and most of his extended family, despite the fact that slowly but surely each one of his friends started dropping off the map as they became aware that his new role didn't allow for the careless party lifestyle they were all still into, Trey didn't regret it. He wished things were different but given the choice to either go back and do it again or not do it at all, to stand back and watch Julie suffer alone, to not even get to see her anymore once she stopped coming out on the weekends, to have to listen to the cruel gossip disguised as sympathy exchanged between her so-called "friends" at parties…no, he would never have stood for that. He did what he believed was right at the time, and he still believed it.
Besides, some good had come of it, hadn't it? He had this house, a fairly nice house that he never would have been able to afford on his income alone. Having dropped out of community college at age nineteen to get married and take care of Ash while Julie finished her education he was certainly not expecting to ever be rich. Up until a few months ago he had still worked for the tire company that had employed him since high school, and they did treat their employees well, paid them fairly and promoted internally whenever upper level positions opened, but still he couldn't have expected changing tires to ever get him in a place like this. That had been all Julie, Julie and her beautiful baroque cello that she always got such rave reviews for and somehow, rather unbelievably to Trey, made money off of.
How she ever became so adept at an instrument that wasn't even technically taught at the conservatory she attended – they taught cello of course but not baroque cello which according to Julie was vastly different – seemed to be a mystery to everyone. Julie had been adamant though, maintaining that a baroque cello was the instrument she had, insisting that she could not afford another, and refusing to play any sort of modern music on it because it just wasn't meant for that. All her teachers warned her that putting herself in a box would only be detrimental to her future career, that baroque music didn't have a very wide audience and she should try to be more versatile, but in her usual way Julie Newman Davis, as was her legal name at the time she graduated, went on to prove all of them wrong. She avoided the common route most graduates took – a slow slog through large orchestras, just biding their time and hoping against hope that someday years in the future they would be named first chair and eventually become a soloist – and instead joined a small chamber ensemble that specialized in baroque and early classical music and within a year was playing solos every night.
She became the most rapidly successful graduate the conservatory had seen in a long time and they were all too happy to take credit for her talents, including her name in almost all of their recruitment fliers, a fact which she did not appreciate at all. It was for that reason, at least she said it was for that reason, that she made the decision to go by the stage name Julie Shay instead. Besides, she had rationalized, Shay was an easier name for international audiences to pronounce. Trey personally didn't feel that international audiences should have had much trouble pronouncing Davis either, but he didn't argue. He never argued with Julie. It was just easier not to.
Julie's blossoming career, while it did generate a moderately impressive amount of money, more than Trey secretly felt the baroque cello really deserved, also had the unfortunate downside of taking her on frequent tours thousands of miles away, leading her to leave her husband and son behind often for weeks at a time. It got lonely occasionally but it hadn't been so bad before, Trey thought, when it was just him and Ash. He loved the kid, Ash adored him just as equally, and they'd had fun together, lots of fun. Julie was not a necessary part of that equation. Now however, with the addition of two brand new members to the Davis family if you could even call it that at this point, Trey was in way over his head.
It took four years of hinting, prodding, asking, and then just straight out begging and pleading, but he had finally convinced Julie to have another baby, although her reason for finally giving in wasn't that she wanted one but that she, in her own words, guessed she did owe him that. Trey didn't really care what her reasoning for it was honestly, at that point he knew the whole marriage had been a cruel joke but he also knew he couldn't, or maybe just wouldn't, back out of it. He talked himself into believing that having another baby would fix things, that Julie would finally feel truly bonded to him instead of just viewing him as a poor substitute for Ashton Shay. He convinced himself that everything would work out because it had to work out, because his own parents had divorced when he was five years old and he was not under any circumstances going to let that happen to Ash. The flaw in that argument was that Julie had never planned on divorcing him, had never been in the marriage for the sake of love or partnership or expanding her family, no, she had been in it solely to provide a father figure for her son and to ensure that she'd be able to continue playing the cello, travel whenever she wanted to, and know that Ash was being cared for without actually having to do it herself. That was what it was all about and Trey had given her exactly what she wanted.
Hadn't Trey's mother told him that too? Hadn't she pointed out with painful clarity each and every one of the ways that Julie was using him during one of the only two short telephone conversations they'd had last year? It hadn't made a bit of difference though because Trey had been completely determined. He wanted another child, a little girl specifically, to share his love with, to have that special kind of closeness with that some of his coworkers who had young daughters described. Most men would probably say that they would prefer a son over a daughter, but Trey had never felt that way. He loved Ash unconditionally of course, but he had always wanted a daddy's girl and, perhaps just as a result of that natural sense of possessiveness that seemed to be present in every man's DNA, he wanted her to be his own.
Julie finally allowed herself to be talked into it, although she was quick to let him know that if it turned out to be another boy that was just too bad, she wasn't going to be trying again. That saddened Trey a bit because he had always pictured himself having three children, it seemed like the perfect number, but the world wasn't a perfect place. Two would be just fine, it was a compromise and compromise meant that the marriage was working, didn't it? He chose to think it did, and he took it as a sign that the whole thing really was meant to be when Julie went to an OB-GYN appointment, reluctantly agreeing to allow him to tag along, and the doctor found two heartbeats instead of one.
Trey was ecstatic, and even more so when it was revealed that they were twin girls. He was getting everything he had ever wanted. Well, he supposed that technically he had wanted a wife who truly loved him and was around a bit more often than Julie was, but nobody in his right mind could expect to get everything he had ever wanted. Besides, once the girls were born Julie would have to stay around. She had taken six months off of school when Ash was born so Trey had just assumed that she would take at least six months off of touring and hopefully more, but that hadn't happened.
Three weeks. That's how much time she took off, and technically even less than that because the day she got back from the hospital she was in the empty bedroom upstairs practicing the cello frantically. She hadn't been able to play at all during her third trimester because her belly was too big and the cello didn't lay right, so it was evidently of the utmost importance that she whip her skills back into shape. It wasn't that she didn't love the girls or anything like that, Trey was certain from the way she interacted with them when she wasn't holed up with her cello that she did, it was just that she didn't seem to have the time for them. For Ash, yes. Ash was perfectly at liberty to burst into the room and disturb her practicing and he would get showered with kisses, but if Trey were to do that, if he were to bring a screaming baby in there and ask her to feed it…well, he had never really tried but he was fairly certain it would be frowned upon. The point was that Julie just didn't seem to show the same maternal devotion to Eva and Anna that she had to Ash, and Trey didn't understand why.
He also didn't understand how she could have just left to go back on tour so suddenly, how one day she had been sitting next to him on the sofa, a blanket draped over her shoulder and a sleepy, content Anna lying on top of that, looking up when he said her name tenderly and giving him what he thought might have been a genuine smile, and then the next day she was packing her bags, tearing through the house looking for her passport, and announcing that she was leaving for Brussels in six hours. Trey had been totally unprepared for that, and he had been even less prepared for being left entirely alone with a six-year-old boy and two newborns to care for.
It had been virtually impossible, he literally could not leave the house and he'd had to enlist the help of some of his coworkers to do his grocery shopping and things like that, none of whom understood why he didn't have the power to just demand that Julie come home. In order to save himself further embarrassment Trey had stressed the importance of Julie going on tour because they needed the money, even though in reality they surely could have survived on their savings for at least four or five more months, and that led a few of his more sympathetic coworkers to start a donation basket for his family in the break room at work. Then when they'd brought it to him he'd had to accept the money or else it would have been apparent that he had lied, and Trey felt absolutely horrible about that. The entire thing had been excruciatingly uncomfortable.
When Julie finally returned from her two-week stint in Europe Trey actually confronted her and made her aware of all the problems her just leaving like that had caused, but where he had been hoping for an apology and a promise to stay home for the next several months, he was sorely disappointed. Julie had plenty of solutions to his problems and none of them involved her going on leave from the chamber group she played with who still had an entire North American tour to complete over the summer. Trey knew he was a pushover, had always been that way, but it wasn't until he somehow, unbelievably, found himself trading in his beautiful jet black 1990 Camaro that he had spent so much time and money working on for a Grand Caravan with third row seating that he realized exactly how much of one he really was. But Julie was right, he pointed out to himself, having third row seating was the only possible way to get three car seats into one car. Never mind the fact that Julie just as easily could have traded in her two-year-old Hyundai Sonata that she had absolutely no sentimental attachment to, there was no point in even making that suggestion. Trey had officially joined the ranks of the Caravan Dads, but that was okay because that was what it took to ensure his kids' safety and nothing mattered more than that. That's what he told himself at least.
The Caravan wasn't the end of it though. He was forced to explain the entire humiliating situation to his boss who was kind enough to grant him four weeks of "paternity leave" which Trey didn't even think really existed, and he'd had to turn that down anyway because Julie's tour was set to last twelve weeks. With no other options left he was faced with the choice of either quitting or being fired, so he quit. His boss assured him that he was eligible for rehire but really it was just the principle of the thing. He shouldn't have had to do that. He shouldn't have had to go without so much as four consecutive hours of sleep for two straight months. He shouldn't have had to sign up for the Foods to Go program at the closest grocery store because it was too much trouble to get two infant car seats safely strapped into a shopping cart and keep an eye on a six-year-old at the same time.
Trey felt like a lazy, incompetent prick every time he drove up to the side door of the store and watched the cashier roll his fully stocked cart of groceries he had preselected online out to him. The service was supposed to be for old people or disabled people, people who physically couldn't go into the store and shop for themselves, not people who were merely inconvenienced by it. He could just see the way he looked to those bored, critical employees who loaded up his trunk, sitting there in his Caravan with his three car seats while the babies fussed and cried and Ash played Little Fox Music Box on his phone. Lazy, spoiled, superior, those were all words he was sure had crossed their minds and he just wanted to scream at them that he really wasn't like that, that he would have absolutely loved to go into the store and do his own shopping if he could, but Trey Davis wasn't the sort of person who screamed. He was the sort of person who laid down on the ground and let everyone else walk all over him all the while wearing a huge smile and insisting that he didn't mind being their doormat one bit. Someone had to do it, right? He would hate for there to be muddy shoe prints all through the house, his face was a much better place for them, he agreed.
Trey felt like he was slowly going insane, although whether it was from the lack of sleep, the high stress levels, or the realization that basically all of this had been an indisputably terrible mistake he wasn't sure. He wasn't sure of much of anything anymore. He wasn't sure why the hell he had ever been so desperate to have another baby because now that he had two of them he had no idea what to do with them. He didn't…he didn't even really want to do anything with them. He was overwhelmed and he wanted to set them down in their cribs and walk away despite their crying and go on vacation for a week or two. That might not seem so bad, there were probably plenty of parents who got to feeling like that every now and then, but the horrible thing was that he wanted to take Ash on vacation with him.
It's not that there was anything wrong with Eva and Anna. They couldn't be blamed for how much they wore him out. They were just babies, they were his babies and he loved them, but he did wish sometimes that they could have come a few years apart to give him some time to recover, either that or that they would just grow up already. He was over babies. Ash had been a different story because with him it was all brand new, every single little thing he did was an amazing new discovery for Trey because he had never had a baby before, but this time none of it impressed him as much. He hated himself for thinking it, hated himself for playing favorites like that because he had always sworn he was never going to be that kind of parent, but what could he do when it was honestly the way he felt?
He was completely burnt out. Two straight months of taking care of two needy, screaming infants for twenty-four hours a day with absolutely no breaks was enough to drive anybody crazy. As soon as one started crying the other would join in and he only had two arms and a moderate level of dexterity, not to mention he only had so much attention to give and there clearly wasn't enough to go around. Ash was frequently temperamental and badly behaved, taking out his frustration with his little sisters for suddenly just showing up and interrupting his routine on anything or anyone he could get his hands on. Trey couldn't leave Ash alone in a room with the babies because he was honestly afraid he would hurt them, and he couldn't say that he blamed him really. He desperately needed Julie to come back, he was at the end of his rope, but he knew he would probably have better luck getting the President of the United States to come help babysit than he would convincing Julie to leave her tour.
Trey sighed and listlessly pushed a few buttons on his phone, putting it to his ear and listening to the familiar ringback tone, the courante from Bach's cello suite no. 2, one of Julie's absolute favorite pieces to play. It went to voicemail as he expected it probably would, and he sat there and listened to the pleasant, professional, accentless voice that he knew was not at all the way she really talked inform him that he had reached the number of Julie Shay – "Davis," he muttered under his breath just like he always did whenever he heard that. "Julie Davis" – but that she was unable to answer his call at this time and would return it as soon as possible.
"Hey honey," he said flatly after waiting for the tone. "It's me. I, um…I wasn't sure if you forgot to put this month's money into the account or something because I just got a notification from the bank saying that I overdrafted…" He grimaced a little. She wasn't going to be happy to hear that. "So anyway, sorry about that," he added quickly. "It's only a thirty-five dollar charge though so it's not really a big deal, but I do need to buy baby formula pretty soon and the account is sitting at negative forty-seven dollars right now so…yeah. If you could just transfer some money please, that would be great. Um…" He hesitated a moment as usual, never quite sure whether to add the last part of the message or not. "Love you, bye." He always ended up saying it anyway.
It was utterly ridiculous for him to overdraft that account, and it wasn't his fault either. Granted he maybe should have checked his online balance before using the debit card, but he wasn't exactly used to doing that. He and Julie weren't poor, they'd never had anything even close to zero in their account for years so clearly that had been an oversight on Julie's part, she just forgot to make the monthly transfer from her account to their joint account…but that was a completely ridiculous premise to begin with because they were husband and wife, for God's sake! They had been married for almost seven years, there was no good reason why Julie should feel the need to maintain a bank account separate from his. Trey never did back when he used to work, used to being the key words there which was a bit of a sore point for him. Every paycheck he brought home went straight into the joint account to be used for whatever his family needed and he found it exceptionally irritating that Julie could just take off, leave him alone with three children, and try to control how much he spent by putting him on a budget. She had to know better than to think he was spending any of her hard earned money on himself. It was for the kids, every last penny of it except for the basic things he had to provide himself with to survive, and her micromanagement offended him.
There was a knock on the door. Speaking of micromanagement…
Trey took a deep breath and then heaved his body up off the sofa. The couch was old, cheaply made, and sagged in the middle, plus he was a bit overweight, always had been, so sometimes it took more effort than it probably should have to get up. Add to that the fact that he was completely exhausted, just wanted to sleep, and knew very well who was at the door and he almost considered just not getting up to open it at all. He wished he could blow it all off, lock himself in his bedroom, and take a twelve hour nap, but it was of the utmost importance that Ash be made happy as much as possible these days so that meant that his little friend Donny had to be let in for their bi-weekly play date.
Donny himself was not the problem. Trey liked him perfectly fine, he was a decently respectful kid, but his mother…God. She was just a rude, obnoxious, insensitive bitch and Trey couldn't stand her. According to the neighborhood gossip that he couldn't help but hear every time he so much as walked out his front door – sometimes he felt like he lived in a real life version of Desperate Housewives – Shannon, that was the bitch's name, came from a part of Mississippi so backwards that interracial relationships were still frowned upon and had scandalized the whole town by moving to Florida immediately upon graduation from college and coming back six years later married to a black man. She only stayed long enough to parade her mixed-race baby around under the noses of all the ignorant hicks she so despised, and then she was gone again, never to return. She and her husband divorced before their second anniversary which wasn't surprising, at least not according to Marybeth Vega who lived next door, because she had only ever married him for the sake of making her parents angry. She was a serial gold digger, that much was evident even to Trey based on the fact that she could only possibly be in her mid-thirties yet was already on her third marriage, all of which had been to very rich men.
Shannon and Donny, her only child, used to live three houses down on the same side of the street as Trey and Julie so play dates every Tuesday and Thursday weren't much of a hassle at all, but Shannon had just recently gotten married yet again to some filthy rich business executive divorcé and moved all the way to the other side of the city. She made it quite obvious that she was not at all happy about having to drive thirty minutes each way twice a week to accommodate Ash and Donny's little get-togethers, and had been even more of a bitch than normal lately which was impressive considering her usual demeanor.
Trey glanced down at the time as he went to answer the door. If it was really her she was half an hour early which was annoying, but he knew it had to be her because nobody else had any reason to be knocking on his door besides maybe a couple of nicely dressed older people spreading the word of the Lord or something. At this point he would almost rather deal with Jehovah's Witnesses than Shannon, that's how much he couldn't stand the woman, but unfortunately he wasn't so lucky.
It was her, and she gave him a huge, fake smile, flashing her blindingly white and unnaturally straight teeth as she unceremoniously shoved Donny through the door and stepped in behind him. "Trey," she said in a syrupy sweet voice. "It's good to see you again. Sorry the last couple weeks haven't worked out, but you know, wedding planning and the honeymoon and everything..."
Trey just stood back as she walked uninvited into his house and then closed the door behind her. "That's alright," he said. "You're a little early though, aren't you? Ash is still taking a nap right now."
Shannon frowned inquisitively. "He's taking a nap? He's too old for naps, Trey! Donny hasn't napped since he was four years old."
Trey took note of the fact that she had completely ignored his comment about being early, and did not mention it again. There was no point anyway, she was already here, wasn't she? The much more irksome thing was that she had so blatantly and unapologetically criticized his parenting, and in front of Donny too! Being several years younger than the parents of most of Ash's friends, Trey tended to get that a lot and it angered him because if there was one thing he knew for sure about himself it was that he was quite a bit more capable than many of the smug thirty or forty somethings who tried to tell him how to raise his son. He wasn't much good at anything else perhaps, but he knew he was a good father. "He doesn't nap every day," he argued defensively, "just when he needs it. Besides, we have the girls now so he's still kind of adjusting."
Shannon gave a tiny, almost imperceptible roll of her eyes and then pushed Donny forward a little bit. "Go upstairs and tell Ash to wake up," she directed, and Trey, in his usual manner, didn't protest.
He should have, he thought hotly. It was his house, his son, he should be free to make that decision, but he wasn't an assertive person and Shannon clearly was so he left it alone. He just watched as Donny took off up the stairs to Ash's bedroom and then turned back to the woman he was unfortunately going to have to spend the next hour entertaining. "Do you want coffee or anything?" he asked wearily.
"Oh, I'm not staying," she replied, which was perfectly fine with Trey. "I have a hair appointment back on the other side of town that I really have to get to. I'll be leaving right at rush hour too so I might be a little late picking him up."
She wasn't asking, Trey noted, she was just telling him. A few years ago something like that might have really gotten to him but by now he was so used to just being told things by Julie that it no longer had much of an effect. "Okay, that's fine."
"We need to talk about this arrangement though," Shannon continued brusquely, "because frankly it's a pain having to drive all the way over here and I don't think it's necessarily fair that I'm the one who has to make the trip twice a week."
No, it wasn't fair Trey agreed, and had his situation been any different he would gladly be the one to drive Ash over to her new husband's house instead but as things were that just wasn't possible. It would be far too much trouble to get the twins in the car, make the half hour drive there, and then figure out what in the world to do with them for the hour that Donny and Ash played. He was certain Shannon didn't especially want the babies hanging around in her house, he certainly didn't want to hang around there with them, but it would also be stupid to just drop Ash off and drive home only to have to turn around as soon as they got there to go pick him up again.
Shannon eyed him in a calculating way. "I mean, do you understand where I'm coming from? It's just a really big inconvenience."
Trey shrugged a little. "I understand that," he told her mildly, "but right now that's kind of the only way it works."
"Well, I don't know if I can keep this up," she snapped. "It's very time consuming and I have other obligations too."
Of course she did. She had hair appointments and nail appointments and facials and bikini waxes, Trey was sure, and all of that was clearly far more important to her than maintaining her son's socialization during the summer months when he didn't have school. "I mean…" He paused for a second. Being argumentative did not come easily to him, but he felt very strongly that Shannon was being selfish and tried to come up with the best way to make her aware of this while remaining nonconfrontational. "I just don't think it would be fair to Donny and Ash to tell them they're going to have to stop playing together because we can't work something out."
"I'm not the one who can't work something out," she observed. "We used to do Tuesdays at your house and Thursdays at mine which I think worked out very nicely."
That was true, but that was also before the twins were born and when she lived on the same street as them so taking Ash over there had involved nothing more than a two minute walk. "Look," said Trey helplessly, "I completely understand that it's an inconvenience and I'd like to be able to work with you, I just…I'm in kind of a difficult situation right now. What do you want me to do?"
She sighed huffily and then glanced around the living room, taking in her surroundings with a distasteful look on her face. Trey guessed she was probably entitled to that, the house was a total mess, but he just didn't have time to clean nearly as much as he used to before the girls were born. He didn't have time to clean at all really. "Where is your wife?" Shannon asked, making no effort to disguise her scornful tone.
"New York," Trey answered. "She has a break coming up soon though, she'll be back for three days starting on Saturday." That reminded him he really needed to find some time to clean before Julie got home. She would definitely not be impressed with the state the house was in at the moment.
"Well, when she gets back talk to her about this," Shannon waved her hand vaguely at the room around her, "situation. It's ridiculous."
Trey agreed wholeheartedly that the situation was ridiculous but also knew that talking about it to Julie wouldn't make a bit of difference. "Are you still going to come on Thursday?" he asked, because as much as he didn't like Shannon the boys were fast friends, had been playing together for years, and he knew Ash certainly wouldn't cope well with being suddenly cut off from Donny for the rest of the summer. The kid had been through so much recently what with gaining two new baby sisters, his mother taking off abruptly, and his father suddenly having only microscopic bits of time or energy left for him. Trey couldn't stand the thought of Ash having to miss Donny as well on top of all that.
"I don't know," Shannon said haughtily. "I'll have to see whether I have time, so I guess I'll call you Thursday morning. I really have to go though, I'm going to be late for my appointment." She turned to leave and then stopped short in the doorway. "Oh, I almost forgot," she added, reaching into her purse with a soft, perfectly manicured hand, "I've got Donny on a gluten-free diet now. I think he has celiac disease, although his pediatrician…" She trailed off and rolled her eyes as if to show how little she thought of that pediatrician. "Anyway, if you give Ash a snack just give Donny this instead."
She handed Trey a little Tupperware container of what he was assuming were gluten-free crackers. They looked fairly unappetizing and he couldn't help but feel that Shannon was surely overreacting, especially if the kid's pediatrician thought he was fine, but she was the type who always needed something to be displeased about and seemed very likely to jump on whatever national panic bandwagon was being most gossiped about by her rich, bored housewife friends. "Alright," he said, accepting the crackers. "See you…whenever you get back, I guess."
She didn't even answer, just gave him a distracted sort of wave over her shoulder as she walked down the porch steps, eyes glued to the screen of her brand new iPhone. Trey watched her leave, closed the door, and went into the kitchen to put down the gluten-free crackers. He took a second to check his own phone and see if Julie had by any chance called back during the time he'd been talking to Shannon, but of course she hadn't. Getting back to him was never really a priority, not unless she was the one who needed something.
Trey knew he shouldn't complain, knew there were people in the world that were homeless and starving, people in prison, people with cancer, people who had literally lost their minds, but he couldn't help feeling glum sometimes. He couldn't help being jealous of all the people on the trashy, late night reality TV shows that he watched on mute with subtitles while he calmed fussy babies at 2:00 a.m., people his exact age who were out drinking and partying, acting like idiots, getting arrested, and not learning a single lesson from any of it. That's what he was supposed to be doing too, this was the time for it, but he couldn't. He had missed out on so many stupid, seemingly meaningless experiences that for some reason still mattered to him, like getting drunk at a bar at midnight on his twenty-first birthday. By the time Trey turned twenty-one he was already married with a one-year-old son and had no time for going out and getting wasted even though that's what all of his friends had done on their twenty-first birthdays. He had spent that night at home playing patty cake with Ash and listening to Julie practice the cello frantically in the room above his head. In the grand scheme of things he knew it wasn't exactly important, but sometimes he wished he could have had a slightly more exciting twenty-first birthday…or a slightly more exciting past seven years.
Trey sighed as he started up the stairs to check on the kids. There was no reason to be bitter, he told himself. It had been his decision after all, his choice to sacrifice his own youth in order to "save" a pretty girl with long hair and nice curves who had turned out to be nearly as selfish as Donny's rich, bored housewife mother, and deep down Trey knew that he really wasn't even surprised. This sort of thing would happen to him.