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It’s been that way from the moment we met.
You don’t expect to meet the love of your life at 25 Cent Wing Night at a college bar. Or hell, maybe you’re more optimistic than I am, and so you go to every “BOGO Beer Wednesday” and “No Cover Charge For 36C and Up This Weekend!” special that’s advertised assuming you’re going to meet the One.
Me, I just really wanted some cheap wings. I’d moved to California from Florida after three semesters of community college for the usual reason pretty girls leave small towns and head west—to be a star. Thing was, the only person I knew out there was an acquaintance from high school, Emma, and since she’d lived in San Bernardino, I’d landed there first.
Bloom where you’re planted, people like to say, but theyignore the fact thatplantedis sometimes just a nice way of sayingstuck, and I’d definitely fallen into that category.
So I was juggling two jobs back then, waiting tables at one of those nightmare chain places that makes you wear a lot of buttons on your black apron while also spending a few afternoons every week watching a couple of kids who lived in my apartment complex. I didn’t charge their mom much, given that she was working just as hard as I was. Sometimes when I watched her come in with greasy sacks of fast food, already cold from her long drive over from the next town, I wished I were able to say, “Hey, it’s fine, you don’t need to pay me.”
But that wasn’t my life.
So I took her twenty bucks and tried to make it last, and that was why I was at Senor Pollo’s on a Thursday night when I was just twenty-one, the same night that Camden was tending bar.
I’d ordered a water—couldn’t afford wingsanda beer, even when the wings were cheap—but from the way my gaze had followed a couple of pints of Stella he pulled for another table, he must’ve known what I really wanted.
A few seconds later, a frosty and perfectly poured glass was sitting in front of me, and he’d flashed me that little smile I would come to know so well, the one that could almost be a smirk on another guy. “On the house,” he’d said quietly. I’d noticed then, as he’d looked over at me, that his eyes were two different colors.
One was gray-blue, the other a clear golden brown that made me think of high-end bourbon. It’s a genetic thing, heterochromia, and because Camden was adopted, he has no idea if he got it from his mother or his father. Sometimes I wonder if any children we might have will inherit it, too, will look atme with that same patchwork gaze that always seems to see everything.
That first night, I noticed more than his eyes, of course. He was tall, a little too thin back then, brown hair longer and shaggier than he wears it now, and I liked the way he moved behind the bar, liked how his hands looked when they held a glass or opened a bottle.
He was cute, yes, but it was more than that. There had been something about him that was so calm, so still. So sure of himself, even though he was just barely twenty-two and, as I’d later learn, going through his own shit.
We kissed later that night beside my shitty car. He spent the next night in my even shittier apartment.
And that had been that.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this part now. I mean, it probably doesn’t even seem all that romantic to you. Cheap college bar, my heart won forever by a free beer and a cute smile, sex on a mattress I’d gotten from Goodwill and suspected someone had died on.
But itwasromantic. More than that, it wasreal.
And I guess I just want you to know that, before you hear the rest of it.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
For now, we’re here, in our little rental in Golden, Colorado, a place we’ve lived for the past five years, where Camden teaches ninth- and eleventh-grade English at an all-boys prep school and I churn butter on a make-believe farm. We’re happy with each other, if not exactly with the lives we’re leading, and later, I’ll realize it’s because we knew eventually this moment would come.
That we were waiting for this.
For a cool September evening, a random Wednesday that shouldn’t have been anything special at all, when Camden nods at his phone and says, “It’s my family. They want me to come home.”
HEIRESS, PHILANTHROPIST, ONETIME KIDNAP VICTIM, RUBY MCTAVISH CALLAHAN WOODWARD MILLER KENMORE DIES AT 73
One of North Carolina’s most famous (some would say infamous) women has passed away peacefully at her legendary mansion in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ashby House.
Ruby McTavish was born on June 1, 1940, the oldest child of lumber magnate Mason McTavish and his first wife, Anna Ashby McTavish, in the town of Tavistock, North Carolina, a once-sleepy hamlet transformed by the power of the McTavish fortune.
That fortune came at a cost, however. In 1943, when she was barely three years old, young Ruby McTavish vanished on a family picnic in the mountains surrounding Ashby House. The disappearance held the nation in its grip for nearly a year with the McTavishes offering what was, at the time, the highest reward ever for any information leading to her safe return.
Authorities had assumed the child had succumbed to exposure in the thick forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and were stunned when the private detective hired by Mason McTavish found the child alive and well, living in Spanish Fort, Alabama, with a family by the name of Darnell, eight months after she first disappeared. The return of “Baby Ruby” was a balm to a country still locked in the Second World War, and the joy at seeing a family reunited overshadowed the grubby and sordid end of her alleged kidnapper, Jimmy Darnell, who was killed while attempting to escape the local jail before his trial could begin.
While the kidnapping had a happy ending, it would not be Ruby’s last brush with notoriety. Married four times, Ruby seemed singularly unlucky in love, losing her first husband, Duke Callahan, to a shooting on their Paris honeymoon, her second to an electrical accident at Ashby House, the third toa lingering illness, and the last, Roddy Kenmore, to a boating mishap.
It was this last husband that gave her a nickname people in North Carolina barely dared to whisper: “Mrs. Kill-more.”
However, no charges were ever brought against Ruby McTavish, and those closest to her insist it was not in her nature to hurt anyone.
“If you ask me, she just had bad taste in men,” one confidante said. “Duke was reckless, Hugh was stupid, Andrew had always had health issues, and Roddy was a [expletive] basket case. I see where it looks bad, but I promise you, that woman was a saint.”
