The Bottom Club

03 | propinquity

REGAN CARTER PLAYED the violin, and at a point, he had been one of the most talked-about performers in America’s classicist music circles. He graduated with honors from Julliard and even had an article in the Times referring to him as a 20th century Niccolo Paganini, until the accident that left him with a hand that looked alright outside but began to hurt excruciatingly if he played for longer than ten minutes as a bone inside had healed the wrong way, and an inability to play pieces like the Violin concerto in D minor. 

He also used believed in Love at First Sight, and for him, First Sight was a flight attendant he met on a flight to Boston during his orchestra days, Emmeline Hernández―whose surname used to be Carter, known to all and sundry as Emilia. Now he worked as a music teacher. 

Albeit a well-paid one.                     

On good days he was level headed and managed to show an almost obsessive amount of investment in Wyatt’s life, but when the melancholia set in he got drunk on his favorite bottle of pinot, blocked out the rest of the world, and silently binge-watched old romantic tragedies like Titanic until he’d fall sleep in front of the living room TV.

Wyatt was seven when he first walked in on his mother kissing the man who would eventually become her second husband, Robbie. His father had been on one of his many trips, Wyatt couldn’t remember where, and he had been alone with his mother and sister, Vivian. It was raining and Viv had fallen asleep in his bed. 

When he heard sounds coming from his mother’s room, he assumed the man he’d watched her let in earlier from his hiding spot from the top of the staircase was hurting her, and he rushed to her bedroom in all his seven-year-old fury, sharpened pencil in hand. The sight that greeted him would forever change his life, and when Emilia noticed what was happening she’d told Wyatt that it was all a mistake and that if he told his father she would die of a broken heart. 

Of course, Wyatt had started to cry because he didn’t want her to die, and it was never spoken of again. It took exactly almost three months before his father did the walking in. The screaming that ensued was so loud that Wyatt had started to cry, to Viv’s confusion, who did not understand what was going on but began to calm her older brother down. 

It took Emilia and Regan a year to realize that they were not soul mates and ten years later, even with their parents separated, he’d managed to remain close to his sister.

“I’m done,” Viv said. “I can’t believe that Rashad would do something like that. He broke up with you in front of his friends and then confronted you in the bathroom? Jesus, he needs to suck my dick.”

Wyatt could hear a child on her side of the screen asking her to drop a dollar in the swear jar, to which she asked him to get the fuck out of her room and he agitatedly began to whine at her to drop two dollars instead because she’d sworn again. She stood up, chased him out of her room, and then returned to plop down her mattress.

They were on FaceTime and meanwhile Me Before You played in sync on both of their TV screens. After their parents’ divorce, Emilia had retained custody of Viv and now the both of them lived together with her new husband, Robbie―who happened to be this Family Law expert―and his family in Alabama.

Personally, Wyatt felt offended, because divorces were almost always messy, but he figured that if you were going to go through with it and remarry then at least Hubby 2.0 had to be a switch up from his prototype. Robbie was plain-faced and middle class. And then there was the added irony of having a family lawyer play home wrecker.

“I mean,” he paused to blow into the handkerchief, “I don’t know why I’m surprised that things didn’t pan out the way I expected them to. It’s like I’m cursed to be single forever.”