Just Peachy
I didn’t know if Annalee understood why my mood turned sour practically the second we crossed the Georgia state line or not, but she seemed determined to do everything she could to cheer me up while we were there. Even though she was Avery’s friend, she wasn’t really part of the Hanson family, so she was all for spending as much time away from their four billion offspring as possible. I couldn’t say that I didn’t feel exactly the same.
Eventually, though, we had to go back to work. It was an altogether different tour with the family there. Instead of loud music, the venue was filled with screaming children. If I thought the band ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, it was nothing compared to watching seven of their children use the venue as their own personal playground.
It was giving me a headache, but there was nothing I could do about it. Even if I could get Zac alone now, I knew there would be no smoking with his family around. It was all too obvious that he only took that habit on the road to hide it from them. I couldn’t help wondering if his decision to smoke the day before we met up with them was a coincidence or if he’d purposefully chosen that day to get high. Maybe I was reading things into his marriage that weren’t there. Even though he was too busy to spend much time with his wife and children that day, I hadn’t seen any real reason to think their marriage wasn’t perfect.
So why did I still have this nagging feeling that it wasn’t?
Since I couldn’t get drunk at work, either, I tried to fight my headache off with lots of caffeine, even though I knew that wasn’t the cause of it. It was the best I could do. The fact that neither Natalie nor Kate seemed all that concerned with actually watching their children made it so much worse. They seemed more than happy to sit back and talk as though they hadn’t seen each other in ages, while their kids went running and shrieking all around.
When their laughter rang out even louder than the kids, I thought my head was going to explode from the sheer nails-on-a-chalkboard-ness of it. Realistically, I knew it wasn’t that bad. I was just jealous. It was nothing more than catty, childish jealousy.
Accepting that fact still didn’t make it any easier to tolerate the two Georgia peaches holding their little party where I was trying to work.
“Hey, Colby?” Annalee said, and I jumped a little, realizing I’d just been staring into a box of t-shirts. I wondered how long I’d been doing that. “Can you run backstage and see if I left the diagram somewhere? I think it must have fallen out of my bag… I’m gonna keep looking for it here.”
“Yeah, no problem,” I replied.
I was sure by the end of the tour, we would have the whole display committed to memory, but it hadn’t happened yet. I still saw Hanson t-shirts on the inside of my eyelids when I laid down to sleep, though.
I dodged a few kids I was pretty sure belonged to Taylor and Natalie as I made my way through the venue. We had dumped our bags backstage earlier after eating lunch far away from the screaming horde, and I struggled to remember where the green room was. Finally certain I’d found it, I rounded the corner and crashed into something very small moving very quickly.
“Fuck!” I cried out as my feet seemed to get tangled into a pretzel with whatever I’d run into, sending me crashing to the floor.
The shrill sound of a crying child hit my ears and it was then that I realized I’d run right into a Hanson offspring. I struggled to remember which one this little blonde girl was, but ultimately I figured it didn’t really matter. I scrambled toward her, ignoring the fact that I was pretty sure I’d managed to scrape my knees and hands in the fall, but she skittered away from me like a scared animal.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said, feeling awkward and out of my depth trying to talk to a kid. “Let me just see if you’re hurt, okay?”
That only made her cry louder, and the sound attracted attention. I heard footsteps coming quickly down the hallway and in seconds I saw that they belonged to the last person I wanted to see.
Kate.
She towered over me even more from my position on my hands and knees, looking like some giant, pregnant Amazonian goddess. It took only a matter of seconds for her face to turn from confusion to shock.
“Junia, baby, what happened?” She asked, doing her best to bend over and retrieve the child that I suddenly realized was hers.
Junia waddled toward her mother and latched onto her leg. Sniffling, she mumbled, “Fell down.”
“Aww, baby,” Kate said as she struggled to pick her up and balance her on her belly. “Let mommy take a look, okay?”
I scrambled to stand up, wishing there was some way I could just make a quiet escape before Kate remembered that I was there. I had no such luck. After kissing the tiny scrapes on Junia’s knees, Kate turned her attention back to me, her eyes flashing with an anger that rivaled even the worst I’d seen from Zac.
“And I suppose that was you I heard using such bad language?” She asked.
“I didn’t… I mean, yeah, it was. But I didn’t realize what had happened… I didn’t even see her…” I stuttered out.
“Oh, well,” Kate replied, the words laced with sarcasm. “That just makes it all okay. It’s not like there could be all kinds of little ears listening in whenever you’re talking. Or little feet getting trampled under your big clumsy ones.”
I figured it wasn’t appropriate to point out that I only wore size six shoes.
“You need to watch yourself,” she continued. “You can’t just run around here like you own the place, being so totally thoughtless.”
It seemed like a weird overreaction to a simple accident, and I didn’t understand it at all. I wasn’t sure at all what I was being chastised for, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t like feeling like a child when I was an adult myself, and not even that much younger than Kate. Still, she made me feel childish and two feet tall. I hated it.
As if my nightmare couldn’t get any worse, Zac suddenly appeared around the corner. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
For some reason, this set off another round of tears from Junia, her little hands grasping at the air as she cried out for her daddy. Zac rushed to her side and swept her up into his arms, which only seemed to sooth her a little.
“Seriously, what happened?” He asked, his big hand rubbing her back gently. The question was obviously directed at me and Kate, since Junia was pretty much incapable of being coherent at this point.
“Someone wasn’t watching where she was going, and she just barreled right into our daughter!” Kate replied. “Who is this girl, anyway? She’s never worked for you guys before.”
I wanted to speak up for myself and to say that I didn’t appreciate being talked about like I wasn’t there, but the words just wouldn’t come out of my mouth. Surely Zac would stick up for me. It had been an honest accident, and I was certain he could see that. Couldn’t he?
“She’s new,” he replied.
“Well, she needs to learn how to be more careful and more professional. Running around, using bad language around the kids… someone needs to give her a serious talking to.”
I stared at Zac, mentally willing him to come to my defense. He shot me a quick look, his eyes flickering to me and then away so quickly that I wasn’t even sure it had really happened. But he didn’t speak. He murmured something soothing to Junia, but he didn’t speak. Not to me. Not even about me.
It hit me suddenly that he was going to let Kate throw me under the bus. It didn’t matter that it had been an accident; she had decided that I was a horrible person, and Zac was going to let her get away with it.
I felt sick.
Suddenly, Kate gasped and whisked Junia out of Zac’s arms. “She’s bleeding! Poor baby, no wonder she was so upset.”
Sure enough, one of the small scrapes on her knee had started to bleed a little. It was a minor injury, more likely caused by one of the dolls that had gone flying out of her arms than the actual collision with me, but it still had both mother and daughter on the verge of hysterics.
“I’m going to go find a bandaid for her,” Kate said, shooting me a dirty look before spinning around and scurrying away as fast as she could in her condition.
I could do nothing at all but stare at Zac. Surely now that Kate was gone, he would say something to me. But he didn’t. He just stared back at me, his eyes strangely devoid of any emotion.
“Zac, I didn’t… it was an accident…” I stuttered out. It wasn’t much, but I had to say something.
He shook his head, and first I thought he was shrugging off my attempt at an apology. When he held up his hand to stop me, I knew it wasn’t. “Just… just drop it. Just do your job.”
“I was doing my job…” I mumbled.
“Whatever,” he replied, as though he hadn’t even heard me at all. “Just do your job and stay out of everyone’s way. Is that too much to ask?”
I stared at him, barely believing the words he’d said. “No, I… I can do that.”
“Good.”
He looked at me for a moment longer, as though he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. He just shook his head again and walked away.
I knew I shouldn’t have been surprised that Zac had sided with his wife and not with me. It was the natural thing for him to do, wasn’t it? I could never compete with her, anyway. I was just a clumsy little mess who was still struggling to get her life together. I wasn’t some perfect little debutante of a wife, and I definitely wasn’t a Georgia peach.
But we weren’t competing, were we? Even if there was even the tiniest chance that Zac was actually interested in me, it didn’t matter. Kate had won that contest years ago. I wasn’t even in the running.