Music in the Key of Love

Chapter 15: Graham's Story (Pt 2)

🔥 🔥 The mature rating has been switched 🔥 🔥

Graham poured himself a drink and held the bottle out to Cressida, who shook her head.

"Come sit and tell me the rest," she encouraged, sitting on the sofa and patting the spot next to her.

"Two years ago, about five years after I left, I got a call from one of Ash's friends. He told me that Archer had come home from a bender and beaten both Ash and my mom really badly, and that my mom had died and that Ash was in the hospital."

"Oh, Graham, I'm so sorry!" And, even though she already knew, it wasn't hard for Cressida to sound shocked.

"I had to—to go back there," he said, shaken. "My brother wasn't in any shape, so I had to go back to straighten everything out, you know?"

Cressida nodded, squeezing his hand. "It must have been awful, to go back to that town, to that house."

"You can't imagine." He shuddered, looking off into space. "The house seemed smaller, somehow, even though it seemed pretty small when I lived there. I had to organize a funeral for my mother, and go through the house, the house where I'd been so miserable all those years—" He broke off and wiped his face with his hand, then poured himself another drink with a hand that shook. I stayed for a week, cleaning things out of the house and getting it ready to sell, visiting my brother in the hospital every day, you know, stuff like that." He took his drink down by half and continued. "Ash was in a coma from hitting his head against the wall so hard. Then, on my eighth day there, he had a stroke. His whole system was weakened from all the drugs he'd been doing, and that, coupled with the beating, brought it on."
He turned to Cressida, again squeezing her hand so hard. "I lied when I told you he needed the money for school, Cress, I'm sorry. He's in a facility. He woke up from the stroke and the beating, but he has severe mental and physical impairments. Even with the state helping, it costs so much money to pay for it. That's why I need the money from the competition so badly."

"God, Graham, I'm so sorry you had to go through this alone, and when you were only twenty years old?"

He nodded. "I asked Kath to come and be with me, you know? I basically lost an entire semester of studying trying to straighten everything out, but it was so hard for me, so hard, and I needed her. She said she'd come, but she never did. And after all the mess of putting my brother in the home and my father's trial, I came home to find out she'd been seeing someone else while I was gone." He smiled, though there was no humor in it. "It was horrible, waiting for her day after day while having nightmares about my father every night, with her just stringing me along and telling me one excuse after the other. 'Next week,' she kept saying. And she never came."

Cressida hugged him, hard, and his arms came back around her. "I'm okay now, I am," he assured her as he released her. "I finally realized after a couple months that she wasn't going to come, and I stopped asking. So I come home and find out that my beautiful, classy girlfriend, whom I love more than anything, has been carrying on with another guy in our class while I was away.

"She wasn't always horrible, you should know," he said, his voice misty with memory. "She was funny and smart, so well-read. I'd never known anyone like her. And when she chose me out of all the guys who were after her, well, it was like a dream." He shook himself like a wet dog. "I followed her around like a puppy, just worshipping her, happy to be with her. And she wanted to be with me because I was the best in our class. Total snob all the way." Again the awful, humorless grin. "She didn't mind slumming, but only to a certain degree, you know?" He finished his drink. "She just couldn't, she said, she couldn't come. Just thinking about being in White Chalk, Texas, was too much for her."