Goodbye Earl
Leesa Cross-Smith
My friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.
—Emily Dickinson
2019
1
Kasey Fritz
Yep. That electric slut-red cherry on top of the Goldie Dairy Dee sign was zapping like always, even though Kasey Fritz hadn’t been back home to see it in fifteen years. She rolled the rental car window down and stuck her hand out—like maybe she could touch the ghosts she knew were there, like lightning bugs wisping through the summer dark.
The old used car lot was now a family-style Mexican restaurant. The gas station where she and her girlfriends stopped to get slushies after school got turned into a fancy new gas station with more pumps and glowing bulbs hanging overhead than the one before. It was lit up like a fish tank as Kasey drove past. She went through the green light, knowing the next turn would put her right in front of where the laundromat, the KFC, and the liquor store once were. They’d been replaced by a brand-new boutique hotel, which she’d read about online right after Taylor sent her to the wedding website.
Enjoy Goldie! You can visit a farm, stroll around the old-fashioned town square, get a mixed cocktail with your fried chicken at the swanky hotel restaurant…
The town decided to knock down a KFC to build a hotel that sold a plate of fried chicken for thirty dollars. Kasey wowed as she remembered checking the price twice, so sure she must’ve read it wrong. She stopped the car in front of the hotel and pulled the brake. She’d refused the luxury rental they attempted to upsell her at the airport thirty minutes away and gotten a little hatchback stick shift instead. The hotel’s valet parking wasn’t optional and Kasey tipped well, but she wheeled her luggage to the front desk on her own as a tiny act of defiance.
The receptionist was young, so young. Was that how young they were making hotel receptionists now? Kasey was only thirty-three, but this girl behind the counter didn’t look like she should be allowed out past ten. Kasey gave her the wedding hashtag—#PlumBMarried—as Taylor had instructed her, guaranteeing the discounted hotel room. The Plums had more than enough room to house her, and it was true that Kasey had grown up counting every penny; it also felt ridiculous to be paying so much to stay in some fancy hotel in Goldie, of all places. Still, money wasn’t an issue anymore, and Kasey liked having her own space. She insisted on staying at the hotel for the entire wedding week and not imposing on anyone—yes, wedding week because nothing, not one thing, was too much for little miss Taylor Plum.
The receptionist gave Kasey a small, stiff card for free drinks with her first and last name and #PlumBMarried written on the back in frilly cursive. Kasey pocketed it and glanced around quickly, betting she’d see someone she knew.
Thankfully, she didn’t.
Whew and praise Jesus. She wasn’t ready for that just yet.
The hotel lobby was piping out a comforting lavender-vanilla scent to go along with the coffeehouse acoustic playlist—brushy voice and guitar, soft and low. Both the smell and the music hemmed Kasey in as she made her way to the elevator. There was a big digital screen inside flashing a slideshow of Main Street and the town square. The green hills and blue sky. Smiling, sunglassed families. Rich-looking tourists. Enjoy quaint Americana! slid across in a fat yellow font so bright Kasey squinted at it and scrunched up her nose. The screen jumped to black and she almost laughed at the ridiculous reflection staring back at her.
*
Once Kasey got to her room, she plopped on the bed and promptly tapped the Devon messages to text her fiancé and let him know she was safe.
He responded, So glad to hear it. Do you feel like talking? It’s ok if you don’t.
Not really, but thanks. So freakiiiing
weeeeird being back…but…I
don’t know. Maybe seeing everything
in the sun tomorrow will make
a difference.? I hope so.
It will. Have you bumped into
anyone you know yet?
Weirdly and thankfully, no.
Did you go to the farmhouse?
Nope.
Gotcha. Call me in the morning?
I love you.
I will. I love you too.
As Kasey texted Devon, she undressed and took a speedy shower. Brushed her teeth. By the time they were finished, she was in bed with the lamp off, the blue light of the television glowing the room. It’d comforted her ever since she was a little girl, sleeping with the TV on. She turned on a home-renovation show and drifted away easily as a couple timidly argued about whether to go with Italian or French marble for their kitchen countertops.
*
The blackout curtains did their job a little too well. Kasey was knocked out for a full eight hours, something that rarely happened back home in New York. Between her job as finance manager of LunaCrush—the third-largest beauty company in the world—and traveling for work and meetings at work and drinks after work and emails and phone calls and Devon and her girlfriends and and and, the thought of getting a full eight hours of peaceful, dreamy sleep at night in New York City was ridiculous. Being in Goldie gifted Kasey the luxury of being dead to the world.
She sat at the table by the window in her matching underwear, the sunshine warming her face. She drank the surprisingly good hotel room coffee, sipping carefully and scrolling through the wedding group chat Taylor had added her to, although Kasey had never written in it. The last one from Taylor read,
Good morning, bitches! I love you all so much and I’m so glad you’re here to celebrate our special weeeeek! Get your asses to the Plum house as SOON as you can for mimosas and cupcakes. Srsly, there’s so much food! GET. HERE. NOW.
The other girls began chiming in quickly, at least a million of them.
OMW!
I LOVE YOU SM BITCH!
Can I bring you anything?
Are we doing dressy-dressy?
Of course it's dressy-dressy, this is the south! :P Dress up like you're going to a football game!
Can someone come pick me up? I am NOT walking in these big-ass heels.
Kasey set the group chat to Do Not Disturb before calling Devon and telling him her plans for the day. Devon was a Listener and stayed quiet as she complained about the embarrassing fawning, the possible tension, and all the questions she knew were waiting for her.
“Well, Kase…I offered to come with you, but you said you wanted to do this alone. Do you still want to do this alone?” Devon asked when she was finished. “You have a hard time admitting you need help. I wish you didn’t. It would make things a lot easier sometimes,” he added. Kasey heard New York City clichés over the line—quick honks, rumbly construction, overlapping chatter.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said. Devon meant well. She was sure he could hear her loud facial expressions over the phone; he’d told her plenty of times that her face could use a volume button. “Thank you. I’m okay, I am. Just venting. I can take care of it, and trust me, there’s no point in you coming here. At all. Pfft, let’s talk about something else. Tell me something good, please.”
Although it frustrated him, Devon was used to Kasey deflecting whenever he wanted to dig deeper about Goldie and what life was like for her growing up. She gave him—along with everyone else—the bare minimum: she was from a small town, didn’t have much family, had an asshole stepdad, both of her parents died when she was young. Orphaned, she left right after high school and never came back, never looked back either. She’d ditched that town in the dust because Kasey Fritz was so much bigger and better than Goldie, that was for damn sure.