Page 1 of Except Emerson (Detroit ABCs #7)

Last summer

“Y ou humiliated me.”

When he didn’t respond, I said it again, rephrasing a little to make sure the point was clear.

“You embarrassed me in front of all of them.” I shook my head, like I could shake off the memory.

“How am I ever going to face those people again?” And I would have to face them, because they were constantly in our lives.

He didn’t answer. Had he even heard? He’d turned up the music as soon as we’d gotten into the car, like he was anticipating this argument and he was going to drown me out.

Not today. “That’s not the way you treat someone you love. You’re supposed to love me,” I reminded him. After all, we’d been together for five years. What had held us together if it wasn’t that bond?

He didn’t look in my direction, but at least I now knew that he’d heard me.

The muscle clenched in his cheek where his upper and lower jaws met, right below the sideburn that he had carefully shaped this morning.

It locked so hard that the skin over it turned white even with the tan he’d gotten last weekend, when he and his friends had gone to the baseball game together.

“Well?” I prompted. “Aren’t you going to answer? Don’t you have anything to say to me?”

“What do you want to hear, Emerson?” he asked. He didn’t unclench his jaw to speak and he hardly moved his lips. “What do you think should happen now?”

“I had hoped that—” I started to reply, but then broke off.

What was the answer to that question? I’d been going back and forth for months now about how I could fix whatever was wrong between us.

We flew past other cars, raced under overpasses, and whipped past exits as I tried to figure out what to say.

“I know that we have our issues but I’m your girlfriend,” I finally told him. “I’m the person who paid your parking ticket from last weekend. I’m the person who folded the t-shirt that you’re wearing right now. Don’t I deserve some respect? You shouldn’t have treated me that way.”

Grant sighed deeply. “I was kidding, but you just can’t take a joke. You never have been able to, not since the day we met.”

I turned to look at the traffic speeding along with us on the Lodge Freeway heading toward Detroit, but my mind went backwards five years into our past. I had been in college and was on my way to making a satisfactory life for myself.

I’d spent my time getting good grades, making money, and dreaming about a stable future away from the small town where I’d grown up in northern Michigan.

And then I’d made the mistake of going out with my roommates when I should have stayed in our apartment to study for the evolutionary bio test that I had in two days.

“That’s stupid. Study tomorrow!” they’d told me, and I’d wavered…

and then grabbed my wallet. I hadn’t been friends with any of those girls but I had wanted to be, and this was my chance.

We went to a bar that got rowdier as the hours passed and it had felt exciting, like I was part of the crowd.

I’d been standing in front of the band when a cup of beer had sailed through the air.

I hadn’t seen it coming, but I felt it land and I’d turned around, drenched, to find a bunch of guys who were hysterical with laughter.

They were part of a large male group that I’d never engaged with and had tried to avoid.

They had haircuts that were purposely styled to be scruffy and wore t-shirts that came from their ski vacations or the islands they’d visited.

They played sports and joined frats that threw parties I’d never attended.

In a clump like that, they were very intimidating. I’d seen them there, laughing as the beer rolled down my neck, and I’d wanted to melt into another of the puddles on the dirty barroom floor.

“I still don’t think that was funny,” I told him now.

“I told you it was a mistake.”

Yes, he had. “Oh, shit. I was trying to hit the guitarist,” Grant had announced when he’d walked over, and I hadn’t thought to question why he would have thrown a full cup of beer on anyone.

He could have ruined that guy’s instrument, or the speakers or their other equipment.

But his drink had hit me on the back of the head instead, soaking my hair.

Beer dripped down between my shoulder blades.

“You asshole!” I’d said. I was wet and smelly and then later, very sticky.

But he’d laughed more, and so had his friends. “Feisty,” he called back to them. “I always like a blonde.”

They’d said that they knew it, and I’d self-consciously felt my wet, white-blonde ponytail. Then he had told me that he needed to practice his aim, and he’d mimicked the motion of a throw. “I also need another drink,” he’d said. “What’s your name?”

“Emerson.”

“I’m Grant. Come on, I’ll get you one, too.

” So I’d gone with him and let him buy me a beer, and that was how we’d met.

I remembered almost every word we’d said, but only because the day had been so unusual.

It wasn’t until later in our relationship that I’d realized I needed to write everything down and as soon as we got home today, I would type up what had just happened at Lance and Vivienne’s house.

Lance had been one of the guys at the bar who had watched me get hit with the plastic cup.

That had been five years ago. Five years!

We spent a lot of our summer weekends with him and their other friends, and they still enjoyed many of the same activities that they had liked in college: bragging, throwing various balls, and drinking.

They’d done all of those things today and now, just like always, Grant was speeding on our way home to Detroit, where he would complain about our neighbor with his smelly truck, the size of our kitchen, the street noise, and everything else that made it not like Lance’s house at all.

Today, we’d eaten the same food and worn the same clothes—there were little differences, like that Vivienne, Lance’s wife, had on new sandals that I had loved.

She’d also gotten a haircut that Grant had frowned over, saying he thought it was better long.

They were remodeling their guest bathroom so we’d had to use the one off their bedroom instead, and his friend Lance had made sarcastic comments about hiding all their sex toys before we showed up for the party.

It was pretty much the same, though, five years of the same.

Except Lance had made another remark that was also supposed to be funny and Grant had followed it up with what he was now calling a “joke.” The day had been ruined.

“You know, you embarrassed yourself,” he told me, and then swore as he jerked into the middle lane to avoid another car. “If you’re humiliated, it’s because you acted like a bitch. Everyone there was staring at us.”

They had been. I remembered the women’s wide eyes and some smothered snorts, too, and his friends had all turned their heads to hide their grins. They’d definitely found it amusing, but me?

“How did you expect me to react when you said that?” I asked him. “Didn’t you guess that I’d be upset?”

“I was kidding!” he repeated.

“It wasn’t funny. Isn’t it obvious that something like that would hurt my feelings? Do you even care?”

“You have feelings? News to me.” He shrugged and flicked the turn signal once before he moved back into the left lane. The car’s engine roared up and then kept revving higher.

“Of course I have feelings!” Right now, what I felt was rage. I also felt insulted and I was also trying not to cry. “Your ‘joke’ was terrible. Is that what you really think?” I asked. I waited, because what he was about to say could have been the end of everything.

But Grant didn’t answer. I looked out the window again but I still didn’t see the hot pavement or the other motorists.

I saw five years speeding past, five years of us dating, sleeping together, moving in together.

This car had both our names on it, even if it was “his.” We’d both signed the lease on our house, too.

We’d bought furniture, and maybe it hadn’t been a fifty-fifty split, but we’d each contributed.

He had my passwords for all the streaming stuff; I was the emergency contact listed on the documents he'd had to fill out when he got hired. I was the one who’d filled them out for him!

After five years, there were so many ways that our lives had become intertwined.

Didn’t that mean something?

We flew past Livernois Avenue and then Linwood Street and traffic got heavier, but he didn’t take his foot off the accelerator, and he cut from lane to lane to get ahead. The back wheels shimmied slightly but he regained control.

“Slow down,” I demanded sharply.

“I want to get out of this car. I don’t want to be stuck with you and your bad attitude for an extra minute.”

“My ‘bad attitude?’ I’m not the one who just—look out!” I yelped, because he’d swerved onto the shoulder to pass a slower vehicle.

“That’s the fast lane!” he yelled at them, looking in the rearview mirror at the road behind us. Then he had to swerve again, because he only saw a truck in front at the last second. “People in this city drive like shit!”

He looked at his lap, where his phone lay. With the way he’d tilted it, I couldn’t see the screen but he must have read something there because he nodded, and his gaze stayed averted from the road for much too long. He typed a reply, too.

“Pay attention! Slow down,” I said, because now I was scared.

He was a poor driver (no matter what he thought about his skills and those of others) and he was worse after a few beers (no matter what he thought about being unaffected by drinking).

The DUI he’d gotten and his four speeding tickets over the past few years had made our car insurance so expensive that I felt a little ill every time I had to pay it.

Those infractions proved to me that he had to be more careful, but Grant wasn’t worried about his skills.

He just thought that he had bad luck, because he’d been caught.

We’d had endless arguments about the topic but they’d gotten us nowhere.

In fact, he thought that I was the bad driver because I’d been rear-ended when I was in high school.

That was why, he always told me, it was safer if he was behind the wheel, in the vehicle on which I was currently making the payments but was his.

I didn’t feel anything like safe at the moment, but he shook his head and made a disgusted sound in his throat when he saw me holding onto the door.

“You’re fine,” he snapped, and I watched the numbers on the speedometer.

Seventy-five. Seventy-eight. Eighty-two.

“You know, I’m the one who should be embarrassed,” he continued.

“You just showed my friends how crazy you are. They saw for themselves what I’ve had to deal with.

They’ve all been asking why I put up with it and they’re telling me to leave you.

” He held up his phone so that I could see the notifications, and yes, there were a lot.

“They think that I could do a lot better.”

“Go ahead and give it a try!” I told him.

“You’ll find out pretty quick that not many other women will put up with your crap.

” But I was aware that there were probably a lot who would.

He was very good-looking, in a regular-featured, catalog model kind of way.

Even features, straight teeth, thick hair, and once upon a time, a body to match all that.

But over the last few years, he’d been letting things slide, like skipping the gym to go to a club or skipping the dinner I made to go to a restaurant for a multi-course meal with plenty of drinks.

It had gotten to the point that I’d caught him sucking in his stomach as he looked at his profile in the mirror.

A little gut wouldn’t have been enough to dissuade too many women, though, because he did have his looks and he definitely had charm.

Wherever we went, he would chat and smile and they smiled back.

He made a great first impression and probably the next few would go well, too.

A few months in, maybe they would see how he “forgot” his wallet a lot, how he “didn’t think” to text when he was running late or wasn’t showing up at all.

They would realize that time with his boys was the most important thing to him, and they’d have to craft a good answer to his perennial question: “Don’t you want me to have fun?

” They’d also learn about what he called “fibs” and I called “lies.” There had been a lot of those in the last five years.

“Are you suggesting that we break up?” he asked me. “You really want to do that, Emerson?”

Yes, of course! Yes, that was what I wanted, because who would want to stay with a guy like this, a guy who flirted with waitresses, a guy who’d gone to a baseball game with his friends last weekend on my birthday, a guy who had just told everyone—

“Grant!Look out!”

But it was already too late when he noticed the line of traffic that had slowed down in our lane.

We’d come up on them so fast that there was no way to fully stop.

There was also no way to go around, since a tow truck blocked the shoulder and a big rig loomed on our right.

The only path led into the back of the RV in front of us, so he yanked the wheel and the tires turned ninety degrees as the brakes shrieked.

He lost control and there was no room to stop. There was no way to avoid the barrier that separated us from the northbound side of the freeway—

And suddenly, my thoughts crystalized. The image of a map flashed into my mind, one that traced the long road of our relationship.

It included warnings about all the potholes and broken pavement, the detours and dead ends.

It was like I could see it perfectly, from where I’d made the wrong turn at the beginning and up to this moment, when the trip would terminate.

For so long, I’d been trying to patch things and steer us in the right direction, but now I saw the answer. I knew exactly what I had to do and it was so obvious that the realization hit me like I’d run straight into a wall.

Which we did. His car crashed into the concrete barrier and then—